Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Aral Sea


Gore's fans paint the picture of fantastic global warming by claiming that

Rusting ships litter a desert where the Aral Sea used to be.

However, Luboš Motl is fuming:

The area of the lake shrunk to 40% and the volume to 20% of the original values and the Aral Sea dropped from the 4th lake to the 8th lake in the world. What do you think happens with salinity if you reduce the volume five-fold? Indeed, it increases almost five-fold, from 10 g/l to about 45 g/l. The concentration of all possible poisons jumps, too. The cancer rate around the lake thus increased ten times, together with tuberculosis. Fisherman and the rest of economy started to die, too.

In 1990, BBC called these changes the world's worst disaster

Let me nention that spending $200 million during a decade for something that was called the world's worst disaster in 1990 is pretty absurd in a world that wastes around $3,000 billion per decade on absurd and manifestly futile policies to "fight the climate change". Yes, global warming - I mean the religion - already swallows 15,000 times more than the world's worst catastrophe.

I urge all sane people with some common sense to realize the absurdity of this comparison.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Aral Sea is is a not too extreme example of how agriculture, especially government subsidized agriculture, is the biggest environmental threat we face.

The Aral Sea's water was used to grow cotton. The Murray Darling is not too dissimilar.

The good news is the Aral Sea has grown substantially as the uneconomic Soviet era cotton growing has been abandoned.