How dare you, I tell you it's global warming da**it! :-) Thanks to enlightenment individualism we have become very myopic. Events that may or may not have significance generationally speaking are elevated to emergency levels by our desperation to be important in our lifetime. What I do, what my children do and what my childrens children do is important, my actions as an individual apart from them as an extension of myself is not.

Boy, what an article. Full of half-truths, misleading statements and sensationalism. I wondered what kind of reporter would write something so full of inaccuracies until I got to the tag line. Cato Institute. Oh, yes, from the same people who would have the gov't do away with seat belt laws, mileage requirements and AFDC, among other things. A bunch of rich white dudes who figure that if life is miserable, then it must be your fault all of the time.
The opening tone is yellow journalism at it's very best. It moves on to clairvoyancy (upstream resevoirs "are and will remain"), reassuring to know that he sees the lakes always full. Dry years are warmer. Yes, but why are the "wet" years of the 80's and 90's the ones that have the records for 7 of the top ten warmest years in the last century or more? That is not touched on. He goes on to mention that the highest ever temp in VA was in 1930. An anomaly, as even he would agree, but 1930 is not the warmest year ever. Snakes attacking turkies for fluids? Not. First of all, it is anecdotal, unless the snakes told the farmer. Secondly, no snakes in VA attack anything for fluid, hunger, yes, blood- come on, more sensationalism. "Atmospheric chemistry doesn't care whether polluting organic compounds or obnoxious oxides are produced by a burning tree or an aging Belchfire 8. The result is the same: unhealthy air." Big lie. If wood is burned, it is vastly different from burning hydrocarbons. Wood smoke is particulate matter, which settles with light rain. Very little sulfer compounds are created, almost no O3 (ozone), and tree soot is not tar-like. Big difference. Just for confusion, he then talks about today's ozone with 1930 temps. Why? He'd be just as accurate if he ran the numbers using temps from Nome, Alaska.
Calling the hurricanes he mentions local events is disingenuous. They may not have amounted to much in VA, but here in PA the floods from Agnes remains the benchmark for flooding. The others are probably mentioned for their effects elsewhere; linking them in people's minds to the drought. This is bad journalism, or at least bad writing. If he meant that the cost from the drought is the most expensive in VA history, then say it. Sort of like when he says that there is a potential of closing 395 for ozone. I don't think anybody in their right mind thinks that would make a difference, but it is mentioned as a cure here.
The Fortress Monroe measures. Rainfall totals give only part of the picture. For Baltimore, for instance, the Sept. 2001 to Sept. 2002 period has been the driest on record. I realize that VA records will not corelate exactly with MD, but to base the severity of a drought on one rain guage is faulty at best, misleading too. The statement that it was clearly political folly for Glendening to institute drought measures in 99- what were the reprecussions? If it was a political mistake, did somebody lose an election? Was there grumbling? Duh! There is grumbling all the time for all kinds of reasons. I think the reason for mentioning this is because the Cato Institute is at odds with everything Glendening does, and they wanted one more jab at him before he leaves office.
One more thing. Just once I would like somebody to tell me how burning millions of tons of coal, spewing billions of tons of pollutants from millions of barrels of oil, and altering the mitigating forces of this planet does not lead to climate change. We are on a planet that is a closed system, people. We thought the forests were endless, we thought the seas were bottomless. Large areas of the Gulf of Mexico are dead. The Atlantic ocean off of NJ has been okayed as a dumping ground on the basis that nothing is left to harm for a large area. Warmer and warmer years are recorded, sea temps are rising. Some say it is a natural fluctuation. Some say that the Earth has reached carrying capacity. If it is naturally induced, what do we lose but money by mandating cleaner technology. But if it is manmade and we do nothing, we lose our home, and our kids, or grandkids or their children will hate us for it.

Or your grandkids children may not live to hate us.

So sorry, I didn't realize that putting our current drought in a historical perspective, and pointing out that worse droughts have happened in the region (and not that long ago) had a purely political motivation. Perhaps you know better than I do that he thinks that, since drought is a natural occurrence in our region, we don't need to conserve water or change the way we use it.

Johnnieb, drought is a natural occurance everywhere on the planet. The author seems to pooh-pooh the idea of conservation. Another angle could be that they (droughts) are occuring with greater frequency. He seems to draw conclusions from very few selected points. I wonder if the news accounts from the Richmond or Winchester newspapers from the 1850's would talk about a calamatous drought. (One calamatous drought occured the year the lost Roanoke Colony was founded. They happened to go ashore in a place that was having one of the driest years out of the past 700, according to tree rings from Cypress trees (Taxodium distichum.)
I wonder too if the data could be extrapolated differently. What about if somebody from Earth First! wrote saying that there was proof that severe droughts were occuring more often. From 1850 to 1930 is 80 yrs. From 1930 to 2002 is 72 years, therefore droughts of epic proportions are occuring more often. This conclusion would be equally false, for the same reason-- not enough points on the graph to draw from. On the other hand, land temperatures have been recorded long enough in alot of places, and the fact is the planet on average is warming. In the past when this happened, the climate turned out very different than what we have today. Whether or not we can adapt to this is not agreed on, but everybody agrees that the disruptions will be costlier than shutting down the airports and closing all the interstates.

