Why Would The EPA Lie To Our Kids?
By Paul Homewood
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/impacts/signs/droughts.html
The EPA have published a student’s guide to climate change. In the section on droughts, they claim :-
Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more extreme worldwide, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.
They have obviously not studied their history. In the UNESCO magazine “The Courier” back in 1973, when the world was going through a cooling phase, climatologists such as Hubert Lamb were writing :-
- Among the effects of the changes of climate in recent years, which have given cause for concern are – the long-continued droughts and deficient rainfalls in various parts of the world associated with shifts of the world’s anticyclone belts.
- Rainfall at eight places in northern India, the Sudan and at 16 to 20°N in west Africa averaged 45 per cent less in the years 1968-72 than in the 1950′s. In all these areas people have been driven from their homes by the continued failure of the rains.
- Famine threatens millions of villagers and herdsmen with their decimated flocks, today forced into an unprecedented migration in search of food and water, in all the West African countries to the south of the Sahara, from Mauritania to the Sudan. Its cause is drought, a prolonged decline in rainfall that has been recorded as far as central Asia, throughout the periphery of the arid zone, extending from the tropical desert of the Sahara to the continental deserts of temperate Eurasia.
- We are all aware of the ravages of natural events of the recent past, the devastating Russian drought of 1972; current drought in sub-Saharan countries, especially Mali, Mauritania and the Upper Volta, which seems to have persisted and become aggravated in the last few years; the occasional seasonal droughts in parts of India and Australia and the "Seca" or" drought which occurs in some years in northeast Brazil.
The EPA then go on to forecast :-
Droughts are expected to keep getting longer and more severe. The U.S. Southwest is at particular risk for increasing droughts.
Instead of trying to indoctrinate kids, perhaps they might have considered giving them the facts.
Annual Precipitation
Southwest Region
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The EPA has a lot to answer for. Established in December 1970, it took less than a year before it displayed an enduring characteristic: facts and solid science are dismissed if they get in the way of strong campaigning by eco-pressure groups. in 1971 the EPA held hearings about DDT and their own examiner concluded there was no scientific evidence to support a ban. On the other hand, Rachel Carson’s book of junk science, Silent Spring, said DDT was bad, and the eco-groups were on to it. Here is an extract from 2004 article@
‘The testimony of Dr. Edwards and others during Environmental Protection Agency hearings in 1971 on whether to ban the insecticide led to an EPA administrative law judge ruling that, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
Inexplicably — or so it seemed — DDT was nonetheless banned by EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus. Dr. Edwards investigated and uncovered disturbing statements and troubling connections between Ruckleshaus and anti-DDT environmental extremist groups.
In a May 1971 speech before the Wisconsin Audubon Society, Ruckleshaus acknowledged being a member of the anti-DDT National Audubon Society and to have “streamlined” EPA procedures so that DDT could be banned even before the administrative hearings had been completed.
After Ruckleshaus left the EPA, he began fundraising for the Environmental Defense Fund, a spin-off of the National Audubon Society and the lead petitioner to have EPA ban DDT.’
Read the rest here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,128165,00.html#ixzz1sYyzKKIC
The harm that followed on from this ban is now well known, and the avoidable deaths and the associated misery and crippling of economic development that followed will ony be surpassed by the mounting bill due to panics around CO2. Panics in which the EPA has been behaving true to form, i.e. as a moral and intellectual disgrace.
Your piece on their targeting of children with scare stories is a good illustration of this, and supplements remarks on the same topic on Real Science last year ( http://www.real-science.com/paying-obamas-epa-lie-kids ). I have added a link to your work in my compilation of notes on sites targeting children and teachers: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-sites-aimed-at.html.
Hi to the admin or owner of this site.Is their anyway that this information can be shoved into their face as they think history started er 10 years or 30 years or from 1960??This is for Australia : The Brisbane Courier Friday 11 October 1889
THE PREDICTED DROUGHT. Australian weather statistics 1782 – 1889.
” In order to throw some additional light on the above question, I will furnish a few condensed Australian weather statistics of the last 107 years, and if anyone can found a positive forecast on them he is welcome to do so ; all that I can see in them is the simple fact that floods and droughts alternate out here with “lucid intervals” of ordinary settled and moderately wet or dry weather.
Captain Cook in 1770 says little about the weather. Dampier in 1690 or thereabouts was equally silent.
Captain Matthew Flinders reports drought and bush fires from 1782 to 1792.
There was a great drought in 1797 for 100 miles round where Melbourne now stands ; 1799 to 1806 were very wet years, and in 1806 the floods culminated by a rise of 101 ft. at Windsor, on the Hawkesbury River.
The crops were destroyed, wheat rose to 80s. a bushel, and a famine prevailed.
The excessive rain kept on till 1810, but 1811 cut it short, and was so dry that water was worth 8d. per bucketful in Sydney.
This drought was sharp but short, and there was plenty of increasing rain for years afterwards, till in 1820 the Hunter River rose 37ft.
Ten years now elapsed without any more floods, and it was so dry from 1826 to 1829 that water at last became worth 4d. a gallon in Sydney. 1830 saw the first flood for ten years.
Ordinary weather followed till 1837, but 1838 and 1839 saw the champion drought of the century. Stock were all but exterminated. The Murrumbidgee is a great river, 150ft. wide, 60ft. deep, and overflows its banks, like the Nile, when the head snows melt, for five miles on each side to a depth of 3ft. This gives a volume of water equal to a river of 1450 ft. wide and 120 ft. deep, and besides this it fills a group of lakes each from seven to eighteen miles in diameter.
