To Rein in the Rain's Reign, Halt the Flair to Flare.

 

Twenty tons in one Driveway.

Correlation does not = causation. A truism used to counter you-haven't-got-a-cluism. Okay. I get it. But isn't the opposite true as well? Isn't it possible that not correlating events that occur at the same time, at least in order to disprove that their simultaneity is related, can be just as clueless? That being blind to what's happening right in front of your eyes is perhaps simply denial? Waiting to be bit in the ass before you admit reality bites? 

Last May an equivalent to a Cat4 hurricane came ashore in India and inundated its West coast, yet the rain totals in India from that Cat4 major Hurricane dropped less rain than a storm system in the US Southeast that  measured 21" of precipitation. That means that a good three inches more rain than the heaviest rainfall from Cyclone Tauktae had dropped, has already fallen in parts of Texas and Louisiana, the two hardest hit States in the US.

What's the correlation?

The oil being produced by the escalation of fracturing the earth in Texas' Permian basin does not stay in the US, whose refineries are not tooled to process the light crude that is being wrested from the tight oil formations of the Permian. Contracted to be shipped to Iranian refineries during the Obama/Biden administration, the CEO of Exxon, (the company that has the largest presence in the Permian, having bought up all the companies that went bankrupt, leaving their investors with enormous losses (deductible from their income taxes, meaning the fracturing of the Permian is largely federally subsidized)), Rex Tillerson was made Secretary of State, in which position he rescinded those contracts, and renegotiated the destination for the Permian's output to India.

Now as we read about the anticipated escalation in oil prices, and remember that last year you could make a fortune by taking oil at minus $35/bbl off the hands of suppliers, the largest drag on oil prices' rise became India's Covid outbreak, which had speculators uncertain about the strength of the resurgence in demand, some even speculating whether peak demand hasn't already hit (a very dubious proposition).

And if we then contemplate that Mauna Loa, where the CO2 concentration, in the relatively clean air of the no man's land surrounding the Hawaiian Islands, had risen to 420ppm or thereabouts, then it is easy to understand that in the center of the most intensive oil extraction enterprise in the world, where the rig count is increasing on an almost daily basis in order to supply the vast energy resources necessary to power the US transition to clean energy (although it's exported, it provides the wherewithal to increase the amounts imported), the concentration of CO2 is going to be greater by a significant factor, and in places already exceeds, at our current rate, the more than 600ppm's the entire world could well be at by the turn of the century.  

It is fairly universally agreed upon that such high concentrations would raise global temperatures to a level that would be disastrous for the globe, so could it not be possible that they are already proving disastrous at both the source of that extraction, Texas, and the destination where that output will be incinerated, India, both of which literally exist under a cloud of GHG gases of their own creation, and might be experiencing their shared drenchings from the same source: Permian output? And in Texas, the faster the rig count goes up, the more natural gas they flare, turning increasing amounts of methane into CO2 and H2O, carbon dioxide and water vapor being the two most powerful the GreenHouse Gases; while the more they fracture the earth, Surprise! Surprise!, the more methane is able to leak out of the myriad network of fractured rocks they leave in their wake: you can plug a well, you can't plug a fracture. And, unlike CO2, methane provides a more localized warm-up, not needing centuries to provide the additional warmth, the effects are as predictable and immediate as turning up the dial on your electric blanket.

Simultaneous to the typhoon in India, where yet another cyclone is likely to form over the Bay of Bengal and is expected to hit the eastern coast on May 23,  and the continuing major downpours in the Southeast USA, it is hard not to notice that, according to the Moscow Times, temperatures in the Russian Arctic (that other epicenter of fracturing), where hundreds of fires are already raging, are now hotter than in the Mediterranean … Temperatures across this Arctic region are now 20-24 degrees Celsius [36 to 43.2F!] higher than normal for this time of year…

While in Scotland, they are set for a ‘very unusual’ temperature record… nowhere in Scotland has exceeded 20 degrees [64F] so far this year, which is very unusual by this point in May …

I remember reading that if it were not for the Gulf Stream, London would experience about the same temperature as Moscow, so such anomalies could portend it's slowing down. Something we really won't know except in hindsight. Lest I've not mentioned it before, although I can hardly see how I couldn't've, is it not curious that the same group of people that believe in the "butterfly effect", a concept of chaos theory in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world could create a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe, think it absurd of me to think, which I do, that Climate Chaos can be turned from an inconvenience into what we are seeing today, in less than a decade, by forcefully introducing the tons of added methane and CO2 production that fracking engenders? It is only because fracking is the only way it is possible to keep the illusion of prosperity that our continued untrammeled energy use bestows, that hydraulic fracturing remains a Verboten subject. An infrastructure bill that plans on spending  trillions of borrowed dollars joins and an offensive weapons bill of similar proportions, are wending their merry way through the Corponational-owned Congress; one that assiduously ignores the role hydraulic fracturing continues to  play in bringing Climate Chaos forward by decades. Without continued fracturing of the earth, the US, which just last month alone, rang up $1.2 Trillion in debt ($600 billion in trade deficit and 600 billion in gov't deficit spending) has no source of exportable manufactures ... otherwise the trade deficit would be a trade surplus. So, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a country's citizens to understand something when its revenue stream depends on its citizens not understanding it." Only that can explain why "Climate change is a hoax" could remain unquestioned National Policy for an entire four years, when even those pretending to believe it knew exactly why they had to keep up that pretense: their paycheck.

You Can't Fool Mother Nature!

                    So yes, Correlation  does not necessarily = Causation ... but sometimes it (tragically) does!