So Perfectly Canadian

Mean Center of Population of Canada:

 

Source: a Canadian

Canada is Kinda Weird

This is a little old, but here's a map of Canada divided into four areas of equal populations, about 8.6 million each. (Canada's total population in 2024 is 41.0 million.) About the same as Virginia in the US.... It's almost like Canadians want to be as far south (warm) as possible, given their national border. Except for the yellow Canadians. Probably like Alaskans... Anyway, I think Canada has about the right-size population for a decent country--not too many, not too few. Maybe a bit too many though. 

Nota bene: But Canadians aren't weird! I've never met a Canadian who wasn't a nice person. (Traveled there a lot for work in 1993-94.)

Mental Health and Society

“Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the 'adjustment' of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”

-- Erich Fromm

Climate News I've Seen (esp the third)

There's too much climate news to keep track of anymore, but here are a few recent items I've come across:

• Students are now required to take a course in climate change in order to graduate from the University of California at San Diego. Forty different versions that meet the requirement will be offered. The article says, "...at least 30% of a course's content must be related to climate, and the class must address two of these areas: scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies, and project-based learning." I'd choose scientific foundations and mitigation strategies, but that's just for me. Irrelevant fact: I took Introduction to Statistics from the psychology department to fulfill my college's social science requirement. I knew most of it from high school. It wasn't a good choice, in retrospect, as I took very few "soft" courses in college; it was almost all math & physics


• The Independent: "...hurricanes as intense as Helene, which were once expected to occur every 130 years, are now likely to happen every 53 years – about 2.5 times more frequently." 
• "A separate analysis of Helene last week by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists determined that the climate crisis caused 50 per cent more rainfall in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, and that observed rainfall was “made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming."


• UniverseToday.com: Advanced Civilizations Will Overheat Their Planets Within 1,000 Years
• "Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. Depending on the extent of temperature increases, the impact on Earth’s habitability could be catastrophic. In a recent study, a team of scientists examined how temperature increases are a long-term issue facing advanced civilizations and not just a matter of fossil fuel consumption. As they argue, rising planetary temperatures could be an inevitable result of the exponential growth of energy consumption. Their findings could have serious implications for astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)."
• Here's a preprint of the study: "Waste Heat and Habitability: Constraints from Technological Energy Consumption," Amedeo Balbi et al, arXiv 9-Sept-2024. The analysis is very simple physics. Here's a key figure:

• Mind, this has nothing to do with fossil fuels. It's only about how much power the planet uses--could be solar, could be nuclear (fission or fusion), geothermal, FFs -- because the problem is waste heat from the machines run by our power sources, not the type of power sources.

"They're Made of Meat"

"They're Made of Meat" is a sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson, written in 1991. It only takes about 4 minutes to read. I thought it was very good, but that's all I'm going to say. You might like it too.

There's also a short audio play that takes about the same amount of time to listen to. Also good, IMO.

Oganesson (Z=118)

"For me, it is an honour. The discovery of element 118 was by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, and it was my colleagues who proposed the name oganesson. My children and grandchildren have been living in the US for decades, but my daughter wrote to me to say that she did not sleep the night she heard because she was crying."

— Yuri Oganessian, for whom element 118 is named

SpaceX's Slanted Descent

I hadn't realized how slanted/sideways the SpaceX booster descent was before it was flew into the catching arms of the tower:

 
Here's a couple of YouTube Shorts that have a broader view. Unfortunately they're not embeddable (I think).

https://www.facebook.com/reel/475930265468399?mibextid=UalRPS

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2097828604005596?mibextid=UalRPS

These booster landings still never look real to me, but always like something out of a movie. Maybe that's what progress always looks like.

And whoever came up with the idea of including the cheering crowd of employees on SpaceX videos is a public relations master. Why didn't NASA ever do that? Maybe their skinny neckties were too tight.

Another View of Kamala Harris's Plunge

Here's another view--a stark view--of Kamala Harris's plunge on the PredictIt Presidential Election market. It shows the difference between the share price of Harris and the share price of Trump:

From +12¢ three weeks ago to -4¢ now. Stunning.

Here's how this market works. Basically, but shares in your candidate. If she/he wins the election, you get $1 per share. If she/he loses, you get nothing.

Kamala Harris Plunging in Election Market

Kamala Harris has plummeted in the PredictIt President Election market. Here are the prices per share for each candidate:

I really don't understand why. My guess is that she might be getting attention as a lightweight--doing very few interviews with the press, for example. Saying "nothing comes to mind" about what she would have different than Biden. Trump's insanity seems to be normalized by now, everyone thinks he's crazy but MAGA's kind of crazy. Harris has to go at him much harder. 

