Above, video – 4 minutes, below, press conference.
Arctic report Card is an eagerly awaited event every year at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting every year – now underway in New Orleans.
Month: December 2021
Minnesota Logs First December Tornado
Not many people paying attention to this warning about what’s happening to property insurance under climate change.
As storms continue to pound with out let-up, this could be coming to everyone’s doorstep sooner than they think.
PLAINVIEW, Minn. (FOX 9) – Two possible tornadoes in Minnesota would be the first for December. One tornado was reported just northwest of Albert Lea with damage reported in Hartland. The other in Plainview with damage reported there. Those tornado reports came in the 8 p.m. hour Wednesday. Watch live coverage at fox9.com/live.
The latest tornado on record in Minnesota had been on November 16, 1931, east of Maple Plain.
Strong winds made it as far north as Elko New Market, with a gust of 68 mph reported.
The tornadoes fall on the same day the Twin Cities broke a record high temperature for December, hitting 52 at MSP Airport at 2 p.m. and continuing to climb into the late afternoon and evening. That breaks the record of 51 set in 2014. Snowpack at the airport dropped from 8 inches to just a trace over the course of the day.
Storm damage in southern Minnesota
A line of storms brought strong winds to southern Minnesota. In Dodge County, the sheriff is reporting multiple trees and power lines down. Xcel reports more than 3,000 customers are without power in the county. To the south, a bank suffered damage in Hartland, Minnesota, with bricks lying on the ground and some damage to the windows.
Rare December Storm Barrels Across Heartland
Nothing to see here.
Half of the Lower 48 is enduring a dangerous weather event Wednesday as an extremely powerful storm system sweeps through the middle of the country unleashing damaging winds and, in some areas, tornadoes, dust storms and out-of-control fires. So severe are the conditions that the National Weather Service is calling it a “historical weather day.”
Weather alerts of different types affect about 100 million Americans.
“The Central U.S. has never seen a December storm like this,” tweeted Bill Karins, a meteorologist for MSNBC. “Multi-hazard, life-threatening weather today.”
From New Mexico to Michigan, more than 36 million people are under high-wind warnings. Winds of 70 to 100-plus mph have already sheared off roofs, overturned vehicles, toppled trees and caused tens of thousands of power outages while contributing to hazardous ground and air travel.
Amid the high winds, blinding dust storms have swelled over parts of southeast Colorado and western Kansas, with wildfires erupting in Kansas and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.
The threat of severe thunderstorms is historically high in the zone from Iowa to southeast Minnesota where the Weather Service declared a level 4 out of 5 risk for severe storms early Wednesday. It had never previously issued a risk forecast at this level in this area during December. If tornadoes strike Minnesota and parts of northern Iowa, it will be a first during the month.
Twisters could even carve through areas blanketed in snow by last week’s storm.
Multiple tornadoes have already touched down in Nebraska and western Iowa as a violent storm complex or derecho charges eastward at breakneck speed.
Following Tornadoes, Heartland Braces for Hurricane Winds
Merry Christmas.
UPDATE: This is really happening.
Above, Omaha radar with tornado warnings in red.
But wait, there’s more!
Continue reading “Following Tornadoes, Heartland Braces for Hurricane Winds”Climate Denier: Were Tornadoes “Weather Weapons”?
We’re getting a preview of how climate denial will evolve as the impacts become all too obvious.
Anyone that was hoping there might be some wider acknowledgement of the science might be disappointed.
Future psych majors will have plenty of material for theses in these archives.
I reported recently on a batshit GOP candidate’s contention that the recent Kentucky tornadoes were “Demonic weather modification”. Now we have more.
Alex Jones is an equal opportunity denier, having recently lost a lawsuit from Parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting a decade ago. ( he denied it happened, says it was a false flag enacted by “crisis actors” – to make psychotic gun killers look bad, apparently)
He has also been a long-time climate denier, and he’s still at it. Recently he told his rabid audience of conspiracy buffs that the US government was developing “weather weapons”, that the recent tornadoes might have been a result of that, and showed as evidence a clip from former CIA Director John Brennan.
For the record, Brennan’s talk was related to Geo-engineering, the possibility of using active measure to block solar energy in the upper atmosphere to mitigate climate change. Everything Brennan says in the edited clip is correct, but Jones apparently wants his audience to fixate on the observation that such interventions might “benefit certain regions of the world at the expense of others.”
Meaning, China might unilaterally, for instance, enact a geo-engineering program, which might actually work, and say, lower temperatures in Beijing, but the law of unexpected consequences being what it is, you don’t know if that might mean it stops raining in Iowa. So that’s one of the legit biggest concerns about engineering our way out of climate change – not evidence of a “weather weapon”.
