A cone is coming.
Florida will be getting soaked and saturated with rain next two days, awaiting the arrival of whatever this system in the western Gulf, slated for the name “Milton”, becomes. 90 percent chance of development in next 7 days.
Month: October 2024
More Pushback on Rampant Helene Disinformation
Disinformation keeps ramping up.
All of a piece with climate conspiracist BS.
Serious consequences for responders on the ground, and possibly the election.
We wondered where the AI would come in this election cycle, and it’s really ramping up here, for sure.
Above, the Bulwark podcast, run by Never-Trump Republicans Tim Miller and Sam Stein, does some service in shooting down myths.
This goes beyond typical politics and creates
A Republican mayor representing a Tennessee area affected by Hurricane Helene implored social media users to stop spreading bogus rumors about storm aid.
Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs – more famously known as retired wrestler Kane from the WWE – rebutted a common right-wing talking point amid the aftermath of the storm, which killed more than 200 people. At least one of the deceased was from Knox County.
According to one rumor, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been confiscating supplies, rejecting donations, and stopping aid vehicles. The false claim became so prominent, FEMA issued a statement rebutting it. Another allegation claims money is being redirected to immigrants.
Former President Donald Trump, far-right billionaire Elon Musk, and others alleged FEMA is unable to assist hurricane victims because the Biden administration gave the money to migrants. As Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post noted, not only is this fault, it was Trump who, as president, redirected $155 million in disaster funds to building detention spaces and hearing locations for asylum seekers – and “in the middle of hurricane season.”
Helene’s Numbers are Grim, and Spectacular
As the scope of catastrophic infrastructure damage, loss of life, business disruptions and other economic impacts becomes clearer in the wake of Hurricane Helene, AccuWeather has increased its estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Hurricane Helene in the United States to between $225 billion and $250 billion.
The latest death toll makes Helene the U.S. mainland’s second-deadliest tropical storm since Hurricane Camille in 1969, behind only Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,200 people. Only three other storms have been as deadly since 1950, including hurricanes Diane, Camille, and Audrey. Helene’s ranking falls one notch when Including Hurricane Maria, which killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico in 2017.
Helene’s grim death toll passed 213 people one week after the storm, with deaths reported in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. Hundreds may still be missing.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’’
Continue reading “Helene’s Numbers are Grim, and Spectacular”Study: Solar Fields Have Positive Impact on Property Values
A newly published study examining property values near dozens of large Midwest solar farms has found no significant negative impact — and even a slight positive effect — from the projects, according to the data.
Loyola University researcher Gilbert Michaud has attended scores of community meetings about proposed solar projects across the Midwest. In past research, he quantified that property values were the most common concern brought up in local hearings about proposed utility-scale solar.
And while solar arrays may have an aesthetic impact, property values are influenced by a wide range of other factors, such as the quality of schools and the local economy.
“I’ve observed a lot of the negative comments framed as ‘I think’ or ‘I saw something on social media,’” said Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at the School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago. So he sought to “elevate the discussion from ‘I think, I think, I think,’” by injecting it with some hard data.
BiPartisan Pushback on Internet’s Helene Conspiracies
All kinds of internet blather, no doubt some of it spread by malevolent actors, pushing conspiracies in the wake of the flooding disaster following Hurricane Helene.
Above, Republican State Senator Kevin Corbin.
The most prominent conspiracy theory circulating on TikTok about Hurricane Helene claims that the storm was not a natural occurrence but engineered in order to devastate North Carolina and create access to the land for lithium mining.
“Can I say what I find suspicious as shit?” said one user in a video with over 1.8 million views, “That one of the areas affected by Hurricane Helene is the world’s largest lithium deposit and the DOD just entered into an agreement with this company right here to mine lithium for electric cars starting in 2025. Now that area is completely devastated.”
Another video with over 119,000 views stated that the hurricane was a “weather modified storm to displace the residents of western N. Carolina so a land grab can take place.”
