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Atlanta, Ga: Where did the hurricanes go?

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Atlanta is becoming increasingly distressed over a drought that has reached “exceptional” level threatening to leave more than 3 million city residents without tap water if the drought persists more than a few more months. What happened to the increasingly frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes that so-called “global warming” was supposed to produce? There’s nothing but the proverbial sound of crickets chirping in the southeast where there should be at least a few howling hurricanes or remnants thereof dumping torrential rain on the region. Meanwhile, on the western side of the Gulf coast, Texas has had an unprecedented amount of rainfall even absent hurricane activity. Lake Travis, a 20,000 acre flood control reservoir near me, has been near or into the flood plain for almost 12 months in a row. Never before in the 60 year history of the lake has it been above the flood elevation for the entire month of August. This all just goes to show that the climate is unpredictable and predictions made by global warming alarmists are no exception. Even if anthropogenic global warming is true there is little to no evidence that its consequences will be a bad thing. Indeed as more and more scientists are admitting, when all real evidence is considered global warming is a good thing. It’s not a good thing for everyone everywhere of course but the net consequences appear to be of benefit to more people than not.

Comments
The real clincher for me is how, inarguably, plant growth rate increases dramatically when there are both higher tempertures and higher CO2 so long as enough sunlight, water, and nutrients are available for the higher growth rate. Plants also use water much more efficiently in the same high temperature, high CO2 environment. Fresh water conservation for agriculture is as important as anything. Given that it will take thousands of years for the Greenland ice cap to melt, and a million years for the Antarctic ice cap (it's getting colder at the south pole in any event so that's not even a demonstrable issue), the manmade excess CO2 will be a thing of the distant past. The earth might still warm up enough to melt the ice caps but it won't be human activity that causes it. The earth is usually much warmer than it is right now which, by the way, is why plants grow so much better in that environment - it's normal for them - whether you want to say plants evolved in a warmer environment or were designed for it makes no difference because one or the other is certainly true. The tradeoff between humanity adjusting to a warmer climate, especially in the higher northern latitudes where most of the warming is occuring, sea level rising a few inches at least and a few feet at most over a century or more, and the primary producers in the food chain increasing growth rate by 25%, the increased food production is by far the better thing. It's preferable even to keeping the status quo in the environment. There is a such thing as an optimum climate for the biosphere, we're not in the optimum right now, but thankfully we're heading that way. Global COOLING would be something to get really alarmed about. Primary production decreasing is bad news for the higher ups on the food chain including humans.DaveScot
October 22, 2007
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By the way, while we're running out of water here in Atlanta (no outdoor watering allowed), the Army Corps of Engineers is said to be releasing millions of gallons of water from dams to preserve an endangered mussel's habitat. I wonder if the critter is really endangered, and I wonder if its more drought-resistant than they're saying? And why should such an environmentally unfit mollusk be allowed to pass on its genes in the first place? Are we not preventing more complex shellfish from arising by Darwinian processes? I would love to see a flying mussel, an amphibious mussel, or a cow-like mussel that gives milk that we could drink and can manipulate objects with opposable thumbs. But alas, our short-circuiting of natural selection is preventing this from occuring.russ
October 21, 2007
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Dave, you must not have gotten the memo. Global warming causes severe climate change, regardless of whether the change produces higher or lower temperatures or more or less precipitation. They have borrowed a page from the Darwinian playbook: all events support their theory, including those that contradict it. Human-caused GW is true by definition.russ
October 21, 2007
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