The Dumbest Article on Global Warming I've Ever Read: The Canals of Venice are Drying Up Due to Drought!
Yes, this is for real --the existence of the story, that is, not the cause of events it describes. It was published in America's newspaper of popular choice -- USA Today -- and carried in various forms by other publishers. The story is alarmingly titled, "'Never-ending drought emergency': Italy's iconic Venice canals have dried up."
The title caught my attention immediately as total nonsense -- that the canals have dried up due to drought. Had that story been published on April 1st, I'd be an April fool for missing the joke and believing it was intended to be actual news and publishing my own criticism of a joke. Likewise, if it had appeared in The Onion or Babylon Bee, the written equivalents of Saturday Night Live; then, alas, the joke would be on me.
However, writers and editors who are more popular than I (because I don't write the things they like to publish) are the fools here, as the story was published on February 23, 2023. Maybe that is Venetian Fools' Day, and I'm just not culturally aware. In which case, I will hang my head in appropriate shame when I find that to be the case ... as, otherwise, should all the writers/editors involved in publishing the following sad wreck of a story:
The renowned canals in the compact Italian city of Venice are usually threatened by flooding, but now, weeks of dry winter weather have made it impossible for gondolas, water taxis and ambulances to navigate.
While global warming is not even my theme, criticizing brain-dead journalism in the mainstream, which obviously is drying up due to a drought of properly hydrated journalists, certainly is my gig; and this USA Today article was more dried-up and rotten than the fish carcasses exposed on the bottoms of Venice's recently empty (for a partial day) canals.
(Extreme low tides are never a good time of year to be in Venice, by the way, as empty canals stink almost as bad as USA Today's article, especially those that carry their share of sewage, as does USA Today, which runs raw and undiluted along the bottoms of dried canals as continually as it does in the columns of one of America's favorite fish wrappers. In fact, that is likely all that last little stream at the bottom of the canal in the photo above is -- effluent from the surrounding buildings. Extreme low tides establish the time of year when the city crews of Venice likely do such routine maintenance as clean the crap -- sometimes literal -- off the bottoms of the canals while the dredging is a little easier.)
The lack of rain, a high pressure system, a full moon and sea currents are contributing to Venice’s unusually low tides currently.
Nope. The only true part there was the full moon ... and maybe to some degree the high-pressure system. When the moon is closer to the earth, we get extreme tides at full moon and new moon. Even sea currents do not contribute to the lowering of the ocean's tides. Tides do create local sea currents in and out of enclosed areas, but sea currents do not create tides or change sea level. It's a one-way street where the change of tide creates the current.
So absurd was the article, that I had to read it three times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding it. Perhaps it was just dry humor. Was it in the humor section of the newspaper? Was there anything in the content that should have indicated the author was writing satire of the global-warming scheme? No, it appeared to be seriously presented as news, even with a sad video that implied the lamentable waning of earth under global warming.
Watch the video, which is even more pathetic -- and, therefore, funnier -- as the "news" lampoons itself by laying sad music over scenes of low tide while the video actually states that lack of rain has caused low tides in Italy! Yes, folks, the global ocean is now drying up due to lack of rain in Europe.
A comedy of errors upon errors due to politically-correct bias
Now, it is not the fact that an individual author might not realize that Venetian canals are kept full by the sea, not by rain and rivers that is of concern. It is the fact that this story passed right by the eyes of a managing editor, a copy editor, maybe a caption writer, and likely a photo editor of a major national newspaper as well.
No one at USA Today said, "Hey, wait a minute here!" And that was most likely because the article appeared to reinforce the approved text of the global-warming narrative that has been tied for months to Europe's drought, so how could it be wrong? More evidence of global warming! Get the story out, hot off the press, before the world cools again. The enthusiasm for finding such stories is so great that no one stops to seriously think about them.
The editors have even added their own slug line at the top of the article:
Extreme drought, low tides in Italy dry out parts of Venices famed canals. A severe drought and low tides dried up parts of Venice's canals, making it difficult for water taxis and ambulances to get around the city. -- Anthony Jackson, Associated Press.
Droughts, after all, have long been expected from what was called "global warming" until the warming practically stopped cold, so that must be the cause.
To make matters abundantly worse, apparently, USA Today got the story from the Associated Press, which means AP's writer/editor, including Anthony Jackson who wrote the slug line, missed the brain-dead thought-plot as well. This is a comedy of errors upon errors in that the original writer, AP, and USA Today, all bought into the baloney.