Continue reading “BiPartisan Pushback on Internet’s Helene Conspiracies”“Climate Haven” is a Quaint, Naive Notion
More classics in the genre of ‘Best Places to Escape Climate Change”.
Above, a Climate Scientist felt the need to get away from Coastal Georgia to escape storm and sea level risk.
Guess where she ended up?
Below, CNBC report quizzed some experts. What City do you think they named first?
USAToday:
12 climate resilient cities
- Duluth, MN
- Orlando, FL
- Asheville, NC
- Knoxville, TN
- Charlottesville, VA
- Lynchburg, VA
- Johnson City, TN
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Syracuse, NY
- Buffalo, NY
- Toledo, OH
- Green Bay, WI
Asheville, N.C., seemed like an ideal place to escape the worst effects of global warming. In recent years, media outlets and real estate agents named the city a “climate haven” because of its cooler-than-normal temperatures in the South and a location far inland from the flooding-pummeled coasts. Last year, the Asheville Citizen Times reported on worries that the city would become overcrowded from climate-change migration.
Continue reading ““Climate Haven” is a Quaint, Naive Notion”Helene Adds to Insurance Woes in North Carolina, and Everywhere Else
A year ago, Insurers in North Carolina were asking for a 42 percent rate increase, because, they said, they were not making money in the state. The request also included hikes of as much as 99 percent in vulnerable beach areas.
That increase was denied.
This storm is not going to help.
Every disaster a wake up call for a new population.
On average, just a tiny fraction of households in the inland counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene had flood insurance, according to a Washington Post analysis of recent data from the National Flood Insurance Program. Across seven affected states, only 0.8 percent of homes in inland counties affected by the hurricane had flood insurance. By contrast, 21 percent of homes in coastal counties in those areas had coverage.
The Post estimated the share of homes with flood insurance by using policy counts as of Oct. 1 provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and housing unit counts from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Experts say that lack of insurance will prove deeply damaging for those households in the years to come. Available disaster assistance funds are largely intended to provide for temporary shelter, food and water — not to rebuild homes. And thanks to a combination of outdated policies and high prices, most people don’t know they should enroll in flood insurance — or can’t afford it.
How the US Lost Solar Leadership to China
China didn’t steal their leadership in solar manufacturing, or stumble into it by luck.
They saw that some American inventions held the key to the future, and they made it happen.
A big part of this story took place just down the road from me…
To make the solar cells that are projected to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2031, you first melt down sand until it looks like chunks of graphite. Next, you refine it until impurities have been reduced to just one atom out of every 100 million — a form of elemental silicon known as polysilicon. It’s so vital to the production of solar panels that it can be likened to crude oil’s role in making gasoline. The polysilicon is then drawn out into a vast crystal, resembling a Jeff Koons steel sculpture of a sausage, before being sliced into salami-thin wafers. These are then treated, printed with electrodes, and finally sandwiched between glass.
The basic process has changed little since the first cell was invented in 1954 by scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey exploring whether silicon could be used to power computer processors. “It may mark the beginning of a new era,” The New York Times wrote at the time in a front-page article announcing the discovery, “leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams — the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”
The seven decades since tell the remarkable story of how America squandered its invention of solar photovoltaics, or PV, to the point where it will never recover. As recently as 2010, a small town in central Michigan was the world’s biggest producer of solar polysilicon. Nowadays, the US is barely in the game, and more than 90% of the total comes from China. That country’s clean-technology exports “threaten to significantly harm American workers, businesses and communities,” President Joe Biden said May 14, announcing 50% tariffs on Chinese solar cells.
NC Sheriff: Death Toll to Get “Drastically Worse”
On the Ground in NC – Disaster Area Walk-Through
Postcard from the future.
I recently heard Bill McKibben say, “It doesn’t matter what career you are training for, if we don’t get a handle on climate change, you are going to spend your life as a disaster crisis manager.”