Steve Hochstetler was fed up with buying gasoline.  It wasn’t so much the price of gasoline that was bothering him, but the realization that the vast amounts of money and effort going into the petroleum business benefitted the few at the expense of many.  “Nigeria is a perfect example.  The money doesn’t flow down to the people of Nigeria.”  In his work for IBM, Steve had travelled to 32 countries, seeing firsthand how people could be desperately poor in countries rich in resources.  While living in North Carolina, Steve had been heavily involved in the fair trade organization Ten Thousand Villages, which provides artisans in developing countries an international market for their products.  So when he and his wife Pat moved to Austin in 2000, they spearheaded the drive to open a successful Ten Thousand Villages outlet on South Congress.  They no longer manage the store, but making a difference in the world remained very important to both the Hochstetlers, so they turned their attention to a new project.

When Steve realized that buying gasoline was not helping anybody, at least not helping anybody who needed help, he decided to stop using it.  He traded his Toyota Prius for a 1983 diesel Mercedes 300TD wagon with 186,000 miles on it.  He enrolled in a workshop to learn how to convert waste vegetable oil into biodiesel.  He bought a biodiesel processor from a guy on craigslist who had built one out of an old electric water heater.  But as he learned to make biodiesel, Steve discovered that the conversion process required both methanol and lye, toxic chemicals that he just didn’t want in his garage.  So he ditched the idea of making his own biodiesel and decided to run his car on straight, unconverted, waste vegetable oil.

Now you can’t just pour canola oil into your Mercedes and expect to motor on down the road.  First, you need the right kind of waste oil:  liquid, fairly clean, and with almost no chicken fat in it.

During the sacrificial season of Lent, Catholic churches have a lot of fried fish suppers.  To me a fish fry doesn’t really seem like much of a sacrifice, but anyway, after the parishioners go back to eating meat, the churches end up with a lot of excess vegetable oil.  Steve takes it off their hands, collecting 700 or 800 gallons of lightly used oil at the end of every Lent season, enough to fuel his Mercedes for the rest of the year.

The oil has to be filtered really well or food particles will clog up the engine.  Steve is compulsive about this step because he wants to keep driving.  He pours the oil through a series of filters from 600 to 200 microns.  The openings in the mesh are barely wider than a human hair.  Then he lets the oil sit undisturbed in a barrel for several weeks, so any remaining tiny particles settle to the bottom.  For the final step he pours the oil through a one micron filter, fine enough to remove bacteria.

The filtered oil is very, very clean, but it still can’t be put directly into the diesel engine.  Vegetable oil is a big, complex molecule, and more viscous than biodiesel.  Chemically, vegetable oil is composed of three hydrocarbon chains (fatty acids) connected to a glycerol molecule.    Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil too, but biodiesel has the glycerol stripped off during processing, leaving hydrocarbon chains which are almost identical to diesel made from petroleum.

In order to use the thicker vegetable oil in an automobile, it has to be made less viscous so it won’t gunk up the engine.  Just like butter turns liquid in the frying pan, vegetable oil gets less viscous when it is heated.  Cars that have been converted to run on vegetable oil have two tanks.  They start on biodiesel, and then after a few minutes when the engine and the fuel are good and hot, they switch over to the oil.  Before turning the car off, it is switched back to biodiesel to flush the system, so that the vegetable oil won’t cool off and turn to Crisco in the fuel injectors.  Some people say that the exhaust smells like French fries when it’s running on oil, but Steve claims he doesn’t notice it.

Steve and Pat have put about 50,000 vegetable oil miles on the Mercedes wagon without any problems with the engine, and they have also acquired and converted two more Mercedes sedans to run on waste oil.  When they need more biodiesel for start-up and cool-down, Steve gets it at DieselGreen Fuels, Austin’s only source of biodiesel.  They will give him 30 gallons of biodiesel in exchange for 120 gallons of his fish fry oil.

Though he is keeping his day job at IBM, Steve plans to start a side business called “GreaseMyMercedes” to help other people convert their own diesel cars to waste oil.  He admits that a few cars running on vegetable oil won’t replace the gasoline industry, but it’s a small step that he can make toward alternative fuels.  “At least I’m doing something,” he says hopefully.  “If everybody just did a little something, the world would be a lot better place.”

