The Drought No One Is Talking About, Here Anyway
by Jeff Davis
While the mighty American people sat glued to their televisions watching the Prison Perils of Paris and waiting to see if Tony Soprano finally gets whacked, the Independent newspaper in Britain reported that: “America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.” Odd. American newspapers and television commentators seem to have missed that little story.
According to the Independent: “From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water. In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.”
Anyone who lives in the Southwest is aware of the drought, and anyone who lives there also knows at least one of the major causes of the drought. We have twenty million illegal aliens overloading the infrastructure and turning a minor problem into a major problem. In San Antonio the aquifers get lower each year as the illegal Mexican population rises. In the famed Texas hill country, the rivers where vacationers used to go tubing down the rapids are drying up into mud puddles. The once mighty Rio Grande, which in the past really WAS the Big River of its name, is now a trickling sewer. South Texas, which used to grow crops like watermelons, zucchini, and peaches, has become desert landscape because the massive Mexican population on both sides of the border simply uses up all the water.
The Independent goes on: “Big farmers [read corporate agribusiness that brings in the Mexicans] are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities. But the long-term implications are escaping nobody.” (Uh, actually, they seem to be escaping pretty much everybody; Americans are more interested in Paris Hilton’s drunken escapades and Lindsay Lohan’s drug problem.) Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east’s weather - today’s drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago. In the West, meanwhile, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests a movement towards a state of perpetual drought by the middle of this century. ‘The 1930s drought lasted less than a decade. This is something that could remain for 100 years,’ said Richard Seager a climatologist at Columbia University and lead researcher of a report published recently by the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Another article reports “Los Angeles’ driest year in 130 years of record-keeping went into the books Sunday morning. The nation’s second-largest city is missing nearly a foot of rain for the year counted from July 1 to June 30. Just 3.21 inches have fallen downtown in those 12 months, closer to Death Valley’s numbers than the normal average of 15.14 inches. And it’s much the same all over the West, from the measly snow pack and fire-scarred Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada to Arizona’s shrinking Lake Powe.”
I would really like to see how this country could handle all these problems of climate and so on, if we didn’t have this “illegal alien” monkey on our collective back. Using up our water and worsening the drought is just the beginning for the illegals. Just wait until they run dry the funding for Medicare and Social Security just as they’re running dry the reservoirs in California.