In Hot News
Three of the dumbest people in LA County have been arrested for starting the Colby Wildfire in the Angeles National Forest that has destoyed 5 homes and damaged more than a dozen other structures. Despite being under Red Flag fire conditions because of high temperatures, low humidity, and high Santa Ana winds, these kindergarten rejects started a campfire and threw paper on it. The flaming paper was picked up by the wind and ignited multiple locations.
It is not as though people in Southern California don’t know about the hazard of wildfires, the ease with which they can start, and the speed at which they spread.
The fire is 30% contained.
In Melbourne they are playing tennis. They are playing tennis despite a temperature of 41°C on the court. That temperature is 105.8°F. At a heat index of 105°F the US military declares a ‘black flag’ condition, and all non-essential outdoor activity ceases. You head for air conditioning if it is available, or the shade, take salt tablets, and drink a lot of water. It is unhealthy. It can kill you.
At the Australian ‘Oven’ Tennis Tournament people are passing out, hallucinating, water bottles are melting, but play continues. This is insane, and it proves nothing about someone’s ability to play tennis, only their ability to tolerate heat.
17 comments
Bbbbb-bu-but… it’s *SPORT*!!! You can’t stop a sporting event just ‘çause of the weather!! That’s total sacrilege that is! You could get hung for that kinda talk matey! I dunno… and people think we’re crazy! Sheesh! 😉 Hey… they can always quit and default ya know… they have that option if’n they iz too weak ta play in the sun! 😛
Ahem. (Just between us…. Think of the Tennis Association as being run by the Tea Party, except they are too extreme to allow any deity to share the credit or spoils. Get my drift? There is a massive amount of money involved, not to mention prestige.) And it’s Global just BTW. They are the same extremists in every Country. Just sayin.
Crazy people do crazy shit. *shrug* What’s new?
It’s all fun and games until the law suits start. The first ball boy/girl who is seriously affected and the wisdom will shine through. The top-tier competitors should have just withdrawn. Any manager or coach who would recommend playing at 41°C should be banned. It’s a game, not a war.
Sadly, Sporting event’s stopped being *just a game* sometime around the 30’s. Like everything else in this World today… “It’s about the money stupid!” And hell, even War is “…about the money stupid!” *shrug*
We both know that.
Anyway, back onto the weather here:
Australian heatwaves more frequent, hotter and longer: Climate Council report
Hell, Adelaide hit 46C!! Never thought I’d see those temp’s on the Southern Coast of Aus! In the Nth, near the Equator, yeah. But here? Nope.
I think I’ll move to Tasmania. It’s colder in Winter, but it’s easier to keep warm than cool. *shrug*
I experienced a lot of hot weather when I lived in Phoenix. 105 is the temperature at which I would not hike, period, because it became impossible to stay hydrated, you sweated faster than you could absorb water. 110 was when you stepped outside and it was like stepping into a furnace. And 115… well, even the planes don’t go out in 115 degree weather. First time it hit 115 in Phoenix, air traffic at Sky Harbor Airport slammed to a halt because there were no capacity tables for what load you could get into the sky at that temperature and altitude with a civilian airliner. Not to mention the planes that bogged down on the asphalt, which heated up to 150F+ and turned into a tarpit that brought planes to a dead stop.
They’ve since released tables for hotter temperatures (which makes the air thinner and reduces lift, of course) and replaced the asphalt with concrete, so Sky Harbor no longer shuts down when it’s 115. But the fact that 115 is now common enough that they had to do that… that’s scary.
As is the fact that California is bone dry right now, in the middle of the “rainy season”. I should not be having to water my plants in the middle of January. It just isn’t right. We’ve had dry years, but never in my experience *no* rain in January, which is the current prediction…
Professional sports has taken all of the fun out of games, even for kids. We used to have ‘pick-up games’ after school, a group of kids playing something, but now your parents have to pay money and join a league to play games. It’s absurd.
Man, that’s like over 100°F in Pennsylvania or New York. They have a lot of deaths in heatwaves in the city, and there will be a lot more heatwaves, here as well as Australia.