But, obviously, for Jone’s audience, it seems to work. He tells them, “they think you’re stupid”.
Well, he’s not wrong there, but if anyone thinks his listeners are morons, it is Jone’s himself, who continues to laugh all the way to the bank, selling survival food and BS supplements to the credulous conspiracy rubes of the world.
Below, clips from actual scientists I’ve talked to who are doing serious thinking about actual geo-engineering ideas – Alan Robock and Mike MacCracken.
Science Denier Rand Paul Butt Hurt after Tornado Relief Hypocrisy Revealed
Compare and contrast.
Sea Level’s Hidden Cost: Rising Ground Water
Above, Henry Brisceno of Florida International University told me and (Rolling Stone writer) Jeff Goodell about this problem some years ago. Guess I just assumed everyone knew about it. Not so.
Reviewing these images is still astonishing, and an illustration of human powers of denial – as rising sea levels force ground water up thru septic fields carrying sewage into populous neighborhoods.
Huge, expensive side effect of sea level rise, not just coming, already here.
Fae Saulenas does not want your sympathy.
Saulenas, along with her 46-year-old daughter Lauren, spent last winter—their covid winter—in Saugus, Massachusetts, in a house without a working furnace. Saulenas is in her 70s. Lauren, because of brain injuries she experienced in the womb, is quadriplegic, blind, and affected by a seizure disorder, among other disabilities. In winter, it’s not unusual for overnight temperatures in Saugus to dip into the teens. The two could not long survive without heat, so absent a furnace, they relied on a space heater. But the cost of electricity to power it was $750 in February alone, and it warmed only a single bedroom.
Saulenas doesn’t tell this story to engender sympathy but, rather, as a warning. The water table, she says, is rising—seeping into gas lines and corroding furnaces from the inside out. That’s what happened to hers. And she wants you to know that if you live anywhere near a coast—even one, two, three miles away—that water might be coming for you too.
For something you’ve probably never heard about, rising groundwater presents a real, and potentially catastrophic, threat to our infrastructure. Roadways will be eroded from below; septic systems won’t drain; seawalls will keep the ocean out but trap the water seeping up, leading to more flooding. Home foundations will crack; sewers will backflow and potentially leak toxic gases into people’s homes.
Saugus is a small town roughly 10 miles northeast of Boston. On maps, water is one of its defining features, with the Saugus River and its tributaries meandering through the town and heading through marshland to the Atlantic Ocean. Among those salt marshes, blocked from the Atlantic by the peninsula of Revere Beach, is where Saulenas bought her house in 1975.
Given the proximity to the ocean, the source of her recent woes would seem obvious: sea-level rise. Since 1950, sea level in the region has risen by eight inches, and that change has not been linear. The sea is rising faster now than it did a generation ago—about an inch every eight years. But the water that left Saulenas out in the cold did not come from the sea, at least not directly.
Her problems began in 2018, when she lost gas—and thus heat—because of water entering an underground main. It was a problem that would persist, intermittently, for several years. Water would enter the gas main, and her utility, National Grid, would be forced to shut off the gas. National Grid would then try to find where the water was coming from, patch the leak, and pump the water out.
Officially, National Grid has not named the source of the problem. But Saulenas thinks the culprit is groundwater.
Even under normal circumstances, the cast iron pipes that make up roughly a third of National Grid’s infrastructure in Massachusetts are prone to rust and corrosion. She thinks these pipes, which once sat comfortably above the water table, are finding themselves intermittently swamped during seasonal high tides that essentially push up the groundwater. And it’s that elevated groundwater that she thinks seeped into the gas main, flooded out her gas meter, and eventually corroded her furnace.
Kristina Hill, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whom Saulenas reached out to in pursuit of answers, agrees. “She was asking me, is this something that comes from sea-level rise? And obviously, the answer is yes,” says Hill.
Continue reading “Sea Level’s Hidden Cost: Rising Ground Water”Hill is one of a number of researchers trying to get the public and policymakers to take the risks of rising groundwater seriously. Unlike rising seas, where the dangers are obvious, groundwater rise has remained under the radar. Hydrologists are aware of the problem and it’s all over the scholarly research, but it has yet to surface in a significant way outside of those bubbles. Groundwater rise is only briefly mentioned in the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment, released in 2018; it’s absent from many state and regional climate adaptation plans, and even from flood maps.
GOP Candidate: Tornadoes Were Demonic “Weather Modification”
“They’re messing with our atmosphere.”
