We All Need a Drink

I’m sure that I’m not alone in my conflicted thoughts about what is happening in the Middle East at this time (November 2023). So much hatred and violence, and — speaking only for myself — I cannot see any clear line of demarcation between the good and bad, or the right and wrong.

What I do know is that these people have been fighting for thousands of years, and there is no way I can even begin to understand the overarching animosities… or craft a solution that would help them escape the loathing for each other that they all seem to share. No matter how hard we try to offer a resolution — from before Jimmy Carter through Bill Clinton to the Trump/Kushner “Deal of the Century” — the long-term issues doom the success of any forced accord we might try to impose.

We’d all appreciate if a solution could be brokered, but this would seem to be a fool’s errand without empathy for the problem. What’s a poor boy to do?

For myself — and squinting through the tunnel of my constricted worldview — I generally try to keep it simple and look for some way to pin the reality I’m seeing to what the earth is doing anyway (click here for a discussion of the 6th Law of GeoFantasy).

In most cases I usually have little trouble — again, at least in my own mind — with linking the complications of nearly any situation to the earth’s local processes and conditions. So, with that as a goal, let’s consider just one aspect of the ongoing Middle East crisis that may contribute to what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza (there are surely myriad stressors — I simply propose this as one of them).

One thing we can all agree upon is that there are three major religions that claim the area, and none of them have enough water for all of their devotees. Imagine living outside of one of the developed urban areas and on a limited income: tough to get a clean body or teeth, no clean houses or dishes, no luxuriant vegetation or flourishing gardens, no cold glass of ice water on a sweltering August afternoon. I don’t know about you, but I’d probably be pissed off all the time, too!

So why only a bare trickle of water? This one is easy, and is the result of the relationship between the earth and sun, the unforgiving laws of thermodynamics… and global wind patterns.

Making it rain has just a couple moving parts: a rising (and humid) airmass, and itty-bitty particles in the atmosphere (called condensation nuclei) to give the vapor something to attach itself to so it can turn back into the liquid phase and create clouds. Click here for an earlier post regarding cloud formation and rainfall.

Getting the air to rise isn’t that tough, and there are a couple ways to do it. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have mountains that force the air to go up (called “orographic lifting”). In the Midwest there are huge frontal boundaries that collide and do battle, with the warmer air (usually) rising over the cooler, leading to storms (and even tornadoes if conditions are just right… or just wrong, depending on where your house ends up).

But a more regional cause relates to something as simple as latitude — starting at the equator (0° latitude) and increasing to 90° north or south at both polar axes.

There is more solar energy along the equator than at the poles, so — assuming warm air wants to rise anyway — we should expect a simple, and continuous, global pattern: a rising airmass at the equator (leaving a hole in the atmosphere); a northerly flow in the upper atmosphere; a descending airmass at the poles; and a southerly flow at the surface that returns the air to the equator (and fills the hole left behind when the warm air rose in the first place). As such, we should expect a wetter climate at the equator and arid lands at the north and south poles.

We get both of these at the ends, but the earth makes it a bit more complicated in the middle. It’s a long way from the equator to the poles, so the earth breaks the single circular flow into three separate cells (again, both to the north and south). What we end up with is rising (and wet) air at the equator and 60° north and south, with descending (and dry) air at 30° north and south, and at both axes.

So, by extension, what this means is that we have wet climates at the equator and mid-latitudes, with arid lands clustered along 30° north and south, and at the poles.

And this is indeed what we see: tropical rain forests in central Africa and the Amazon Basin, as well as here in the Pacific Northwest (and other places around 60° north), with deserts clustered along 30° north and south, and at the poles. (As an aside: Antarctica is arguably the driest land on the planet, with even less precipitation than in the Sahara. I find it amazing that it also has the earth’s most extensive glacier.)

Look carefully at the map and appreciate one of the sidebars it shares with us. You gotta feel bad for Australia. Thanks to plate motions, most of the continent is currently stuck around 30° south — right under a descending (and dry) air mass. The good news is that — again compliments of plate tectonics — in fifteen million years or so, as it continues to drift north, it’ll be a tropical paradise. I’m buying land now and putting it in a long-term trust…

I know what you’re thinking: Australia is south of the equator and everything down under is backwards anyway, so who cares? But we should also feel bad for the Middle East. Just like the Aussies, the residents of that area are sitting below dry air, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

(As another aside: Imagine if the inhabitants of the Middle East actually got along and could work together. I can visualize a sea level canal heading north from the Red Sea along the border between Israel and Jordan. Once it gets to the top of the hill, it’s a thousand foot fall into the Dead Sea. Plenty of head to generate sufficient hydropower to desalinate enough water to give everyone a drink!)

So yep, the reason for the lack of water was easy to explain. With that behind us, let’s jump into the second of our givens: why there are three major religions claiming and fighting over the same geographical area. This one is also pretty simple (especially if you close one eye and don’t look too hard out of the other).

Consider the following: If you credit God for putting all of them in the pressure cooker the discussion is essentially over, but if you chose to put your faith into the science (along with Louis and Mary Leakey), humanoids began in the Olduvai Gorge region of eastern Africa several million years ago.

A gregarious species, the populations would have blossomed; soon filling that immediate area and needing to expand into new regions. The problem — then and now — was that Africa, for the geographical reasons discussed above, had limited areas that would have been amenable to humanoid migration: blocked by the Sahara to the west, tropical rain forest to the south, with thin strips of habitable land sandwiched between and along the coastlines (click here for an earlier post about primitive cultures and their desire to live at the beach).

There would be a mirror image — with similarly restricted favorable habitats — south of the equator, with the ocean halting emigration around the entirety of the continent… except to the far north near the mouth of the Nile River. So after filling the greater African continent, the humanoids only had this single avenue of escape: through Egypt and into — wait for it — what in now called the Middle East.

And transit and settle they did!

Fortunately for the immigrants (it’s not a dirty word), at that time the Middle East probably wasn’t the wasteland that it is in large measure today — even the most arid of lands, when left undisturbed, will develop a robust and vibrant biosphere. The earliest Judeo-Christian accounts place many of their important historical sites in this area. The Cedars of Lebanon, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, even the Garden of Eden — all were to be found east of the Mediterranean.

But… imagine all the footprints, not to mention the hungry and thirsty travelers and residents, that migrated through what was — even in the early days — a relatively restricted and fragile landscape. All of this overuse surely had to have taken its toll, as we are apparently seeing today.

(A third aside and then I promise to stop: a common ten-point essay question in my G103 class after studying Arid Lands went something like this: “Arid Lands are the most fragile environments on earth and need to be protected. What say you? Agree or disagree, and then support your position.” The knee-jerk response was to agree — and most of them did, in some cases hoping for a few Brownie Points from the teacher — but the best ones were those who took the other side… and then stoutly defended their position.)

Anyway, back to Gaza before we close. My heart goes out to the suffering residents on all sides. I’ve been around long enough to recognize that it can often be difficult — indeed, nearly impossible — to separate the good guys from the bad, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t truly innocent victims caught by the insanity, no matter what their personal beliefs may happen to be.

With that being said, I’d like to pass on something I’ve learned after seventy-plus years on an often bumpy ride: Always beware of bandwagons. They can look so inviting as they cruise past — banners waving and signs proclaiming the rightness of their message, and all to the driving beat of a John Phillip Sousa march. Filled with your friends and loved ones, it can be so tempting to join the parade. But when you keep your focus on the wagon, it’s all too easy to miss the looming abyss just over the horizon.