Dalton Rebecek is only eleven years old, but he has no qualms about speaking to the press.  May 3 is a newsworthy day at Jo Ann Ford Elementary School; the lunchroom is beginning a composting program for food waste.  As student council president, Dalton has been preparing his classmates for the inauguration of this new program, so he confidently explains it to me.  The Ford lunchroom used to send 16 bags of trash to the landfill every day.  With the new food composting program and single stream recycling, Dalton says trash will be reduced to only one bag a day, which will be “healthier for the Earth.”

Jason Sanders, coordinator of recycling and composting for Texas Disposal Systems, is patiently herding 500 very noisy grade-schoolers through their first trash sorting line.  Food, paper napkins, and milk cartons go into the bin for composting.  Water bottles and aluminum cans go to recycling.  Styrofoam, plastic cutlery, and sandwich bags go into the trash.  While volunteers continue to teach proper trash line etiquette, Jason invites me outside (where it is blissfully quiet) to see the special dumpster where the food waste goes.  The dumpster is equipped with a radio frequency ID tag.  When the truck comes to collect the food waste it will immediately record the source and the weight of the food, so TDS will know exactly how much waste is being diverted from the landfill by each school.  Ford is the last Georgetown elementary school to go live with the composting program, so Jason has data from all the other elementary schools in town, as well as from the Austin and Hayes elementary schools.  He confirms Dalton’s claim that landfill waste will decrease from 16 bags per lunchroom per day to one or two.  Mitchell Elementary, which was the first Georgetown school to begin composting and recycling, is now the champion of all the TDS Green schools.  Mitchell kids recycled and composted over 8000 pounds of waste in April alone.

Food waste composting is not just for little kids.  At Southwestern University the cafeteria in the Red McCombs center is now diverting over 90% of its waste stream away from the landfill and will save $10,000 a year by doing so.  Gary Hertel, Georgetown Facilities Manager for TDS, shows me a special door at the back of the kitchen where food can be thrown directly into a collection bin, and another chute where recyclables such as cardboard boxes slide into a huge compactor.  I don’t see any place for regular trash so I ask Gary where it is.  Before he can answer a janitor comes out with a single black plastic bag and sets it primly on the curb.  This kitchen feeds 1000 people a day but there is so little trash generated that after lunch a golf cart comes by and hauls the few bags to a dumpster at another location.

After the food waste is collected at the schools, it is hauled down to the Texas Disposal Systems facility at Creedmoor, just southeast of Austin.  I am greeted there by Adam and Paul Gregory, sons of founder and CEO Bob Gregory.  Rarely will you meet two young men so enthusiastic about recycling.  Adam is only 27 years old, but led the design and construction of the 107,000 square foot Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), pronounced “murph” in dump-speak.  Adam proudly shows me huge bales of plastic milk jugs, bimetal cans, and aluminum stacked in endless rows.  He explains that in order to make a profit, sometimes TDS has to hold onto the bales temporarily and wait for the right market price.  Recycling not only makes money by saving valuable resources, but also keeps 300 tons of material out of the landfill every day.  Adam thinks that with diligent materials recovery he can make this landfill last 100 years.  Paul, the older brother, is no less committed to the long view.  As long as every man, woman, and child in America continues to discard over 1.25 tons of trash every year, their family business will have plenty of opportunity for innovation.  Both brothers have business degrees but confess that they have little interest in mundane matters such as quarterly profits.  They prefer to focus on long term projects such as harvesting methane gas from the landfill to run the materials recovery facility, a process that should be operational within two years.  They are also looking forward to opening a safari park in the buffer zone surrounding the landfill and have already collected over 2500 exotic animals, many of them endangered species.  As we drive off-road in the grass among antelope and bison, I forget that we’re in Texas, much less in a landfill.

Paul Gregory is in charge of composting the food collected from the schools.  We drive his truck back to the big piles where the children’s lunch leftovers have been ground up in a five-to-one ratio with chopped brush.  The piles are called “static” piles because they are allowed to sit for the 6 months required for the milk cartons to disappear.  Twice during that period they are stirred up and blasted with water cannons to keep the decomposing bacteria active.  The temperature inside the piles rises to 140 degrees Fahrenheit from the metabolism of the bacteria, killing seeds and pathogens.  In fact, the piles get so hot that they can catch fire if they are allowed to get too big.  After 6 months the compost will be ready to be sold through the Garden-Ville outlets as a valuable source of organic humus and nitrogen for lawns and gardens.  It can also be used at TDS’s tree farm on the premises.

