THE ATMOSPHERIC RIVER TO THE RESCUE.

At the end of January, we noted that a canal built through a tropical rain forest could still go through a lot of water.  "It's not enough that Iranian proxies and African pirates are scaring shippers away from Suez, which makes for intermodal business on Eurasian railways.  Now, the rains aren't coming in Central America, and transloading in Panama has picked up."  It's May, the rainy season is starting in the Canal Zone, and La Niña is weakening.

There might be a slight break in the bad news, and it comes with an interesting little sidenote attached for climate cultists desperately flogging the global warming narrative.

As far as the Panama Canal situation goes, things are looking up in a good, rainy, and wet way. Last August, they had a 20-day wait and a 200-ship transit backlog due to low water levels, which was forecast to worsen this past February. The Panama Canal Authority was planning to drop the number of ships even further.

Then the rains came.

They never did have to cut back to 18 from 24 vessel passages a day.

In fact, by March, things had improved to where they could bump up a couple of extra slots thanks to "above average rainfall."

Sometimes a well-understood phenomenon of long standing is well-understood and of long standing because it ... works.

The climate phenomenon known as El Niño—and not climate change—was a key driver in low rainfall that disrupted shipping at the Panama Canal last year, scientists said Wednesday.

A team of international scientists found that El Niño—a natural warming of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide—doubled the likelihood of the low precipitation Panama received during last year's rainy season. That dryness reduced water levels at the reservoir that feeds freshwater to the Panama Canal and provides drinking water for more than half of the Central American country.

Human-caused climate change was not a primary driver of the Central American country's unusually dry monsoon season, the World Weather Attribution group concluded, after comparing the rainfall levels to climate models for a simulated world without current warming.

The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal yet but follows scientifically accepted techniques, and past such studies have frequently been published months later.

One surely hopes that working papers turn into minimal publishable units eventually, rather than having the editor turn it down because the results have been so widely shared in the working paper.  (Yes, that's been known to happen.)  It should not come as much of a surprise that natural variability is a stronger explanation than the results of an extrapolation model, which is only as good as the priors of its composer.

Next, it might be wise to take into account the ways in which provision of fresh, running water in malarial zones might make lakeside, or lake-served, residences attractive.  "Another point that the climate cultists have left completely out of discussion concerning the Panama Canal's woes, but this survey took into account? Panama's exploding population and the fact that Gatun Lake is their primary freshwater source."

It's apparently too much to ask whether those residential users pay a water rate that reflects its opportunity cost.  Yes, one large ship going through those enlarged locks uses enough water to flush all the toilets in Green Bay for a year.  But without the canal, what is the value proposition for a house or office in the Canal Zone?

[Y]ou're not to make the connection that the previous drought cycles had nowhere near the current population, nor did the canal host massive container vessels using up to 50 million gallons of freshwater per ship to transit the locks.

Climate change and global boiling cultists would prefer to have you pulling your hair out and taking a sledgehammer to your car over something that has demonstrably happened before and was appreciably worse.

Ask the next doomsday environmentalist to explain how water can be a commodity when a shipping company pays a toll for the water it uses, but it is a right for a householder with lakeside property.