See the Sky About to Rain

See the Sky About to Rain
By David Glenn Cox

Rain happens, floods happen, droughts happen, blizzards happen; it’s all just anecdotal, isn’t it? Southern China is facing a severe drought and expects a 16 percent decline in its grain harvest because of it. Millions of its residents struggle because many of their villages are water-insecure. The villages had a community water supply with only a well with little or no storage capacity, and now the well has run dry.

Meteorologists call it a hundred-year drought, but since accurate records weren’t kept a hundred years ago in China no one is quite sure if it is a hundred-year drought or a two hundred-year drought. In Southeast Asia the Mekong River is to Asia what the Mississippi River is to America. Sixty-five million people depend on the river for water, for fish and for transport. Now the Mekong river is shrinking. Some blame dams built by China as the culprit, but the Chinese point out that even if they kept all the waters of the Mekong that run through China, it would only affect the level by 13.5 percent.

There is more going on here; snow runoff from the upper Mekong was lighter than normal. The rainy season along the lower Mekong River ended sooner than normal and run off from tributaries was at a fifty year low. The drought has been ongoing for several years and each year becomes more severe because of the year before.

The floods that struck New England and Rhode Island were called two hundred-year floods. The floods inundated thousands of homes, and as Hurricane Katrina taught us, homeowners insurance doesn’t cover floods. Flood insurance is a separate entity but the insurance companies aren’t completely off the hook as tens of thousands of automobiles were flooded as well.

Monday it was 57 degrees in New York, today 77, Wednesday 89. Chicago had temperatures 30 degrees above normal. What does it mean? It’s all just anecdotal, isn’t it? In the western United States they are in the third year of a drought. California’s water year shows a strange pattern. The average rainfall average from 1922 to 1993 was 50 inches. In 2005-2006 it was 78.3 inches and it has fallen below normal each year after that. This year could be the third driest year on record.

In 2007 the European Union developed the European Drought Observatory, in their words, “Due to repeated drought events in the last decade throughout the continent.” In 2003 a heat wave in Europe killed 35,000 people and the highest temperature on record was reached in the United Kingdom. In 2006 another drought and heat wave struck Europe with all-time high temperatures in 150 years of record keeping all across Europe. In Germany the drought was less pronounced, but the rainfall came in only a few heavy thunderstorms.

What does it mean? It’s the weather; if you don’t want it to mean anything then it doesn’t mean anything. You can argue that weather patterns move in 100, 500 or 1,500-year patterns, and who can dispute it? Just because climate scientists forecast that shrinking snow pack and glaciers in the Alps will produce warmer summers and greater chance of droughts, it's only a theory, isn’t it?

The Associated Press
NEW DELHI — "For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone. 'New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged,' said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. 'Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols,' he said.

"'What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,' said Hazra. Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.”

In 2009 droughts covered the United States, Mexico, most of South America, West Africa, Australia, India, Pakistan, all of the Middle East and China, and in more cases than not they were all-time historic droughts without equal on record. So where is the rising water coming from?

Seven of the fifteen most expensive hurricanes on record in the United States have struck since 2004. The average number of major weather-related catastrophes such as windstorms, floods and drought is now three times higher than at the beginning of the 1980s. What does it mean? It’s all just anecdotal, isn’t it?

The National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts fewer hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico but the fewer storms will be of greater intensity. They predict that the largest increase in stronger storms is expected to be north of the 20 degrees north line of latitude that runs south of Cuba and through Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, which puts South Florida clearly in the cross hairs.

State Farm Insurance has reversed its decision to stop selling residential policies in Florida after winning a 15 percent rate hike and regulatory permission to drop 125,000 of its more than 800,000 customers. State Farm had a $542 million loss in 2008 because of Hurricanes Ike and Gustav. As an industry, weather-related damage claims were $27 billion in 2008, the worst year since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Could it be that the cost of insurance will eventually depopulate South Florida? The annual 2010 Storm Surge Report estimates that a category five hurricane hitting Miami-Dade County could generate losses over $53 billion. Yet that’s only private residential property; it doesn’t include commercial property or public property losses. Potentially losses could dwarf Hurricane Katrina’s $81 billion cost.

Global warming, or more accurately climate change, doesn’t mean that it will be eighty degrees year round in Bismarck, North Dakota. It means normal, expected weather patterns will break down and become more erratic. Extremes become the norm, but that’s all just anecdotal, isn’t it? When will we know for sure? Maybe never. The anecdotal evidence piles up but is dismissed because it is just anecdotal, but it’s all we’ve got. There is not now nor will there ever be a definitive test that will say beyond a lead-pipe certainty that climate change is an undeniable reality.

I began to wonder after the failure in Copenhagen how world leaders could, in the face of such evidence, refuse to act. My mind wandered back to the science fiction film "Soylent Green," where the planet was living with runaway global warming. A scientific study pronounced that the oceans were dying and the Soylent Corporation was killing people to keep that knowledge from the public.

In a real life scenario what would world leaders do? Would they tell the public or pretend that it was all under control? What could they say?

survive it.

...with a daily maximum temperature in excess of 20 degrees C.

But at least with water in Lake Eyre, Victoria is finally getting some rain.

about the lakes in Australia and about how many of them had fallen below sea level. That the lower levels caused the mud to acidify potenially ruining them as a source of drinking water.

Kick