(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report-July-11%2C-2024.pdf
A Note to Readers
The heat wave that has stalled over California, and has set high temperature records in the West for near two weeks now, may be coming to an end soon, so say the forecasts. Of course, blaming it on global warming is, as usual, the standard explanation that attempts to continue the argument that we humans are to blame for all unusual weather and climate developments.
Once again, I must disagree with that narrative. Of course the climate changes. It has done that regularly for three billion years. It does make me wonder if high school science classes even mention the phenomenon of Ice Ages any more. Alternating warming and cooling cycles has been the history of the Earth’s climate.
I call your attention, once again, to the history of California’s climate. Which for at least the past 2,000 years has been characterized by alternating megadroughts and megafloods. Droughts that lasted decades and floods that turned the entire Central Valley into a four-hundred mile long lake.
See my book review of “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow,” by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam, two Climatologists at the University of California- Berkeley.
Here is my review: “Are We Controlled by the Whims of Nature, or Will We Create Our Future?”
https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
I shall limit this week’s report to the heat wave and the wild fires that so far this year surpass the number and acreage burned five year average. And the summer has just begun.
Of course, other developments include the catastrophic damage from the hurricane in Texas. Which, again, there is a loud attribution to climate change. Often one will read that the dollar damage of such storms is multiple times what the damage was 20 or 50 years ago. Usually such reports ignore factors such as more people live in vulnerable areas, much more has been built there to be wrecked or destroyed, and inflation costs of clean up are, like most things, subject to inflation over the years.
The Wild Fires, and their growing intensity and destructive power does have a simple, not a solution, but a means of alleviating their destructive power. That is, thin the forests and allow harvesting of the timber once again. Edward Ring has a contribution to make on this topic, and you will find it on page 6.
