“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”For non-Americans, first grade in the US is ages 6-7.
-- Donald Trump, 2015, via the New York Times
"When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create."
-- Howard Thurman
From the NY Times, two days ago:
Here we go again: Hurricane Milton is set to hit Florida as a Category 3.
The Tampa Bay Times calls this "life-threatening."
Millions of Floridians along the Gulf Coast could be told to leave, and officials in Tampa Bay are warning the storm could be far worse than Helene. Sewage systems and power could be out for weeks.
Schools are closing. Governor expands state of emergency. Meanwhile, "Hurricane Helene overwhelms Tampa Bay cities and haulers."
Are there any countries more prone to natural disasters than the US? We have it all -- hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, extreme heat events. Of course, the US is very big and small countries can't be expected to match us in total. What about per unit area? Earthquakes in Turkey? Heat in India? Cold in Russia?
Sorry, but I'm still a little obsessed with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, as I explained a few days ago.
It's such a beautiful region. They mountains are layered, each one higher than the one in front of it. The highest is Clingman's Dome in the Smokey Mountains, 6644 ft in elevation (2025 m). Not high enough to feel a lack of oxygen, but high enough to not feel part of the real world.
You know, I think I'm getting a better understanding of what's going on there from Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts and Insta than any network news programs. It's raw and it's personal without all the pretty people in makeup.
This guy says it's worse than a Middle East war zone and there's no coming back. He and his family are moving:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/487564184271601
(Sorry, these shorts aren't embeddable, and sometimes barely connectable. Sometimes you have to unmute the video and then hit your up-volume key to get audio.)
More grim:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/487564184271601
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1236075937535449
It seems everyone has trucks, a good thing at a time like this.
Here's a NY Times article that will make you think:
The People Fleeing Climate Disasters Are Going to Transform the American South
The link should be free, I think.
"Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word “unsurvivable.”
And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise."
Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene
In this last link, to his credit, David Wallace-Wells points out that these kinds of storms have hit this area before:
Helene gives one vision of the future, with the storm scarring a whole region and imposing perhaps a decade of recovery. But in truth, as extraordinary as its devastation might seem, this kind of flooding in this kind of setting was not unthinkable or, for that matter, even unprecedented. Indeed, it happened in western North Carolina in 1916, and Hurricanes Camille (1969) and Agnes (1972) offered additional cautionary tales.
Some of the families in those mountains have been there for a century, generation after generation. (They can be quite xenophobic in that region, too, as I learned on the Appalachian Trail.) They won't leave, but will rebuild as best they can. But some people aren't going to be able to dig out and start again. They're the ones with a little more money, more options, probably not native to the region. They're not barely getting by. Ironic that the very poor are the ones who will survive there and stay there. Reminds me of the Middle East, with all its turmoil. People with deep roots respect them. Sometimes I think I should have respected mine too.
Remember when Roy Spencer was the kind of denier who invented an unscientific and arbitrary fit to the data just to imply there was a decline?
We stopped that real quick, pointing out that his entertainment implied the world would end in January 2171.
He got the message and ended his "entertaining third-order polynomial." Shame when you have to teach a scientist how to be scientific.
Of course, there has been a lot of warming since.
--
An "entertaining" thought: how many people did climate denialists kill via Hurricane Helene? Say, to the nearest factor of 10 human beings? Too soon to ask?
I'm perfectly happy to wait until professional climatologists present their verdict on climate change and Hurricane Helene, the hurricane that slammed into northwestern Florida a few days ago, but it's hard to imagine it wasn't a factor. It struck Florida as a Category Four hurricane--only two years after the Category 5 hurricane Ian tore close to Helene's path, and did a huge amount of damage there, and Georgia and, especially it seems, in western North Carolina.
