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Minnesota winters ain’t what they used to be

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A rare Arctic blast is set to freeze a vast 12-state swath of the Midwest, from the Dakotas to Ohio. Wind chills well below -40 degrees F, like those expected this week, are cold enough to cause frostbite in minutes. Chicago is set to have its coldest day in decades; “the coldest air many of us have ever experienced,” according to the National Weather Service. Even schools in hardy Minnesota are closing due to the cold.

As brutal as that weather sounds, it’s a point of pride for locals — and this kind of cold is becoming rarer as the climate warms. In Minnesota, one of the fastest warming states in the country, winters are warming at a rate 13 times faster than summers, according to new research from the University of Minnesota. Extreme cold days are virtually ending in some parts of the state.

Grand Rapids is the heart of the coldest part of Minnesota, and one of the coldest inhabited places in the continental United States. From 1950 to 2000, there were 45 days with actual temperatures below -35 degrees F. This century, there have only been two. Wednesday could be the third.

In Minneapolis, Wednesday’s forecasted low temperature of -28 degrees F doesn’t even rank among the city’s top 10 historical all-time lows. And the bulk of this month was much warmer than normal, so even with these few days of cold weather, January 2019 will likely rank warmer than the long-term average.

And, of course, this isn’t just a Minnesota thing: Hundreds of millions of people will lose access to frozen lakes in the northern hemisphere in the coming decades, according to a new study, impacting everything from the availability of freshwater to core aspects of cultural identities.

In this context, this week’s Midwest cold snap isn’t historic — it’s just a glimpse of past winters. As a Minnesota transplant, I was ready for cold weather when I moved here. What I wasn’t ready for was how deep Minnesota natives’ reverence of the cold goes.

On Sunday night, as the National Weather Service issued a warning for 8 to 10 inches of snow and wind chills approaching -60 degrees F (colder than the top of the Greenland ice sheet), I put out a call to my neighbors for their favorite stories of winters past. The responses were almost poetic.

This winter-worship is acted out in person at The Great Northern, an annual outdoor festival of snow sculptures, pond hockey, and sledding in the Twin Cities. And this weekend, temperatures there are set to soar back into the mid-40s, putting frozen activities in jeopardy.

Young people in Minnesota are growing up with a state that’s vastly different than even their parents’ youth, when it comes to having truly cold winters. Earlier this month, a group of about 100 youth held a meeting with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to demand a Green New Deal, in part based on their desire to preserve the region’s cultural traditions. The cold snap is a window into what makes Minnesota Minnesota — and what we could lose under unchecked climate change.

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Minnesota winters ain’t what they used to be

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Here’s how the government shutdown hurts disaster recovery

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We don’t yet know if 2019 will be a letdown, but it will likely start with a shutdown.

Seven days in, the budget gridlock between Congress and the President over federal funding for his proposed border wall remains at a standstill. The House and Senate adjourned Thursday without a budget deal, meaning the partial government shutdown, which affects about a quarter of the federal government, will continue until at least Monday.

For President Trump, that means no Mar-A-Lago trip for New Year’s. For around 800,000 federal workers, that’s no paycheck for the foreseeable future.

The shutdown caps off a year that’s been marked by several climate-related disasters, from Hurricanes Michael and Florence, which pummelled states like Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, to California’s deadly wildfires. Among the Americans affected by the partial shutdown are disaster survivors — and the federal workers and lawmakers working to help them recover.

The failure to pass a federal spending bill also has repercussions for those who have survived disasters and intimate partner violence, as the Violence Against Women Act lapsed during the shutdown. (Studies show that there are upticks in domestic and gender-based violence after super storms.)

Because of the current shutdown, The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Flood insurance Program has stopped issuing new flood insurance policies and will not renew existing policies that lapse. “FEMA’s decision will cause upheaval for home buyers and sellers across the country,” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said in a statement.

As long as the shutdown drags on, federal employees will be furloughed or required to work without pay. FEMA officials have said that staff will stay on the job, much to the relief of residents in hurricane and wildfire-affected areas.

