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Posted
On 2/17/2025 at 2:00 PM, David Dennison said:

I wonder how many of the five million plus people in the Houston metro know about the South Texas Project.

Wow. I realized how old the coverage of that fiasco is. They don't, as you point out, even know it exists at all.

Posted
On 2/17/2025 at 2:00 PM, David Dennison said:

I wonder how many of the five million plus people in the Houston metro know about the South Texas Project.

2 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Wow. I realized how old the coverage of that fiasco is. They don't, as you point out, even know it exists at all.

The South Texas Nuclear Plant is ~ 75 miles from Downtown Houston.

The Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant is ~ 40 miles from Downtown Fort Worth and ~ 66 miles from Downtown Dallas (DFW @ 8+ million people).

The STNP and CPPP are both ~ 140 miles from Austin.

Posted
On 3/30/2025 at 5:31 PM, Willfully Horn said:

Whelp. Say goodbye to one of our wildlife preserves. Scientists estimate 18 million tons of lithium can be extracted from under the Salton Sea. Street value $540 billion.

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/massive-18-million-tons-of-lithium-deposit-found-under-california-salton-sea-35561

i think this is the first time the former has been used to describe the latter.

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Posted

I guess I'm just being histrionic. Doug Burgum says there is "plenty of time" to solve a "potential temperature crisis" after we beat China in the AI arms race and prevent Iran from getting a nuke. These rich guys are so nice to be looking out for us all the time and telling us what really matters. 

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Posted

Blatten won’t be the last alpine village that meets this fate.

Quote

A huge chunk of a glacier in the Swiss Alps broke off on Wednesday, causing a deluge of ice, mud and rock that buried most of a mountain village that had been evacuated due to the risk of a rockslide, authorities said.

One person is currently missing, officials said.

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/glacier-crumbles-above-evacuated-swiss-village-prompting-huge-rock-slide-2025-05-28/

 

Blatten is first mentioned in the written record in 1433.

 

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Posted
11 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

was fascinated by that story late last week. glad they were able to get (almost) everyone out in time

Yes. Trusting scientists saved the lives of a couple of hundred people.

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Posted

image.thumb.png.aa73eadf2ccf59f37821675b7c55bc70.png
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/climate/climate-heat-intensity.html

Quote

 

Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “heat dome.” Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history.

The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since.

This doesn’t surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives.

“Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California.

While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them.

“Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,” Dr. Swain said. “There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,” he added.

Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 percent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr. Swain said.

“There is no weather that’s happening outside of climate,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author of the book “Human Nature.”

“This is stuff that’s manifesting in the real world,” she said, citing catastrophes like Hurricane Helene and Vermont’s historic floods in 2023.

According to Dr. Swain, scientists have yet to come to a universal understanding of these events, in part because the infrequent nature of outliers makes them difficult to study.

And as warming has intensified, so have the impacts on vulnerable regions of the planet like the Arctic and Antarctic, making previously rare or hidden consequences more apparent. Scientists are fine-tuning their models to understand the behavior of the vast ice sheets in such places to match the rapid changes they’re observing.

In March, a NASA analysis found that sea levels had risen faster than expected in 2024, in part because of a combination of melting glaciers and heat penetrating deeper into oceans, causing them to expand thermodynamically. Sea surface temperatures are rising faster than previously predicted, too, according to a study published in April by researchers at the National Center for Earth Observation in Britain.

Cecilia Bitz, a professor of climate science at the University of Washington, said that modeling the Earth is complex, and that there are an innumerable amount of small factors that could be taken into account. But even with these uncertainties, scientists have ways of building their models to identify trends that are largely accurate. “Nothing is defying our big picture about the physics of the climate system,” Dr. Bitz said.

Overall atmospheric warming has consistently followed modeling predictions for decades. But recently, the fundamental imbalance responsible for this heat has been tilting — catching even scientists off guard.

Global warming is a symptom of Earth’s energy imbalance, which is a measure of the difference between the total amount of heat reaching Earth from the sun, and the amount radiating back into space.

In May, a paper analyzing data from a NASA satellite found that this imbalance had grown faster than expected, more than doubling in the past two decades and becoming nearly twice as large as it was previously predicted to be.

Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said climate scientists were still working to understand these findings. There are various theories, such as fewer emissions of aerosols, a type of air pollution that is harmful to human health and that increases the reflectivity of clouds, which bounce the sun’s heat back into space.

Historically, aerosol emissions have masked the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Over the past half-century or so, as nations reduced certain kinds of air pollution, aerosol emissions fell significantly. According to Dr. Hausfather, this change is the primary reason atmospheric warming has accelerated in recent decades.

But the most worrying possibility behind Earth’s energy imbalance, he said, is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It’s a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is “one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate,” he said.

As the world continues to emit planet-warming greenhouse gasses, and temperatures climb past what the human world was built to handle, Dr. Marvel said, more people will experience climate change in damaging and frightening ways.

“It’s always worse than expected when it happens to you,” Dr. Marvel said. “It is one thing to see something in a climate model, and it’s a totally different thing to actually experience it in your own life.”

 

 

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Posted

Well, Kerrville is about to get wiped out by this flood.  And a lot of people won't be able to rebuild with FEMA now functionally out of business.  So any of y'all looking for some cheap Hill Country real estate and willing to take advantage of some human misery . . . this may be your shot real close to home.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Well, Kerrville is about to get wiped out by this flood.  And a lot of people won't be able to rebuild with FEMA now functionally out of business.  So any of y'all looking for some cheap Hill Country real estate and willing to take advantage of some human misery . . . this may be your shot real close to home.

