Our highway system is completely broken now. Here’s a map of all the blockages. Yellow means partially blocked, red means fully blocked.
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And now for something really stupid: waters are lowering but not inside the flood barrier because the pumps are broken! The solution? Tear down a floodgate so the water can flow faster. Hurray! Now, what if it rains some time in the future and the level goes up again? Oops!
sounds vaguely familiar. now where have i seen that exact thing happen? 
Some countries have been using “sponge city” techniques to control floodwater and combat drought:
Based on recent floods, hopefully they can figure out what elements of “sponge city” projects could be useful elsewhere:
Cities have a choice: you get sponge cities or eventually will get tent cities
There’s another good argument for the building this kind of infrastructure here in southern Brazil, we are in a see-saw of heavy rain during El Niño and heavy drought during La Niña and this seems like a good protection for both.
… not new but I just read it again
An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress
The BLM’s decision carries public health benefits, too, Hornbein continued. “The amount of savings in terms of sicknesses, premature birth, fetal brain damage, respiratory infections, and mortality is almost hard to quantify, but it’s really, really impactful,” she said.
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Holy shit! Approaching unsurvivable conditions in way too many places.
We screwed up the climate, we screwed up the defenses, partly human-caused? The rain only fell from the sky, we did all the work!
A 2023 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that severe clear-air turbulence increased by more than 50% over the North Atlantic Ocean from 1979 to 2020.
The uptick in turbulence likely owes to the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the upper levels of the atmosphere, the researchers found. Some of the most pronounced increases in clear-air turbulence in recent decades were over mid-latitude regions, including over the North Atlantic and flight routes over the United States, according to the study.
The results suggest that global warming may be driving instability in the jet stream, a conveyor belt of fast-moving air that encircles the globe over the Northern Hemisphere, said Mark Prosser, co-author of the study and a doctoral researcher at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
Muito triste.
Unfortunately, all of this leads us to believe that the floods will repeat themselves in all corners of the world.
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Those picture are really beautiful.
I visited Porto Alegre 10 years ago. I liked the city. It was sad to see all the places I got lost, wandering and gazing the buildings, under two or three meters of water. My favorite spot was the Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana. It was an old Hotel, the home of late poet Mario Quintana, that was converted into a museum/cultural center.
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This is some serious in deep nerd analysis, but the tl;dr is renewable are a lot better vs extractive energy than was previously thought. Excellent fuel for argument in future, filing away.