Lunchroom leftovers are only a small part of the composting operation.  Other piles contain such sundry items as animal manure or waste liquids from the Borden dairy and the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

The brothers admit that these massive, hot compost piles are also an expedient way to dispose of rare fatalities among the wildlife.  Last year George, a 20 year old American bison, died peacefully of old age.  He was suitably mourned and then, rather than digging a really big hole, George was interred in a compost pile.  After 10 days there was nothing left but hooves and teeth.

Published in the Sun April 28, 2012

Vegan:  A strict vegetarian who consumes no animal food or dairy products

 

Gary Ranck is probably the last person in the world you would guess is a vegan.  At 70, the ex-marine still works full time as a security guard.  Don’t sneak into his apartment unannounced because he keeps nine handguns in his bedroom closet.  His favorite gun for target practice is a .45 caliber model 1911 automatic pistol.  Gary doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about animal rights or the environmental impact of industrial farming.  But he does listen to his doctors.  Eight years ago when an agonizing blood clot cut off the circulation to his left leg, his doctor told him he had to quit smoking.  Gary threw his last pack of cigarettes in the trash that same day and never smoked again.

When Dr. Allen Mauldin in Leander told Gary that his cholesterol was too high and suggested that he follow a diet free of all meat, eggs, and dairy products, Gary’s first impression was “Yeah, right.”  But Dr. Mauldin himself is a vegan, so Gary reluctantly agreed to try the diet for 90 days.  He was surprised to find that it wasn’t too difficult.  For breakfast he would nuke a frozen Amy’s Tofu Scramble.  He discovered that he genuinely liked grilled Portobello mushrooms on sprouted grain bread.    Before he became a vegan he didn’t even know what lentils were; now he makes his own Lentil Loaf instead of meatloaf.  He is happy to note that the diet allows him to wash down the lentil loaf with a beer.

After his 90 day trial period, Gary’s cholesterol was normal and Dr. Mauldin let him quit taking his cholesterol medication.  Since Gary hates to spend money on medicine, he decided to stick with the plan.  He has followed the diet very carefully for over two years now, only cheating with a bit of turkey at Christmas and Thanksgiving.  He is 27 pounds slimmer and his LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) is down to an absolutely perfect 53.  He doesn’t even miss meat, except when he sees a Burger King commercial on TV.  Then the longing for a double cheeseburger briefly reappears; a conditioned response that says more about the effectiveness of advertising than it does about the qualities of ground beef.

Thinking about the qualities of ground beef brings me to the topic of “pink slime,” otherwise known as lean, finely textured beef (LFTB).  After slaughtering a cow, the tiny scraps of meat left over are processed to separate the lean bits from the fat.  The resulting meat paste is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.  Since the process was developed in 2001, “pink slime” has been added to ground beef at fast food restaurants and school lunch programs to make the meat go further.  This process recovers about 13 extra pounds of meat from each cow.  Iowa governor Terry Branstad said that, in order to keep eating the same number of hamburgers, we will have to slaughter an extra 1.5 million cows a year to make up for the lack of LFTB (over the 35 million head of cattle currently slaughtered annually.)  That sounds like seriously bad news for the cow population.

There is, however, another way to make up for the “loss” of pink slime.  We could eat fewer hamburgers.  Meatless Mondays would benefit both our waistlines and our arteries, as well as granting an eleventh hour pardon for those 1.5 million cattle.

Gary Ranck skips meat to save money on cholesterol medication, which is a perfectly good reason all by itself.  But even if your cholesterol is normal, environmental impact is another huge reason to decrease the amount of meat in your diet.  A United Nations report in 2006 titled Livestock’s Long Shadow concluded that the complete process of feeding and distributing livestock accounts for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a larger percentage than the entire global transportation sector.

As a retired physician, I must add one small caution.  It is possible to go vegetarian and still have a very unhealthy diet – think chips and soda pop.  Meat should be replaced with actual fruits and vegetables.  And some people who completely avoid all animal products risk becoming deficient in vitamin B12, so a small supplement would be in order.  If you are interested in vegetarianism, a little research will help you get it right.  And of course nobody should stop cholesterol medication without consulting his or her physician.

