This is true. Therefore, either God told Texas "no", or Texas told Perry, "no", or both.
I think this must be some sort of sign.
The Storm that Wasn't
I’m no meteorologist, but am a keen observer of weather trends. Moreover, an old saw Mom told me years ago says, “You know you’re getting old if you swear the weather is changing.”
What I remember about summers, growing up in middle TN, was the prevalence of thunderstorms, yeah, most nights here, then, were like the fourth of July, even if you didn’t get a rain on your yard, there would be lightning in the distance, “heat lightning," the old-timers called it. Summers were hot and muggy, but the mugginess produced rains with regularity, sometimes daily, as if on cue, as the subtropical climate mimicked that of the tropics.
The perennial Bermuda high, anchored 1000 miles off North Carolina, did this, pumping moisture up from the gulf. The infamous humidity I welcomed more than most, knowing that the refreshing, life-giving storms that could drop temperatures 20 degrees F in minutes were made more imminent by the soupiness in the atmosphere. Those summers seemingly don’t happen anymore, here, the nightly parade of thunderstorms is greatly attenuated, the hotter summers are often dry or have extended dry periods and drought overall is more likely. Being a guerrilla farmer I am concerned and I watch the sky, especially in the growing season.
A few days ago a tropical storm brewed up in the Gulf, and, like the Mexican General Santa Ana, it visited Texas. When it reached tropical storm force, with sustained winds of 45 mph, the seething mass was named Don. It was unremarkable and a bit of a drifter, yet, it had integrity and warm water before it, with the potential to grow larger and more powerful, adjacent to the same warm basin where Katrina like Topsy nursed itself, to become the size of Connecticut. Reminiscing a thousand storms before it, TS Don was loaded with moisture and the potential for helping alleviate a drought as it roiled and pulsed and writhed, like an amoeba on the radar screen.
Now, the Lone Star State is in the midst of a drought, it virtually hasn’t rained there this year in most of its acreage. From the hill country and the piney woods to the panhandle and the Rio Grande to the coast, the tap dried up in 2011, and this has been compared to the Dust Bowl of the thirties. Marlboro Men anxiously looked southward for redemption in the form of clouds and a respite, for rain from this storm, Don, in a stark contrast to the universal dread that accompanies deadly storms the likes of Katrina. Only the cotton farmers didn’t want it to rain on their harvest.
However, when the storm hit the oscillator, that is, the coast of Texas, it dissipated, something I’ve never seen before. With global warming producing a high pressure dome so dominant and with the air so dry, the proverbially irresistible force encountered the immovable object and the object didn‘t budge. Lakes of water evaporated when they met an air mass as desiccated as this one, with the storm in contrast paradoxically being analogous to the 900 pound ape that sits where it chooses. Yes, high pressure systems do deflect and steer tropical storms and hurricanes, but, they don’t stand guard, like Cerberus at the gates of Hades. Again, I am only a casual observer who is alarmed by what he just witnessed, via radar.
Global warming has dislodged the historical Bermuda high that wanders more now, and reduced the number of thunderstorms that accompany the moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and an increasingly hot and dry south in the summer is even more dependent on the occasional hurricane or tropical storm to break the dry cycle and humidify the air and to wet the landscape to produce more humidity, and, subsequently, more rain.
For the first time, in such a decisive manner, a tropical system with the punch and size of TS Don was thwarted. This is ominous and scary.
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