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I will be getting it!
But you wont hear it mentioned on the Beeb
I hope there are some rude bits in it ,we need more rude!!
When do you do a cartoon about the drought in Texas?
I would probably start the piece with this, Ed…
DROUGHTS. Droughts have been recorded as a problem in Texas since Spaniards explored the area. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca found a population of soil tillers near the site of present-day Presidio, where it had not rained for two years. Regarding the white man as a god, they begged him to tell the sky to rain. In 1720 a summer dry spell in Coahuila killed 3,500 of the 4,000 horses that the Marqués de Aguayo, governor of Texas, was prepared to bring to Texas. A drought in Central Texas dried up the San Gabriel River in 1756, forcing the abandonment of a settlement of missionaries and Indians. Stephen F. Austin’s first colonists also were hurt by drought. In 1822 their initial food crop of corn died from lack of moisture. Each decade since then has been marked by at least one period of severe drought.
…I would then move on, to ask, why we think that mankind is entirely to blame, for something that nature seems to be quit capable of arranging for itself? The desperations that leads mankind through history, and still today, to believe in supernatural causes, influenced in some way, by mans behaviour. The risks and difficulties of living in areas that are prone to extreme natural events…..And finish by showing the absurdadities of all the present methods being proposed to ‘fix’ the problem (Wind folly building, for instance.) Pointing out particularly the cost and counterproductive impacts, and what could have been done with that level of effort instead.
…How would you have tackled it yourself?
Not sure. I’m not a cartoonist. I’d have made it accurate, historically and factually, though. Cartoons carry more punch that way. You know, stick to the facts, so you don’t have to remember the propaganda line.
And somehow, I thought there’d be more drawing, less vitriol.
We’re still at the rough stage here Ed…… (The drawing comes later) and we cut out what’s not needed. No point in saying ‘accurate’ and then not supplying the corrections to the concept is there?…I played the ball back to you (its your idea), don’t walk off the court instead ….(That’s not very educational.)
And the drought of 2010 laid over ’em all. You’re right. Environmental, weather and climate disasters don’t lend themselves to cartoons.
That’s very ‘dry’ Ed. But not terribly visual. Perhaps we should get some graphs together?
Any problem with this?…
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/drought-history-in-texas.html
If you do a month-to-month comparison, instead of just one month to that month in every year, you find that the current drought in Texas is, in almost every case, longer, dryer, with higher temperatures.
Statistics don’t tell the whole story. Your earlier drought stories talked about deaths to wildlife — more severe this year than ever before measured — and dramatic effects on domestic stock in the past — more severe in the past year than ever before measured, particularly in terms of reduction of herds of cattle — greater heat with great dry weather — worse than ever before.
If we cherry pick, we can find drought measures that surpass each of the drought measures in Texas in 2011. But never before have they all happened in the same year, at the same time, often with records coming month after month, combining to make this drought worrisome.
In contrast to the anti-warmists’ claims in the spring of 2011 that “the drought is over!” in the Southwest, 2011 delivered a rather crippling blow to claims that warming is not occurring, won’t be severe, and won’t at least decimate, if not obliterate, economic actions.
Cattle herds that had survived droughts in Texas since 1800 were sold off this year. Old cowboys remembered their grandfathers talking about where they found water “way back in the drought of ‘XX.” When they could not find water there this year, coming on top of the previous dry year, and floods, they decided to sell.
Your happy little beagle just doesn’t seem primed for true drought cartooning.
La Nina, has done Texas no favours, thus far this year Ed. Let us hope the little girl leaves you soon.
It’s a double-dip La Nina, you know, back-to-back LN events — never before seen.
Al Gore warned that there would be events like this. Surely this is just coincidence, though, right? It can’t be a sign of warming . . .
Double dip La Nina, like on this graph you mean?…
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/la-nina-2011?media=7556
Warming trends for Austin Texas…
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/austin-texas-all-daily-trends-since.html
More like this warming and precip trend for all of Texas:
You’re right, I was wrong. There have been back-to-back La Ninas before.
http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/back-to-back-la-nina_2011-09-12
My error.
My intent was simply to figure out whether this site is fair enough to bother to follow. I got my answer in your first response. Thanks.
You’re very welcome.
Ed is studying droughts in Texas. I am intrigued by the temperature records, perhaps as this easier to follow. This is because in my mind, “drought = temperature – rainfall – management”;
that is, a perceived drought is both the weather and the success in managing the vagaries of the weather. Also I don’t do precipitation or drought management. Looking just at the temperature records in Texas last year (following the Darwin Airport and Dublin Airport data scandals), I noticed that the long-run (100y+) temperature records in Texas were intriguing. Overall, they seemed to drift downwards, although some showed cyclic features over 60 years. It is difficult to eye-ball some of this from the graphs or even put trendlines through them with any confidence. Yet the NASA records asserted a significant upward drift. By subtracting the original figures from the NASA assertions I arrived at the “adjustment” made by NASA to the figures as recorded by the staff at the weather stations. I noticed that in nearly all cases the adjustment was in the direction of lowering the temperatures around 1900s, by about one degree. This adjustment makes it appear that, regardless of what the average temperature is actually doing, the temperatures asserted by NASA are doing the same but with an extra rate of warming of about one degree per century. This is, in climate terms if not drought terms, a very major adjustment. I have not been able to find any rational explanation for lowering the temperatures around 1900 and am therefore very suspicious of the NASA data. These adjustments can be found in many other stations around the world. I summarise the Texas situation here http://i55.tinypic.com/5zqvcw.jpg .
This is not of course to say that drought frequency in Texas is not increasing, nor that this unrelated to drifts in climate, nor that methods of management of droughts are become increasingly ineffective. All I am saying is that (i) it appears that Texas does not appear to have got warmer over the last hundred years, and may well have cooled by a fraction of a degree; (ii) NASA for some reason do not wish us to believe this.
NASA denies a cooling trend anywhere? I doubt it.
Worldwide, the temperature rises. In specific places, extra energy in the atmosphere will provide cooling trends. A local cooling trend doesn’t alter global warming, worldwide.