The Mighty-er Mississippi
I am hardly a weather guru. The only way I can predict the weather for the day is to get up in the morning and go look out the window. But, anti-guru-osity aside, I’m still going to make the claim that this planet, and its inhabiting species, has endured a lot by way of Mother Nature lately.
There have been all sorts of tornadoes and floods and hail storms where they don’t belong. There has been a shocking amount of death and destruction. And hurricane season isn’t even upon us yet. Though I have no power of weather-prediction, those people who do possess the gift have already predicted an unstable oceanic atmosphere this hurricane season. So batten down the hatches, Coast.
But, for now, it’s the Mississippi River that’s rolling along, looking like a gentle dream on the surface and flowing like the devil’s flood underneath. The water now sits at flood levels that haven’t been reached in nearly a hundred years. The flooding is not taking people by surprise, rushing in and swallowing up towns in a flash. The death toll is relatively low. That makes it anticlimactic. It lacks drama. That’s why it’s the second or fifth or tenth story on news websites instead of the major headline. But the destruction in the areas that have been hit by the Mississippi flooding is immense. Farmland has been wiped out by the millions of acres. The Farm Bureau is estimating $500 million in lost crops. So, no matter how many hundreds of miles one might live from the damage itself, Americans are sure to feel the effects on their supermarket shelves.
And now the Mighty Mississippi, and its deceptive waters, is heading toward New Orleans and those prediction gurus have no idea what’s going to happen when it gets there.
It’s a bad flood, part of a bigger, more frightening picture.
But don’t worry. For every proof positive occurrence that points to the validity of severe, irreversible climate change, there’s some authoritative politician or preacher to assure us that it’s a natural process and nothing that we humans have done. That global warming is a myth.
And thank God for them. For a minute, I was worried that we humans might actually have to change our ways, to sacrifice, to save the world.