Cape Town is making the international news again. It’s not good news this time though. Even if, like me, you have a very dry sense of humour.
This gif is from some American fly-by-night organisation called NASA. I don’t know if they know what they’re talking about when it comes to science and stuff, but their informative webpage on the subject seems to suggest that we are royally screwed.
They quote from expert
Piotr Wolski, a hydrologist at the Climate Systems Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town
who:
has analyzed rainfall records dating back to 1923 to get a sense of the severity of the current drought compared to historical norms. His conclusion is that back-to-back years of such weak rainfall (like 2016-17) typically happens about once just every 1,000 years.
That’s some pretty spectacular extrapolation there. You’d think that you’d have to analyze at least 1,000 years before you could draw this sort of conclusion. But I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. He’s an expert, after all. Sadly though, much like Dr David Olivier, Piotr’s expertise will be ignored by those Facebook warriors determined to lay the blame for the water crisis at the doorstep of the City and Provincial governing structures.
They’ll point instead to a massively inaccurate newspaper article from 1990, and shared by a man who helped tell us that the chocolate and coffee farmers downstream of Theewaterskloof are stealing all “our” water.
Yeah. Not much thought went into that.
Elsewhere, The New York Times shares news from this shithole country with their shithole country:
The Daily Telegraph photographer should have turned off this tap:
And there’s a typically understated response from the Daily Express:
And you know things are getting SERIOUS when someone brings out THE CAPS LOCK key twice in a headline.