Yeah, Badtux, they don’t believe in climate change, but they rebuild the airport to deal with it. California is toast. Food prices are going to soar. I just discovered Flame red seedless grapes this year, and now they will only be available as raisins.
They had better start desalination plants to take some of the pressure off of non-drinking uses of water.
I looked at desalination plants, Bryan. The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego County is going to cost $1 billion and produce roughly 55000 acre-feet of water per year. It’s going to meet 7% of the water needs of San Diego County. You’d need at least ten of these plants, plus some water conservation, to meet the needs of San Diego County alone. There isn’t enough money, energy, or coastline to desalinate enough water for the current California lifestyle.
Nevermind irrigation. Most crops need at least two acre-feet of water per acre per year to get any kind of yield, and there are around 6.3 million acres under irrigation in the Central Valley. Desalination for farming purposes simply isn’t viable. The fact that we’re likely to get less than 20% of the water we usually get this year means… well. Farmers will not plant crops, and will reduce irrigation of perennials like grapes and apricots to the minimum needed to keep the plants alive, nevermind yields, there won’t be any. Because there just isn’t water. Expect the price of lettuce to go up…
I remember your research when we were discussing Syria, and I certainly don’t expect desal to solve all of the problems, but they have to do something to reduce pressure on the existing water sources.
They need to outlaw lawns, swimming pools, ornamental fountains, and other unnecessary wastes of water. Fracking, and other water intensive waste must cease. Treated water needs to be recycled, probably to agriculture. There are a lot of things that could be done, but they have to be done soon, and ‘voluntary’ won’t cut it.
I did all of the voluntary stuff in San Diego before anyone was taking about a problem, so when the emergency was declared, I was expected to cut even more, while other people were reducing their lawn irrigation schedule. I want quantity limitations, not percentage cuts based on past usage, so responsible people get rewarded for their efforts.
Here ya go Bryan… Don’t let your kitties watch TV! They may pick up habit’s you really don’t want! 😉 😆
(If the GIF isn’t animated, here’s the link to the original):
Cat watching Boxing match – Animated GIF
And yeah… Desal plants are not cost effective at all! The one they are building here (despite everyone saying it’s a bad idea) will cost over $10 mill a year to maintain, when it’s not operational! It’s insane.
Y’all can do solar desal plants for a lot less than the powered plants. They use them in South America for small towns, but you can scale them up. We had a solar still in our survival pack that you inflated and float on the surface of the ocean that worked reasonably well. It was clear plastic. The ones in South America are usually flat boxes with glass on top. The sun heats the salt water and the pure water condenses on the angled glass and runs down to a trough for collection. Really simple, but you need space and sun.
There is probably a system involving solar mirrors that would be more efficient and higher volume that could also provide the power for the pumps required.
No worries about the telly, I don’t have one.
Solar insolation at mid latitudes is roughly 20 kJ/m² per minute . To evaporate 1 liter of water at 25C requires 2428 kJ of energy, so would require 121.4 minutes or roughly two hours. So to get 1,000,000 liters per day of water via solar insolation would require 1,000,000/12 square meters of solar concentrators. That’s 288 square kilometers of solar concentrators. Well, actually, since you only have 8 hours a day of strong light, you’d need three times that.
Uhm, that’s a lot of solar concentrators. Just sayin ;).
As inefficient as reverse osmosis plants are, they still use less energy per gallon than condensing plants. You’d be better off deploying kilometers of photovoltaic panels. It just requires a lot of energy to boil water into vapor, as anybody who has had to carefully measure out fuel for a backpacking trip to make sure there’s enough to boil water for all the meals on the trip can tell you.
Australia tends to get a bit warmer than 25C and they have a lot of essentially empty land because of a lack of water. They could try it and see how it worked out. I’m just thinking out loud about things that don’t increase global climate change and are suitable for small to medium sized towns.
