We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So

Re:We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to ... by carpedimebagjoe on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @07:24PM (#26800874)

Uh no, not backdoor climate emergency denial. I survived in the 2018 Paradise fire. The main problem there was no rain for 200+ days, coupled with strong, dry winds in a particular direction, and PG&E's 100+-year-old under-maintained, bare powerlines that broke off their ancient fasteners. The reason for the 200+ days of no rain is likely related to both rising average temperatures, breaking record-after-record each year, and the lack of enough Arctic sea ice pack to stabilize the Arctic's jet-stream. Without a stable jet-stream, it breaks off into disjointed loops and also dips down into lower latitudes. This causes havoc and seemingly more random/variable/intense weather in N America. Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south.

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Re:We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to ... by 29083011397778 on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @08:15PM (#26801403)

> Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south

The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,

> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."

Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,

> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."

With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...

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Re:We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to ... by listenallyall on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @07:31PM (#26800950)

> The main problem there

No, the main problem there was a neighborhood situated in a highly flammable area in the middle of a forest.

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