A strong El Niño can shift a subtropical jet stream that normally pours rain over the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America toward California and the southern United States.
But so much rain all at once has proved devastating to California in the past. In early 1998, storms brought widespread flooding and mudslides, causing 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars in damage in California. Downtown L.A. got nearly a year’s worth of rain in February 1998.
Of course, the problem with that is that most of it just goes into the ocean, no way to catch water that rains downtown. We really need snowpack up in the Sierra, and to fill the reservoirs, but at least amidst all the upcoming damage, it looks like that might happen this winter.
On another note, if the Panama Canal is low on water due to drought, couldn’t they pump it up the locks? But I guess they want fresh water in the upper canals, not salt.
I’ll be interested to see what people like Phil Plait have to say. I suspect they’ll try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
[Thursday-morning update]
Thoughts (and a lot of excerpts) from Judith Curry.
I’m not sure that the fact he’s making a lot of money on the book reduces his chances of getting damages from Mann. I’m sure he would have preferred to have been writing other books, and he needs the money for his legal defense.
At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was … the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.
Emphasis mine. I guess it didn’t occur to them to have a group that got a healthy breakfast, like bacon and eggs.
But at least they do admit that observational studies are worse than worthless.
The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease.
The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter.
There is zero scientific evidence that eating saturated fat is a problem. Zero. And yet they persist.