I'm OK with waiting because I lived through the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes in June 1972, which hit Pennsylvania especially hard. That storm caused 128 deaths, 50 of them in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. (Adjusting for population, 128 deaths then would be the equivalent of approximately 206 today, if you adjust for population.) About Agnes in Pennsylvania, here's what Wiki says:
Though Agnes made landfall as a hurricane [in Florida], no reports of hurricane-force winds exist....Our little white wooden house--which didn't even have a bathroom, just a toilet under the stairs and a rusty shower in the coal cellar--had a pretty stream that went along two sides of our big yard. It was great for messing in for hours, catching crabs (crayfish), shooting the legs of water skippers off with BB guns (if you shot two legs off one side it could only go in a circle), throwing your puppy in on a cold winter day, that kind of thing. But it must have worried my mom to death because after big rains it would become a roiling brown deluge about 20 yards wide, not too far from our backdoor then curling around and across the bottom of the yard. Kids were always outside then, unsupervised, so she had to have worried one or more or her kids or others' kids or both might get swept away.
In Pennsylvania, heavy rainfall was reported, with much of the state experiencing more than 7 inches (180 mm) of precipitation. Furthermore, a large swath of rainfall exceeding 10 inches (250 mm) was reported in the central part of the state. Overall, the rains peaked at 19 inches (480 mm) in the western portions of Schuylkill County. As a result, Agnes is listed as the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the state of Pennsylvania. Overall, more than 100,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to flooding. The Allegheny River reached above flood stage at several low-lying locations and at some places rose about 7 in (180 mm) per hour during the height of the storm. Additionally, the Susquehanna River threatened to reach record crests along its course.[42] Some buildings were under 13 ft (4.0 m) of water in Harrisburg. At the Governor's Mansion, the first floor was submerged by flood waters. Governor Milton Shapp and his wife Muriel had to be evacuated by boat due to flooding.
It's such a beautiful area. In 1996 I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Massachusetts (sprained my ankle 1/4th of the way and only made it 2/3rds of the entire trail), and there are so many pretty towns way up in westernmost North Carolina, some of which the Trail runs down main street: Franklin NC, Hot Springs NC, Damascus VA all of which we took a day or three off in and which I have great memories of.
I haven't followed methane much because I couldn't find a good data source, but now I have, from NASA. And even better source is the Global Carbon Project, which is updated every 7.6 days.
After that weird lull in the mid-aughts, methane is on the rise again and is the highest it's been in 800,000 years.
Methane's radiative forcing has increased by about 0.4 W/m2 since 1979, while CO2's has jumped about 1.6 W/m2 in the same interval.
The other day I gave the data on global ocean acidification, which I'm reproducing below. But first, here are the projections from the IPCC AR6 (WG1 Figure SPM.8c p22 of SPM):
Here's what the PredictIt US Presidential Race market shows after last night's debate:
A human brain (average size 1,300 grams) versus a dolphin brain (1,600 g). However
"The human brain has a far more developed hippocampus than the dolphin brain. The hippocampus is a somewhat small region in the human brain that is shaped like a seahorse. The hippocampus is responsible for the elements of memory, learning, motivation, emotion, and more."
Apparently it's too late for dolphins to ever transition back to land again. They're probably safer there anyway. Besides it looks much cooler, with significantly less waiting in line.
From a site called the Institute for Environmental Analytics:
So that's a pH change of about -0.075 in 40 years, or an average of -0.019/decade (-0.19/century, if you want to unfairly extrapolate). I don't know what the projections have been--will try to post that later. Is this a significant change in ocean water, if your species has chosen to reside there?
This site looks legit, since 75% of the males who lead the Institute have beards.
Seriously though, they looked funded by real sources. Worth exploring more. The data source for this graph is from a legit journal.
The data for the other oceans (at least, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian) look very similar.
There's an article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) titled "As Extreme Heat Becomes More Common, the Unprecedented Pacific Northwest Heat Dome Offers Lessons." It might be paywalled, I'm not sure--I'm on their media list and not sure what I get for that.
Anyway, it says a few interesting things [sorry/not sorry for the bullet point format]:
Here's the monthly data, just updated with August's number:
Source: Solar Influences Data Analysis Center, Royal Observatory of Belgium
The last couple of weeks for the current year are always subject to changes (increases).
I'm not going to start wearing a mask yet, but I am going to get vaccinated as soon as the new batch is available in mid-September. (Will be my 7th; I still haven't had COVID yet.)
Data source: CDC (scroll down to "Click here to download", then click "Export", then "Download file".)
"They left, saying they would return after five o'clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrace and the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza's favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighboring patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost and went to sleep when it was almost three o'clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus."
-- Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property."
An interesting article that just came out:
"The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s: It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated," Kate Yoder, Grist, 5-Aug-2024.
https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-supreme-court/
The Hunga Tonga volcano, the underwater volcano that erupted in January 2022 and has been blamed for the recent warming spike, crop failures on Mars and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, had an overall cooling effect when it injected vast amounts of volcanic aerosols and water vapor into the atmosphere, according to a paper just published in JGR Atmospheres. Its effect has been over since the end of 2023.
Plain Language Summary The Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai (Hunga) submarine volcanic eruption on 15 January 2022, produced aerosol and water vapor plumes in the stratosphere. These plumes have persisted mostly in the Southern Hemisphere throughout 2022 and into 2023. Enhanced tropospheric warming due to the added stratospheric water vapor is offset by the larger stratospheric aerosol attenuation of solar radiation. Hunga induced circulation changes that reduce stratospheric ozone and lower temperatures also play a role in the net forcing. The change in the radiative flux would result in a very slight 2022/3 cooling in Southern Hemisphere. The Hunga climate forcing has decreased to near zero by the end of 2023.Here's a news article.
His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour.
"After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida."
I found an unexpected...issue...with iPhone's Siri when I asked it to do a calculation: It doesn't understand scientific notation.
I wanted to know the ratio of the mass of Jupiter to the mass of the Earth, so I asked Siri to calculate it. I gave it instrutions:
"Hey Siri, divide one point nine times ten to the twenty-seventh by five point nine seven times ten to the twenty-fourth."
It returned 3.18 x 1050, when the correct answer is 318.
By Maggie Smith
"Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful."
Via the Poetry Foundation
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury
I don't think he wrote this in his book Fahrenheit 451. I guess perhaps in an interview about it.
Thomas Friedman with some pretty sober words in today's NY Times (free link):
"But if he [Biden] caps his presidency now, by acknowledging that because of age he is not up to a second term, his first and only term will be remembered as among the better presidencies in our history. He saved us from a second Trump term, and for that alone he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but he also enacted important legislation crucial to confronting the climate and technology revolutions now upon us.
"I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, it’s time for him to keep the dignity he deserves and leave the stage at the end of this term.
"If he does, everyday Americans will hail Joe Biden for doing what Donald Trump would never do: put the country before himself.
"If he insists on running and he loses to Trump, Biden and his family — and his staff and party members who enabled him — will not be able to show their faces."
Here is China’s Chang’e-6 re-entry capsule, containing about 2 kg of lunar regolith. Landed in inner Mongolia. Just surprised how burned up/beat up it is....
Now over 900:
Death toll from heat at hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia passes 900.... Temperatures hit 51.8°C in Mecca, Islam's holiest city, on Monday, as 1.8 million people took part in the annual pilgrimage...total reported dead so far to 922.... According to a Saudi study published last month, temperatures in the area are rising 0.4°C each decade. Last year more than 200 pilgrims were reported dead, most of them from Indonesia.
Source: Le Monde, yesterday
Update: CBS News now saysCBS News now says 1,081.
“At least 562 people have died during the [2024] haj, according to a Reuters tally based on foreign ministry statements and sources. Egypt alone has registered 307 deaths and another 118 missing, medical and security sources told Reuters, as temperatures at times soared past 51 degrees Celsius (124 Fahrenheit).”
from “Climate change threat hangs over haj pilgrimage as hundreds perish in heat,” Reuters 6/19/24.
Here's what I posted last night, then accidentally deleted:
Here's what they wrote (it's still up):
While London was experiencing 32C (89.6F) a year ago, temperatures were around 16C (60.8F) in the capital on Tuesday. Similarly Cambridge had temperatures of 30.3C (86.5F) on June 11 2023, and 15C (59F) on the same day in 2024.
Of course, half of 32°C (=305 Kelvin) is 152.5 K, which is -121°C.
Notice their claim is bollocks in Fahrenheit.
I wonder how many editors this article past through before publication. Not one caught this. Probably they never even heard of Kelvin nor understands what it means.
I've been collecting these as I find'em:
The mass of all asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is equal to about 3 percent of the Moon's mass.
