Shortly
“Climate switch doesn’t exist,” they said, teeth chattering and blue thumbs gamely tweeting.
“Look at all this snow.”
Well, a fresh probe from Stanford confirms that those hell-frozen-over winters are part of global heating, too.
Researchers looked at how the past duo of winters have left the eastern U.S. trapped under a thick lid of ice while the West basks in the warm sun of an increasingly desperate drought, and found that this pattern is becoming more common. In the last thirty five years, the difference in winter temperature inbetween the two coasts has gotten fatter and fatter in the U.S. — and the winters of two thousand thirteen and two thousand fourteen witnessed the largest difference of all.
The thinking is that as the Arctic heats — quickly, alarmingly — the jet stream that stabilizes the planets climate could be slowing down. And as it slows, like a wobbly top, it spins more erratically. This sends loops of cold air down over North America, and traps other areas (cough, California) under high-pressure, low-rain systems.
It’s just another reminder that while on average, the planet is heating, climate switch is an exercise in extremes. July might have been the best month on record, but that doesn’t mean your neighborhood hell won’t freeze over again.
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The Fortunes Are Turning
Can we not talk about Hurricane Harvey’s effect on car sales right now?
Especially if we don’t know what to say about it yet?
Here’s a screenshot of a Google search for “Harvey cars”:
A flooded chemical plant near Houston is just going to keep exploding.
On Thursday, explosions and black plumes of smoke were seen coming from a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, fifteen miles east of Houston’s city center.
Arkema, the company that wields the plant, said there was nothing they could do to prevent further explosions. The volatile chemicals stored onsite need to be refrigerated at all times to prevent breakdown, but flooding from Harvey cut the plant’s power. The “only plausible solution” now is to let the eight containers, containing 500,000 pounds of organic peroxides, explode and burn out, Arkema CEO Rich Rowe said at a press conference on Friday.
That’s bad news for Arkema’s neighbors. On Thursday, fifteen public safety officers were taken to the hospital after breathing in acrid smoke from the plant. After local officials took a peek at Arkema’s chemical inventories, they ordered everyone within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant to evacuate. We don’t know precisely what’s in the noxious fumes, as Arkema has refused to release details of the facility’s chemical inventories.
In the worst-case screenplay documented in the company’s two thousand fourteen risk-management plan, the air pollution coming from the plant could put the one million people living within twenty miles radius in danger. That seems unlikely — but then again, Harvey has outdone slew of worst-case screenplay predictions so far.
Trump’s Harvey aid donation is a drop in the bucket compared to the storm’s real price tag.
True, a $1 million donation isn’t anything to sneeze at (assuming he goes after through with his donation promises this time) but initial estimates of Harvey’s cost aren’t in the millions. They’re in the billions.
How many billions? Nobody’s sure yet. AccuWeather kicked off the guesstimates with an alarming $190 billion, calling Harvey the “costliest and worst natural disaster in American history.” Meantime, reinsurer Hannover Re sits on the opposite end of the spectrum, with a guess of $Trio billion or less. Meteorologist Bryan Wood says the most likely estimates lie somewhere inbetween $70 to $100 billion.
Harvey blew all predictions out of the water, so it’s no surprise that the same goes for the financial repercussions. Chuck Watson, a geophysical hazards modeler, told NBC that traditional forecast models don’t work for the tropical storm and with estimates of “a big system like Harvey, you’re so dependent on things you can’t predict.”
In the meantime, as donations proceed to pour in, Trump finds himself “standing in a puddle acting like a President.”
nor any drop to drink
Harvey knocked out the water supply for thousands in Beaumont, Texas.
The storm made a 2nd landfall Tuesday, pouring twenty six inches on the oil town one hundred miles east of Houston. Floods inundated its roadways, leaving many of its 118,000 residents stranded.
To make things worse, now Beaumont doesn’t even have running water. Floodwaters bruised the city’s pumps, knocking out its primary and backup water sources early Thursday morning. Local authorities say the water supply is out indefinitely, since they have to wait until the flood recedes to inspect the pumps.
The lack of water compelled the shutdown of a large hospital, which also suspended its emergency services, NPR reports. And Beaumont residents lined up outside stores overnight, waiting to buy water and supplies. Almost two hundred people were in line outside the local Walmart on Thursday morning, according to the Huffington Post.
Some area stores reported water deliveries were coming from Houston, but major roadways inbetween the two cities were impassable as of Thursday morning. FEMA Director Brock Long called Beaumont’s situation “dire” and said the military plans to supply water to the city’s residents.
A little early for pumpkin spice, isn’t it?
One way to think about climate switch is that it makes everything topsy-turvy. What was snow is now a puddle; what was a tree is now a pile of ash; what were securely considered the golden days of summer are now the opening notes of pumpkin spice season.
The Fresh York Times reports that “pumpkin spice season” is upon us earlier and earlier. Pumpkin spice is traditionally considered a Fall Thing because pumpkins are an autumn vegetable, even however there are exactly zero pumpkins to be found in a pumpkin spice-flavored anything.
The debut date of the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, an almost archetypically mainstream beverage that the Times incorrectly identifies as a “cult beloved drink,” has been bumped up to September 1. September 1!
The earlier onset of the season actually has nothing to do with climate switch: It’s capitalism, folks. The irresistible draw of faux-pumpkin is supposed to prep consumers for holiday shopping sprees, according to the Times.
But capitalism causes climate switch! Utter circle. Pumpkin spice, therefore, portends certain planetary doom. Don’t buy it.
