Sweaty-Heat Control

July 28, 2015

Lowry-industrial_river_sceneNearly clear-as-a-bell with some bright sunshine this Tuesday afternoon on California’s north coast, and although forecasters claim we could see temperatures in the low 80s today, a shoreline breeze will most-likely keep the real sweaty-heat away.

Yet beach-side is still warm (via NWS Facebook page): ‘74 degrees at WFO Eureka at 12:05 PM. That is a record high for the day. The old record was 69 degrees which was last set in 2000.’
In comparison to the interior, with Southern Humboldt in triple digits. A nice, cool, sea breeze has developed the past couple of hours, which makes the rest of the day for us coastal assholes pretty pleasant. Weather-wise, we’re going to be the destination for all  those sweltering under the sunshine of hotter-then-shit.

And as the entire environment continues to warm, the situational-shit will only get worse. The horror of the problem is seemingly a goodly-number of people are still ignorant of our rapidly-corrupting climate.
From today’s Guardian:

The analysis of perceptions in 119 countries found living standards and relative wealth are “poor predictors” of whether someone considers climate change to be a severe risk.
While more than 75 percent of people in Australia, the US, UK and most of the rest of Europe were aware of climate change, far fewer considered it to be detrimental to themselves or their families.
In Australia — recently cited as being a world leader in climate science denialism — as well as the US, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, climate change was perceived to be a threat by just over half of those polled.
In Russia, despite widespread understanding of climate change, less than 50% of people thought it was a risk to them.

The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, found different factors drove awareness and risk perceptions of climate change.
Education levels and understanding the human influence upon the climate was the greatest factor in Europe, while perception of changing temperatures is the key influence in many African and Asian countries.
Authors of the paper, who come from a selection of US universities, say the results show “the need to develop tailored climate communication strategies for individual nations.
The results suggest that improving basic education, climate literacy, and public understanding of the local dimensions of climate change are vital to public engagement and support for climate action.”

Dr Debbie Hopkins, an expert at the social understandings of climate change at the University of Otago, said many people still see climate change as a remote issue.
“People can be aware of it but they see it as a distant risk and don’t engage with it much,” she said.
“This disjunction can negate the feeling that we need to act on climate change.
“In many developed countries we have confidence in our adaptive capacity. We think we can adapt and cope, and in many ways we can do so more than developing economies.
“We also talk about global averages and that’s a difficult term for many people because two degrees doesn’t seem like a lot. That risk seems diminished whereas if you’re living somewhere with extreme variability and extreme weather events, two degrees can seem like a lot.”

And if we here in drought-stricken California await the upcoming El Niño, even a super one may not help us, unless the reach of the event stretches up into the northern part of the state.
From the LA Times last week:

The El Niño hitting the mountains of the north is critical because California’s vast waterworks rely on rain and snow from the Sierra to supply farms and cities.
By contrast, much of the rain that falls in Southern California ends up in the ocean.
Experts are becoming more optimistic about El Niño’s northern reach.
Only three months ago, all of California had an equal chance of a wet or a dry winter.
But in May, the scales began to turn in favor of a wet winter.
By June, the official forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that both Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would be in a region where odds favored wet conditions.
Last week, the line moved north again, and San Francisco was included.
Still, the area north of San Francisco, where California’s largest reservoirs — Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville — sit, has an equal chance of a dry or wet winter.

El Niño can shift the so-called subtropical jet stream from the jungles of southern Mexico and Nicaragua north, over Southern California and the southern United States, said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
“The really big El Niños — we’re not there yet — can soak the whole state. But right now, it’s possible to get a lot of flooding and mudslides in the south.
“In Northern California, you could get below-normal rainfall and snowpack,” Patzert said.
“So that’s why I’m not calling this a drought-buster yet.”

Hopefully, the numbers will prove out a statewide blow-out.

And some old humans-in-trouble news I hadn’t gotten around to posting yet — yes, like all the other environment news, it’s shitty.
From Phys.org:

Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years,” said the study’s lead author, John Schramski, an associate professor in UGA’s College of Engineering.
“The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.”

If human beings do not go extinct, and biomass drops below sustainable thresholds, the population will decline drastically, and people will be forced to return to life as hunter-gatherers or simple horticulturalists, according to the paper.
“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski said.
“These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it.”

Other than that, have a nice cool day if you can…

(Illustration above: ‘Canal Bridge,’ by L.S. Lowry, found here).

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