Could you follow along? It's a serious question.

I'm an engineer. I am not a climatologist. However, I grew up in the desert southwest and I've studied a lot of history. Lemme tell you a few things:

1) Growing up, I could never figure out why the fuck the Anasazi built their civilization in an arid, dry shithole like New Mexico. It made no goddamn sense. It was not mentioned growing up that they hadn't - the reason the Anasazi dissolved into cannibalism and nomadic tribes of Navajos and Apaches is because their little piece of heaven started out looking like Southern Colorado and ended up looking like Eastern Arizona. All the water went away.

2) Ever wondered why the symbol of Lebanon is the cedar? Why they've got a big fuckin' tree on their flag even though most of the country looks like Mos Eisley Spaceport? It's because it used to be a forest. So did Afghanistan. So did most of the "fertile crescent" - which now looks like, you know, Iraq. All the water went away.

3) Why the fuck did the egyptians build all their pyramids and stuff on top of the shifting sands of the Sahara? Well, they didn't. Back when they were rawkin' it the Valley of the Kings looked a lot more like the San Joaquin than Moab. All the water went away.

4) People with no sense of history don't really get "ghost town." I spent a good part of a summer in Jerome Arizona, which was, until all the molybdenum dried up, one of the biggest mining operations in Arizona. There's an abandoned AAAA high school, an abandoned jail, an abandoned courthouse (that slid 200 feet down the hill due to all the blasting over the years), and an uneasy alliance of hippies, yuppies and Hell's Angels that take up maybe 1/50th the population the town used to support. Thing is, there's "abandoned mining operations" all over the Southwest and in many cases, it just got too goddamn hot.

5) You haven't lived until you've been drag racing at Phoenix International Raceway and it's midnight and it's f'ing 108. At midnight. And that was ten years ago now. You wanna see what they're talking about, go head out to Vegas, get off the strip, and just walk around. You hear nothing but air conditioning, buzzing louder than locusts, everywhere you go. The bottom line is that in order for the cities of the Southwest to be comfortable, there needs to be a heat exchanger that shaves 30+ degrees off the ambient temperature. And that takes some juice. And in the arid southwest, that takes some water. Lots and lots and lots of water. And if you don't think it can happen to you, ask Kazakhstan:

Or, barring that, Africa:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S0OEqd1z2YU/UMBJkPKes6I/AAAAAAAAAA...

You watch The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur or something and it's all these dudes in purple robes wandering around the desert. Thing is, it wasn't the desert when they were wandering around it. It was a nice place to live. That's why people lived there - those guys who headed out to the Dead Sea and hid their scrolls? They were batshit. That wasn't what people did. They stayed in the nice places that weren't desertified toaster ovens filled with grit and sand scorpions. And then, the nice places went away.

My grandparents moved from Bastrop County, Texas to Claunch NM when they were kids. Their parents were going to be ranchers. My great grandfather had 400 acres of grazing land... and then he didn't. I've always wondered why the hell anyone would settle in Claunch. It's 2 hours by dirt road from anywhere you'd want to be. The dust blows all the time, piling up inches high around the buildings. If you water plants with well water, they'll die; the pH is around 11.

Thing is, it used to rain in Claunch, and you used to be able to take care of a thousand head of cattle.

And in the space of ten years, it became dust.

So I ask again - would you be able to follow along with an engineering analysis?

Or are you just naturally skeptical that the environment can change for the worse before anyone really knows what's going on?

I live in Los Angeles. I don't like it. We'll have heat waves and hundreds of homeless will die. We'll have a high pressure day and transformers will explode and cause wildfires on the 405. I didn't really freak out about it, though, until I was driving down the grapevine from Seattle (where I still have a house, and where I shall return as soon as I can), and realized the giant pipes on the horizon were pumping drinking water uphill to feed a metropolis with eleven million people in it.

That shit don't end well. Just ask the Anasazi.