Letters to the Editor
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just suppose, the earth turned out to be..
.. a sphere, not flat. then it would follow that air, water and land would be finite in quantity. if it were flat, on other hand, everything goes on forever, we can keep on multiplying like the book said. now, which is it?
yep, i thought so, in the u. s. of a., the earth is flat.
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Um, I guess people haven't noticed, but...
we haven't had a bad winter in at least 10 years, and haven't had a REALLY bad winter in about 20. The climate in the upper midwest is actually not that bad, any more (thanks, global warming. I guess. In the same way I'd thank a triple bacon cheeseburger for making my tastebuds happy, while ignoring the inevitable heart attack). Sure, we get some snow here and there, but really, not all that much of late. Ponds don't freeze any more, it gets below zero maybe twice or three times a year. That's hardly arctic. When I was a kid, even, winter was long and cold. But now there's not much to complain about.
Not that I want people moving back up here en masse, I like the easy commute and the lack of overcrowding. Plus, water's not a problem, as the article correctly states. I guess I'm more pessimistic than most people, I won't get into why I think we're probably all doomed anyway, no matter where we live, but for now where I live is pretty nice. I certainly don't want it overrun with southerners.
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@ timbuktom
Gee whiz! Who put the bee in your bonnet? You sound like George W. Bush circa 2000 describing "pointy-headed intellectuals".
Plus, I would suggest that Hawaii is pretty clearly delineated from space. Most of my Florida too, though not all. But for what it's worth, where is the Michigan-Wisconsin border from space?
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It Goes Both Ways, Mr. McClelland
Here in Austin, Texas, on the Colorado river (no, not that one; t'other one), we have water. And a good life in the Sun Belt, without subzero temperatures for days on end.
You don't want to ship your water south? That's okay. We can stop allowing oil to be shipped and trans-shipped from Houston up the Missouri-Pacific. How do you reckon on living out those cold winters without that oil? Chop down all the trees in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota? Or what about all those goods flowing through our ports and up our railways and carried by our trucks? The cheap winter clothing from Taiwan, and chemical hand-warmers from Hong Kong? Mighty cold up there, I hear.
And so we should live in Detroit? The place where there were riots with the local sports team won a championship? The place where the downtown ain't doing so well, and jobs are fleeing? I would be safer than here in Austin? And I would work where, exactly?
I just want to add that someone from Michigan, like Hugh McDiarmid, needs to be careful about getting high and mighty when talking about "subsidizing" anything. Every state receives all the lagniappe from Washington they can lay their hands on, and I nisdoubt Michigan is at the back of the pack in that regard, what with the auto industry and all.
My point here is not that we've gone too far in migrating from point A to point B, as we probably have; rather, I just want to remind people of glass houses, stones, and the embarrassing mix they can make.
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Visible From Space:
Okay, I will grant Hawaii and Florida. Plus Alaska. But you must realize that those state have lots of people from Michigan!
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Keep your oil if you like
To the poster who says that they shouldn't sell oil to the north, I have no problem with that whatsoever. Go ahead, keep it. Want to shut down your ports, ok, shut them.
I have no issue whatsoever with a state or region deciding how to use their resources. If you want to make it a law to keep the oil in the state, fine. What the drier states want to do is to take the water without the consent of the great lake states. Any state that looks to the feds for a resolution with water is looking to take the water without the consent of the states with the water.
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oooooooh, the Sacrifice!
Not a bad article but this sentence is stunningly stupid:
"It's not fair to say Atlanta has done nothing to conserve water."
Yes, that's right, Atlanta residents have given up watering their lawns, washing their cars and OUTDOOR FOUNTAINS! Oh the Humanity! And we're told it doesn't stop there. Some people at UGeorgia football games DON'T FLUSH THEIR PEE. My God.
"The region is under Level Four Drought restrictions"
How many levels are there? 300?
I would like to state that it is absolutely fair to say that Atlanta has DONE NOTHING to conserve water.
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A few small issues
The problem is less the number of people; it is more the people who think that they can use the same amount of water as in the Midwest in the West. Having multiple golf courses in a city and people enjoying verdant lawns in New Mexico is stupid. What we need to do is stop wasting water.
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winter
I dunno where JennyCox was in the early 1990s, but I was in NE Ohio, when records were set all over the upper Midwest for cold temperatures. At dusk one night early in the year, the temperature was 10 below and dropping. Minnesota saw temperatures well below 20-below. I forget what it was like in Buffalo, but it can't have been good.
So don't tell me about mild winters. I spent 13 years peeling ice off my windshield for months every winter, and I'll never do that again, unless I'm forced into it. Or the winter where we didn't see the sun for a freakin' *month!* And it remained below 20 degrees the entire time. It was like living in a freezer for a month. A closed freezer.
I've done plenty of cold, and I'm through with it. And when it costs you a grand a month, or more, to heat your home because natural-gas is in short supply, you might be willing to trade water-shortages for a little warmth.
I'm a California boy until I die, and that's fine by me. Water shortages or not. We'll get by.
And if there are so many more people in the South and West than there are in the midwest one day, to the point where we have the power in congress, we'll take that water. I'm not saying that's a good thing. But I am saying if you don't have enough people to defend it, enough representation in Congress to defend it, we'll take the water. It's inevitable.
And Canada objecting? Please, give me a break. If it gets bad enough, we'll roll right over Canada. What'll Canada do? Declare war? Hardly. By then we'll have bled Canada dry of all her energy resources. Canada will end up a vassal state.
'course, if global warming makes the midwest a truly temperate place, there might be a lot of reverse migration. Right now, it still looks to me like you guys have a lot of cold weather, and a lot of lousy weather. We'll stay put. And take your water.