Accidental Blogger

Given that Gov.Sonny Perdue of Georgia is at his wit’s end with the current drought parching the state, he has finally decided to resort to invoking supernatural assistance.

Heather Teilhet, his
spokeswoman, said the governor began talking about wanting to host a
service to pray for rain on his way back from Washington D.C. last
week. He was in D.C. meeting with federal officials and the governors
of Alabama and Florida to discuss the region’s water crisis.

 Perdue, whose son is a Baptist preacher, has had similar prayer services in the past.

"Georgia needs rain. The issue at the heart of our drought problems
is a lack of rain," Teilhet said. "And there is nothing the government
can do to make that happen.

"The governor recognizes that the request has got to be made to a higher power."

This is going to be a multi-faith multi-denominational gathering, of course. But have they contacted the rain dancers? Perhaps not, though this columnist  offers
(tongue-in-cheek) that it would have a salutory effect, more than the
years of legal squabbling with other states over water.

Now, before we go further,
I know what you’re thinking: "That’s a really, really, really stupid
idea." But hey, one day of rain-dancing couldn’t possibly be more
futile or a bigger waste of time than 17 years spent fighting Alabama
and Florida over water rights.

What do we have to show for that legal song and dance? Nothing. Years of lawsuits and mediation have produced, well, a dry hole.

In hindsight, everybody involved in the water wars has probably been
waiting for exactly what we’ve now got. They’ve been putting it off and
putting it off, waiting for a full-blown crisis that would finally
force the issue. Now that time has come.

The fact of the matter is clear from these horrifying photos of Lake Lanier, the main source of water for metropolitan Atlanta.

India has a long and hoary tradition
of invoking the rain gods, even with unexpected consequences when
floods strike as they did in the village of Puchaldini in the south
Indian state of Karnataka.

“We never dreamed there would be so much rain in one day,” said T.
Narasappa, 50, amid the debris of his mud house. “Every year we pray to
God to give rain. Now this is too much!”

The deluge turned this
village into a living example of India’s chronic vulnerability to the
rains, which come too heavy in some years and not at all in others,
destroying lives and livelihoods and sending ripples through the entire
economy.

Interestingly, apart from the power of prayer, Australia has been looking at cloud-seeding as a method to deal with the drought that has increasingly plagued it over the last 10 years.

Cold cloud seeding sprays clouds with silver iodode, which acts
as the nuclei around which ice crystals can form before falling as
rain. Warm cloud seeding sprays the base of convective clouds with
salt or aerosols, around which raindrops can form. The Queensland
trial, which will target convective clouds, will use the latter
method.

Unfortunately, said Professor Manton, neither technique had been
shown to work in Victoria, although the state might benefit if the
Murray-Darling river system fills from cloud-seeding-induced rain
in Queensland or NSW.

Cold cloud seeding was trialled over western Victorian in 1979
and 1980 and over Melbourne’s water catchments in 1992. Both
failed.

And another problem with cloud seeding, according to Professor
Manton: you can’t seed blue sky.

All this ties in quite neatly with the consensus on climate change,
effects attributable to global warming, which are only going to lead to
more extreme droughts and extreme floods world-wide.