Floods, Fires, and Heat Domes (the climate change thread)

More awesome straight talk to the rich fucks from Greta! May at least some of them be shamed into less greedy actions.

4 Likes

While I agree, I suspect most of them are so far beyond shame that this will have no impact at all. If they were not, she should leave them weeping.

5 Likes
2 Likes
2 Likes
4 Likes

Well glory be, looks like some food for thought, just as I asked:

tl;dr
lots and lots of maps, some interactive; Virginia seems to be the place to be in most scenarios if one is interested in growing food

3 Likes

That’s pretty much what I’ve seen as well. The valley seems to be in a sweet spot. Not that that will help a lot if everything goes sideways, but I can feed and water my family from what we can grow on our land. Ugly times coming, though.

2 Likes
2 Likes
3 Likes
4 Likes

Gotta say, this is darker than Ars usually gets, and the comment section gets darker still, but facts, as they say, are facts.

9 Likes
4 Likes

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

6 Likes
2 Likes
7 Likes

:eyes:

3 Likes

I can never remember which of the UK papers are dubious… here’s the JPL link…

5 Likes

Yeah, me neither.
Thanks for that solid science link to JPL. I have two friends working there (one furloughed off a Mars project for now, due to brain cancer).

Here’s cranky ol’ James Gleick opining “yes but” when it should probably be “yes and”:

:roll_eyes:

10 Likes

I was periodically in on a discussion thread twenty-two years ago (yes, that far in the past) with Jamais Cascio over at World Changing…

… [laughs bitterly]… (because: am oldish, also the whole rather short wiki entry is just so telling, so harbinger-like)…

… wherein much was made of climate change solutions using geoengineering, a term I [still] despise because engineering AFAIK involves mathematics, precision, calculations, safety factors and a buncha time-tested inconvenient industry-standards that, as we hurtle ever-faster toward The Very Brink of a Livable Biosphere, will all sooner or later be compromised or abandoned as ever more desperate measures to save us from ourselves will not only be considered, but employed.

This term has evolved… rebranded:

World Changing was about getting people to act. Sounding the alarm. Yeah ok ok it talked about geoengineering… yeah… and…

However, we have no backup copy of our home planet, as the excellent Kim Stanley Robinson put it (and others too, the phrase ain’t new):

There Is No Planet B

It’s up to us to craft the shape of the future

By Kim Stanley Robinson | Dec 18 2018

FOR ALMOST MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE, I’ve spent some portion of the summer backpacking through the Sierra Nevada, and during that time I’ve witnessed profound changes. Three out of the past five years, the range was filled with smoke from fires burning on the western slope. I’ve hiked through the aftermath of major forest fires, visited meadows desiccated by drought, and watched the retreat of glaciers. The mountain icefields are a fraction of the size they were when I first visited them. It’s very likely they will be gone by the end of this century—gone like the grizzly bears.

My guess is that one of our only hopes sold to us by the very same bad actors who got us into this whole sad mess in the first place will be the monetizing of geoengineered climate solutions, surely part of The Last Frontiers of Late Stage Capitalism. And swallow it we will, because we have nowhere to go to, nowhere with a breathable atmosphere of any temperature for any commoner price, nearby enough to be practicable to us unwashed masses yearning to breathe free or at a discounted price for a limited time with a 3-year contract and 20% downpayment.

IMG_1861

13 Likes
10 Likes