The IRI at Columbia University is out with their latest monthly ENSO prediction, and the average predicts a strong El Nino beginning around August:
Quark Soup by David Appell
Friday, May 19, 2023
The Coming El Nino
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Florida Road After Beachfront Erosion
Thursday, May 11, 2023
FBI Public Service Announcement
This is an actual ad from the FBI. pic.twitter.com/JNr5rCF392
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) May 9, 2023
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Global SST at record high
The record high for global average sea surface temperature (SST) is about 0.2°C.
The orange line is 2022.
Same for the North Atlantic:
Plots from University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer.
Here's an interesting article from today that goes into more detail:
Earth in hot water? Worries over sudden ocean warming spike, Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, 4-27-23
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Good News, But Not Entirely
"Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election-fraud challenge," Chris Dehghanpoor, Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, Washington Post, 4/20/23.
Lindell has done a huge amount of damage to America, and I hope the history books say that.
==
“The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.”
- David Brooks, "Why People are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States," NY Times, 4/13/23.
All people seem to care about anymore is their own pocketbook.
==
Someone from the Washington Policy Center wrote a blog post:
"Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents per gallon since CO2 tax," Todd Myers, 4/17/23.
"Depending on the comparison, Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents more than neighboring states since the state launched a tax on CO2 emissions at the beginning of the year."Yeah, that's the point! Making fossil fuels more expensive incentivizes individuals to switch to noncarbon sources of fuel.
"Despite the clear data, state politicians and agency staff refuse to acknowledge the cost of the increases and aren’t helping residents deal with the impact of the costs."
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Sidney Crosby Story, plus.
The Pittsburgh Penguins, my team, missed the playoffs for the time in 17 years. They played very inconsistently. Their playoff streak had been the longest in North American sports; I think the second-longest is now 9 or 10 years.
Now it's over.
They did this despite controlling their playoff destiny -- they lost to the worst team in the league, the Chicago Blackhawks, even though if they had won that game they were still in the hunt, and only needed to beat the second-worst team in the league, Columbus, two days later.
It was a monumental collapse. The Penguins fired their front office the next day, and they deserved it for having made several bad trades and contract agreements.
But no doubt some of the players didn't have enough heart, either. (Easy to say, as a fan.)
Crosby played great this season: 93 points, 1.13 points/game, 3.38 points per 60 minutes, played all of the 82 games without an injury. 35 years old.
So did their other superstar, Evgeni Malkin: 82 points, 1.00 points per game, unexpectedly played every game. 36 years old.
But they didn't have the contribution they needed from their third- and fourth-lines, and they didn't have the goal keeping they needed (.907 save percentage, 3.03 goals per game, if my spreadsheet it right).
It's a big disappointment, and although the Penguins have been receding since their back-to-back Stanley Cup wins in 2015-16 and 2016-17, this seems very stark, like the Crosby-Malkin-Kris LeTang era is over. Three Cups in Crosby's career, which is huge by any standard. Crosby was still outstanding this year, not only on offense, but making vital plays on defense too, diving for pucks in a way no others players were (consistently), and leading his team as always. (Crosby will always be a better 200-foot player than the league's current superstar, Connor McDaniel, and a better leader too. But McDaniel did score an incredible 153 points this year.)
In hockey, for players, a "point" is a goal or an assist. That's right, assists count as much as goals.)
Even though the Penguins would have very likely lost in the first round of the playoffs, to the Boston Bruins (the NHL's best team this year, who set the record for the most points ever in an 82-game NHL season), this is a great disappointment for Pittsburgh fans.
I guess now I will root for the Bruins. Actually I somehow got really tuned in to their playoff run in 2003-4 when I lived in New Hampshire; back then they were on regular TV out of Boston, and I had cable TV back then too, even though they were eliminated in the first round. I remember Ray Borque skating all over the place. But I didn't understand much about hockey then.
It's hard to imagine the Penguins doing much better next season. Sadly. As I've said before, I really regret I didn't become a Penguins fan until the year after their 2017 Stanley Cup. There were on a tremendous run, and changed the face of hockey with their fast play. But this year they were the oldest team in the league, which is now dominated by young, fast players (although most of them don't score a point a game, like Crosby).
Go Bruins, I guess. (Sigh.) But not one of them, or McDaniel, is the all-around player that Sidney Crosby is.
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Boston
From the NY Times by Matthew Fetterman: The Boston Marathon Route: The Ups, the Downs and That Citgo Sign: From the rural suburbs to the bedlam of Fenway Park, the Boston Marathon is as special as distance running gets.
I think that's probably true, and I like this quote anyway. But I wish I knew Boston better (and not just one of its southern suburbs). I looked into living there in the early aughts, but concluded I couldn't afford it.
Snicker, Laugh, OMG
If you believe that today’s “climate change” is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 15, 2023
We live on a spinning planet that rotates around a much bigger sun along with other planets and heavenly bodies rotating around the sun that all create gravitational pull on one… pic.twitter.com/Tpzpgd2K2i
Tuesday, April 04, 2023
Camille Flammarion
Camille Flammarion was an interesting guy. He was a French astronomer and author who lived from 1842-1925 -- I posted one of his well-known woodcuts here, La Fin du monde ("The end of the world"). But he clearly had a very active and interesting imagination.
Here are some of his other woodcuts/paintings:
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Another Coincidence
There are very close to one mole of stars in the universe:
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Coincidence?
Number of stars in our galaxy ~ 100 billion
Number of galaxies in the universe ~ 100 billion