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Weird Weather Watch: Floods and Draughts

I'm late on this one, but you may have read elsewhere that Central Texas was deluged with day after day of rain in late June, causing a dozen deaths. Is this weather weird? Yes indeed. As a former Texan, I can tell you that Texas summers (everywhere but East Texas, where weather is more like Louisiana's) are dry as a bone. There is an occasional thunderstorm to cool things down, but all too briefly and infrequently. Not so this summer. The days of continuous rainfall reached a 70-year high, and the weather was sometimes so bad that helicopters rescuing people from rooftops were grounded.

Now move over a bit to the east. Things in the Cotton Belt are dry as a bone. Farmers in this traditional agricultural hotbed are facing the worst draught in 100 years, and three quarters of their crop is gone to proverbial seed.

It seems difficult to get people to respond to the threat of global warming because in many places the warm (or dry) weather is a welcome change. But this is what global warming really looks like: floods and draughts right next door to one another, with nobody benefiting.

Posted by Cameron Scott on 07/04/07 at 11:40 AM | Comments (0) | Email | Print

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