Folks over at the National Weather Service are also still on the job after an exhausting year. “We’ll be here every night, in bad weather or not,” said Jonathan Blaes, acting meteorologist-in-charge at the Weather Service in Raleigh, in an interview with CBS News. “We’ve been tremendously busy weather wise here, to be honest with you, with multiple hurricanes, floods and now a winter storm. So, I know our staff is tired. And, the holidays are a little harder because they’re away from their families.”

Both sides of the aisle have been using the interruption in disaster relief to shutdown-shame and pressure the opposition. Take Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, a Republican, who tweeted out this burn just before the shutdown (after the House voted to include $5 billion for Trump’s border wall to the budget, forcing another, ultimately unsuccessful, Senate vote).

“What the mainstream media fails to report is that in addition to fulfilling Trump’s request on border security $, the House was also able to secure in the [short-term continuing resolution] $8B in disaster assistance for GA, FL, AL, CA & the Carolinas,” he tweeted.

Representative Scott — who has a record of denying climate change — added in a statement that his constituency needs help: “Georgia families, as well as families in Florida, Alabama, the Carolinas and California, desperately need federal assistance to recover from catastrophic weather events this year.”

If the House-proposed version of the budget had passed, $1.1 billion of the $8 billion allocated for disaster assistance would have gone toward paying for crops lost during hurricanes. Austin says that money is urgently needed before farmers are scheduled to plant crops in 2019.

But just like the larger budget, the allocation of disaster relief is a contentious.. Democratic Representative Sanford Bishop — also from Georgia — said in a statement that the $8 million set aside for impacted rural communities would merely be “token disaster relief.” Instead he asked for $150 million in funding for rural areas hit by disasters. He also called for $600 million for nutrition assistance for Puerto Rico (currently not included in the budget at all) and $480 million instead of the allocated $200 million for the Emergency Forest Restoration Program.

This isn’t the first time this year that a government shutdown has hampered negotiations over disaster relief. It’s the third government shutdown of 2018. (That hasn’t happened since 1977 when President Jimmy Carter was in office.) 2018 began with an immigration-fueled three-day shutdown in January, followed by a brief funding gap in February. Hurricanes Florence and Michael hadn’t yet hit states in the south and southeast, but other communities were still reeling from Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

“The delay in passing a budget with a significant disaster package has been devastating for people in Houston,” wrote Michelle Tremillo, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, in an op-ed for The Hill early this year.

President Trump eventually signed a spending bill in mid-February allocating nearly $90 billion in disaster relief and ending that government shutdown. Some politicians said it still wasn’t enough — Governor Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico said the island alone required $94 billion for recovery from Hurricane Maria.

As to when we may have an end to this shutdown, the House and Senate will return next week to continue negotiations. But it’s possible a solution will get punted to the next session of Congress, slated to begin January 3, 2019, when Democrats will assume the House majority.

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Here’s how the government shutdown hurts disaster recovery

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The future of food: droughts, wrecked crops, and empty plates

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More droughts. More punishingly hot days killing farm workers and livestock. More allergen-spewing weeds. More crop-wrecking storms. And ultimately, more hunger.

According to the recently released National Climate Assessment, global warming is already making farming in the United States more difficult, and it’s likely to get worse. A steep decline in U.S. harvests would spur a worldwide crisis, because grains, oils, and meat from the United States ship to every continent. It would increase pressure to clear rainforests around the equator and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia to grow food. Falling yields would also drive up food prices, making it harder for the poor to afford meals.

“Food security, which is already a challenge across the globe, is likely to become an even greater challenge,” the report’s authors wrote.

The short-term outlook doesn’t look so scary. Climate change means a longer growing season, and conditions might actually improve in places like the Dakotas, where cold weather currently limits farming. Warming should also boost wheat and barley harvests. But rising temperatures and CO2 concentrations will also “enable ragweed and other plants to produce allergenic pollen in larger quantities,” for more months out of the year. And in the long term, harvests of all food crops, including wheat, are expected to decline unless farmers take unprecedented steps to adapt.

Radical adaptation could improve harvests and help solve the larger climate problem. Crops can suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in the soil. The report notes that “agriculture is one of the few sectors with the potential for significant increases in carbon sequestration.”