Well, she’s not wrong.
“Keystone” Ice Shelf Cracking Up
An alarming crackup has begun at the foot of Antarctica’s vulnerable Thwaites Glacier, whose meltwater is already responsible for about 4% of global sea level rise. An ice sheet the size of Florida, Thwaites ends its slide into the ocean as a floating ledge of ice 45 kilometers wide. But now, this ice shelf, riven by newly detected fissures on its surface and underside, is likely to break apart in the next 5 years or so, scientists reported today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The most dramatic sign of impending failure is a set of diagonal fractures that nearly span the entire shelf. Last month, satellites spotted accelerating movement of ice along the fractures, says Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who is part of a multiyear expedition studying the glacier. The shelf is a bit like a windshield with a series of slowly opening cracks, she says. “You’re like, I should get a new windshield. And one day, bang—there are a million other cracks there.”
Once the ice shelf shatters, large sections of the glacier now restrained by it are likely to speed up, says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a leader of the Thwaites expedition. In a worst case, this part of Thwaites could triple in speed, increasing the glacier’s contribution to global sea level in the short term to 5%, Pettit says.
Even more worrisome is the process that has weakened the ice shelf: incursions of warm ocean water beneath the shelf, which expedition scientists detected with a robotic submersible. Because Thwaites sits below sea level on ground that dips away from the coast, the warm water is likely to melt its way inland, beneath the glacier itself, freeing its underbelly from bedrock. A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. “That would be a global change,” says Robert DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Our coastlines will look different from space.”
Although it is unclear whether the shelf will fall apart in 1 year or 10 years, Pettit and her colleagues are pursuing important work, adds DeConto, who is unaffiliated with the Thwaites team. The oceans are simply getting too warm for these marine ice sheets, which formed in conditions much cooler than today, he says. “This marine-based ice is not going to come back.”
Music Break: Ariana Grande & Kid Cudi -“Just Look Up” Theme Song
“Don’t Look Up” is Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie satirizing the media’s inability to deal with the reality of climate change. (or anything, really)
Dave Roberts on Twitter:
I didn’t get to it in the review, but it’s worth watching @ArianaGrande & @KidCudi performing this benefit song in the movie — it’s such a perfect simulacrum of celebrity nonsense that it takes a minute to realize how hilarious the lyrics are. It is the first movie I’ve ever seen that captures what it feels like to be a climate hawk in an age of silly politics & broken media.
One of the most devilish aspects of climate change is that it resists good art. But Adam McKay, director first of comedies like Anchorman and later of more serious fare like The Big Short, has cracked the code. Don’t Look Up (in theaters today; coming to Netflix on Dec. 24) is the first climate movie — the first work of art about climate change of any kind — to hold my rapt attention from start to finish. It is fantastic.
One reason it’s so good is that it isn’t really about climate change at all. It’s about a pair of scientists, played by Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, who discover that a large comet is heading directly toward Earth and will strike, and wipe out all life on the planet, in just over six months. They try to tell people. It does not go well.
Lyrics:
Mmh-mh
Ahh-ayWe knew no bounds
Fell at the speed of sound
Ridin’ against all odds, but soon against ourselves
You haunted every memory
With no goodbyes, all bad for me
Your pride put out the fire in our flamesThen just one look is all it takes
I feel your eyes, they’re locked on every part of me
And then my dumb heart saysJust look up
There is no place to hide
True love doesn’t die
It holds on tight and never lets you go
Just look up
You cannot deny the signs
What you’ve waited for
Don’t wait no more
It’s right up above you
Just look upKnow I let you down, a nigga can’t deny it (uh-huh)
And there’s so much I could lose it and, yes, that matters (yeah)
I’ve been dealin’ with madness (yo)
Wasn’t the man you needed (hmm)
You dealin’ with sadness, truthfully, it’s all on me (hmm)
And I’m sorry, my love (uh, uh)
I’ma heal your heart, I’ll hold it in my hand (ooh, yeah)
Time is oh so precious, we don’t really have much left now (ooh)
Take my hand, baby (yeah), never leave you, RileyLook up, what he’s really trying to say
Is get your head out of your ass
Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists
We really fucked it up, fucked it up this time
It’s so close, I can feel the heat big time
And you can act like everything is alright
But this is probably happening in real time
Celebrate or cry or pray, whatever it takes
To get you through the mess we made
‘Cause tomorrow may never comeJust look up
Turn off that shit Fox News
‘Cause you’re about to die soon everybody
Ooh, I, oh, I
Look up
Here it comes
I’m so glad I’m here with you forever
In your arms