A few weeks ago, Romm and McKitten were telling us that the Mississippi River was going to dry up and we were all going to die. Since then, the river depth has increased 400%.
USGS Current Conditions for USGS 07265455 MISSISSIPPI RIVER NR GREENVILLE, MS
Weather worriers are drowning, not waving.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Next they will be saying the river drying up has caused Massive Flooding!
Steven,
Stop peeing in the river!
The Mississippi has long fascinated journalists. Here’s Mark Twain with a rather more scientific take on it than Romm and McKibben:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
From ‘Life on the Mississippi’ 1883.