What would radical adaptation look like? The corn belt might move north from Kansas to Saskatchewan with the weather. Farmers could synch planting times and fertilizer application with precise weather forecasts. Governments might pay farmers for locking up carbon in their fields instead of maximizing profits. They could also provide the funding necessary for scientists to breed climate-adapted crops and animals.

In short, there are plenty of ways that agriculture can provide hope in place of worry. But without action, there’s going to be misery in farm country, according to the report. By 2050, climate change could shrink Midwestern harvests all the way down to the size they were during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when a surge of foreclosures led many farmers to take their lives. And with our global food market, misery in farm country would mean misery around the world.

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The future of food: droughts, wrecked crops, and empty plates

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Another El Niño is nearly upon us. What does that mean?

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A new El Niño is brewing in the tropical Pacific, threatening an uptick in global temperatures and extreme weather.

Scientists around the world have been tracking the looming El Niño — the warm phase of a normal three to five year global weather cyclesince at least May, watching the warming waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean for telltale signs that a large-scale shift in winds and weather patterns has set in.

On Tuesday, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said that water temperatures have now crossed El Niño thresholds, and a full-scale El Niño is likely to start sometime in December. U.S. forecasters place a 90 percent chance of El Niño to form by January.

The last El Niño, peaking in late 2015, was the strongest ever recorded. Rainfall patterns shifted worldwide, causing enormous fires in Indonesia, spurring the largest coral bleaching episode in history, and impacting more than 60 million people worldwide. The coming El Niño isn’t expected to be as severe as 2015’s, but will likely have serious consequences nonetheless.

In response to the news, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report listing several countries at high risk of food shortages. Food crises could worsen or erupt in Pakistan, Kenya, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Mozambique, and the Philippines, according to the report. In the U.S., El Niño often brings torrential rains to California. It can also boost East Coast snowstorms, which, in an era of sea-level rise, now routinely cause serious flooding.

Since El Niño also works to warm the atmosphere, it’s possible that 2019 could beat 2016 as the warmest year on record. As El Niño begins to set in, both October and November have been unusually warm globally, and that trend is likely to continue, according to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at University of California-Berkeley. “It’s not a safe bet 2019 will beat 2016, but it will very likely be warmer than 2018,” Hausfather told me.

There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests global warming is pushing the Pacific towards more extreme El Niños, with amplified effects around the world like 2015’s massive wildfires — another example of a vicious feedback cycle in a changing climate. Not only is El Niño making weather worse; it’s doing it at an ever-faster rate.

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Another El Niño is nearly upon us. What does that mean?

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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

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Northern California faces a new threat in the aftermath of the disastrous Camp Fire: Weather forecasters are growing more confident that downpours, which could bring flash floods and mudslides, are headed for the fragile, scorched terrain.

On Monday night, the National Weather Service issued flash-flood watches for recent burn areas, in preparation for a series of heavy rainfall events arriving between Wednesday and Friday.

The forecast prompted an escalation of ongoing search and recovery efforts in Paradise, with fears that the rains could wash away the remains of fire victims, reducing the chances of families of the hundreds of residents still listed as missing finding closure.

Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, told the Associated Press that the looming rains means that it’s within the “realm of possibility” that officials might never be able to determine the fire’s exact death toll.

As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 79 people are known to have died, 699 are still unaccounted for, and more than 40,000 displaced. The Camp Fire is already one of the deadliest U.S. disasters of any kind in the 21st century. It is the deadliest U.S. fire in 100 years, and the sixth-deadliest worldwide in that same timespan, according to numbers compiled by meteorologist Jeff Masters. The 17,148 buildings destroyed in and around the town of Paradise are nearly equal to all those lost in each of the other top-10 most destructive fires in California history, combined.

Current forecasts call for as much as six inches of rain near Paradise — about as much as the region gets in an average November — arriving in the span of just a few days. That kind of a deluge would not only frustrate recovery efforts, but it could also spawn mudslides and flash floods by turning the newly barren soil into a roiling, debris-filled torrent. That the still-burning fire that started this whole mess could be extinguished in the process is almost an afterthought.

