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Drought in California [EvolutionBlog]
California is running out of water:
California is dry as a bone, and the effects are like something out of an apocalyptic film.
Cities are running out of water. Communities are fighting over what little water there is. Local governments are imposing rationing coupled with steep fines. Fires are ravaging the state. Entire species and industries are threatened.
For California, 2013 was the driest year since the state started measuring rainfall in 1849. Paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram says that, according to the width of old tree rings, California hasn’t been this dry for about 500 years.
California is hardly the only state facing record droughts. Nevada and Nebraska are also in danger of drying up and blowing away.
Periodically doomsayers come along to lecture about overpopulation and environmental degradation. They’re right to do so.
And since I’m always able to bring everything back to religion, this sort of story also makes me think about the absurdity of the fine-tuning argument for God. We are asked to believe that the universe has been meticulously fine-tuned for human life by a loving, omnipotent Creator. Yet almost the entirety of the universe is utterly inhospitable to any sort of life. The large majority of the surface of the one planet that can support life is inhospitable to human life. And on the small portion of the one planet where human life can exist, life nonetheless balances on a knife-edge.
As George Carlin once said, this is not good work. A universe like this has no business appearing on the resume of an all-powerful God.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2014/01/31/draught-in-california/