Published in the Sun April 15, 2012

If you just want eggs you can get perfectly white, clean ones at HEB for $1.58 a dozen, $4.10 if you spring for the organic variety.  So why did hundreds of people show up for Austin’s Funky Chicken Coop Tour on April 7?  Why do otherwise rational people with good jobs at places like Dell and Samsung, people who have the money to buy organic eggs at the farmers’ market and make an arugula quiche every morning of the week if they want, why do they go to the trouble to raise hens in the backyard?

When asked, they always say, “We just want to know where our eggs come from.”  But wanting to know the source of your eggs does not adequately explain the psychological motivation behind this apparently inconvenient hobby, so I am forced to come up with my own (totally unscientific) theory about the popularity of backyard chickens.

For prehistoric humans, hunting game was necessary for survival.  Modern hunters, admitting that they don’t really need to hunt for food, describe their sport in spiritual terms.  They talk about the need to hunt being encoded in our DNA.  They rightfully claim that hunting nurtures virtues such as self-reliance, competence, discipline, and resolve.  Hunters are proud to be conservationists.  Killing game is so much more than just food, they say.  It’s also about creating an honest relationship between predator and prey, and about maintaining a link with an honorable past in which humans provided their own sustenance or they went hungry.

Isn’t it possible that those of us who are a bit less bloodthirsty might experience those same primal urges to get down and dirty with nature?  Just like our armed and camouflaged brethren, we pacifists also want to experience the food chain up close and personal.  The processed, sterilized, and plastic-wrapped chemical conveniences that modern society calls “food” might prevent starvation, but are we truly nourished?  Maybe convenience is not the most important attribute for nutrition.  As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World, “Being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune.”  In spite of splinters and smashed thumbs, is not building your own chicken coop a thousand times more empowering than a PowerPoint presentation to a lethargic committee of under-the-table text-message-senders?  Can scooping poop from the coop purify the soul as well as the henhouse?  A hen-owner has an honest interspecies relationship with the hen:  the human provides feed and shelter and the hen will reciprocate with an egg.  The egg, collected from a nest and scrambled for breakfast, is not just calories, it’s an accomplishment.

In addition to providing a sense of achievement, raising your own eggs makes a social statement.  It says, “I don’t want to support a commercial egg industry that confines chickens in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings.  Chickens, as humble as they are, deserve to live a normal chicken life, wandering about with other chickens and pecking for bugs.  Humans are big enough to extend ethical standards to animals.”

People of all persuasions, from liberals to libertarians, came together at the Funky Chicken Coop Tour in the quest for food realism.  Many home tours have a lot of Wow factor.  You look at something beautiful and you think, “Wow, that countertop must have cost a year of college tuition.”  Not so with Funky Chicken Coops.  Reduce, re-use, and recycle were the watchwords of funky chicken coop construction.

Although not the most functional of all possible coops, my favorite was Erik and Allegra Azulay’s creation, using a Disney castle to house their six chickens.  “All our hens are princesses,” explained Erik.  The Azulays were inspired after the Funky Chicken Tour in 2010 and fashioned their first coop out of a doghouse and some hardware cloth.  Later they expanded into the castle.  I asked Allegra if they had experienced any problems with predators in the inner city.  She admitted that they had one possum attack, “but everybody survived.”  What was her motivation for having chickens in the backyard?  “We just wanted to know where our eggs come from.”

Published in the Sun March 25, 2012

Mining Oil from the Dump

Like many who thought they had their careers planned, the recession put Josh Broussard onto a different path.  He had started his professional life as a chemical engineer smocked up in a semiconductor clean room, but now his office is a trailer on the edge of a landfill.  In spite of the humble (and odiferous) surroundings, Josh loves his new job.  He gets to work on two environmental questions at once:  What do we do with all the trash?  And how can we use petroleum products more effectively?

Here is Josh’s challenge.  Every year, ten million tons of composition shingles are ripped off American roofs and thrown into landfills.  Shingles contain about 20% asphalt, which is the sticky residue left over after the gasoline, diesel, and other oils are taken out of the crude oil.  Each ton of shingles contains the equivalent of one barrel of oil; twice as much oil as can be extracted from a ton of Alberta tar sands.  Not only is discarding used shingles a waste of oil, but it is also exceptionally wasteful of expensive landfill space because shingles do not compact well, leaving a lot of airspace in the pile.