Survivors’ stories are still emerging two weeks after a wall of flames burned through Paradise in mere hours. While the cause of the fire is yet to be officially determined, it’s nearly certain that climate change played a crucial role in how quickly it grew and spread.

It’s worth noting that climate change is likely playing a role in intensifying heavy rainfall in California, too. More rain can fall in a shorter period of time in a warmer atmosphere that’s becoming more efficient at evaporation. In California, most heavy rainstorms, including those in the forecast this week, come via such atmospheric rivers — tropical conveyor belts of moisture streaming directly ashore — and these are growing wider and more intense as the planet heats up.

The fact that two of the extremes of climate change — drier and hotter droughts, and wetter and wider floods — are manifesting as part of the same disaster is a sign of the urgency of the crisis. The Camp Fire is the latest example of the compound, complex tragedy of climate change.

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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

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Michael could be the worst hurricane to ever hit the Florida Panhandle

With Hurricane Michael bearing down on the Gulf Coast, the state of Florida is just hours away from America’s latest hurricane disaster.

As of Tuesday evening, Michael was a Category 3 hurricane, and was expected to intensify even further before landfall on Wednesday afternoon near Panama City, where mandatory evacuations are underway. On Tuesday, President Trump signed a pre-landfall emergency declaration to help speed the flow of aid to Florida.

With Michael’s impending landfall, America is bracing for its fourth major hurricane in just 15 months. Last year’s trio of Harvey, Irma, and Maria made landfall with sustained winds above 115 mph, the criteria for a “major” hurricane.

In the Panhandle region of Florida, a storm like this is exceedingly rare. There have been only nine major hurricanes to approach the region in all of weather recordkeeping dating back to 1850. If Michael strengthens even a bit more than forecast, it could eclipse them all.

But wind speeds aren’t the only important factor here: 2012’s Sandy, which devastated the New York City region, and last month’s Hurricane Florence, which created all-time record flooding in North Carolina, had winds well below that threshold when they hit land. They still caused massive damage due to their large size.

Michael will be a relatively large hurricane, too, and is hitting a region of the Florida coast that’s particularly vulnerable to storm surge and coastal flooding. A huge swath of the northern Gulf Coast, from near New Orleans to Tampa, is currently under either tropical storm or hurricane warnings. Storm surge could be as high as 13 feet, depending on exactly where Michael makes landfall. Just offshore, waves in the normally docile Gulf of Mexico will be up to 40 feet high. The combination of extremely powerful winds and coastal flooding could prove devastating for the Florida Panhandle’s beach communities, like Fort Walton Beach and Panama City, which are set to take the brunt of Michael’s force.

In the past year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, tens of thousands of people have moved to central and northern Florida — and Michael is likely to bring repeat trauma for some. During Irma, half of the region lost power as the storm weakened. Michael is now gearing for a direct hit, while strengthening.

Southwest Florida, which is outside the warning area, is already seeing flooding — in one case, threatening a sea wall that has just been reconstructed after last year’s Irma. Michael is so large, it could even cause coastal flooding on the other side of Florida — in combination with the King Tide, an astronomical oddity that makes October 9 the highest high tide of the year, and the influence of long-term sea-level rise linked to climate change.

It’s impossible to think of record-setting hurricanes like Michael as freak aberrations from “normal” weather. Six of the seven most damaging hurricanes in U.S. history have hit in the past 10 years. In an era of rapid climate change, every weather event — including Michael — is a partial product of current and historical greenhouse gas emissions, and should come as a warning of yet worse hurricanes in the coming decades if we continue on a business as usual path.

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Michael could be the worst hurricane to ever hit the Florida Panhandle

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Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane is already a flooding catastrophe

A rare hurricane is dousing Hawaii, producing flooding, power outages, and washing away roads — damage the National Weather Service is calling “catastrophic.” It’s increasingly clear that the Aloha state is already feeling the effects of a changing climate.

As of Friday morning, Hurricane Lane is at Category 2 strength and continues to move towards Oahu, home to Honolulu and Hawaii’s most densely populated island. Though the latest projections showed Lane’s center remaining offshore, the most powerful side of the storm will still wash over nearly all of Hawaii’s main islands, bringing torrential rainfall for more than 24 hours to a million people.

