Jumbo squid enjoying hanging out in Monterey Bay
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 27, 2008 at 2:49 pmFrom the San Jose Mercury News:
Marine biologists have known for years that 100-pound squid have quietly made their way from the tropical regions of the Pacific to the cooler reaches of California.
With 10 arms, a sharp beak and a mythic reputation for hunting in packs and attacking everything from scuba divers to each other, the Humboldt squid, also known as the jumbo squid, is now a common sight for fishermen and a current fascination of ocean-gazers.
But how much of a nuisance the little-understood cephalopod could become has only recently become clear.
Researchers in Santa Cruz have found that the squid’s favorite foods are some of the most popular catches of fishermen in the region - meaning competition and perhaps another threat to an industry that has long struggled in the Monterey Bay.
“It looks like the squid have eaten a lot of the fish that are commercially important,” said John Field, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Field’s laboratory at Long Marine Lab, he and his colleagues have cut open the stomachs of nearly 800 squid to see what they’re eating and just how much.
Yuk! To read the rest of this article from the San Jose Mercury News, click here.
The jumbo squid can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh more than 100 pounds. To find out more about the jumbo squid, click here.
The root of some water adages
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 21, 2008 at 7:15 amFrom the Arizona Republic, an article on the origin of the oft-repeated “Whiskey’s for drinking, water is for fighting”:
The quote is widely attributed to Twain. The problem is he probably never said it. According to an article by Guy Rocha, Nevada archivist, there is no record of Twain - who lived in Nevada in the early 1860s - ever saying any such thing. And the people at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California-Berkeley agree. Nobody seems to know who came up with the famous adage about water in the West. It also has been attributed to Will Rogers, but the evidence for that is flimsy. So I suspect that it is a clever remark some unknown person made about Western water issues and that it got passed around until somebody tagged Twain with it.
It’s like another Arizona quote, the oft-told, “You could say the same thing about hell.” I found it attributed to three sources. I suspect I could have found more if I’d looked harder.
To find out where that quote came from, click here.
When good rain barrels go bad …
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 8, 2008 at 7:16 amSent to me by Eric Eckl, of the excellent Water Words That Work blog:
You try to do the right thing. You get a rain barrel for your house. And then this.
http://www.koat.com/news/14993696/detail.html
Turning sewer sludge into electricity
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 23, 2007 at 7:23 amFrom the Bakersfield Californian:
That stuff you flush down the toilet may someday provide power to your home. The state’s largest sewage sludge composter, located near Lost Hills, plans to build a renewable energy plant that burns treated human waste and other organic material to make electricity. Owners of Liberty Composting, formerly San Joaquin Composting, already have a contract to sell 20 megawatts of electricity from the planned $64 million facility to Pacific Gas and Electric. Construction of the plant, called Liberty V, is slated to start in three years.
The move is part of the company’s desire to find a better use for sludge in the face of stricter air pollution regulations and public concern about sludge disposal, said Patrick McCarthy, president of McCarthy Family Farms, which owns Liberty Composting. “Five years ago, we started talking and said there’s got to be a better alternative to composting,” McCarthy said. “Our idea is to take these problematic organic waste streams and use them for their highest and best use in the most environmentally friendly manner, and in doing so, generate renewable energy.”
Liberty Composting receives up to 780,000 tons of organic waste annually. The majority is sewage sludge from 48 communities from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz. California produces about 3 million tons of sludge a year. About one-third is directly applied to the land, another third goes into landfills and the rest is composted. About 90 percent of the finished compost from Liberty Composting is used at McCarthy Family Farms’ Liberty Ranch in Kings County.
The Liberty V plant will use a process called gasification, whereby sludge and other organic waste is heated at temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees in a low-oxygen environment. The heat drives gases off the waste and into a chamber where injected oxygen causes the gases to ignite. The combustion heats water and the resulting steam spins a turbine, creating electricity.
Some butane is required for initial start, McCarthy said, but afterward the facility can sustain operation without an additional fuel source.
To read the rest of this article from the Bakersfield Californian, click here.
This story reminds me of a similar story I posted a few months ago regarding the Inland Empire Utilities District, who uses cow manure to generate electrical power to run a water recycling plant and a desalination plant. That is only one of many great ideas the IEUD has developed to provide water and energy to it’s customers. Check it out by clicking here.
