“The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne.” — Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”
It seems as if Ma Nature is trying to wash away the U.S. Midwest. One can hardly stop thinking about flood songs while conjuring up visions of large corn pasture chunks and farm homes floating down river toward places like Plaquemines and Evangeline: “Louisiana, Louisiana/They’re trying to wash us away” and “How high’s the water Mama? Five feet high and rising.”
The electronic media seems fixated on trying to tie the flooding and large number of tornadoes this year to global warming. The right, of course, is ridiculing the media as usual while still others try a more thoughtful approach in making their case against The Big Heater as the villain.
Me? I am somewhere in the middle because my degree was not in climatology or meteorology or one of those other “-ologies.” As some talking weatherhead was saying yesterday on TV, the biggest factor with an unusual number of tornadoes and severe flooding this year has more to do with geography and the ever-present battle of hot air versus cold air. Some like it hot … Could global warming be to blame for what the fellow in the linked article above describes as a continual deluge of 100-year floods? Maybe, maybe not.
Global warming is the 20 and 21st centuries’ “Flat Earth” dispute. And it will not matter whether our spherical planet melts every iota of ice away some day, there will likely still be someone around like “Flat Earth Society” proponents who will believe global warming is a scam, myth or both.
But the speculation of media types each time some sort of rash weather takes place that global warming may be in play does little other than fill a news hole with something a little different than saying the same trite words or showing the same cliche video. Without people who — unlike me — know what the hell they are talking about to offer some perspective or analysis as to whether weird weather is actually abnormal or just cyclical, then wheels will just be continually spun and we advance no more in our understanding than we had before the tape rolled or the words were written.
Dadgum, that is one long sentence! And everything here I have typed out while my arthritic neck shoots out little shocks of pain is much longer than I had planned. But there is little I can do about it now. The water’s rising. It’s time to flee!