What money can’t buy

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

Weather is amazing, isn’t it? Even with the most advanced supercomputers in the world, the weather folk still can’t accurately predict the forecast. Forget 10 days out. Five days. They can’t even get today’s forecast right, six hours prior, at least some of the time.

Memorial Day, for example. All last week into Monday morning, no sign of any rain close to the RGV, no matter which forecast you perused.

Then on Memorial Day, around 6:45 p.m., a look at the radar showed a welcome sight to the parched Valley. A line of thunderstorms moving our way. How much rain we got, still hard to say for sure as of Tuesday afternoon. At least an inch or more in most places?

So why is it so hard to forecast the weather? For one thing, weather is considered a “chaotic system.” It’s like the so-called “Butterfly Effect.” Imagine a butterfly flapping its wings in one place leading to a hurricane in another — that’s the butterfly effect in action. Or at least the theory tied to it.

With regard to the power of supercomputers, even the most powerful can’t account for every tiny variation in temperature, wind speed, or humidity across the globe. Small errors early on in the calculations snowball into bigger and bigger errors in the forecast, especially the further out you try to predict.

Short-term forecasts are considered the most reliable, up to three days, because the initial conditions that go into the art of forecasting are fresher, so to speak, and the chaotic effects haven’t had much time to snowball into something that was never forecast. Like Monday’s rain.

We Need More Rain

At this point, with the two reservoirs that water the Valley set to dip below the precipitous 20-percent level, soon, we’ll take all the water we can get.

Typically, our wettest months are May and September. This year, May was below average in terms of rainfall, and the temps already seem hotter than last year, which was a record-setter all on its own.

The forecast for the next 10 days will hopefully be wrong as well. We need more rain. And we need it now.

If you’re not religious, try to pray just the same. Every little bit helps.

By the way, every time you hear “Climate Change,” think “Population Boom.” Somehow that always seems to get left out of the conversation, but if the world’s population in 1900 is estimated to have been 1.6 billion, and today, it’s estimated at 8 billion, what’s that tell anyone?

Is it really how much water we have sitting in the toilet bowl?

Or is it the fact that the human race is growing at an exponential level?

The number of people Mother Earth can sustain, that number is disputed among scientists. Like the hottest temp, how much can we take and still function?

Climate-related questions like those are still open to debate, checked across multiple sources.

It’s an easy subject to study online, form your own opinions, but in the end, it won’t matter. In this modern era with nation- states, of which there are approximately 193 spread out across the globe, each with its own regulations regarding climate control, too many with over-burgeoning populations, how can anyone tell the other what to do?

Just in case you’re depressed and need something to boost your spirits, please consider this fun factoid: Sources like the Rainforest Trust say over 200,000 acres of rainforest are lost globally every day [Rainforest Trust Stop Deforestation Landing]. This translates to roughly 1.5 acres per second.

“I feel better already.” While this figure applies to rainforests worldwide, a significant portion likely comes from the Amazon basin, which holds the unfortunate title of the world’s most threatened rainforest due to deforestation [Amazon Conservation Association website].

Meanwhile, let’s blame cars, trucks, toilets with too much water, and washing machines that could do with less water.

Save the planet. Last but not least, like good health, “having enough rain falling from the skies” isn’t something any of us can buy, no matter how much money we might have, which makes it invaluable.

What the Valley needs are more heavy rainstorms moving through it like the one that hit us Memorial Day evening. For that, we give thanks.