Led Zeppelin and Water Dummies
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 18, 2007 at 7:22 amFrom the watercrunch blog:
Imagine a straight drop into a vertical loop, followed by a double inversion cobra roll, zero-G roll, vertical loop and a corkscrew. Now imagine as you twist and turn, a 1,200-watt sound system plays Led Zepplin’s 1969 hit song “Whole Lotta Love.”
Your dreams will become reality next year. Some of you all may have remembered when I first detailed in a blog post in July the new signature Led Zepplin roller coaster in Myrtle Beach at the new 140 acre Hard Rock Theme Park. Yesterday, they had a public unveiling of the roller coaster and ran the coaster not with live people (although, I am sure they would have found some volunteers), but with some water ballast dummies.
For some pictures and the rest of the story, click here to visit the watercrunch blog.
Doug Bremmer of Huffington Post on the effectiveness of praying for rain
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on December 11, 2007 at 2:11 pmThoroughly enjoyable article from Doug Bremmer posted on the Huffington Post about Atlanta’s mayor calling for the city to pray for rain. And, apparently, rain did actually come, about two days of drizzle. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has given this a lot of press coverage, according to Bremmer, and many faiths faithfully prayed for rain.
Says Bremmer:
I think it is fine for people to pray/meditate/dance/convulse/transcend, or whatever they want to do to get themselves to a better place. But I think that those people who are folding up their hands in prayer to a personal God to open up the heavens and let rain fall on their pointed heads are simply ridiculous.
You see there is a scientific consensus that planet Earth (you live there too? How cool!) is gradually warming up, and that this warming processes will cause changes in weather patterns throughout the world, including droughts. Normally in Georgia during the summertime the heat and humidity builds up throughout the day until late afternoon when we have some real doozy rain storms with lots of thunder ‘n lighting. Didn’t have a single one of those this summer. Sonny and the prayer people were only able to squeeze out of the skies two days of steady drizzle that looked more like my native Seattle. Hardly satisfying. And nothing since then. So the obvious conclusion is that climate change is behind the Georgia drought. OK not only Red State problem. Blue State people listen up. You are burning up out there in California. Literally. And for us to ask Jehovah to make things all better after we have pooped in our own room is absurd. I say better to use prayer/meditation/dance/convulsion/transcendence to make us all better able to be good stewards of Planet Earth, that was given to us by God/Yahweh/GreatSpirit/Osiris/BigBang/Whatever.
I actually like the views from the spiritual leaders of Atlanta’s Muslim and Jewish faiths better than what the Hindus/Buddhists/Baptists/Catholics had to say.
Plemon Al-Amin, the prayer leader at Masjid of Al-Islam in Atlanta said, “Because the Quran was first revealed in Arabia, there were always challenges in terms of rain. And we do actually have rain prayers. But we want to make sure everybody is already in the frame of mind of conserving. Because it’s problematic when you are asking for something and not making proper use of what you already have.”
Rabbi Shalom Lewis of Etz Chaim of Atlanta, said, “I teach the efficacy of prayer is to inspire us, and it gives us a sense that we are participants in what goes on this planet and on this earth. And we also recognize that we pray to God for our ability to know what is right or wrong and how to deal with the limited bounty we have.”
Amen to that.
To read the full text of this post from Doug Bremmer at the Huffington Post, click here.
Holy smokes! The most important drought story of the year and somehow I missed it!
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 30, 2007 at 5:42 pmI heard it from JFleck Inakstain, who heard it from Waterblogged, and I have to agree, it is, like, the most important drought story missed by Aquafornia! This, from ABC News:
Sheriff Garrett Roberts hasn’t needed a machete to cut any of the scrawny marijuana plants he has confiscated this year. A severe drought that has parched corn and soybean fields across the Southeast has also scorched marijuana crops, leaving plants that should be 10 feet tall so puny that Roberts and his deputies simply pull them up.