Well, we do have lot’s of desert’s, a lot of Australia is arid and sunny for most of the year. We also have a lot of uranium! Just sayin… 😉 😀
It’s curious that most people, including Aussies, think we only have one desert, The Simpson Desert (though some know of two or three). People (again, even Aussies) also believe that “most of Australia is desert”. Neither of those are true. In fact, the Simpson is only the 4th largest in Aus. 🙂 Here are the facts:
Great Victoria Desert, 348,750 km2 (134,650 mi2), 4.5% of AU Mainland
Great Sandy Desert, 267,250 km2 (103,190 mi2), 3.4% of AU Mainland
Tanami Desert, 184,500 km2 (71,200 mi2), 2.4% of AU Mainland
Simpson Desert, 176,500 km2 (68,100 mi2), 2.3% of AU Mainland
Gibson Desert, 156,000 km2 (60,000 mi2), 2.0% of AU Mainland
Little Sandy Desert, 111,500 km2, (43,100 mi2), 1.5% of AU Mainland
Strzelecki Desert, 80,250 km2 (30,980 mi2), 1.0% of AU Mainland
Sturt Stony Desert, 29,750 km2 (11,490 mi2) 0.3% of AU Mainland
Tirari Desert, 15,250 km2 (5,890 mi2), 0.2% of AU Mainland
Pedirka Desert, 1,250 km2 (480 mi2), 0.016% of AU Mainland
Totals: 1,371,000 km2 (529,080 mi2), 17.616% of AU Mainland
One curiosity is that whilst officially Aus. is made up of just over 17.5% deserts, about 40% of Aus. is arid and covered by longitudinal dunes. This is because most of West Australia and Queensland is arid, but aren’t part of one of the named desert’s. The deserts and most of Central Australia is very dry where the average rainfall is 15 cm (6 in) each year.
The simple fact is, many people (again, including many that live here) don’t understand just how damned BIG Australia is! 🙂
It would be possible to get water from the Simpson, Strzelecki, Sturt Stony & Tirari deserts as they are mostly semi-arid (they do have vegetation and underground water), but… well, politics, of course. *shrug* As an aside, it’s one of the reasons the Military uses the Simpson for it’s adv. survival courses. If you were paying attention in classes, you can survive. 🙂 If they used the Great Victoria (which isn’t in Victoria but half in WA & half in SA) or the Little Sandy deserts, your chance of surviving 30-40 days without water supplies are next to nothing. The Army doesn’t try to kill us, they just want to sort out the smart ones with good survival instincts from the tools. 😉 😀
The only thing that makes sense if you have uranium is giant reverse osmosis plants attached to a nuclear reactor. RO takes approximately 1/4th the energy of distillation plants. The downside is that the filters clog and wear out and must be replaced regularly, which keeps operating costs high for perpetuity…
Ah yes, regarding water in deserts, even “Death Valley” has available water. You have to get away from the bottoms and move up into the surrounding hills to find it, but it’s there. The problem is the amount that is readily available. Stovepipe Wells Resort, for example, used to get its water from four springs up Emigrant Wash. But those springs put out a mere trickle of water — plenty to keep someone alive, but not enough to run a hotel with all the water wasters therein like flush toilets and showers and a swimming pool. So now they use a massive reverse osmosis system to treat the salt water available from wells (Death Valley is an ancient lake bed and the remnants of the lake are still there underground, but it’s salt water because of evaporation).
The problem I have with nuclear, beyond the problem of the long-term storage of spent fuel rods, is cooling, which isn’t easy in Australia. Nothing is insurmountable, but solar solutions are definitely cleaner, if not as efficient currently as other solutions. We are going to be forced to make a break at some point, and the sooner the better.
Cooling is pretty easy if you’re on a coastline with lots of ocean water at your disposal, which of course is where a reverse osmosis plant has to be (duh!).
With rising sea levels and typhoons you don’t want to be too close to the coast, so you will need some pipe. Nukes make me nervous, but I grew up with them, given what my Dad did, and have never embraced their ‘warm and fuzzy’ side. There are fixes for every problem, and the new systems are safer than the old designs.