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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (237220)	6/15/2005 12:55:52 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572963

Ted, have you heard what's going on in Laguna Beach right now? Hillslides are destroying several multimillion dollar homes. It was on the local news almost every night, right up there with the MJ "trial of the century." Yup. Its normal after a winter of heavy rains. This year's record rainfall contributed to the mudslides, but of course Laguna Beach residents are pretty convinced that too much construction helped destabilize the geology. So how much of this was man-made and how much of this was Mother Nature? That depends on way too many things, more than what pissed-off residents and CYA politicians care about. About half and half. The soil conditions in S. CA hils generally suck for construction and get worse as you get closer to the ocean. Its mostly a clay/sandy mix and when it rains the soil gets saturated. The weight of the construction causes the earth to move. Of course, all the small earthquakes that occur 24/7 don't help the situation. And hey, who knows? Maybe this year's record rainfall is also man-made, if you buy my theory that global warming helped shift the weather patterns across the West Coast? It definitely was a strange winter all along the West coast. The strangeness was not the huge rain totals in S. CA and the large shortfalls in the Pac. NW. That does happen from time to time but rather the strangeness was that it wasn't caused by the El Niño effect and that the shortfalls and huge rain totals occurred in such a short period of time. Scientists don't know why it happened. Typically, with El Niño the rains start early in S. CA......as early as September and last until April. However, this year, most of the rain fell during the month of January and the drought in the PNW was only in Jan. and Feb. I could go on and on, but you get my point. Seems like anything's possible, but nothing's for sure. That's the problem with climate and the huge gaps in our knowledge. However, we do know that there have been been some significant changes in the atmosphere during the past 200 years, and that in the past, significant changes in the atmosphere have triggered major changes in the world's climate. So why take a chance that the changes wrought by Man are manageable? ted