Something there is that does not love a wall

Y pooess asi, “Hanna” derribó parte del muro fronterizo que se construye entre Estados Unidos y México. Para la furia de la naturaleza, no existen fronteras. 🇲🇽🇺🇸... pic.twitter.com/N3BxTadRhh

— Yadith Valdez (@yadithvaldez) July 26, 2020

It's called Hurricane Hanna.

This is a reminder that physical structures fall by physical means--borders are not physical, but legal constructs and the wall is a poor answer to our immigration situation even in the symbolic sense.

But the barrier between the White House and reality still seems more solid all the time.

While we’ve been watching Portland, Trump has been building a bigger wall around the White House. This is what it looks like now.

📸: @RebeccaARainey pic.twitter.com/a9B4y7KRar

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) July 26, 2020

The Impact of Hurricane Irma Needs to Be Respected

The astonishing devastation to the Virgin Islands, particularly, of Hurricane Irma, has to be visually represented to be fully appreciated. In the above graphic, you can see the difference made by a storm where the wind snapped off much of the leaf-bearing vegetation, and a storm wall inundation of salt-water did the rest at killing off the plant-life of what had been island oases of beauty and teeming with life.

It should be noted that the island of Barbuda is, for once in 300 years, without a single human, because it is unlivable. The toll to property has been epic in proportion. The number of persons displaced and bereft of anything at all to their name is astonishing.

And our fuckwit president, Donald Trump, has opinions:

TRUMP: It was such a small number that nobody would have — people thought thousands and thousands of people may have had their lives ended. And the number is a very small number, which is a great tribute to you.

Eight bodies were taken from a Florida nursing home. This is the guy who was in favor of limiting the rights of nursing home residents to sue in the cases of abuse and neglect. I don't know how I feel about that--but I do, but I don't. I have images in my mind I will remember all my life of a situation where people were powerless, and I will always be for those people.

I don't even know if this grinning fool who wants to display his swag ball-cap understands that there is still devastation from Harvey, that there are wildfires leaving residents only too happy for a storm system in the NW,  and still and all, there is ever-developing climate fuckery on the horizon.  He only has his denial.

Trump has no respect for what is happening all around him. I do not think he has the sense to learn, either. He is not fit for this environment.

Climate Sunday Bobby Jindal Edition

The Governor of Louisiana, a state which experienced a devastating hurricane ten years ago, rather prefers that climate change not be a feature of how President Barack Obama commemorates the recovery from this event.

I don't invest a lot in whether I'm doing anything Bobby Jindal finds appropriate, so I am going to not only talk about climate change, but name this post in his honor. I'm funny that way. Because, among other wild things, the state of Louisiana is kind of disappearing because of sea level rise.  The state loses as much as 50 square miles a year.

That's something former FEMA Director Michael Brown certainly doesn't think is necessarily real science.  Or rather he prefers not to believe that human activity is exacerbating the effect. But real science finds that sea levels are definitely rising. As for the folks who think global warming isn't happening or that human activity isn't causing it, it turns out they are sciencing badly, and real scientists can't reproduce their stupid data. (Reproducibility is totally a real science metric about whether results of a test are valid. This demonstrates that climate denialism isn't appropriately "skepticism" as much as it is "total fail". )

Just this Friday, Bill Maher hosted Rick Santorum on his HBO show, Real Time.  There was a "he said/he said" moment regarding whether 97% of scientists really did support climate change. Well, some would call it more than 97%.

Climate change is real. We need to ensure our infrastructure can support the worst case scenario (in 2005, for a minute, some observers thought New Orleans dodged a bullet, until the levees burst). We need to mitigate our carbon output. And we need to think about how climate change impacts especially the poor and less-mobile among us. We are foolish not to see this as a problem.

Climate Sunday--Megadroughts and Megafloods.

As the NE US is gripped with cold, and especially the New England region is inundated with record snowfalls, I think I might like to make this Climate Sunday post short, although not especially sweet. As needs to be regularly stated, while winters will still be cold, climate change as a result of general global warming is responsible for larger amounts of moisture being retained in the atmosphere, which creates more massive storms. This phenomenon can result in megafloods. But in areas that receive less moisture altogether, the dry ground will be less receptive to even the little rain it gets, so areas such as the American Southwest will experience megadroughts.  States like California and Texas already have a pretty good idea what that kind of water scarcity might look like, and in the Northeast we need to shore up our infrastructure so it will withstand what looks like fiercer storms (a la Superstorm Sandy).

Basically, as far as climate change goes, the time for "skepticism" is over, because we are already in it.

Climate Tuesday--Fire and Water

Wildfires are raging in the west, with one in Alaska currently about the size of the entire city of Chicago. That isn't necessarily out of line for a wildfire in that area, but it is coming early, as conditions make it dry and warm enough to spark a conflagration sooner--and if that dry and warm pattern endures for a little longer it will make future wildfires for the season likely.   What we know is that wildfires are liable to increase under climate change, as some areas become drier and more drought-prone, but the sad kicker to that is that wildfires themselves contribute to the conditions that spur climate change. Some areas are going to be drier because they will lack the snow pack that once lent much needed-moisture to the otherwise combustible terrain. In any event, we've a situation where fires will happen--and forest management in terms of controlled burns comes with risks.