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AGENDA 21 RADIO

By ASSEMBLYMAN TIM DONNELLY

Scientific American published an article Monday claiming that climate change is to blame for the ongoing Oroville Dam crisis, due to engineering calculations made that did not anticipate global warming.

The author, Jane Braxton Little, argues:

The dam was built in the 1960s when temperatures were cooler and more precipitation was stored in a greater snowpack in the mountains of the Feather River watershed, which drains into Lake Oroville. Today warming temperatures are bringing more rain as well as melting the Sierra Nevada snowpack earlier in the spring.

Little notes that two California counties surrounding Lake Oroville, Butte and Plumas, challenged the state’s environmental review of the dam in 2008, arguing the state “recklessly failed” to account properly for climate change in its long-term dam management plan.

The attorneys in the lawsuit predicted a faster flow of water downhill. “That’s exactly what happened a week ago, leading to the crater,” Little concludes, offering no scientific basis for her conclusion.

At the time of the lawsuit, attorneys for the California Department of Water Resources (which owns the dam) argued that the counties’ speculation about climate change speculation was “too speculative” to warrant inclusion in their review, Little notes.

Similarly, climate scientists themselves have refused to link recent forest fires in California to climate change — contradicting Governor Jerry Brown himself.

This brings the entire debate full circle. The Oroville Dam — and almost 1500 other dams — are not in jeopardy because of climate change. Rather, they are in jeopardy because of policy decisions made by those in charge — Democrats, for the past decade — to ignore tcritical infrastructure in favor of pandering to groups who could guarantee their reelection for decades.

In the end, the politicians chose illegal aliens, powerful public sector unions and the environmental lobby over dams and infrastructure.

Great Flood of 1862

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Lithograph of K Street in the city of Sacramento, California, during the Great Flood of 1862

The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of Oregon, Nevada, and California, occurring from December 1861 to January 1862. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains and snows in the very high elevations that began in Oregon in November 1861 and continued into January 1862. This was followed by a record amount of rain from January 9–12, and contributed to a flood that extended from the Columbia River southward in western Oregon, and through California to San Diego, and extended as far inland as Idaho in the Washington Territory, Nevada and Utah in the Utah Territory, and Arizona in the western New Mexico Territory. Immense snowfalls in the mountains of the far western United States caused more flooding in Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora, Mexico the following spring and summer as the snow melted.

The event was capped by a warm intense storm that melted the high snow load. The resulting snow-melt flooded valleys, inundated or swept away towns, mills, dams, flumes, houses, fences, and domestic animals, and ruined fields.

 

Tim Donnelly is a former California State Assemblyman.