The Necessity of Regional and Nations Zoning

The Necessity of Regional and Nations Zoning

Response to a post on the drying up of lakes Mead and Powell

January 13, 2014

One VERY IMPORTANT piece of information: when the climatologists finally had the funding for the Cray computers needed to process the enormous amount of data collected since a small band of researchers got sick of the political gamesmanship over "Is there global warming?", and decided to find out using hard nosed science around 1990,everywhere they looked they found exponentially more relevant data.  But even jacked up PC's couldn't begin to process the data.  But they kept collecting.  They were most impressed by the pollen data that came from ice cores.  After Katrina, the year of world wide climactic disasters, big corporations and Western governments finally funded the needed Crays.

 After a year or so of data input, they asked the Crays to draw a picture of the world's climate by regions in the PAST.  The American Southwest (AZ,NM,TX0 was one such region, the smallest area that they believed that the data would be useful.  There were historical landmarks by which the picture drawn by the Crays which could be used to check for accuracy, like the volcano in Indonesia that threw up so much ash, it caused a mini "nuclear" winter.  The world's top scientists from a wide variety of disciplines were watching the print out, and while they had modest expectations, the graphs hit every time landmark right on target.  The key data was the pollen.  They were stunned.  For the American Southwest there was a perfect sine wave of periodic catastrophic droughts, with a mean of 1000 years, with 95% (2 standard deviation units from the mean) and the period of drought was a very regular 100-200 years.  The most recent was 600-800 AD, 1400 years ago, which makes the current drought statistically as close to a sure thing as one can statistically get.  So the current drought is almost certainly the beginning of a 100-200 year catastrophic drought.  This information adds a great deal more punch to this piece, and should give managers a more solid footing to support stingy use of the remaining water.

The nation desperately needs a national and regional ZONING authority.  Allowing uncontrolled growth in the three states is insane, given the bigger picture.  Cities and counties too easily give in to the pressure from builders to allow growth in places where it makes no sense. Housing expansion from Texas to Southern Cali, is going to set up catastrophes of mass forced migrations, leaving trillions of dollars of deserted housing behind.  Can we afford that?  Absolutely not.  It is pouring vast resources into a hole in the ocean.  The American people enjoyed such a long period of westward expansion, our attitude is that we have the right to live where ever we want.  But ecology and climatology says clearly, that this is a worn out fantasy.  People and  developers will certainly no stop the insane expansion of housing in places which will run out of water, the government MUST step in and regulate the process.  The right wing will howl about more government, but as Lincoln said: "The purpose of Government is to do for the people what they can't do for themselves."  People don't have the discipline to conserve water, so government MUST put strict regulations on water usage. So you whiney free range capitalists shut up and admit you don't have the self discipline to conserve on your own, and it is your greed and lack of self discipline that causes Government to make the rules.  It is not some liberal plot to control your lives, it is purely your own behavior which is at fault.  SHUT UP and stop wasting resources we cannot live without.

Morris Creedon-McVean, D.O.