“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it….”
Joseph Goebbels – Reich Minister of Propaganda – Nazi Germany
“No matter how big the lie, repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.”
John F. Kennedy – Criticizing the Republican Congress in 1948
I was a licensed civil engineer in the State of Minnesota from 1976 until 2018. One of the things that I did as a civil engineer was to design drainage systems. This involved the concepts of probability and agreed upon standards for what probability storms should be accommodated for individual elements of the overall systems. For instance, a storm sewer pipe in my local street is probably designed to handle the runoff that results from a storm that has a 10% probability of happening in a given year. Facilities that serve larger areas are usually designed to accommodate the runoff from 2% probability storms or 1% probability storms – the so called one-hundred-year storm. But what amounts of rainfall are in these design storms?
The Bible for drainage engineers for defining design storm events has for many years been a document published by the United States Weather Bureau – Technical Paper 40 (TP 40). TP 40 is a series of curves that reflect predicted rainfall intensity, duration and frequency. A part of my career was spent as a public works director. A public works director is someone who is probably an engineer but whose duties also involve OPERATING the stuff that engineers design. As a public works director my observations were that the storms that our system was experiencing were so much more intense and frequent than what TP 40 predicted. But was that really true? It is all probability and perhaps we just experienced a naturally occuring series of intense storms. Is it really raining more in Minnesota?
According to a report from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), in 2018 the city of Harmony in Southeast Minnesota set a new total rainfall record for the state, coming in at 60.21 inches of total precipitation for the year. This would be like what one might normally see in something more tropical – like maybe New Orleans. This new record eclipsed a record that was set in 2016, just two years earlier, in Waseca – 56.24 inches. These levels are more than 20 inches above our normal precipitation in the state. So total rainfall is increasing dramatically but what about those “design events” that I talked about above?
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) climate office has assembled a list of so-called “mega-rain” events that have occurred since statehood. There have been fifteen. One can always question how accurate the records were in the old days although the DNR has worked very hard poring through rainfall reports, newspaper accounts and other historical documents. If we look at the period between the early 1970’s and 2016, there have been eleven of the mega-rains, with a sharp uptick since 2000. Of these 11 events, two were in the 1970s, one was in the 1980s, none were in the 1990s, but four occurred in both the 2000s, and the 2010s (which are still underway). Thus, the 18 years from 2000-2017 have seen nearly three times as many mega-rains as the 27 years spanning 1973-99. Now that data more coincides with what I observed as a public works director. But why is that happening?
So what’s my point? I am often asked if I “believe” in global warming or do I think as President Trump has stated on more than one occasion that it is a “hoax invented by the Chinese”. I certainly am not a global weather expert, but I know what I have seen with my own eyes. The pace of the changes we are seeing convinces me that this increase in temperature and rainfall intensities MUST be related to human activities and not a natural long-term trend. And I don’t think we fully understand how the impacts of this phenomenon will play out. I can tell you that local governments are spending lots of money trying to prepare for these new realities. FEMA is going broke trying to keep up with the seemingly endless series of unprecedented weather events. But am I really concerned? YOU BET I AM!!! Being an old-timer, I may not live to see how this hits us – then again, I just might. But I KNOW that my children and grandchildren will be encountering weather related challenges that our generation never has.
Is this an EXISTENTIAL THREAT? I don’t think that anyone can say that with certainty. But clearly it IS A THREAT and one that I believe will soon dwarf the other challenges that we have as a society. And I believe this so strongly that the environment has risen to number one on my evaluation criteria for possible holders of public office. And I think that this issue is moving toward the top of many other people’s list too.
It is this belief that makes the rhetoric of the last few weeks regarding the environment so disheartening to me. I try to be somewhat politically balanced in this little thing that I publish. The Lord knows that there is ample criticism that can be made of both parties and of individuals in both parties. And I believe that President Trump is sometimes unfairly criticized and doesn’t get credit for good things that he does. I think this is a bane of all presidents to some degree. BUT I wouldn’t be truthful if I didn’t stand up and say that President Trump’s characterization of his efforts to enhance the environment is GREATLY exaggerated. I might even say that it is subterfuge that rises to the level of the quotations at the beginning of this article. He and his administration have done nothing but to try to reverse the scant progress that has been made on global warming. And I am not just talking about pulling out of the Paris Accord. I am talking about the rampant relaxation of coal burning standards, the undoing of automobile mileage standards and many other actions. He has given the appearance of truly denying that there is any issue that even needs attention.
The President recently said that his administration has worked HARDER than prior administrations on the environment. He talked about major improvements that have been made in air quality and water quality since the 1970s. I don’t know if it is true that we really have made so many gains, but if it IS TRUE, he sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t care how many times he says it. It is BS. I can only assume he is following Goebbel’s playbook by telling us the most audacious lies he can think of and saying it over and over again on the assumption that we are stupid/gullible enough to believe it. Maybe he believes HIMSELF – because he has heard himself say this stuff so many times. But I don’t.