Losing 19 firefighters in one incident is pretty frightening. It hit 117 degrees in Las Vegas; 102 at one in the morning. It was 129.9 degrees in Death Valley. People are baking cookies in their cars. Meanwhile, Philadelphia is the new Seattle, where it never stops raining and the sun rarely shines. All the creeks around here are raging rivers, almost as high as they get during tropical storms and hurricanes.
But Al Gore is fat.
Also, too, if a Prez (finally) gives a major speech on the crisis of climate change, and it receives no teevee coverage, did it ever happen?
Your lib’rul media!
Funny Boo Boo, that my extensively conservative home state, (Oklahoma, although I have not lived in 35 years,) are silent about the 2 tornadoes and climate change, they are lining up for the “guberment” money.
Not only baking cookies. Babies.
This is a terrible time of danger for children in cars. In the kind of heat out there, it probably takes 20-30 minutes to parboil a 1 YO in a carseat.
Check and double check before leaving that car, folks.
and don’t forget the doggies, either!
The weather in upstate NY, seems to be a lot like Philly’s.
It’s raining outside, as if we were in the middle of a tropical storm.
We had virtually no nice days in the spring. It was damp, cool, and rainy, most days.
The day before summer, it was nice, and since then, it’s been hotter than a young boy hooker turning cheap tricks at a convention of Conservative religious men.
Flash flood warnings for us in Maine today. We have had a lot of rain this spring and summer.
Another calamity is coming š http://linkapp.me/Z0S2e
Boo:
This is a troll. Ban, please.
Deleted the troll, I think I accidentally deleted the troll-identifier too. Sorry, whoever you were.
Anyway, yes: rain in Philly, again. Welcome to our new monsoon season! Perhaps we’ll get the same kind of floods we got in 2006, when I-81 was washed out.
Watching the Death Valley coverage yesterday where they indicated that the planes were grounded when temps surpassed 118 then watching the AZ firefighting planes I wonder if that will be our next problem…not being able to get tanker planes in the air because of the heat?
On a good note, newf puppy got an A+ in rattlesnake school on Saturday, I’m thinking she’s going to put those lessons to good use! It’ll be 100 here today.
Sympathies to the fire fighters and their families. Fire fighters are the truest heroes in this society, and they deserve all the support and protection we can give them.
Last week, Sacramento got hit by an atmospheric river. Two days later it was 111. The central valley, which supplies a quarter of the nation’s food supply, will be under water within a few decades, but at least I will have lovely ocean front property. The fight between science and conservatism is now for the survival of the species. Choose your side.
Why would the central valley be underwater?
I would think it’d be more likely to become (or revert back to) semi-desert.
Sacramento is 32 feet above sea level. Most of the central valley is less than 100 feet above sea level.
That’s why it is threatened with being under water. However, the central valley is in an unusually good situation for engineering solutions to sea level rise. They’ll just have to sacrifice the Oakland sea port and dike up the golden gate. Given the threat to the SF Bay area cities that will be a certainty.
The expected sea level rise this century is between 2 and 6 feet, obviously there is uncertainty but for sea levels to rise 30 feet is likely to take centuries or millennia.
If this is a threat to central valley, living in The Netherlands i should probably be freaking out and start running for higher ground.
The point being that we shouldn`t label possible future threats we wont likely live to see as threats.
Actual threats we may experience will be socio economic in nature, diminishing fresh water from disappearing glaciation and food insecurity trough changing weather patterns and ocean acidification.
The flooding is absolutely long term, but some scientists think it could certainly happen before the end of the century. And yes, the Netherlands are very concerned and already taking steps to protect themselves. For the Central Valley, extreme heat and drought will be a much greater threat in the near future, but I have kids, and I am just as concerned about what my descendants will have to face as I am about myself.
Some scientists believe in lizard people running everything.
There is no serious scenario where 30 ft of sea level rise will happen within this century.
like the belief in lizard people we shouldn`t talk about it as being plausible if we dont want to to be ridiculous.
And climate change is way to serious to be ridiculous about it.
Especially when apocalyptic scenarios are to be had just by looking at Florida. even a 3-5 foot rise there could soak up a lot of landmass, coming from both the gulf and the atlantic.
There is a high degree of uncertainty on sea level rise, in part due to the many unknowns regarding the melting of Greenland and Antarctic above-sea level ice and and in part due to uncertainties regarding water temperature increases and resulting expansions. However, most infrastructure-planning experts are suggesting preparing for a rise of 7 feet by 2100 and a foot-per-decade after that. So the 2-6 foot estimate isn’t inconsistent with that, although I haven’t seen anyone versed in the science suggest under a meter by 2100 in quite a long time (recent developments have more often than not shown that ice melting and water warming trends are faster than the IPCC forecasted).
However, a 7 foot rise does not mean that land at, say, 10 feet above sea level is safe. Storm surges aren’t going to have as big an impact on the central valley as they do on the coast but you still have tidal factors to consider, which means downtown Sacramento would start to resemble Venice some days. And large parts of the farmlands would be transformed from growing fields to wetland-marshes. Then there is the impact of having the sea water seep into the central valley water table – both on residential water use and farming.
So, yes, saying Sacramento would be under water is an overstatement – but without some sort of dike engineering like at Golden Gate it would dramatically transformed.
And that’s if the 7 foot limit holds. In today’s political and media climate – where none of the Sunday shows covered Obama’s climate change speech, perhaps for fear of being Monsantoed by the powerful fossil fuel lobby – anyone speaking about global warming is overly cautious and out of fear of being dismissed as “alarmist” provides only the safest scenarios as predictions. Certainly if the sea level rise is double that or more no one will blame the infrastructure-planning experts for understating in a political climate where they are by default labeled as fear-mongering if they suggest any warming at all. Even the IPCC reports have been forced into this kind of defensive mode when offering predictions.