Josh works for WM Asphalt Products, a special division of Waste Management, the company that runs the Williamson County landfill.  His job is to divert composition shingles out of the waste stream, and recycle them into a product that can be used to pave and repair asphalt roads.  It’s like he is drilling for oil, but he’s doing it in the dump.

When a roofing contractor replaces a damaged composition roof, he has to get rid of the old shingles.  He can take them to Josh, even if they are mixed with nails, flashing, and other roof debris.  Josh will charge him $32 a ton, up to a maximum of $64, to recycle the shingles.  This is less than the contractor would be charged to dump them in the landfill, so the contractor comes out ahead.  Josh and his helper Tim Cunningham then “clean” the shingles, which means they pick out all the wood, plastic soda bottles, and other extraneous trash.  The shingles are then run through a giant grinder and chopped into pieces no bigger than one half inch.

The chopped shingles can be sold for $25 to $35 a ton as an additive for hot mix asphalt which is used for paving roads.  Hot mix asphalt can be up to 5% recycled shingles by weight.  The asphalt in shingles is actually harder than the rest of the mix, so it helps prevent heavy wheels causing deep ruts in the road.  Even better, the recycled shingles reduce the need for virgin asphalt, which costs $500 a ton.  The Texas Department of Transportation states that using 5% recycled shingles in hot mix to pave one mile of a two lane highway uses 80 tons of shingles and saves 40 cubic yards of landfill space.  So the hot mix company saves money, the roofing contractor saves money, and both of them give money to Josh.  It’s a win/win/win situation.  Even the county comes out ahead by saving landfill space, which costs millions of dollars to build and operate.

Asphalt recycling is just part of a larger trend called Resource Recovery:  the economical harvesting of “trash” for valuable materials.

Published in the Sun March 18, 2012

When Dean Hamilton, chaplain of the Wesleyan Homes, was 8 years old, he decided he was big enough to butcher a chicken by himself.  His grandmother, keeper of the chickens, gave the go-ahead.  Dean caught the unfortunate hen easily enough, but in his excitement he neglected to tie the legs to a tree branch, a crucial mistake.  After a deadly whack, the unrestrained and now headless bird flew over the grandmother’s clothesline, splattering the clean white bedsheets with blood.  Terrified by the carnage, Dean fled the scene and hid in the woods for several hours.  His grandfather had to finish the job, but in the end, everybody had a nice chicken dinner.  With practice, Dean got more proficient at butchering.  He and his grandmother working together could take a chicken from scratching in the yard to steaming on the table in under an hour.  Dean’s farming chores as a child gave him an understanding of the work involved in food production, and a respect for the creatures involved.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said “it is just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.”  After moving to a hilltop outside of Walburg a few years ago, Dean followed Mr. Wright’s advice and built a chicken coop for ten hens.  The chickens provide Dean and his wife, Cullie Mac, with farm-fresh eggs, manure compost for their prolific vegetable garden, and hours of bucolic entertainment.

In addition to bugs and greens from the yard, Dean’s hens eat a high protein laying mash which helps them achieve their full egg-laying potential.  A hen in her prime can lay 2 eggs every three days.  Dean calculates that it takes 4 pounds of laying mash for a dozen eggs.  At 60 cents a pound for organic mash, his eggs are costing $2.40 a dozen, just for the feed.  It would cost about half as much for non-organic feed, but Dean is particular about what goes into his eggs.  What goes in affects what comes out.  Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have been studying the nutritional characteristics of eggs raised under various conditions.  Eggs from truly pasture-raised chickens contain three times more omega-3 fatty acids, twice as much vitamin E, and 40% more vitamin A than eggs from factory farm hens.  In 2007 Mother Earth News tested free range eggs from 14 flocks around the country and confirmed the PSU findings.  They also found that pastured eggs contained 7 times more beta carotene and one third less cholesterol.

