While the media advertises drought and towns take steps to address local water usage we should take a moment to appreciate this chart. Courtesy of the NOAA, the image plots the 24-month average amount of precipitation in New Hampshire for the past 120 years.
Notice anything? Notice a few things?
First, after ten years of sometimes record-setting above average annual rainfall (2003 to 2013), we’ve taken a few years off. And it’s not the first time this has happened.
So the current precipitation averages are not a sign of the apocalypse, particularly when the trend shows a steady decade on decade precipitation increase of 1.24″.
Put simply; New Hampshire has been getting wetter not drier, so don’t let the chicken little alarmists bilk your stagnating annual incomes with promises that they can fix “the weather” if you’ll just hand over more of what you make at every opportunity they can legislate into existence.
That aside, the modern society still needs water, there are certainly more of us using more water, so maybe New Hampshire circa 2016 needs more water than our land-hugging agricultural dependent ancestors. I have a solution for not one but two so-called alarmist problems.
For about $500-700 million dollars (and I’m sure we can just get that as “free money” from the feds, right?), we can build a desalination plant on the coast capable of processing 100 million gallons of water per day. (Green jobs!)
I know, maybe we could spend less to suck less, but at that rate, we could probably ignore any and all future concerns about 3mm a year worth of sea-level creeps.
The money we would have spent (stolen or otherwise borrowed from the feds) worrying about giving up about a half-foot of ocean front every century (assuming it doesn’t start receding on its own) could be diverted to other infrastructure to move that water inland.
At this point, I should remind everyone that this is no more or no less absurd than any alarmist nonsense peddled as fact or science and that this is deliberate. The next part is absurd only in the sense that it is painfully realistic.
So, before we spend a penny, the environmentalists who say they are concerned about drought and sea-level rise will have blocked any effort to address either problem in any way that might prevent them from accumulating donations and relevance resulting from their being alarmed by the problems so-called existence. While they are blocking progress in the name of progress, the weather will have done what it usually does. We’ll be back to a cycle of wet years while the sea rose another impossible-to-detect few millimeters sold as record setting and catastrophic evidence of our collective doom–which we will deserve having failed to act upon their prescriptions. Absurdly expensive solutions that won’t do anything beyond enriching people who, coincidentally fund their alarmist activism.
That about sums it up.
In the meantime, we are technically in a down year for rainfall, not that this should stop us from bringing in hundreds of refugees who will use more water we don’t have. So, do us all a favor and stop watering your lawn for a few days each week, take shorter showers, and if it’s yellow let it mellow.
Advice for the ages.
And in case you forgot, the weather was here long before us, and it was often awful. It was awful long before abundant, affordable energy dragged us into the first world where free markets and the invisible hand afforded us a nation where poor people have cars, AC, and indoor plumbing. And before cranky, progressive, busy-bodies politicized everything in an effort to accumulate impenetrable political power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.
And the science says that New Hampshire is getting wetter, not drier, in case you forgot.