“The plants we’ve seen have been anywhere from 2 inches to 5 1/2 feet tall,” said Roberts, the chief law enforcer in eastern Kentucky’s Lawrence County. Kentucky, one of the nation’s top producers of marijuana, has seen a sharp decrease in production of the illegal crop this year. The weather there and in neighboring states is cutting into the supply, and street prices for the drug could rise, authorities say.
For the rest of this news story from ABC News, click here.
And, well, while I’m at it, what’s cool about a drought? Waterblogged asked the same question:
… We were puzzled when we saw it, not only because we don’t recall using the word cool in any of our entries, but also because dude, what could possibly be cool about a drought? After an emergency meeting about the matter, the Waterblogged.info editorial team determined that either this visitor is an idiot, or worse, knows something about long periods without normal precipitation leading to severe water shortage that we don’t. After putting our crack team of researchers to work we’re embarrassed to report that the latter is true. The web abounds with cool facts about Georgia’s drought and, with deep apologies for not having done so earlier, proudly present the ten coolest.
Click here to read the rest of Waterblogged’s post about what is cool about the Georgia drought.
Mesa, Arizona: catching a wave in the wrong direction?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 30, 2007 at 7:40 amFrom the New York Times opinion section:
The Atlanta metropolitan area has been hit by a drought so severe that Georgia’s governor has resorted to praying for rain. Lake Mead has been drying up so quickly that there is now a giant chalky ring around it.
Then there’s Mesa, Ariz., where voters this month overwhelmingly approved a water park called the Waveyard.
It is not a couple of water slides and a kiddie pool. Pictures from its Web site make parts of this sprawling water wonderland look like a surf break off Oahu, with tubular waves big enough to hide in, or a fish-dotted reef in the Bahamas, or a whitewater river in British Columbia.
In a region where yearly rainfall is about 8 inches, the Waveyard would use 50 million gallons of water on its first fill-up, then go through 60 million to 100 million gallons a year. About 50 million of those would be lost to evaporation, and 5 million to splashing.
Only as much water as an 18-hole golf course, it’s proponents say.
To read the full text of this editorial from the New York Times, click here.
To visit the website for The Waveyard, click here.
Just for fun …
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 14, 2007 at 10:48 pmFrom the California Progress Report, here’s a couple of articles just for fun …
Baseball responsible for global warming? A theory you probably hadn’t heard of … here’s a humorous, non-political article written by Thomas Gangale for the California Progress Report:
After an afternoon of walking the Manassas battlefield in the sweltering Virginia summer, we talked about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and global warming over an Italian dinner. “It’s not greenhouse gasses,” Mike said in a matter of fact manner, “It’s baseball.”
It was only due to my military training that I avoided spewing cabernet all over the good colonel. “Baseball?”
“Baseball. Nature is a baseball fan. She’s warming up the planet so that more baseball can be played in more places and for longer seasons.”
Needless to say, I was skeptical, but as we explored Mike’s theory, I saw that the logic was inescapable.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Mr. Gangale has a solution for our budget crisis, in this humorous article also from the California Progress Report:
Now, sometimes bills are named to honor individuals, nothing strange about that, but I have a learning disability, and sometimes when I’m reading, I parse things a little differently from normal people. So, the name of this hypothetical bill took my thinking off on a tangent: Suppose that I could pay a few million dollars to the state of California to have the Russian River officially named the Thomas Gangale Russian River for a few years. That would be a nice boost to my megalomania, and at the same time put some chump change in the public coffers–a win-win.
Years ago, I hated it when Candlestick Park was renamed 3Com Park. Now it’s Monster Park. Sure, that makes more sense; you have to be some kind of a monster to survive the weather in the damned place. Anyway, city governments have been cutting such deals with corporations for years in order to ease their financial woes, so why couldn’t the state government do the same thing by leasing the naming rights to the state’s geography? If not the Thomas Gangale Russian River, then perhaps the Stolichnaya Russian River or even the Big Lebowski White Russian River. Thanks to occasional water quality issues, there are times it sort of smells like ragged vodka anyway.
To read the full text of this humorous article from the California Progress Report, click here.
Cloud seeding: does it work?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 14, 2007 at 11:16 amFrom Wired News:
Once upon a time, shamans danced to bring the rains. Now we send pilots into the clouds, bearing a sacrifice of silver iodide.
