Archives par mot-clé : Flooding

climate-debate

No, Venice Isn’t Flooding Due To Climate Change

by J. Delingpole, No. 14, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Venice is flooded – again – and the mayor Luigi Brugnaro is blaming climate change.

This has become the standard dog-ate-my-homework excuse for desperate politicians and administrators who want to dodge their responsibilities while simultaneously attracting media sympathy and aid money.

But it’s rubbish, of course. The real reason for Venice’s plight is in whichever idiot decided all those years ago to build the city on a series of swampy islands at the edge of a lagoon.

On the plus side, this helped the Venetians build a wealthy maritime empire and later to extract gazillions of euros from tourists who think it’s romantic being propelled in a funny looking boat down rancid, rat-infested canals by a man in a stripy shirt with a long stick. On the downside, Venice is slowly going the way of Atlantis.

There is nothing weird about Venice flooding at this time of year. From Autumn to Spring is the season known as ‘acqua alta’, when the tides in the Adriatic are higher than usual, so it’s not uncommon for attractions like Piazza San Marco to be inundated with water rather than the usual hapless travelers being fleeced for a 20 Euro cappuccino.

In 2003, Venice began building a flood barrier – known as Moses – which was supposed to put an end to all that.

But as is the way with Italian public works projects — in fact, all public works projects everywhere — it has run fearfully overbudget, become riddled with corruption, and taken much longer than originally planned.

According to Business Insider:

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climate and geology

More Failed Predictions: May Was The Second Wettest Month In US History

by Chriss Street, June 28, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the month of May was the second wettest and temperatures were in the bottom-third for its 125-year US history.

The 2010 publication titled, ‘A Global Overview Of Drought and Heat-Induced Tree Mortality Reveals Emerging Climate Change Risks for Forests’, was accepted by the Obama administration as scientific evidence that climate change had made the Earth:

“…increasingly vulnerable to higher background tree mortality rates and die-off in response to future warming and drought, even in environments that are not normally considered water-limited.”

But NOAA just reported that May US precipitation totaled an average of 4.41 inches, 1.50 inches above average, and ranked second wettest in the 125-year period of record for May as well as second wettest for all months since January 1895.

The only wetter month in US history was May 2015 with 4.44 inches of precipitation.

The 37.68 inches of precipitation across the contiguous U.S. from June 2018 to May 2019 shattered the previous 1982-83 12-month period by 1.48 inches.

Near-record to record precipitation was observed from the West Coast through the central Plains and into the Great Lakes and parts of the Northeast.

As a result, severe May flooding was observed along the Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers. Vicksburg, MS, reported ongoing flooding since mid-February.

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