Yet this great river dried up so thoroughly in 1839 that the fish died and putrefied at the bottom of it.
I make no comments on what such a drought now would do to Queensland, and I am at present only going for dry facts and bald statistics.
1841 broke up this drought with the champion flood of Queensland; the Bremer River rose 70ft., and the Brisbane bar not being then dredged, there was no quick “get away” for the water, and it filled the lower story of the commissariat stores here, and Ipswich was very short of rations for some days.
Moderate rain carried the colony of Now South Wales (then the only one) on till 1849, when dry weather began and lasted till May, 1851.
The scattered bush fires of Victoria got ” boxed” into one mighty whole on 6th February, 1851 (” Black Thursday “), before a southerly hurricane which sent smoke and leaves across Bass Straits.
1852 brought a flood that swept Gundagai away and drowned the inhabitants ; 1853 saw great overflows of the Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, and Darling rivers, but not from local rain ; 1854 was dry; 1855 and 1856, ordinary weather; 1857 was a flood year, with three months ceaseless rain from February to May.
Settled weather lasted till 1863, which, with 1864, both gave heavy flood. The weather settled again till 1873 (bar a small drought up North in 1866), which, with 1875, was very wet, and gave a flood each.
Settled weather again carne, with a small local flood in 1879-80 ; 1882 very wet: 1883 to 1886 very dry; 1887 very wet; 1888 very dry; 1889 moderately wet.
Here we have 107 years of statistics, and who can discern from them the rule that guides the weather ? A matter which enters so largely into our health and comfort, happiness and prosperity, that I hope to be excused for thus dwelling upon it. ……
N. Bartley The Brisbane Courier 1889 ”
and
Reports of Drought by our Early Settlers.
Governor Arthur Phillip 1791
Governor Arthur Phillip wrote the following to the Colonial Secretary, the Right Honourable W. W. Grenville on 4 March 1791:
The Tank Stream Sydney (10)
“From June until the present time so little rain has fallen that most of the runs of water in the different parts of the harbour have been dried up for several months, and the run which supplies this settlement is greatly reduced, but still sufficient for all culinary purposes… I do not think it probable that so dry a season often occurs. Our crops of corn have suffered greatly from the dry weather.”
On 5 November 1791, the governor of this colony, Arthur Phillip, reported that the normally perennial ‘Tank Stream’ river flowing into Sydney Harbour had been dry for “some months”.
It did not flow again until 1794. Phillip marks the start of the droughts in July 1790; no rain had fallen by August 1791 **
During the drought in 1814 Governor Macquarie had to import food to avoid what he called:
“the heavy calamity of very great scarcity, both of animal feed and of grain, if not in an actual famine.” http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html#8
I am quite sure that the people at the EPA do not believe they are lying to our kids. There are a large number of scientific papers which project drought in many areas of the world, including the Southwest of the US, due to global warming. Here is one recent example.
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/2904/climate-change-drought-may-threaten-much-globe-within-decades
“Thanks to global warming, the United States and many other populous countries face a growing threat of long, harsh drought in the next 30 years, a new study indicates.
If the projections “come even close to being realized, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” said Aiguo Dai of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who conducted the research.
His analysis concludes that global warming will likely create increasing dryness across much of the globe, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the century’s end rarely, if ever, seen in modern times.
Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, Dai reports that by the 2030s, dryness is likely to increase substantially across most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia.
..In addition, previous studies by Dai have indicated that climate change may already be having a drying effect on parts of the world. In a much-cited 2004 study, he and colleagues found that the percentage of Earth’s land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Last year, he headed up a research team that found that some of the world’s major rivers are losing water….”
You may be skeptical of this research, but it is wrong to claim to imply that the EPA is lying about this. The article by Lamb and the graph of rainfall in the southwest of the US doesn’t prove this research is wrong. The fact that drought has happened before doesn’t prove the projections of more severe drought are wrong.
The EPA say droughts have already become longer and more severe. This is not true in the US,
Globally, there are no doubt places where drought is getting worse, but there are also many places where the reverse is happening.
Your quote from the EPA aligns with the research I quoted. They say,
“Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more extreme worldwide, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.”
I don’t interpret this statement to mean every single area of the world has seen more extreme drought.
It is also clear that the EPA is not saying the whole world will see drought in the future. . If you look at the map of projections at the end of the 21’st century, on the page to which you linked, there are areas where increases in rainfall are projected, as well as vast areas which are similar to current conditions. It is clear that they are not claiming every point in the world is going to see drier conditions.
In addition they point out that some areas of the world will see more rainfall:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/impacts/signs/precip-patterns.html
“On average, the world is already getting more precipitation now than it did 100 years ago: 6 percent more in the United States and nearly 2 percent more worldwide.
The effects vary by region, though. For example, states in the Northeast are getting more precipitation than they used to get, but Hawaii is getting less.”
I think you have misrepresented what is on the web site by picking on one sentence out of context. If you are trying to be a reliable source of information, you should be more careful, and do a more complete investigation, before you accuse people of lying.
I think we need to remember that we are talking about kids here.Kids see things in black and white.
A more balanced statement would have gone something like
“While droughts have got worse in some places in the world, in other places they have lessened. Although some forecasts suggest droughts may get worse in future, in the US there has been no evidence of this happening yet”
What they said was highly misleading. Was it deliberately so? That’s a matter of opinion.