Flood And The Desert – The Heroic Water Crisis Clash

By: Andrew_McKillop

Oh California
 As you read this California's lakes, rivers and streams are steadily dwindling to nothing. Across the SW USA underground aquifers are relentlessly draining dry and by 2025 Lake Mead has a 50% probability of becoming totally dry. About 80% of all rivers in China are so polluted they can support no aquatic life at all. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow irrigated wheat and will be 100% dependent again on wheat imports by 2016. Elsewhere in the Middle East,  the flow of water to the Jordan river, Tigris and Euphrates is down to less than 5% of historic averages. The Dead Sea is shrinking so fast that huge sinkholes proliferate daily, able to swallow roads, buildings and any imprudent person. In central Asia the Aral Sea, one of the world's biggest lakes outside the US-Canadian Great Lakes continues to shrink leaving rusted hulks of ships a dozen kilometres from the retreating waters.

The global lack of water could be the tipping point for a worldwide economic collapse, not only through its impact on food production, food prices and industry, but also its ability to aid the spread of deadly epidemics like the Ebola pandemic spreading across Africa from its initial three-country hearth. The world's human population can fill the Pacific Ocean with about 200 million tons of plastic debris to date but it can only empty the world's fresh water reserves.  Fresh water is the single most important natural resource on the planet, and we are rapidly running out of it.

Reasons for this, on the supply side, include the very high cost of conventional desalination technology and a refusal to treat the crisis seriously. Most societies, worldwide, have flood myths but do not have counterpart drought myths, and this itself is a major cause of the inert and trivial responses to the worldwide water crisis that has steadily built – and is now a global threat.

For more than 25 years and whether it concerns emerging, developing or developed countries, the investment, aid and policy decisions concerning water were treated only as a question of raising its price, privatizing, and “letting the markets decide”. Underlying this state of stupidity was the belief that world fresh water resources are “unlimited” and only need to be tapped by private acumen. This is not the real situation but a travesty of it.

Noah and the Aral Sea
Noah's Ark would likely be a rusted-out hulk, like others on this ancient mega-lake or sea, if society at the time of Noah was like society of today and refused to act on the understanding and knowledge that water, although abundant on this planet, is mostly unfit for human use. About 98% of all water on this planet is salt water.

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

As already noted the vast majority of human societies have flood myths but do not have drought myths. The playing field is tilted. Today we are paying the price of this. For us in western society this defect is especially strong. The Genesis flood narrative occupies Chapters 6 to 9 of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.and most certainly drew on, and exaggerated flood myths in a host of ancient west Asian and Mediterranean cultures. Even worse for hard-wiring a primitive belief in the superabundance of water, many of these myths claimed that the Creator Being or God intended returning the Earth to its pre-Creation state of “water chaos” by flooding. That way, humanity's misdeeds would be punished and the New World would be created using the microcosm of Noah's Ark – an original environmental paradigm. Man would be closer linked to animals and plants than before he strayed from the path.of God, but first he would be drowned in a surfeit of water.

Thus we are not culturally prepared for water shortage, Whether it concerns the Noah myth or the almost identical Gilgamesh myth of the Kurds, and many others, the flood is a reversal of creation and it returns the world to its natural state. Even more problematic for our ability to do anything about a longstanding, steadily building world water crisis – which in the SW USA crisis could last 100 years on past and long-proven historical antecedents – the “evil of mankind” results in even more water. The counterpart belief, often only subconscious, is that humans can do nothing about it. Therefore human culture and society is totally unprepared for the exact opposite – drought and water crisis.

We can go further with this fundamentally lopsided human social belief in the superabundance of water. Noah, who in Islam is one of the first Imams of Allah, has to offer guarantees to God to avoid yet another mega-flood. God will destroy the world again by flood, unless Noah signs the Noahic Covenant. How can society accept and adapt to water shortage?

The Flood of Gore
Only an idiot cannot see that Al Gore and other global warming fanatics and charlatans do not directly exploit the Flood Myth. All they have as empirical evidence is a long-term average increase of world sea levels by about 0.7 millimetres per year, but that is enough for them! The Flood Myth is extremely hard-wired, not only in western society but elsewhere.
Although scholarly consensus since the 19th century has been that the Noah myth and similar stories cannot be literally true, overturning the human belief in superabundant water supplies and resources is probably a losing battle. Also, there is no point in trying to logically reason with this myth by pointing out that all flood myths (for example the founding Chinese cultural myth of Emperor Yu) incorporate a myth of of the flood's retreat. Where did the water go?
After the flash flood there was the flash retreat of the waters.
We could take just one revealing example. The Torah tale of the Pentateuch was dated in the 17th century by the theologian Joseph Scaliger as The Flood in 3950 BC followed by “business as usual” when the waters completely retreated about 50 years later. Other tales use much shorter chronology. Even in 1784, the “father of modern geology”  James Hutton could affirm that the “100-meter platforms' or traces of ancient sea levels 100 metres above present were proof of the Great Flood. He said that all previous continents had been washed away and dissolved in The Ancient Flood.
Hutton was careful to avoid talking about the Great Drought, or droughts, for reasons that include their much more recent proven geological occurrence, through the Holocene (or Recent) period of geological history, starting about 11 700 years ago. Simply for this reason the present drought in SW USA, already stretching from Oregon to Texas, is geologically predictable. One later and extreme period of this recurring drought was the extreme 25-year drought of about 1275-1300.

One of the most-fundamental direct causes of long and intense droughts will quickly exit from the discourse of the Global Warming fraternity – droughts, especially since the Holocene started, are probably due to, or at least associated with global cooling. As the Earth's average temperature declines. there is less evapo-transpiration and less continental cloud cover. Historic droughts since the year 1000 AD, to all intents and purposes, stopped by about the 1970s, after which a short period of mild Global
 Warming intervened. After that, the cooling trend resumed and with it – droughts.

Totally Unprepared
The world is unprepared for drought. The reasons for this even include the fantasy theory of Global Warming on a “runaway basis”. They even include the myth of Noah or Gilgamesh.

The US Dust Bowl of the 1930s (in a period of mild global cooling) is a somber warning of the degree of unpreparedness. There is no adaptation when the crisis strikes – because it is an “Act of God”, the same God who threatens all-out flooding on a permanent basis!

Both in the 1930s at the same time as the US Dust Bowl, and in the 1950s, in two periods of mild global cooling, the Ukraine's role as supposed breadbasket of the USSR was tried, tested and failed. We know the political sequels of that in Ukraine, where political violence did nothing to solve a problem of persistently low rainfall and low harvests of wheat.

Country after country in Sahel Africa still reeling from the Great Drought of the 1980s, are now exposed to the exact opposite of unpredictable but massive flooding as local climate regimes cool. World agricultural output is still on a tear – notably due to irrigation farming – but this will not last long as rainfall regimes turn down. The window of opportunity brought in part by a brief interval of global warming ss now shut.

The world is unprepared for what happens next.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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