So close they were, too! They almost got it right in their own slug line. Low tides are the culprit, but the dry Venetian canals have nothing at all to do with drought. In fact, the only way drought could dry up the sea enough to reduce sea level in the canals would be if it caused massive evaporation of the entire expanse of global ocean, drawing down the full body of water. Even then, all of that water would have to stored somewhere; and the only two options for that are that the water be stowed away in advancing glaciers or be held aloft as dense clouds that would block out the sun completely, as happened on Venice's misconstrued-namesake, Venus, reflecting away all the light of the sun. (None of which are actually compatible with drought.)
Global warming claims it works the other way. Long periods of drought evaporate the glaciers and dump them into the sea, raising sea level (and, therefore, Venetian canal levels). It should also cause more rain due to more evaporation and higher winds. The global-warming geniuses, like the ones the author of this USA Today article apparently reads but is confused by, have been telling us for DECADES that the first floors of Venice's prestigious historic buildings, such as the glorious Doge's Palace, were all going to be flooded by this very time we now live in due to rising sea levels caused from melting glaciers.
The canals were never predicted to find themselves lacking water entirely. Yet, here we are in the time when sea levels were supposed to be showing significant rise, reading an article now claiming -- perhaps because dramatic sea-level rise hasn't happened -- that Venice's canals are drying up due to a drought, said all over the media to be caused by global warming! Ah, the vicissitudes of global climate change. Clearly, the outflows of thought in today's media run a lot murkier than the sewage-laden waters of Venice.
As if so many editors missing this one obvious point were not bad enough, the writer and her various editors compound the error. Take this photo for example, placed where the writer claims "Images show awe-struck onlookers perched above canals reduced to muddy pits":
Do you see awe-struck onlookers? I don't. I hardly see anyone! Maybe the toxicologists in Venice deploy some extra-potent doses of hallucinogenic alcohol in the cocktails that the author might have imbibed ... like the absinthe that became the Green Muse of Bohemian writers a century ago. Perhaps this writer of European dystopian tales aspires to be like those earlier European authors. (As an aside, today's absinthe, made legal in the US again in 2007, has had all the fun extracted out of it, so it was not likely the author's actual source of inspiration in case you were hoping to get in on the enlightenment, unless Europe serves a wormwoodier concoction.)
To me, the photos appear starkly vacant. If there is anything odd about the photos as a collection, outside the infrequency of extreme low tides, it is that the gallery presented almost looks as if the normally human-flooded Venice has suffered the human-evaporating holocaust told of in the classic Earth Abides ("One of the most influential science-fiction novels of the twentieth century," which I highly recommend; and that is an affiliate link, by the way, because I can't resist recommending it as one of my all-time favorites that set the scene for many later apocalyptic stories, appropriate to our present plagued times. OK, advertising over.)
Ironically, the caption on the photo notes the actual truth of the situation that the article, itself, misses:
This photograph taken on February 20, 2023, shows gondolas tied up in Venice Canal Grande, during a severe low tide in the lagoon city of Venice.
Yes, severe low tide is all it was, but where is the story in that event, which happens more than once a year?
As we move through the almost entirely vacant streets/canals of Venice, the author and editors compound their errors, though the next photo gets a little bit of the story right in its caption:
It is true that high-pressure weather systems can press down on the ocean, causing lower local sea levels on a temporary basis, just as a low-pressure hurricane can create a bulge in the sea as water lifts slightly into the relative vacuum of the storm, adding to storm surge. However, the event is almost routine on an annual basis as pointed out in a related article by NBC that references the same caption above:
In mid-winter, high atmospheric pressure combined with the lunar cycle produces the ultra-low water levels during ebb tide, noted Jane Da Mosto, an environmental scientist and sustainable development analyst with We Are Here Venice, an environmental advocacy group.
She -- even as an environmental advocate -- claims only that the story highlights one particular need:
She added that the phenomenon highlights lack of attention to the overdue need for cleaning Venice's inner canal network.
Yes, this extreme tide is a perfectly normal, midwinter event that presents a good time for dredging the more inland canals, which are shallower the further "up" the canal you go, as the sea floor rises around the islands of Venice. USA Today missed that little bit about this kind of thing happening, at least, annually throughout Venice's existence as high-pressure systems happen to align with and amplify tides, perhaps because that tends to undercut the apocalyptic aspects of their story, including the sad music in the video. How tragic that Venice is having its annual winter extreme tide. The people must, indeed, be onlooking in awe as they wonder where all their water has gone.
The text of the NBC version got the story right:
Separately, the same high pressure system compounded by scarce Alpine snow melt this year has been a factor for the shriveling of lakes and rivers in northern Italy in recent weeks.
Yes, "separately," as in having nothing to do with the situation in Venice. High pressure systems do cause droughts and lack of snow melt, and that does shrivel lakes and rivers; but those droughts have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with declining water levels in Venice's ocean-fed canals.
However, even NBC couldn't resist a video that gets it completely wrong in order to score some global-warming points among the illiterati.
