THE STORM DOOR

It rained last night. For people living in Northern California, rain is a really big deal. This is because for much of the year we don’t get any rain at all. There is this handy dandy high pressure cell that parks just offshore from San Francisco that conveniently pushes all the summer weather events up to places like Washington & Oregon. In most years we don’t get any rain between April and October. The weather announcers here typically talk about heat waves and weather in other parts of the country. But they get excited when “the storm door” opens and they can talk about rain. Well, last night, one of the local meteorologists said the magic words: “The storm door is open.”

The change is remarkable and fast. Two weeks ago, I was playing golf with the weather in the high 90’s, wearing shorts and drinking lots of water. Today the high is 63 and the high this week will be 69, on Thursday. They are also predicting rain on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.  Since we are in a drought and literally subject to mandatory water rationing, this is received as good news by most people.

What makes this ironic is that we just saw a report, from scientists, that Lake Tahoe is dry and warning of dire consequences. For the record, it is snowing in Lake Tahoe. The LA Times wrote a report saying this was the driest water year in more than a century and experts fear the coming 12 months could be worse.

California records driest year in a century (msn.com)

The good news is that experts are very good at getting things very wrong. One will note that the last time the state reported so little rain and snowfall was in 1924. Perhaps it is just me, but my first reaction was: “oh, it was really hot in 1924, long before ‘global warming’, excuse me, ‘climate change’, was threatening our very existence.” Thank goodness we switched to all electric cars back in 1924 or we would probably all be dead! Oops, that didn’t actually happen. Instead, we built all those freeways and purchased lots of gas guzzling SUVs.

If you read the entire article, you will note that:

“The history of California has been written in long droughts,” said Bill Patzert, a retired climatologist who worked for decades at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory studying the effects of climate change. “There’s a lot of water, but it comes down to how it’s used.”

Bingo. There’s a lot of water, what matters is how it is used. Two years ago, in 2019, Folsom Lake was over 100% of normal and we were told this was enough water to last through five years of drought. This summer, Folsom Lake has very little water. So where did it go. It sure didn’t all evaporate. What happened was that water was released to try and save about 1,000 salmon.

This is not a new problem that requires a new solution. The story of Joseph is recorded in Genesis, chapters 37-50. To make a long story short, Joseph convinced Pharoah that there would be seven years of plenty and seven years of drought. He suggested building warehouses to store up the excess grain during the good years, so there would be more than enough grain in the bad years. Pharoah listened and it worked brilliantly.

People from other areas, who did not figure this out, had serious problems. Many of them fled to Egypt because it was the only place with food. Among them was the sons of Abraham, Joseph’s brothers.

But no one appears to have learned anything from Joseph. Instead of doing the obvious, like finding ways to STORE water, we have people recommending extremely expensive strategies, guaranteed to not work, in a desperate attempt to save mankind. It is literally insane, but incredibly popular. I am sure that we should all want to live in a cleaner world with less pollution, but there is little if any evidence that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has much impact. Currently the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated as 415 parts per million or .0415% of the atmosphere. It is a trace element. Some really smart people are terrified by this.  Here is one example from bloomberg.com:

How Much Carbon Dioxide Is in the Atmosphere (bloomberg.com)

They aren’t even pretending this anything they are proposing will work anytime soon, even if we miraculously manage to eliminate all new CO2 emissions. No one expert predicts that, regardless of what we do, because there are other countries who are unlikely to do squat.

If new greenhouse-gas emissions ended tomorrow, CO2 in the atmosphere would begin washing into the ocean, rolling the parts-per-million count backwards outside of the seasonal up-down cycle. This would start a very long process. Getting it back to pre-industrial levels would take thousands of years—unless we deploy technologies that can suck up vast quantities of CO2 from the air.

So, this extremely expensive green new deal could reduce CO2 levels below the industrial levels in just a few thousand years, unless we deploy technologies that can suck up vast quantities of CO2 from the air. What? Even if we cut all new CO2 levels nothing will change for over 1,000 years.

We need something that sucks CO2 out of the air. Wait, don’t plant(s) suck CO2 from the air? Maybe, just maybe, instead of focusing on reducing the amount of CO2 emissions, we just grow more plants. What is the downside? People eating healthier food?

In the meantime, God is obviously not listening. Is it just me or it just seems that whenever someone starts talking about switching to electric cars to cut CO2 emissions, God responds by opening the storm door?

DON’T SELL YOUR RAINCOAT!

TDM