Okay, so there’s a bit more science to cloud seeding than rain dancing. But despite being around for decades, the mainstream scientific community’s still skeptical. Why? In part because it’s so difficult to do rigorous, double-blind, case-controlled studies on something so variable and long-term and poorly understood as the weather itself.
While researching the possibility of using cloud seeding in the drought-stricken southeast, I ended up talking to Joe Golden, a researcher who’d actually seeded clouds in Florida. He told me about the experiment, run by Bill Woodley in the late 1970’s, designed to confirm an earlier experiment that suggested cloud seeding success.
Over the course of an entire season, pilots took to the skies at every sign of rainclouds; they wouldn’t know until they delivered their load whether it was silver iodide or sand. But one of the placebo days also happened to fall on a day of widespread torrential downpours. It swamped the experiment. Take that day out, said Golden, and the cloud seeding was a success; keep it, and it’s not clear whether it worked.
To read the rest of this article from Wired News, click here.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - twice the size of Texas and growing
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 27, 2007 at 9:46 pmHow did I miss this … out there in the Pacific Ocean, there’s a huge patch of garbage which originated on land and migrates it’s way slowly out into the middle of the ocean, where it joins other trash swirling around. From the San Francisco Chronicle article posted on the 19th of this month:
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years. “With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping,” Eriksen said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm.”
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle opinion section takes it a little bit further, calling it both impressive and revolting:
Is there anything more impressive than the idea that you can, say, toss away your little Calistoga bottle or your plastic Safeway bag or your meth syringe or old iPod case or cigarette lighter or DVD wrapper here, and it will somehow, through a miraculous combination of time and wind and wastefulness and the flow of nature’s beautiful eternal pulsing rhythms, wend its way 1,000 miles out to sea and then, well, just swirl around, slowly breaking apart and poisoning all life surrounding it and joining with the mountains of other plastic crap spewed out from our friends and enemies and neighboring nations worldwide? Is this not, in its way, profoundly moving? You bet it is.
But oh holy hell, it certainly is impressive. At least 1,500 miles wide (give or take, could be much larger, no one’s quite sure because it’s a bit difficult to measure), 30 meters deep, 80 percent plastic, and 100 percent appalling. Truly, there is nothing else quite like it on Earth.
The editorial also points out the absurd irony of it all:
Let us think upon this stunning phenomenon for a moment. Because, unlike the obvious intimations of death and decay coming at us from the likes of our landfills and our SUVs and cell phones and Dick Cheney’s sidelong sneer, the GPGP might just be one of the greatest examples of ironic poetic justice of our time. Can you see it?
The poetry goes something like this: Plastic bottle is tossed away. Plastic bottle, along with millions just like it, escapes out to sea, drifts and wanders and ultimately joins giant toxic stew of other plastic garbage sitting like a massive island in middle of impartial but increasingly wary ocean.
Time passes. Life churns. Sea birds and other large marine life ingest (and then die from) some of the billions of bits of brightly-colored plastic floating about, as the sun slowly breaks down the rest of the plastic bottle into its fundamental, ultra-toxic polymer molecules. Stew thickens.
And then, the magic happens. Nature’s most efficient organic filters, the sea jellies, absorb those tiny plastic molecules into their bodies. Small fish eat the jellies. Larger fish eat the smaller fish. Slowly, the deadly plastics, which never completely biodegrade, amble their way back up the food chain and back into the stomachs and bloodstreams and ecosystems of larger and larger animals until, voila, there again is your plastic bottle, right there on your dinner plate. Neat!
In short: Your plastic bottle, once full of life-giving water imported all the way from Fiji or France, has come back around to poison you at last. Isn’t irony fun?
To read the full text of this editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle, click here.
Brain eating amoeba in Tucson’s water supply poses no health risk, officials say
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 11, 2007 at 5:25 amFrom U. S. Water News Online:
A brain-eating amoeba has been identified in Tucson’s water supply but experts assure consumers that drinking from the city’s water supply does not pose a health risk.
The killer amoeba, known as Naegleria fowleri, was found in several Tucson wells but experts say its presence in the city’s water supply poses no danger to consumers. Tucson Water chlorinates its well water before distribution, killing the amoeba before the water reaches taps, the Associated Press reports. Its presence in underground water is however a surprise to at least one expert. “The organism is everywhere. It feeds on bacteria,” the AP quotes Charles Gerba, a microbiology professor with the University of Arizona’s Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science.