Drought causes the canals of Venice to run dry. Exceptionally low tides, caused by lack of rain have left the city's famous canals almost dry.
NBC, too, fell for the murky thinking of "low rains, due to drought, cause low tides." Sorry, but rains never change tide levels.
The AP/USA Today article goes on to lay out more words that contradict their own story:
Rising sea levels are the usual primary threat to this historic city — situated on a small, fish-shaped island at the northwest corner of the Adriatic Sea.
One might think this contradiction with the driving narrative about sea levels rising would have caused the writer and editors to factcheck themselves on this story. But why do that when you can so easily spin the narrative to saying, it's all about global warming because warming causes droughts.
“Like the fabled city of Atlantis, the city is at risk of being submerged. Autumn and winter high tides flood city streets and raise water levels on the canals, making it difficult or impossible for boats to squeeze under the bridges.
So, whether the water level is up or down, it's all due to the effects of climate change. The city, long said to be at risk of drowning due to global warming, is suddenly high and dry as never before due to the same global warming!
In the coming days, forecasters predict temporary relief from much-needed precipitation and snow in the Alps.
Yes, we are to believe coming rains will surely, in a few more days, raise the level of Earth's ocean, which includes the Mediterranean Sea as actually a SINGLE joined body of water. The ocean does have different tides in different areas at any given time, which are sometimes more extreme than others due to the moon's position (and to a lesser extent to the sun's position) or high- or low-pressure weather systems that come and go, adding to or subtracting from the moon's and sun's pull. However, the extreme tides always go away quickly because the moon's greater pull diminishes to a greater extent than air-pressure can change the level of the sea as the moon slides out of its full or new phase. How extreme the tide is, is simply a matter of how closely all these forces coincide.
Conclusion: It's the mainstream that has run dry
If the article provided evidence of anything about global warming, it was that all the concerns over the past half century were hugely overblown by the mainstream media -- a realization the media cannot abide -- because sea-level rise clearly has not happened to the significant degrees once predicted. Water still laps close to the same average level on New York docks and Seattle piers ... and in Venetian canals, AND sea level has been rising ever since the Ice Age started to fade, which has never stopped.
In the same USA Today article, this writer talks about how, due to extreme weather changes, the riders on Venetian gondolas are sometimes bumping their heads on the bottoms of bridges because of how high the canals are running. The rest of us call this a "king tide" or "spring tide" ("spring" in this case has nothing to do with the season, but means to "spring up" because extreme low tides are accompanied about twelve hours later by extreme high tides). It happens. Always has. Tides. They come and go.
This story left the high-tide side of the story that happened about twelve hours later out entirely, as that broader truth apparently didn't fit the drought narrative because it it would have made the event all about tides and nothing to do with the mega-drought that the mainstream media has been presenting as evidence of global warming.
Venice is simply doing what Venice has done for many hundreds of years, having occasional days of extreme low tides, accompanied by extreme high tides -- all of which has nothing to do with drought/rain, as none of the canals are fed by freshwater creeks or rivers or lakes. Unless someone has dammed the Straight of Gibraltar to hold back the singular global ocean, and I just have not heard about it, to where the now-stagnant Mediterranean is drying up like the Great Salt Lake due to lack of fresh-water inflow, there is no lowering of Venetian canals due to lack of rain. (Sure, if it were actively raining, there would be runoff in the canals from the roofs and piazzas, but that would end almost as quickly as the rain because it would flush quickly out to sea -- flush being an apropos word.)
As the article unintentionally reveals, sea level has not gone up in any noticeable way due to all the supposed extra heat of all the past decades. If the global-warming doom-and-gloomers were correct in their original proclamations back when I was a mere teen-ager in the seventies, the canals would no longer be drying out during extreme low tides. (Which is why I stick to writing economic doom-and-gloom proclamations. They are much easier, weather being uncooperative as it is to where forecasters are lucky to get the next day right, much less the next half century.)
I remember reading those first climate-change proclamations about how sea level could be nearly three feet higher as we hit the year 2020. That extra three feet would now be floating the boats shown in the pictures if it had happened. Even as late as 1988, climate scientists predicted the ocean would completely cover the Maldives by now, which were barely three feet above high tide at their centers ... and still are. In fact, the practically submersible islands in the archipelago are almost all much larger now. In the case of the Maldives, the islands have grown due to human intervention. However, equally susceptible Tuvalu, which was supposed to disappear by now, has grown entirely on its own.
That one author may not have understood that water level in Venice's canals is determined by sea level and tides (and sometimes by storm surge) but never by drought is understandable; but that so many editors and even different publications that carried the AP story missed all of that speaks clearly of groupthink about global warming/climate change throughout the mainstream media. The story revealed more about a severe drought in journalism than about the plight of Venice under droughts attributed to global warming.