Pierce: "Meanwhile, hurricanes are lined up like the Rockettes. Let's check in on the president*.

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23063097/rio-grande-drying-up-hurricane-season-climate-change/

Soon Enough the Rio Grande Won't Be a Rio Anymore
Meanwhile, hurricanes are lined up like the Rockettes. Let's check in on the president*.
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 10, 2018


This episode in our continuing series, Water: How Does It Work Anyway? brings us to what used to be the Rio Grande River, the third-longest river wholly contained in the United States. It is of intrinsic environmental, cultural, and historic value. It is one of those natural wonders with which the imagination can conjure, as author Richard Parker pointed out in a column in The New York Times two days ago.

The Rio Grande is so long that when Europeans first arrived they didn’t realize it was all the same, roiling body of water. It sustained tens of thousands of Native Americans: The Pueblo people populated the basin to the north, while tribes such as the Manso lived easily off the fish, ducks and bounty of the middle river, according to accounts by Franciscan monks in 1598 who accompanied the conquistador Juan de Oñate when his expedition forded the river.

Downstream, wrote the historian Paul Horgan in his book on the Rio Grande, “Great River,” published in 1954, “The river at Presidio came among willows, cottonwood, lilacs, mountains with attendant clouds, emerald green fields and pink sand, through a sweetness in the air made from all these together.” Some Native Americans called the river P’soque, or big river. The Spanish named the lower stretch Rio Palmas, for its thickets of palms.

The problem is that, between overuse and the climate crisis, which has reduced the upland snowpack that has fed the river for millennia, the Rio Grande is ceasing to be a river. The Times has published several stories about the slow death of the Rio Grande—one in 2015, and one last May. The situation, as the newspaper pointed out last May, has passed dire on its way to catastrophic.

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Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, tropical depressions, tropical storms, and hurricanes are lined up like the Rockettes from here to Africa. Florence is scheduled to drop in on the Carolinas some time on Monday or Tuesday. Much of their power derives from the work of those crafty Chinese climate hoaxers. Luckily, however, the president* is right on top of the nation's serious environmental threats.

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The ways we are so very screwed increase by the hour.