I don't understand this sudden plunge and it's very worrisome. Two weeks ago she was up 56-47. A week ago was up 54-50, and it felt like she was on track to win the election. Now she's down 49-53. I just don't get it. 

Of course I don't understand has any person in the US could vote for Trump. This country is a mess and could well get a lot messier.

The Same as First Grade

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

-- Donald Trump, 2015, via the New York Times

For non-Americans, first grade in the US is ages 6-7.

Quote

"When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create."

-- Howard Thurman

Hurricanes-Related

From the NY Times, two days ago:

Also from a few days ago, the blackout caused by Helene:

Next Up: Cat 3 Hurricane Milton

Here we go again: Hurricane Milton is set to hit Florida as a Category 3. 

Milton Cone, Tampa Bay Times

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? 

More of Helene's Mess

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.

Hot Springs, NC damage

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/utkjMtcFqj4SGxUY/?mibextid=UalRPS

(sorry, no embed available)

Asheville River Arts District damage

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/GsWMjzrCbdpE7KoS/?mibextid=UalRPS     

Blast from the Past (Re: Roy Spencer)

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?

Hurricane Helene

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....

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.

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.

For Hurricane Agnes, the creek ("crick" where I grew up) went up over its bank and flooded most of your yard. Our lawn furniture was swept away, as was a swing set. We were standing around watching it and my grandmother said to my dad's uncle, you better get that [Volkswagon] Beetle out of the driveway before it floats away! For some reason they never spoke again after that incident. There must have been bad blood going into it.

I was just a kid so I didn't really understand the extent of the damage, which was over the entire region and other parts of the state. Downstream a few miles from us it wiped out a Mennonite community, so afterward the state brought bulldozers in, scraped the creek clean and piled the rocks up on the side.

Was Hurricane Agnes affected by climate change? I don't know. It was 1972, when CO2 was only 328 ppm. So what does that say about Hurricane Helene? I don't think we know yet until climate scientists run their models with and without the effect of today's added CO2. I suspect those will be coming in due course. But sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher, so there must have been at least some impact. But clearly there have been greater or equal storm when CO2 was much lower. 

Helene's damage in Florida is bad enough, but western North Carolina looks worse than a war zone and it's possible to imagine it might never come back full. 

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.

Here's Hot Springs; the Appalachian Trail runs right down this street:

I had maybe the best day of my life there, thanks to heavy hiking the days before, nothing but rest and eating on a beautiful early spring day with green buds coming out, several of our friends there at the same time, four fun white kittens on the back porch of the B&B we stayed at, a big cozy bed and a major shot of testesterone due to having lost 30 pounds in 30 days. (It affected all the men the same, my girlfriend said her trail girlfriends told her.)

The mountains there are so beautiful. A couple are over 6,000 ft in elevation (1,830 m). Not huge compared to the Alps and the western US and the Himalayas. But they are flooded with green, and snow, and hiking them for an extended period was like living in a cloud no one else ever saw.

I'm sad other hikers might not get to experience Hot Springs in the same way. There have to be huge blowdowns over the trail in that entire region. Yesterday the director of the Appalachian Trail Conference said it may be years until the Trail is back in shape. It probably won't deter hikers planning to start in Georgia in the spring, but there could be lots or erosion and damage way up there in the mountains.

The people way up in those mountains usually don't have much money and are very unlikely to have flood insurance. Many may have lost everything they own and will simply not have a house to go back to. One day you think you're living in paradise and the next day it's entirely gone.

I've never been to Asheville NC, but it's such a well known place now after attracting a lot of breweries and artists and businesspeople and progressives and good people in the last few decades. It might be worst of all. People haven't even been able to get in or out of town, though that's probably taken care of, in part, by today. There's almost no gas, I saw a video of a casket floating down a flooded stream, no electricity, the entire River Arts District was wiped away.

Predictably, Trump is already telling obnoxious lies about it about President Biden's response to the storm.

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking yesterday and today. If I didn't have to work I have half a mind to drive across the country and help out there in whatever way I could.

--

Added a couple hours later: Of course I’m aware of the impacts of climate change in other parts of the world: in Bangladesh, where the area affected by the encroaching ocean has increased by a factor of over 12 from 1973 to 2009, in western and Canadian wildfires, in Africa, where climate change is costing up to 5% of GDP, etc. It’s just that it really hits home when its somewhere you love or know well. Obviously.