The Weather Outside Is … Weird
Australia has massive flooding in the East and drought-driven wildfires in the West with tropical storms clipping the North.
Europe has been thrown into a deep freeze for a week, with two to four inches of snow falling on London.
If that wasn’t bad enough – there is Invest 90 down around Cuba that looks like a candidate to become a tropical depression … in the first week of bloody February.
Global climate change is here, and people better start making their plans for what they will do when where they live changes, or, possibly, disappears. This is not the time to look for more hydrocarbons to burn.
6 comments
Who made
Newt GingrichPuck the god of weather?Seriously, this is the kind of thing we can expect for a long time to come, and there’s no getting around it. If I live another decade, I expect we Houstonians will have to vacate.
Worse for us in NE Europe is if the Gulfstream shuts down. We Londoners are on a latitude with Labrador and yet we bitch about a few cm of snow. How much would we bitch f the Gulfstream fizzles out!
jams, Houston, TX is officially 30′ above sea level, but it doesn’t take much of a rain to flood the whole greater Houston area anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep. Tropical Storm Allison a few years back filled the street I lived on back then, a street deliberately engineered as a sort of channel, above the curb, above the parking area and all the way up to within 6″ of the apartment windows. As storms go, it didn’t do as much damage as Hurricane Ike because the wind wasn’t as high, but the water flooded the basement parking garages of several buildings in the Texas Medical Center (killing at least one woman who foolishly tried to get to her car; she never made it out of the elevator). The TMC has been “flood-proofed” about as thoroughly as any place in town after an incident in 1976, but I’m glad I didn’t have an emergency requiring hospitalization during that storm.
A few changes to the building codes have been made since then, but they’re still building hi‑rise apartment buildings in neighborhoods where it is known with certainty that the additional water and sewer use will aggravate flooding. Neighborhoods have tried to stop them, but apparently the developers have found ways around the law that allow them to build come hell or… yes… high water.
I’m serious. I expect to have to leave here if I live another 10 years or so.
(Bryan, above in the word hi‑rise, I used one of those nonbreaking hyphens I just discovered in Unicode (it’s U+2011)! )
They have permitted building the damn things too close to the Gulf, and they will be underwater in a decade. The shore changes even without the climate change, and long time residents know it. You couldn’t stop it from happening before, and it will just get worse.
Yes, Jams, the Gulf Stream is already being affected as the amount of cold water downwelling is reduced as a result of the warming. The fall of the colder Arctic water is what pulls the Gulf Stream North. You’re right, London will have winters like Goose Bay, Labrador and most people don’t have the clothes for it.
[Steve, I’ll try them. This is a Unicode specified blog, but not all are.]
But the Rapture is coming, so apparently we can burn all the hydrocarbons we want. The godly people will be zoomed up to heaven and get to watch the mess they made on Earth kill all the non-believers.
Because God is Love.
They are going to be surprised when they finally realize that the Rapture has already occurred and they didn’t make the cut. 👿
The problem is that you can’t depend on what Noah was told because of the ‘gambling problem’ that was warned about in the Book of Job. Gamblers just can’t be trusted.
I think they need to read the entire book, not just selected chapters that agree with their prejudices.