The reality is that while the notion of human-caused, greenhous-gas-based warming is a certainty, and while this topic has been subject to far more extensive research than all but a few other scientific topics in human history, the complexities of the global climate are so extensive that there is a great deal of uncertainty in the forecasts. Potential “trigger points” such as methane trapped in permafrost are so far from being reliably quantified that they are usually just ignored in the mainstream models, like those shown by IPCC, and thus there is a very good chance that factors which have yet to be quantified will cause warming to accelerate much faster than predicted. Therefore, it’s important not to cite figures like the 7 foot sea rise planning figure as an upper limit of what is possible. It is perhaps the upper limit of what is possible to recommend to government officials, but that’s all it is.
Although i don`t fully agree with your creative interpretation of the numbers i suppose you are right on the edge of acceptable politics to battle the opponents.
I believe there is reason to think reality will be at the high end of projections of the IPCC, due to the influences on the process by skeptical voices, to think that it is fatally flawed and things will be very much worse makes no sense to me unless we need to scare people more, a strategy i never agree with and believe in the end will cause more blowback than gain.
The point about the “mainstream” models makes little sense to me, its like you want to label science as mainstream and that we need a alternative voice.
There is only science and pseudo science , if you want to be creative please do it without attacking what we know with what we cant know.
There is only science and pseudo science
Well, I agree there are clear instances of pseudo-science, brought to you by people who argue that tobacco doesn’t harm health, that the earth is 6k years old, that the earth is cooling, etc.
However, within the science community there is, on pretty much every topic, a broad range of views on how to interpret the evidence. For example, virtually every scientist who studies any aspect of biology agrees with the concept of species evolution as a fundamental principle but there are extensive disagreements on the details.
This situation is made even more so when forecasting is involved, as with climate science. There are a wide range of views and there are a lot of factors that could have a major impact to forecast but which simply haven’t been studied enough to know the results.
Finally, the question of whether scientific reports are influenced by public/media influences should be obvious – but since it’s not I’ll simply note that I’m far from the only person saying this – it’s now considered part of the consensus in the climate science field:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-ipcc-underestimate-assessing-climate-risks-15338
There are several sites that have maps that allow you to choose the sea level and see how your city will be affected. According to Surging Seas, for example, an increase of only one foot would flood 19.6% of the acres in Stockton. Ten feet would flood 54.2%, most of it farmland. Essentially, the SF bay could easily come up to swallow Western Sacramento and a good chuck of the northern Central Valley.
Looking at the situation at Stockton it seems to be comparable to where i live- patches of reclaimed land with dikes to keep out the water.
The floodlines they give are sea level rise + tide + maximum storm surge , to interpret this as when sea level rises that this will flood the farmland and it will be lost would make no sense. At worst the cost of raising dikes would make it economically less interesting to maintain all land.
simply the solution to 10 feet sea level rise is to raise dikes by 10 feet. This may be hard and costly but if economically sensible no biggie. The lowest point in the Netherlands is 22ft below average sealevel, and thats without storm surge or sealevel rise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Ordnance_Datum
What you`re saying is the equivalent of me saying The Netherlands is 50% flooded at this moment.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Netherlands_compared_to_sealevel.png
If we do anything, the hippies win.
[Not that anything can be done. It is far too late: that ship has sailed.]
It seems like it’s rained every day here since March, I’m pretty sure we had a day or two where it didn’t I just can’t remember.
Yeah, cool and wet instead of hot and dry like last year. Practically every apple graft I made took, the grape cuttings are doing fine also. Trees are starting to show signs of fungus though, and the mosquitoes are viscous. On the down side, all the apricot and plum grafts failed. They like it 80 degrees and higher.
Winds are ferocious, I already lost a white peach limb and a new graft that was wind whipped until it broke. The winds scare me. In the Fifties it was ice cold and hot in the Nineties, but the high winds and hail are new this century. I had two cars repaired and my house re-sided in the last five years because of hail. That’s new.
Meanwhile, here in the old Seattle – where it really does usually rain most of June – it’s been dry and hot – 91 yesterday, which is pretty unusual in June. And kind of difficult for the locals to enjoy, since not many places here have air conditioning.
I’m in N Central WA, had to laugh yesterday, it was sweltering hi 90’s so went to the river where we encountered a huge encampment of TBaggers, American flags aflyin’ sitting out in the full sun frying what was left of their noggins.
19 is amazing and almost certainly means that they encountered an unusually fast-moving firestorm. Just 10 years ago it was fairly common to lose 10-15 firefighters in these really big wildfires. New strategies and new training were developed and rolled out. This included developing escape plans and recognizing when to get out immediately. This was critical in the Waldo Canyon fire last summer when an afternoon windstorm, strengthened by mountain-influenced downdrafts, resulted in the fire jumping two firebreaks and 3 canyons in less than 20 minutes. No firefighters were lost – 10 years before (such as the Hayman fire) we almost certainly would have lost a few.
So, for this to happen in Arizona – and the Prescott area hot shots would have received all of the current training and probably contributed to it themselves – the situation had to be extreme – both heat and wind combined to make the fire move that fast.
This is ugly. And global temps are up only 1 degree celcius. Very few people have even the slightest notion of how bad it will get and how soon.
Several flights in Phoenix had to be cancelled yesterday because the heat exceeded the safe operating temp for the planes. The air wasn’t dense enough for the planes to take off.
On the 19 firefighters: I recommend reading Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire. Every time one of these wild land fire disasters happens, I think back to Maclean’s descriptions of the Mann Gulch fire fighters desperate situation.