Kansas Crimson

TDub wrote: ↑Sat Aug 07, 2021 7:27 am I think "possibly causing a new ice age" refers to more than "there are locations where the opposite is true".

But see, all the facebook uncles out there who post the "oh YeAh!??!?!" memes every time it snows in like April.

the variable effects at different locations is something happening in the relatively short-term (relative in the geological sense, not human lifetime sense)

the next ice age will undoubtedly come, likely after humanity has worn out its welcome

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/1 ... 07?cid=apn

hmmm...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... plnews_d-1

With a reported temp of 119 degrees Fahrenheit, Sicily may have just experienced the hottest temps ever on the continent of Europe

Is Sicily on the content of Europe? How's that work?

what other continent should it belong to?

edit: i didn’t realize it was literally part of the European tectonic plate...figured it’d have been more like the Anatolian and Aegean plates

learn something new every day

maybe it shouldn’t be Europe, since Italy is literally trying to kick it off the continent

from NatGeo:

A disaster can be long-expected and still come faster than expected.

People have been forecasting a long-term drying of the West for well over a decade. By this spring, as Alejandra Borunda wrote for us at the time, it was pretty clear that the water level in Lake Mead (pictured above), behind Hoover Dam, would drop below an elevation of 1,075 feet this summer, obliging the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to declare a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time since the dam was built in the 1930s.

And yet when officials did just that yesterday, on a day when the news was consumed with the sudden collapse of Afghanistan, it still came as a bit of a shock.

Arizona farmers will suffer first, as the state loses nearly a fifth of the water it gets from the Colorado. But Nevada will take a hit too. And if the drought wears on, and Lake Mead continues to drop, cuts are coming to the water supply of other states, including California.

A long-feared reckoning is at hand. The “megadrought” is likely to wear on. "It’s really climate change that pushed this event to be one of the worst in 500 years,” Columbia University climate scientist Ben Cook told Borunda.

People have been forecasting a long-term increase in wildfires in the West for a long time too.

We’ve been watching it happen. Between 1983 and 2001, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center, an average of 3.24 million acres a year burned in the U.S. Between 2002 and 2020, that figure more than doubled, to 7.21 million acres a year.

Drought promotes fire, climate change promotes both. This long hot summer has felt a bit like a doom cycle. Yet the path to limiting climate change is clear, and we’re starting to stumble down it. The path to healthier, less fire-prone forests is clear too: As scientists have been telling us for decades, we need to unlearn the lesson we absorbed from Smokey Bear, that all fire is bad, and allow controlled, prescribed burns back into the woods to clean out the excess fuel—like the Native Americans used to do.


At the same time, as Jennifer Oldham writes for Nat Geo this week, we need to pay more attention to Smokey Bear (pictured above at L.A.’s Griffith Park). The septuagenarian bear’s handlers are working hard to update his messaging for a younger and more diverse audience.

What?

Humans ignite more than 80 percent of all wildfires, Oldham explains, and 97 percent of all fires that threaten homes, in large part because of the American penchant for building homes in the woods. No spark, no wildfire—and with our burning of leaves on windy days, our undoused campfires, and our ill-placed fireworks, we provide most of the sparks.

Sometimes we need to find room in our mind for truths that may sound contradictory. Our problems feel overwhelming, of the kind that only concerted action by governments can solve—Western forests need cleaning, Western water use needs reforming, the whole global energy system needs changing—and yet our actions as individuals still matter.

Maybe, if we can manage not to lose heart, some good changes too will come faster than we expect.

https://strangesounds.org/2021/08/high- ... lting.html


I have no idea what this source is or how reliable it is...but its kind of interesting.

they cite a Nature article...so there’s that

will definitely have to check it out

jfc

https://www.usatoday.com/restricted/?re ... 2987002%2F

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles ... ional-park

A large swath of Denali National Park, one of Alaska's premier travel destinations, has closed for the summer tourist season weeks early after heightened landslide activity from excessive thawing of a mountain slope made the park's only access road unsafe...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180978519/

Europe’s Extreme Floods Are ‘Up to Nine Times More Likely’ Because of Climate Change

welp

Though apparently it might contained by the East troublesome burn scar, go figure

all i know is that this air quality and smoke from the west has gotten old

if this is any sort of new normal, Utah won’t be for me for much longer...job be damned

what’s the point of living here if you can’t even enjoy the natural wonders?

ill tell you whats not dying. flies. I have never in my life had a summer with so many flies around. its insane. ive filled up over a dozen or more fly bags to the brim. they are everywhere. never have i seen this amount of these things

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/us/g ... ality.html

Booming Utah’s Weak Link: Surging Air Pollution

A red-hot economy, wildfire smoke from California and the shriveling of the Great Salt Lake are making Utah’s alarming pollution even worse...