Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Hypothetical Kansas family still can't catch a break.

 

RIP Great Salt Lake?

Without dramatic cuts to water consumption, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is on track to disappear within five years, a dire new report warns, imperiling ecosystems and exposing millions of people to toxic dust from the drying lake bed.
The report, led by researchers at Brigham Young University and published this week, found that unsustainable water use has shrunk the lake to just 37 percent of its former volume. The West’s ongoing megadrought — a crisis made worse by climate change — has accelerated its decline to rates far faster than scientists had predicted.
But current conservation measures are critically insufficient to replace the roughly 40 billion gallons of water the lake has lost annually since 2020, the scientists said.
The report calls on Utah and nearby states to curb water consumption by a third to a half, allowing 2.5 million acre feet of water to flow from streams and rivers directly into the lake for the next couple of years. Otherwise, it said, the Great Salt Lake is headed for irreversible collapse.
“This is a crisis,” said Brigham Young University ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report. “The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn’t disappear.”​

Great Salt Lake on track to disappear in five years, scientists warn — The Washington Post

 

Ruh-roh foodies!

 

The "new research" the story mentions three times before linking to, and only cites the agency that conducted it in passing: Population Attributable Fraction of Gas Stoves and Childhood Asthma in the United States

Now, I'm not as well-versed in statistics as someone like @doctorquant, but the description of this study reads like some half-assed college class project. Seems like they tried to find states with a high number of gas stoves, and states with a lot of asthma cases — which are were mostly states with higher populations — and say the two are related.

Banning gas stoves is a new Cause Du Jour among environmentalists, who for the good of the planet are also pushing for people to eat bugs and go back to a 15th century existence where life expectancy is about 37 years old. So I'm sure that this study will soon be cited as bedrock proof that your kids will get asthma and die if you cook their dinner on a gas stove.

 

To be fair, it seems Population Attributable Fraction (PAF) is a pretty standard statistical projection method in public health. Which isn't to say it isn't occasionally misused.

The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA) publications

That said, the story and the study link to lots and lots of other studies and stories corraborating the premise.

 

US Safety Agency to Consider Ban on Gas Stoves Amid Health Fears

 

Anecdotal but this isn't the typical "I did my own research and..."

 

Not a single person born before 1900 is alive today because of gas stoves. Or cellphones.

 

So does what I posted contradict what you did somehow? I linked a post with more data four posts below the original gas stoves post, same as you did directly below it. Is it invalid or incorrect somehow? Otherwise they seem to be in agreement.

 

It's been raining steadily since about 5 a.m. in Orange County, but it's coming down in buckets now, and windy as hell. The deluge hit around 11 a.m. In Irvine, there is a barranca (next to a street named Barranca) that I have never seen water in. It's flowing now. The flood control channel on Trabuco, just outside my tract, is a raging river now. Even the ducks and egrets are seeking cover.

 

This might be a dumb question, but are these storms falling in the right places to be a drought buster?