As Lane approached Thursday evening, civil defense sirens pierced the cloudy Honolulu skies and federal officials pre-staged plane-loads of supplies in the country’s most isolated state, hoping to prevent a repeat of the government’s bungled response to Hurricane Maria’s in Puerto Rico. The Big Island has been hardest hit so far with rainfall exceeding 30 inches, transforming normally tranquil waterfalls into violent torrents.

As a result of Lane’s slow motion, the National Weather Service in Honolulu has boosted its maximum rainfall prediction to 40 inches in some parts of the islands — months worth of rain, even for Hawaii’s lushest locations. In an update late Thursday Hawaii time, the NWS said Lane is “expected to lead to major, life-threatening flash flooding and landslides over all Hawaiian Islands.”

There has never been a hurricane landfall in Maui or Oahu in recorded history. Even if Lane doesn’t achieve that feat, it’s already the closest a storm has ever approached central Hawaii. Water temperatures near Hawaii are as much as 4.5 degrees F warmer than normal this week, supporting Lane’s high winds and heavy rains.

As the waters of the Pacific warm, heavy rainfall has become an increasingly dangerous problem for Hawaii. Lane is Hawaii’s second major flooding disaster this year, after torrential rainfall on Kauai in April produced nearly 50 inches in 24 hours, a new U.S. record. Our warmer atmosphere can now hold more water vapor, resulting in heavier rainfall during both regular thunderstorms and hurricanes. Since the 1950s, the amount of rain falling in the worst storms in Hawaii has increased by about 12 percent, according to a University of Hawaii study.

As the the country’s only ocean state, Hawaii is on the front lines of climate change. Hurricane Lane is the latest example that Hawaii’s warmer, wetter reality is already here.

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Bigger, stronger, rainier: Is Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane a sign of what’s to come?

Hurricane Lane, one of the strongest hurricanes ever measured in the Central Pacific Ocean, is on a crash course with paradise.

At the peak of its intensity late Tuesday and early Wednesday, Lane had sustained winds of 160 mph and gusts up to nearly 200 mph — making it the most powerful hurricane to threaten Hawaii on record. The storm, now downgraded from Category 5 to 4, poses a colossal threat to the islands: The National Weather Service says that “life-threatening impacts are likely.”

On Lane’s current track, Hawaii could see torrential downpours, mudslides, and 20-foot waves. The desert-like parts of the tropical islands could witness a year’s worth of rain, up to 2 feet, in mere hours. Lane should weaken as it approaches, but it could still bring tropical-storm-force winds to almost every part of every island — winds strong enough to tear roofs off homes and cause widespread power outages that could last weeks or months.

Hawaii’s governor, David Ige, declared a state of emergency in advance of the hurricane, which is expected to arrive as soon as late Wednesday night. On Twitter, President Donald Trump urged those in its path to prepare. Hawaiians have taken those words to heart, clearing out grocery store shelves and filling up their gas tanks.

The vast majority of people in the state have never seen a storm like this. Since 1950, just two hurricanes have made official landfall in Hawaii, both hitting the island of Kauai. As of Wednesday afternoon, the most heavily populated islands were either under a hurricane watch or warning.

As the waters of the Central Pacific warm, hurricanes like Lane are expected to become more common — and indeed, the Pacific has seen a flurry of hurricanes near Hawaii in recent years. While the hurricane threat to Hawaii tends to peak during El Niño years, recent research shows that long-term ocean warming, not El Niño, is likely the dominant cause of Hawaii’s growing hurricane threat. And Hawaiian scientists have found these new hurricanes tend to be larger, stronger, and rainier.

A disaster response effort in Hawaii could be hindered by the Jones Act, as Puerto Rico experienced during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The act restricts foreign ships from delivering supplies from the mainland to the islands — meaning that Hawaiians pay inflated prices for basic supplies, which could make restocking shelves and rebuilding homes especially difficult.