Naegleria fowleri can usually be found in surface water such as rivers and lakes and researchers speculate that it has thrived in underground water because of biodegradable oil used in pumps.
The CDC says that swimming pools are safe, as long as they are properly cleaned, maintained, and chlorinated.
To read the full text of this article from U. S. Water News Online, click here.
Brain-eating amoeba claims its sixth victim
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 1, 2007 at 1:42 pmJust for a change of pace … the Associated Press is reporting that the brain-eating amoeba has claimed a young teenager’s life after swimming in Lake Havasu:
It sounds like science fiction but it’s true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it’s killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future. “This is definitely something we need to track,” said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better,” Beach said. “In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”
The amoeba are mostly found in the warm southern states, and can live in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools.
To read the rest of this story from the Associated Press, click here.
This Week’s Odds and Ends: how to make sprawl bubbles, drug testing of sewer water, and splitting up California into 5 states
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 26, 2007 at 6:52 amIt’s been a busy week for water news, with the Delta Summit and the hearings in Fresno. Be sure to tune in next week when the hearings resume.
Here’s a few interesting pieces I have on my desktop:
How to make sprawl bubbles! New Mexico has many water issues, as does the Southwest, and I came across this by way of jfleck at insktain, who linked to this article posted on Cocoposts regarding a development in New Mexico. Here’s my favorite part:
A recipe for SPRAWL BUBBLES
- Take some relatively flat land in the fast growing west
(the plains in the midwest don’t have that economic ZING)- trim any natural drainage by channelization
(don’t be shy with that concrete!)- add as much potable water as you can
(4 – 7 water zones ought to do it)- use just a pinch of regulation
(or none, depending on political taste)And Viola! You’ve got a sprawl bubble! Of course some of the best is made in Nevada, but they used soooo much of that subprime yeast how could they not be Number 1 in the nation with 1 foreclosure for every 200 households?
Drug Testing of Waste Water? Talk about big brother watching you … here’s an interesting post on WaterWired about how researchers have been testing the discharge from sewage plants to determine drug use, both legal & illicit:
Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking. “It’s a community urinalysis,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a University of Washington drug abuse researcher who was part of the Oregon State team. The scientists presented their results Tuesday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
The most common drug excreted was caffeine - no surprise there. An interesting read!
Splitting up California … and last, here’s a blog that Stockton’s RecordNet.com wrote about in a story. I’ve heard that a fringe idea has been bumping around the state about splitting up into two states, but now a blog called Immodest Proposals has written a piece that suggests dividing up California in to five different states: The Bay Area would become Groovy, Northern California would be Lower Cascadia, the Central Valley would be Hill and Dale, Los Angeles would be Lotus Land, and San Diego & the Imperial Valley would be Reagan. From Stockton’s RecordNet article:
I support this proposal heart and soul. Even my gizzard supports this proposal. Mainly this is because of the Delta summit convoked this week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. One of its worrisome themes, oft-recurring in the governor’s recent rhetoric, was that all Delta stakeholders cannot emerge from the Delta’s crisis with all their interests satisfied. What this means to San Joaquin Valley residents can be summed up in three words: duck and cover.
The unholy SoCal alliance of Lotus Land and Reagan have declared war on Hill and Dale. The warmongers thirst for Delta water.
Restore the Delta, a local activist group, spelled it out in a press release this week: “Over the last year, Restore the Delta staff members have learned how to decode such statements about those who would be unhappy with changes to how the Delta is managed.” The “who” are, “the people of the Delta: the recreation community, fishermen, Delta farmers and landowners, urban Delta water agencies, boaters, and Delta business owners,” the group warns. “Such phrases are code for the idea that the people, culture, and history of the Delta must change and live with a ‘new’ environment. … (We) are being set up to lose to more powerful corporate interests in other parts of the state.”
The beautiful thing about the proposed boundaries of Hill and Dale is that they stretch the Valley state up into the Sierra watershed, source of the Delta’s water. So our state would not only boast “natural wonders” such as Yosemite; it would control two-thirds of California’s water supply.
