Hm, might be a drought.

Here's an AP story that ran in the Oregonian on Wednesday:

Drought Tightens Its Grip on Southeast

This headline is different than the headline the Oregonian gave it in their print edition - "Drought Strangles Southeast States". I'm not sure who makes those decisions, but the second headline definitely adds more drama. I'd much rather have someone "tighten their grip" than "strangle" me, and I think it's amazing that the same story ran under such different names.

But that's not the only point where this story fails to make clear the true nature of the water crisis in the Southeastern US. It's not that they misreport the facts - it's that the facts are buried and then glossed over with false "advantages" to the drought.

This article is a classic example of an issue getting boxed in as "environmental" news and thus treated with frightening levity. The truth is, droughts affect more than crop yields and fishing. Four paragraphs into this story, we're hit with a scary sentence: "But little rain is in the forecast, and without it climatologists say the water source for more than 3 million people could run dry in just 90 days."

Wait, what?

In 90 days, 3 million people will be without water, unless rainfall starts compensating for the extreme drought that has been taking place in the last few months. Which it isn't likely to.
Shouldn't more people be frightened about this?? Isn't this already a catastrophe? Even if it does start to rain and the people of the Southeast scrape by, it's sure to be worse next year. It's a documented weather trend. Not only that, but aquifers are running dry, and the population is growing.

So why does the AP lead the story with an anecdote about a lake and make it seem like the biggest concern is that people can't put their boats on it anymore? Any why does it completely leave out the above information about the real seriousness of the situation?

It doesn't get better from here. "Sweltering temperatures and a drier-than-normal hurricane season contributed to the parched landscape," the story says. It would have been so easy right there to refrence the general upward trend of temperatures and the certain human causes of those temperatures. Instead, the writer implies fate and bad luck to be the root causes of all this misery, basically throwing his hands in the air (and causing readers to do the same).

The conclusion to this article barely deserves mentioning for its obvious stupidity, but I'll say it anyway: Get 'em while you can, Mr. Biggers. The AP won't tell you, but next year those fish will be drying up and blowing away in the wind.