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Posted (edited)

Delete. But, fuck. We will see what other folks make of the claim that the southern ocean has changed the way it circulates, it’s transfer up and down the water column. The link is scary, if true.

Edited by Willfully Horn
Posted
5 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

Delete. But, fuck. We will see what other folks make of the claim that the southern ocean has changed the way it circulates, it’s transfer up and down the water column. The link is scary, if true.

This has been a concern for the Atlantic for quite some time. Could cause Northern Europe to have drastically colder weather, among other things. 
 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation

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Posted
22 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

Well, Kerrville is about to get wiped out by this flood.  And a lot of people won't be able to rebuild with FEMA now functionally out of business.  So any of y'all looking for some cheap Hill Country real estate and willing to take advantage of some human misery . . . this may be your shot real close to home.

New location for a concentration camp

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Posted
3 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

Screenshot_20250705-082136.png

Accuweather is also a corporate shill that is out for profit only, so I’ll take anything they say with a grain of salt.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Accuweather is also a corporate shill that is out for profit only, so I’ll take anything they say with a grain of salt.

It's also how they can say that out loud. Gonna be a lot of finger pointing 

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Posted
12 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Oh it must be because someone is injecting chemicals in the atmosphere 

Just not the ones that we know about. Those are fine 

You don't need that data. We're saving money!


climate change is fake yet the global cabal of weather injectors is alive and well. 
 

You Dont Say Nicholas Cage GIF

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Posted

Good piece from Matt Lanza......

https://theeyewall.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-the-weather-that?r=6bg74&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

It's detailed and sciencey but here's the CR part

 

Quote

Did budget cuts play a role?

No. In this particular case, we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event. Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest. There are many places you can go with expressing thoughts on the current and proposed cuts. We've been very vocal about them here. But this is not the right event for those takes.

In fact, weather balloon launches played a vital role in forecast messaging on Thursday night as the event was beginning to unfold. If you want to go that route, use this event as a symbol of the value NOAA and NWS bring to society, understanding that as horrific as this is, yes, it could always have been even worse.

What should we be asking about then?

Beyond the fact that this was truly a tragedy that is extremely difficult to disseminate warnings on, I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred.

It's not as if catastrophic flash flooding is new in interior Texas. There are literal books written about the history. The region is actually referred to as "Flash Flood Alley." But how we manage that risk is crucially important context here. Are there sirens in place? Do there need to be sirens in place? Would people even hear sirens in the middle of the night in cabins or RVs or wherever they were? Tornado sirens have traditionally been used in parts of the country for people outdoors to get warnings. Is that an appropriate method in this region for the middle of the night and indoors?

Do we need to start thinking of every risk of flooding in Texas as a potential high-end event we should pre-evacuate the highest risk people (like children and elderly in floodways) for? Is that even practical? We can critique the answer given by the Kerr County judge here all day, but he's correct in that the reality is they deal with flooding a lot. What is actually practical? I don't know the answers to these questions. But it's been a little over 10 years since Wimberley, which was a wake up call in some ways too. It's time for another, and we need to think much bigger than just the areas impacted this time and more about Flash Flood Alley as a whole. Flooding risk is high in Texas. People learn to live with it in some ways. But something like this absolutely cannot happen again. The Texas legislature meets for a special session beginning on July 21st. This may be an important topic to add to the agenda.

 

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Posted (edited)

Now I'm not familiar with county emergency weather protocols, but I am familiar with the English language. Does this statement from Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly seem somewhat contradictory?

“Rest assured, no one knew this flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said. “This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States. We deal with floods on a regular basis. We had no reason to believe this was going to be anything like what happened here, none whatsoever.”

Edited by TreatyOak
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Posted
3 minutes ago, TreatyOak said:

Now I'm not familiar with county emergency weather protocols, but I am familiar with the English language. Does this statement from Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly seem somewhat contradictory?

“Rest assured, no one knew this flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said. “This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States. We deal with floods on a regular basis."

It's an act of God that shouldn't be politicized only when the finger is pointing squarely at Republican assholes, otherwise it's fair game to hammer the libs for weather emergencies that kill people. See: Hurricane Helene and Joe Biden 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Firemans4Horn said:

This could go on about 7 different threads on 4 different boards. Congrats Big Ballz and DOGE

 

 

Feature not a bug.

1.) it allows for a scapegoat

2.) it ‘proves’ their original assertion that the NWS was a waste of $ because they don’t even do their job well.

The circular stupidity works with their cult.

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Posted

tl;dr: here’s what you need to know:

We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system. Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.

Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction: climate change very likely made this event stronger.

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Posted

@Captainant Cross posting here as I think it could spawn better discussion:

WASHINGTON, July 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will rescind the long-standing finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, as well as tailpipe emission standards for vehicles, removing the legal foundation of greenhouse gas regulations across industries, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Tuesday.

Republican President Donald Trump's pick Zeldin announced the agency's plan to rescind the "endangerment finding" at an event at a truck factory in Indiana, alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and called it the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.

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Posted
7 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

@Captainant Cross posting here as I think it could spawn better discussion:

WASHINGTON, July 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will rescind the long-standing finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, as well as tailpipe emission standards for vehicles, removing the legal foundation of greenhouse gas regulations across industries, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Tuesday.

Republican President Donald Trump's pick Zeldin announced the agency's plan to rescind the "endangerment finding" at an event at a truck factory in Indiana, alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and called it the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.

And guess whose cars won't be bought by anyone else in the world.

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