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It is that time of the week for the US Drought Monitor update. Once again it is pretty good news for Wisconsin. Even though we did not have a drop of rain for the first 10 days of October, the abnormally dry conditions only expanded by about 17% and we don’t have any “official” drought. With the heavy rain that occurred yesterday we will likely see the “abnormally dry” area shrink again next week. Of course, now that we are past the growing season, it is not all that critical if we have adequate rainfall, especially since we have had a little surplus this year. In fact, even if we did not have another drop of rain for the entire year, we would still have about normal precipitation for 2011 here in Wausau. Image may be NSFW.
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So far this year we have received 32.25 inches of precipitation and the normal for Wausau is 32.41 inches. If this looks different that past years, it is because we got an updated set of normals this year based on the temp and precip statistics from 1981 through 2010.
The worst drought conditions continue in the far southern part of the country. Although, things did get a little better in Texas and Oklahoma due to some recent rain.
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Following up on the AGW chatter/discussion from the last couple days of blog posts, here is another story that brightened my day: The world’s 7 billionth person will be born on October 31st of this year. Considering what I wrote yesterday, you might be a little perplexed by my sunny disposition. The good part about the story is not that the U.N. expects 7 billion people on the planet by October 31st, it is that many demographers do not think we will hit 7 billion until next year and there is even an extreme scenario where we would not hit that mark until 2020. Many demographers claim that the U.N. is under political pressure to put an exact date on the “7 Billionth Person”. Even the U.N. says there margin of error would allow for the population mark to not be hit until sometime next year. So while it might sound bad on the surface, there is much uncertainty. What the U.N. is n0t accounting for very well is the dramatic drop in the fertility rate among women for a few decades now in the developed world. I wonder if the markets and debt-ridden economies of the world are projecting the reality that population growth has slowed dramatically and that just maybe we are not going to reach the 9-10 figure
(by 2050) that the U.N. has publicized (and that the IPCC uses to figure future anthropogenic global warming scenarios). Sometimes markets move mysteriously and can only be understood in retrospect. Only a few years down the road does it become obvious. What might be happening now is that all of the developed countries that have huge social welfare programs are running out of money because there are not enough new people to pay for the promised benefits (just like how a ponzi scheme usually collapses). In the markets, maybe the malaise is due to the “invisible hand” not foreseeing as much traditional growth (housing starts, roads, expansion, etc…) as what linear-thinking economists have been “trained” to see.
This is all ok with me. I think the world has enough people. I would rather see people focus on other metrics of prosperity other than more roads, more skyscrapers, more houses, more suburbs, more strip malls, more gas stations, etc… Let’s start focusing on other things.
Have a good weekend! Meteorologist Justin Loew.