A spaceship could travel outward through the asteroid belt likely without seeing any asteroids at all.
The magnet strength in MRI machines ranges from 0.5 - 3.0 T (Tesla).
The Earth's magnetic field on the surface ranges from 22 and 67 μT (microteslas). That's a ratio (MRI/Earth) of about 50,000.
Your hat size is the circumference of your head, in inches, measured just above the ears and across your forehead, divided by π. In other words, it's the diameter of your head for that ring. Not sure what metric countries do. Not gonna look it up now.
Americans spent $4 B on pet insurance last year.
Last summer the water temperatures off Miami reached as high as 101°F (38.3°C).
Medicare [US medical care for seniors] loses $60 billion a year to fraud, errors and abuse. OMG.
It used to be that humans emit 100-200 times more CO2 than do volcanoes [Gerlach 2011], but recently that range has been revised to 40-100. Still a lot more. [Don't know the paper for the latter range yet, but will try to find it, as deniers frequently say something like one volcano emits more CO2 than humans have in their entire history.
{Yes, I had a post up before this one about a very dumb headline error made by The Telegraph, but I accidentally deleted the text and am not going to rewrite it. It's about the third file I've botched in two weeks, saving a short file on top of a large one, etc. One file was about 5,000 words and represented eseveral hours of writing. I hope these are just coincidences and I'm not entering into dementia.}
Trump: Do you feel the breeze? I don't want anybody going on me. We need every voter. I don't care about you. I just want your vote. I don't care. pic.twitter.com/IirvQs123c
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2024
As usual, who knows what he meant. I doubt even he does. His audience laughed.
That's 126.1°F. From Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Temperatures in India's capital soared to a national record-high of 52.3 degrees Celsius (126.1 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, the government's weather bureau said.
Neighbouring Pakistan has also sweltered through a week-long heatwave, which peaked at 53C (127.4F) on Sunday in Mohenjo Daro in rural Sindh province.
An online calculator for wet bulb temperatures only allows values up to 50°C. Needless to say that's above the critical value of 35°C where humans can't cool off by sweating: the wet bulb temperature for 50°C at 5% humidity is 33°C, and at 99% humidity it's 49.7°C. So 53°C is trouble no matter how dry the air is.
Phoenix, Arizona.
Maricopa County in Arizona includes Phoenix and Tempe, and holds 62% of the state's population. From an interesting article from Politico:
Almost half of the victims last year were homeless — 290 people. Twenty died at bus stops, others were in tents, and an unrecorded number of people were found on the pavement, prone as if on a baking stone. More than 250 other people — who tended to be older, ill or unlucky — died in uncooled homes, on bikes or just going for a walk.
Last summer, there were about 117 cooling centers at libraries, community centers and churches throughout Maricopa County. But none of the centers in Phoenix were open overnight, when temperatures often remained above 90 degrees. Of the 17 centers operated by the city, just one was open Sundays — and only from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Many private and public centers don’t allow pets, a rule that pushed some people to stay in the stifling heat with their dogs, according to surveys conducted by the county.
The County Medical Examiner recorded 645 heat-related deaths last summer. Nearly 400 of them occurred in Phoenix, where half of all deaths were among the unhoused. One-third of all heat-related 911 calls in the city occurred outside of “regular business hours,” when cooling centers were closed.
Phoenix will operate two overnight cooling centers in the downtown area. In addition, three libraries will have respite centers with 50 beds each that will be open until 10 p.m. All the sites will be open seven days a week from May through September. Visitors will be steered toward services such as energy assistance, mental health, homeless shelters and substance abuse treatment programs.
“We are surging resources to these locations in the hopes that it helps people get out of the heat, but also get out of unsheltered homelessness,” Hondula said. “We are trying to solve the upstream challenges in addition to the immediate lifesaving mission.”
Not everyone in city leadership appreciates that plan. Though the City Council recognizes heat as a danger to residents, some members have questioned using city resources to protect the homeless.At a February meeting, multiple councilors noted that libraries and senior centers have seen budget cuts, and said it wasn’t fair to open them to homeless people.Councilman Jim Waring expressed disbelief that the program would lead to homeless people getting treatment for addiction or mental heath issues. The cooling initiative was taking resources away from tax-paying families, he said.