Just to clarify, I am putting in a drought tolerant landscape, I am going to convert my diesel truck to run on vegetable oil, and I turn my lights off when they are not in use. My only point was, let's not panic. If change is going to happen it has to be from the bottom up, not top down. Talk to friends, neighbors, strangers etc. and try to convince them (I prefer the smell of french fries or mcnuggets to diesel fuel, don't you?) without using the scare tactics that have undermined much of the environmental movement (I would say to drop the new age pantheism, but the void would have to be filled somehow, and that solution is banned on this forum even though the "gaia hypothesis" "mother nature" and the rest is just as "religious"). BTW, studies have proven repeatedly that the health effects of ozone (N03 degrades to this when exposed to sunlight) are temporary, soot poses the primary health threat and carbon dioxide is the main suspect in current climate change scenarios. BTW you have to figure that we know of no cases where oil is being formed by natural processes at the present time which means most likely that at some time in the past all that carbon was either free in the atmosphere or tied up in some sort of "sink". Doesn't it seem to you that climate change might be a return to ancient climate patterns? Just a thought.

The tone that I got from the article was that the drought of 1930 was more severe than the current drought therefore there is no global warming worth worrying about. That logic is severely flawed: year-to-year variations in climate are larger than the overall increase in global temperatures but that doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening. Global warming is here and some or all of it is caused by us - and that will mean more frequent and more extreme events like 1930. Current thinking is that temperatures over the last couple of hundred years were increasing slightly anyway, although it seems likely that long-term (a few thousand years) we are due for an ice-age.

The main thrust of the article - that we are unprepared for a drought comparable to 1930 - is worth thinking about. Without any global warming there will be such a drought and probably within most of our lifetimes. Add in global warming and you could expect such things every few decades. Reserves of both water and electricity to cope with such extreme events just aren't there, even in the relatively benign mid-atlantic.

As for a return to ancient climate patterns - that would be pretty scary. Magic Mountain at Disneyworld would be an island in a tropical sea, Houston would be gone (the ultimate irony for Exxon-Mobil), and about 500 million Asians would be looking for a new home (and you thought Cuban boat-people were bad!). Of course England would likely have a pleasant mediterranean climate ... maybe I should go get that Ford Expedition I was thinking about ...

--ian

As long as England wasn't swamped with rising oceans... Actually don't know what to think about global warming, except that I think it is probably happening. It only makes sense that large amounts of emissions generated by humankind are probably going to have some impact on the climate. Really don't know what I'm talking about, but can't help thinking that drought conditions, heat, dust bowl, etc. of 1930's was influenced by the fact that there were hardly any trees back then--all cut down by human activity. There are hardly any virgin forests in the eastern part of the country, most have grown up in the last 60-70 years. In Gettysburg the park service wants to cut down what trees have grown up to make the battle grounds look more "authentic" which is really irritating, since they don't have any problem with leaving all of the monuments, highways with businesses, or for that matter building a new visitor's center Can't help but think that this should be factored in to the opinions about west coast forest fires, also, as have little faith that logging companies will "thin" very intelligently.

The best line that I've read recently (in Time) is that by instituting ecological reforms we are not saving the planet--the planet can survive nicely without us. We would be saving ourselves and life as we know it

Here's another news story from the Washington Post, this time about the effect the heat and drought are having on our trees--hope this one doesn't get me in trouble!

Living in the heart of Washington DC, I can attest that the trees in our urban areas are especially hard hit! Unfortunately, we've paved over just about every open space so what rain we get goes straight to the storm sewers, rather than soaking into the ground. It's incredible that the trees can grow at all.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Stresses of Summer Force Trees' Survival Out on a Limb

There were a couple of climate-related articles that came out of Nature Magazine this past week:

Irrigation moves rain

and one related to what ian posted about the next predicted ice age...

Next ice age on ice?

Wow, what a doomsday outlook! May as well get ready now, for a winter storm. Here's an National Weather Service article with wet winter anomalies. Which seem rather the norm.BTW I live nearby to Fort Monroe & agree that it is an anomaly.Within the past two days it has recieved more than ten times the average amount of precipitation that would normally be measured, for the entire month of September!

Here is a link that might be useful: NWS winter storms in VA

In addition to all the other comments posted lambasting the biased and misinfomed article liked above, I would point out that the current consensus is that we are NOT going into another ice age. Rather, we are on our way out of one. The overly simplistic timing scenario used when this "entering the next ice age" theory was advanced in now discredited, and it is apparent that we are on our way to higher temps due partly to the natural effects of this change. This is NOT to say that global warming is not occuring. To be sure, the man-made changes that we have rought are contributing their part.
Another point needs to be made. Many people make a cost benefit analysis and say that if GW is NOT actually occuring, then we are throwing good money after bad installing pollution control equipment in plants to battle something that is not occuring. This is both short-sighted and fallacious. In almost EVERY instance where a pollution control measure was implemented, the industry implementing that control saw improved efficiency and actually SAVED money after implementation. So from a purely capitalistic standpoint, governmant coersion to implement these controls is justified. It forces recalcitrant, short-term thinkers, whose only goal is to please equally short-sighted stock holders, to adopt a long-term strategy that in the end benefits everyone. Capitalism, just like socialism, only delivers all of its proposed windfalls with the benefit of omniscience. With temporal myopia, it is just as prone to long-term folly (although it is better at fixing the screw-up) This is something you will NEVER get those at the CATO inst. to understand, as they can't seem to focus farther than the bottom line of their portfolios.