Climate Change

The weather has been in the headlines a lot recently.  There were two major stories yesterday.  The first was that the Pineapple Express storm was supposed to bring the heaviest rainfall in 6 years.  Second, linked from the same page, was a study claiming that the current drought is the worst California has experienced in 1200 years.  So the one thing we can safely conclude, is that we can't believe everything the media is telling us.

We would have no idea of many of the current pressing issues we are facing, if the media wasn't constantly telling us about them.  They are "pressing" because that means we need to stay updated on them as they develop, and therefore need to continue using the media.  But humans have a terrible memory, and this has nearly always been true.  Half of the Old Testament is saying "don't forget what the Lord your God has done to bring you out of Egypt," and the people constantly forgot anyway.  Things always seem more extreme in the present than in our memories of the past, even if they are factually identical.

Daylight savings time is a great example.  Every fall, I always feel like "I know it is supposed to get dark earlier, but it never used to get dark THIS early."  And every spring I hardly notice as it changes back.  If I didn't fully understand how this worked, I would probably believe a news story about how the increase of the tilt of the earth's axis was making the seasons more extreme, and the days even shorter than usual in winter.

The same is true of weather: it always FEELS hotter this summer than last year, and colder this winter than last year.  It didn't rain this much last year.  It hasn't snowed here in years.  So nearly any weather forecast can be fabricated into a plausible pressing issue that we should all be concerned about.  And my favorite part, that many of these fabricated issues are supposedly caused by our actions.  They ARE caused by our actions, not necessarily from pollution, but they are created for political reasons.  From the global cooling scare in the 70s, to the global warming scare of the 90s, it is something that the government can claim to be protecting us from, if we give them more control over things.

The current "climate change" issue was a rebranding on global warming after it became obvious to even the most gullible that the earth wasn't always getting hotter.  It's a brilliant marketing plan, because climates DO change; it's a fact of life, look at Greenland.  That became un-farmable and froze over hundreds of years before the industrial revolution brought measurable pollution from man.  It isn't always bad change either.  The current polar melting has led to valuable new navigable water routes that the world is beginning to fight over.

This week, the flooding proves that it did rain, although not as much as the hype would lead you to believe.  Our reservoirs are still very low, which is the primary statistic used to measure the drought, but we control how much is retained there, at least to a degree.  If there is no water, we can't divert it, but when there is water, we can choose to let it flow, or store it.  Folsom Lake was empty this summer, but I drove to LA two months ago, and saw Pyramid Lake on the way there.  It is filled to capacity, within a foot of the top.  So there is water, but it is being sent to LA, to meet the growing needs there.  And the drought scare is used to support the $8B proposition to fund more water delivery to LA, to alleviate the man-made drought in NorCal.