In addition to sea-level rise and coral bleaching, hurricanes are increasingly part of Hawaii’s reality. For his part, the governor is putting Hawaii on a path to reduce its contribution to climate change. In 2015, Ige signed legislation making the state the first in the nation to mandate 100 percent renewable energy — a goal it plans to reach by 2045.

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Bigger, stronger, rainier: Is Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane a sign of what’s to come?

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A building El Niño in 2018 signals more extreme weather for 2019

In case you couldn’t get enough extreme weather, the next 12 months or so could bring even more scorching temps, punishing droughts, and unstoppable wildfires.

It’s still early, but odds are quickly rising that another El Niño — the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean — could be forming. The latest official outlook from NOAA and Columbia University gives better-than-even odds of El Niño materializing by the end of this year, which could lead to a cascade of dangerous weather around the globe in 2019.

That’s a troubling development, especially when people worldwide are still suffering from the last El Niño, which ended two years ago.

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These early warnings come with a caveat: Predictions of El Niño at this time of year are notoriously fickle. If one comes, it’s impossible to know how strong it would be.

When it’s active, El Niño is often a catch-all that’s blamed for all sorts of wild weather, so it’s worth a quick science-based refresher of what we’re talking about here:

El Niño has amazingly far-reaching effects, spurring droughts in Africa and typhoons swirling toward China and Japan. It’s a normal, natural ocean phenomenon, but there’s emerging evidence that climate change is spurring more extreme El Niño-related events.

On average though, El Niño boosts global temperatures and redistributes weather patterns worldwide in a pretty predictable way. In fact, the Red Cross is starting to use its predictability to prevent humanitarian weather catastrophes before they happen.

All told, the the U.N. estimates the 2016 El Niño directly affected nearly 100 million people worldwide, not to mention causing permanent damage to the world’s coral reefs, a surge in carbon dioxide emissions from a global outbreak of forest fires, and the warmest year in recorded history.

In Ethiopia, it spawned one of the worst droughts in decades. More than 8.5 million Ethiopians continue to rely on emergency assistance, according to the UN. That includes some 1.3 million people — a majority of whom are children — who have been forced to migrate from their homes.

Initial estimates show that, if the building El Niño actually arrives, 2019 would stand a good chance at knocking off 2016 as the warmest year on record. With a strong El Niño, next year might even tiptoe across the 1.5 degree-Celsius mark — the first major milestone that locks in at least some of global warming’s worst impacts.

Recently, the United Kingdom’s Met Office — the U.K’s version of the National Weather Service — placed a 10-percent chance of the world passing the 1.5 degree Celsius target before 2022. That target was a key goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement because a sharp upward spike in temperature that severe, if sustained, would be potentially catastrophic — causing, among other impacts, “fundamental changes in ocean chemistry” that could linger for millennia, according to a draft UN report due out later this year.

Another El Niño is bad news, but it has been inevitable that another one will happen eventually. Knowing exactly when the next one is coming will give those in harm’s way more time to prepare.

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A building El Niño in 2018 signals more extreme weather for 2019

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Snowmaking goes high-tech as ski resorts adapt to rapid melting.

Producing artificial snow used to be a desperate move taken by ski areas within striking distance of surfing beaches. Now, the practice is commonplace, even high in the Rocky Mountains and the Alps.

As a headline in Powder Magazine read last year, “Like It or Not, Snowmaking Is the Future.”

Utah’s Alta ski area has doubled its snowmaking capacity in the last decade. To make sure all those big machines and water pipes don’t detract too much from the scenery, they’re painted to blend in with the background, according to a dispatch from Wired. At Snowbird, also in Utah, each snow gun has its own weather station, allowing the machines to start, stop, and adjust water flow all on their own.

California’s Squaw Valley spent $10 million on machines that automatically change their water pressure and amount several times a second. Heavenly Ski Resort, at Lake Tahoe, can cover 3,500 acres with fake snow.

All these machines run on electricity, which comes from the still-mostly-fossil-fueled grid. That means making fake snow increases the rate of The Great Melt, which in turn creates demand for … more snow machines. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle of job security for these snow-bots: Is this the way Skynet becomes self-aware?

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Snowmaking goes high-tech as ski resorts adapt to rapid melting.

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