The region would transform from a politically overmatched afterthought to the Big Dog with its teeth sunk squarely in the rump of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The Stockton article suggests putting sandbags in the aqueduct to stop water flowing to the south, and turning it into a waterpark instead, and leasing out the pumps that chew up the smelt to Starkist for tuna making operations.
To read the full text of Stockton’s RecordNet article, click here. To read the post from Immodest Proposals, click here.
Geo-engineering against climate change
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 21, 2007 at 1:52 pmHere’s something from jfleck over at Inkstain that I found really interesting. It isn’t really directly water-related per se, but an interesting read, nonetheless. I’ll post it now while I’m waiting for news from the court hearing today on the Delta pumps.
Geo-engineering is the idea of trying to do something to actually stop or reverse climate change, such as using a fleet of jets to spew aerosols that would deflect the sun’s rays, or using giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays and thus cool the planet. Hmmm….
To read the jfleck’s post and get the link to his full article, click here.
OK, back to waiting for news from the hearing …..
Ten Water Laws of the West
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 1, 2007 at 6:25 amHere’s an article I found on the internet regarding water laws of the West. It is written by Hugh Holub of “General Delivery University“, which bills itself as America’s Only Genuine Diploma Mill. The ‘University’ offers such programs as the College of Agriculture, where you can ‘learn to grow weeds and qualify for federally subsidized water”, and the Ponzi School of Business which is “sought after by authorities in 37 foreign countries”. Tuition is free!
The “10 Water Laws of the West” looks to the casual observer (me) to be for the most part correct, at least as I understand western water laws to be, and, as is all material on this website, written with a sense of humor and should be worth a chuckle or two. However, I wouldn’t necessarily base a lawsuit on any material contained herein; it is, after all, a website that will allow you to print out any diploma you want.
Click here to read “10 Water Laws of the West”. Click here to visit “General Delivery University”, where you can download and print your fill-in the blank college degree today! And you can even play graduation music while you fill it out. Color printer is suggested.
Drought: Things we can do to get it to rain
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 18, 2007 at 6:21 amHere’s an article from Yucca Valley’s Hi-Desert Star. It is a guest commentary, and the writer gives us some ideas on what we can do to end the drought:
He writes: It’s time to do something about the situation instead of sitting around debating global warming or other theories about California drought cycles called normal because we live in a semi-arid area (otherwise known as the Great American Desert). Action is called for and it is time that we begin.
1. We all need to wash our cars. We have been getting away with just a bit of dust on our cars and living with it awaiting the time when it rains and turns that dust to mud. We all know that the minute you wash your cars that it rains so if we know the pattern, go for it.
To read the rest of this humorous article, and find out more things that you can do to make it rain, click here.
Drought, schmought - this blogger’s got the answer!
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 16, 2007 at 10:44 pmOK, here’s a blogger who says we’ve been living too long with the illusion that we can’t do anything about the drought, and it’s time to change all of that. Yep, for only $1 billion a year, this blogger says we can make our own rainclouds. From scratch! Now there’s a recipe you won’t find in The Joy of Cooking!
Just how does he propose to do it?
A possible solution is to start with an ocean going ship off the coast of America. Pump water into the ship from the ocean and remove the salt. Add minerals to the water for raindrop control. We do not want the clouds to rain too soon. The clouds might have to move hundreds of miles inland before it rains. Spray the water out of nozzles high above the ship into a chimney. Have jet engines or fans move the air in the chimney at speeds up to three hundred mph. This upward movement of water vapor at high speed could create a large cloud in a short time. A cloud is just made up of water vapor and raindrops. Have a small fleet of rain making ships off the coast when the wind is blowing in the right direction. Have ships off the California coast, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coast to make large rainstorms for different areas of the country.
Now, this forward thinking blogger forsees more than just storm clouds on the horizon: adding extra storms can cause flooding and other impacts, so we’re going to need some new laws to protect this cutting edge industry from lawsuits due to mudslides, lightning, tornadoes, etc, and the United Nations would have to agree to monitor the rainmaking process ….
Now, doesn’t that have you thinking, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that???”
To read all about it for yourself, simply click right here.
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