Climate switch doesn – t exist, they said, teeth chattering and blue thumbs gamely tweeting, Grist
Shortly
“Climate switch doesn’t exist,” they said, teeth chattering and blue thumbs gamely tweeting.
“Look at all this snow.”
Well, a fresh examine from Stanford confirms that those hell-frozen-over winters are part of global heating, too.
Researchers looked at how the past duo of winters have left the eastern U.S. trapped under a thick lid of ice while the West basks in the warm sun of an increasingly desperate drought, and found that this pattern is becoming more common. In the last thirty five years, the difference in winter temperature inbetween the two coasts has gotten thicker and thicker in the U.S. — and the winters of two thousand thirteen and two thousand fourteen spotted the largest difference of all.
The thinking is that as the Arctic heats — quickly, alarmingly — the jet stream that stabilizes the planets climate could be slowing down. And as it slows, like a wobbly top, it spins more erratically. This sends loops of cold air down over North America, and traps other areas (cough, California) under high-pressure, low-rain systems.
It’s just another reminder that while on average, the planet is heating, climate switch is an exercise in extremes. July might have been the greatest month on record, but that doesn’t mean your neighborhood hell won’t freeze over again.
Get Shortly in your inbox
The Fortunes Are Turning
Can we not talk about Hurricane Harvey’s effect on car sales right now?
Especially if we don’t know what to say about it yet?
Here’s a screenshot of a Google search for “Harvey cars”:
A flooded chemical plant near Houston is just going to keep exploding.
On Thursday, explosions and black plumes of smoke were seen coming from a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, fifteen miles east of Houston’s city center.
Arkema, the company that wields the plant, said there was nothing they could do to prevent further explosions. The volatile chemicals stored onsite need to be refrigerated at all times to prevent breakdown, but flooding from Harvey cut the plant’s power. The “only plausible solution” now is to let the eight containers, containing 500,000 pounds of organic peroxides, explode and burn out, Arkema CEO Rich Rowe said at a press conference on Friday.
That’s bad news for Arkema’s neighbors. On Thursday, fifteen public safety officers were taken to the hospital after breathing in acrid smoke from the plant. After local officials took a peek at Arkema’s chemical inventories, they ordered everyone within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant to evacuate. We don’t know precisely what’s in the noxious fumes, as Arkema has refused to release details of the facility’s chemical inventories.
In the worst-case screenplay documented in the company’s two thousand fourteen risk-management plan, the air pollution coming from the plant could put the one million people living within twenty miles radius in danger. That seems unlikely — but then again, Harvey has outdone slew of worst-case script predictions so far.
Trump’s Harvey aid donation is a drop in the bucket compared to the storm’s real price tag.
True, a $1 million donation isn’t anything to sneeze at (assuming he goes after through with his donation promises this time) but initial estimates of Harvey’s cost aren’t in the millions. They’re in the billions.
How many billions? Nobody’s sure yet. AccuWeather kicked off the guesstimates with an alarming $190 billion, calling Harvey the “costliest and worst natural disaster in American history.” Meantime, reinsurer Hannover Re sits on the opposite end of the spectrum, with a guess of $Three billion or less. Meteorologist Bryan Wood says the most likely estimates lie somewhere inbetween $70 to $100 billion.
Harvey blew all predictions out of the water, so it’s no surprise that the same goes for the financial repercussions. Chuck Watson, a geophysical hazards modeler, told NBC that traditional forecast models don’t work for the tropical storm and with estimates of “a big system like Harvey, you’re so dependent on things you can’t predict.”
In the meantime, as donations proceed to pour in, Trump finds himself “standing in a puddle acting like a President.”
nor any drop to drink
Harvey knocked out the water supply for thousands in Beaumont, Texas.
The storm made a 2nd landfall Tuesday, pouring twenty six inches on the oil town one hundred miles east of Houston. Floods inundated its roadways, leaving many of its 118,000 residents stranded.
To make things worse, now Beaumont doesn’t even have running water. Floodwaters bruised the city’s pumps, knocking out its primary and backup water sources early Thursday morning. Local authorities say the water supply is out indefinitely, since they have to wait until the flood recedes to inspect the pumps.
The lack of water compelled the shutdown of a large hospital, which also suspended its emergency services, NPR reports. And Beaumont residents lined up outside stores overnight, waiting to buy water and supplies. Almost two hundred people were in line outside the local Walmart on Thursday morning, according to the Huffington Post.
Some area stores reported water deliveries were coming from Houston, but major roadways inbetween the two cities were impassable as of Thursday morning. FEMA Director Brock Long called Beaumont’s situation “dire” and said the military plans to produce water to the city’s residents.
A little early for pumpkin spice, isn’t it?
One way to think about climate switch is that it makes everything topsy-turvy. What was snow is now a puddle; what was a tree is now a pile of ash; what were securely considered the golden days of summer are now the opening notes of pumpkin spice season.
The Fresh York Times reports that “pumpkin spice season” is upon us earlier and earlier. Pumpkin spice is traditionally considered a Fall Thing because pumpkins are an autumn vegetable, even tho’ there are exactly zero pumpkins to be found in a pumpkin spice-flavored anything.
The debut date of the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, an almost archetypically mainstream beverage that the Times incorrectly identifies as a “cult beloved drink,” has been bumped up to September 1. September 1!
The earlier onset of the season actually has nothing to do with climate switch: It’s capitalism, folks. The irresistible draw of faux-pumpkin is supposed to prep consumers for holiday shopping sprees, according to the Times.
But capitalism causes climate switch! Total circle. Pumpkin spice, therefore, portends certain planetary doom. Don’t buy it.