Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Blame It On The Rain

I don't know about you, but when I started hearing about the Greenhouse Effect, I was worried about having to scramble around, looking for a drink of water. I imagined a scorched version of our Earth, brought on by the magnified effect of our sun's rays pouring through an ozone-free sky. Now it seems that would be, at least for the time being, preferable to the people living on the Mississippi Delta. Lack of water is not the concern.
Even out here in Sunny California, there are those who believe that not only is our drought over, but now we are in line for a flurry of summer flooding as the exceptional snow-pack begins to melt. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. How do we go about solving this crisis of plenty? Where did all this water come from in the first place?
That's when I remembered what my friend, the science teacher, always used to tell kids about the water cycle: It's the same water that has been here for millions of years. The same water that dinosaurs drank, and later evacuated. Then it got evaporated again, and became clouds that rained and so on and so forth. The way most kids remember that lesson was that every time it rains, it rains dinosaur urine. And so it goes for eons and eons, until now, when it seems as though the dinosaurs must have been having some sort of party, and we're all the wetter for it. But how do we solve this problem?
Once upon a time there was a claim made by Scott Tissue that ninety million toilets were flushed, nearly simultaneously, during halftime of the Super Bowl. Their calculations suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred million gallons of water was moved at that moment. That would help empty some of those reservoirs. Unfortunately, the current labor situation in the NFL may keep the Super Bowl from being played this year. Metaphorically speaking, it never rains, it just pours.
As the water continues to rise, I find myself wondering if this isn't Al Gore's Fault.

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