Dean hasn’t had any chicken disease problems so far.  He attributes the hens’ good health to a spacious yard with lots of room to run and peck, and a clean coop.   When he buys new chicks, he gives them a special starter food medicated to prevent the parasite coccidiosis, the most common cause of death in young chicks.  When his hens reach chicken menopause and stop laying eggs, Dean just lets them hang around anyway.  He no longer has any interest in butchering chickens with names like Buttercup and Pretty Girl.  Besides, having a few old biddies around decreases the odds that his good layers will be divebombed by the red-tailed hawks that keep an eye on his property.  In an effort to keep the hawks away, Dean has several lifelike horned owl statues in the chicken yard.  Hawks apparently do not like owls.

Skunks also prey on chickens.  Skunks don’t eat the whole chicken; they just bite the heads off.  The first time Dean had a skunk problem he caught one in a humane trap.  However once the skunk was in the trap, Dean realized he had no clear plan for how to get him out.  Resorting to a non-humane solution, and standing well out of spray range, he took aim with a 22 rifle.  The first 3 shots bounced off the wire of the cage, but the fourth shot hit the mark.  Very carefully, Dean slid the smelly body into a contractor’s bag and set it out for the unsuspecting trash collectors.  Last year alone Dean dispatched ten skunks.

Dean collects about 10 beautiful blue and brown eggs a day, more than enough for himself, plus a plate of scrambled eggs every week for his pampered dogs, and still has enough eggs left over for special friends and neighbors.  I am happy to be one of his friends.

Readers who are interested in learning more about backyard chickens can attend the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour on April 7, 2012 from 10 AM to 4 PM.

This was never published in the Sun; I guess the editor didn't like it.  It had some great graphics to go along with it, but for some reason I can't get them to cut and paste on this blog.

What Exactly Is La Niña and Why Do They Keep Talking About It?

Some weather events are easy to understand.  Everybody knows what it means when we have 90 days over 100 degrees in one season.  If a tropical storm drops 15 inches of rain on central Texas in one night, we totally get the concept.  But what exactly is La Niña and how is it related to droughts in Texas?  Here is a short answer, with some pictures, so you can be ready if somebody brings up the topic at a dinner party.

El Niño and La Niña are the opposite ends of a naturally occurring cycle called the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  The oscillation refers to the year to year shifts in the temperature of the surface water of the Pacific Ocean in a spot called the Niño 3.4 region.  (See Figure A.)  Normally, tradewinds blow from South America along the Equator, pushing the warm surface water west toward Indonesia and Australia.  The warm water collects there in what is called the “West Pacific Warm Pool.”  This westward movement of water causes cold water to be pulled up from the depths on the eastern side of the Pacific, near Peru and Ecuador.

La Niña is said to exist when the tradewinds blow even more water from east to west, pulling up even more cold water near South America.  The cool water extends along the Equator like a big finger pointing toward the warm pool of water on the other side of the Pacific.  (Figure B.)  During La Niña, the Niño 3.4 region is cooler than normal.

The upwelling of cold water is beneficial to the fisheries off the coast of Peru, because nutrients are brought up from the depths.  Unfortunately for Texans, however, the presence of La Niña causes the jet stream air currents carrying moist Pacific air toward North America to deviate northward, taking much needed moisture away from the southern United States and depositing it in the Northwest and Canada.  (Figure C.)

La Niña conditions are typically associated with drought in Texas, but not always.  During the drought of record from 1950 to 1956, La Niña conditions existed for all of 1950, and then disappeared in the spring of 1951.  A very strong La Niña recurred in 1954 and persisted until spring of 1957, when the drought ended.  The two lowest annual rainfalls ever recorded for Austin (Camp Mabry) were 11.42 inches in 1954, and 15.41 inches in 1956.  On the other hand, the strongest and longest La Niña ever recorded occurred from the summer of 1973 until the summer of 1976.  In spite of La Niña conditions, annual rainfall in Austin for those four years was 38.7 inches, above average for the region.  (Figure D.)

Typically La Niña alternates with El Niño every three to five years.  An individual La Niña lasts 9-12 months, but occasionally a La Niña episode has persisted for more than 2 years.  La Niña conditions are usually strongest during the winter months of the Northern Hemisphere.

La Niña began during the summer of 2010 and continued until spring of 2011.  It then abated for the summer but came back in the fall.  It is not as strong this year as it was last year.  The National Weather Service predicts that La Niña will persist through April of 2012 with higher than average temperatures in Texas through the summer and fall.  They won’t commit themselves about the prospect of rain.