If you ever wonder what el nino /la nina means in terms of weather for your hemisphere, here is a heuristic:
La niña is the opposite of el Niño.
El niño (spanish - "the boy") is the name used by inhabitants of the area it hits the hardest, South America (mostly spanish speaking).
The western part of South America has its usual rainy season from late Dec to April.
The "el nino" boy is a reference to birth of Jesus. Chrstianity is the predominant faith in most of south america, so christmas is celebrated by all. Fishermen would thus say Jesus' birth brought extra "gifts" in the form of a stronger and longer rainy season, starting from late Dec.
So the the Spanish baby jesus boy brings brings miracle heat and rain upon his birth.
Invert the weather for la nina.
Now you you know what it means to you if you live in an affected area.
Edit - took out wrong statement about northern hemisphere
Didn't that work out in the last 2 cycles of La Niña? I read about drought in South Africa recently but I admittedly know nothing about weather patterns there.
There are some towns and cities which are currently running out of water in the dams and are heading towards day zero (no water in taps). Cities like Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) are near day zero and a large portion of the Eastern Cape has been experiencing a drought from 2015 to 2020 and then from 2021 to current.
Water tankers are delivering water to various areas in Port Elizabeth as well as numerous smaller towns which have run out of water.
During Cape Town's water crisis we were queuing to collect water from the mountain spring that the local brewery graciously allowed us to collect water from.
Depends on which part of South Africa you're referring to. Cape Town (Western Cape) had a much publicised drought 2015-2018 [1], but that's been broken. This drought was partial attributed to El Niño.
At the moment dams in the Eastern Cape are empty [2]. My mother's taps in Gqeberha are on a trickle only. No idea whether (El|La) Niñ[ao] is responsible here, but maladministration of available water has also been mentioned.
In summary, in ZA we look forward to La Niña, so this article is good news for us.
Thanks, I remember the Cape Town drought with the semi regular mention of Day Zero in articles. I recently read about another Day Zero in the Nelson Mandela Bay region and thought it was a continuation of the earlier drought. I didn't realize the distance and climate differences. Good luck to your mother.
This description is entirely missing its effects on eastern areas like the Philippines and Indonesia and the monsoon season in India, and cyclone formation over both the Atlantic and Pacific basins. Also misses the physical explanation as to if winds over the equatorial Pacific ocean are causing the water to turn over or not (and the associated pool of cool upwelling water off the coast of central/south America in normal / La Nina years).
Not a good translation, it is the kid (a female kid). Problem is that we (spanish speakers) have letters to define the gender of the noun. The girl would be 'la chica'.
”Kid" vs "boy"/"girl" isn't well defined in English: I would say they both refer to people of the same ages. If what you mean by kid is a very young child, prefer "baby" or "infant".
There absolutely are regional differences with these particular words. People will understand if you use either one but they’ll know you’re not of that place if you use the less common one.
It’s been intense here (SE Australia). It’s just been raining for weeks now without stopping. I think we’ve had 2 sunny days in the last 4 weeks? Crops are dying, lettuce costs $10 each (if you can find them), internet keeps dropping out cos of shittily buried lines, drains overflow and flood the streets constantly, and the kids are going up the walls.
I know it’s normal for lots of areas of the world (and I’ve lived in those places) but we’re generally not equipped for it here.
I follow an Australian hydroponic gardener and general tinkerer on YouTube named Hoocho and he has documented a bit of the mess the weather has caused lately. It’s extremely disheartening.
One thing he noticed is that the water has pushed ants to find new places to live (including his growing enclosure, where they’ve made a home in his electrical box), and they’ve brought aphids to farm along with them. Obviously this along with extremely wet weather is terrible for his crops.
He has mentioned the $10 lettuce (initially $4, then $6, then…) and somehow it seemed so unlikely still, like there must be somewhere you can still buy normally priced lettuce. But I guess not. It’s wild how quickly food supplies can get gutted by climate fluctuations.
Suffice to say, I’ve begun hydro gardening for fast turn around essentials with the idea that in a time of crisis, perhaps I can avoid buying $10 lettuce. Thanks Hoocho, you’ve made my 3D printer far more useful and made hydroponics way more fun.
The supply chain logistics which let asparagus importers get stock from Peru in the off season are the same ones which means they can't just ring up on a whim and ask for some more, in the "on" season. Australian Quarantine and Customs Inspection service is pretty strong on vegitative matter, especially live vegitative matter: You need a LOT of paperwork, to be able to bring fresh produce into Australia.
And this local supply disaster noted, we kinda like it that way.
What's wild to me is that apparently there's only one place on this continent that grows lettuce. It seems like a bit of an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket thing to have one valley in QLD(I think) that does lettuce for the nation, and they have some bad weather and suddenly we're all sans-lettuce.
Many rural areas in Ausralia have small scale local area market gardens, here in W.Australia most everything I eat is sourced within a 15 - 20 km radius be it flour, olive oil, lambs, oranges, etc (even the odd banana and a fw mangos) - but that's a far cry from the dedicated single crop volumes required to supply cities and for export.
Worldwide there's an issue with regions being devoted to mainly a single crop intended to supply tens of millions across several cities, often overseas.
Good when it works, better have a backup alternative when that fails.
Lettuce likes some pretty specific conditions. If there's one area that's perfectly suited to growing lettuce with the minimum resources (fertiliser/water etc) then grow it there. Better than trying to grow it in the desert or somewhere much too cold.
If Australians go without lettuce for a month or so nobody is going to die. Eat rocket, spinach and cabbage instead.
There was big social media/news thing when KFC announced they were replacing lettuce with cabbage on their burgers.
A lot of unhappy campers there - tbh I think if they went further and made it a nice slaw with a sharp/tangy dressing then it'd be a massive improvement to their usual soggy, greasy chicken, and undercooked/limp chips (fries)
I'd seen a decent modular 3d printed tower for growing things like lettuce and it turns out Hoocho is using a newer and more advanced style of the same idea:
Thanks for the mention of Hoocho, hadn't heard of him and binging his videos right now as I've started building an aquaponics setup and a greenhouse to grow more of my own food.
The ants thing is very random and very real too. My paint cupboard in the shed (where I keep all my spraypaints/chemicals) became an ants nest a few weeks ago thanks to the rain. I opened it up and every single surface was crawling with a full blanket of ants. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Things we're going to see more and more of I guess.
He really motivates me to be more engaged and creative with the skills I have. I’m good about certain things, like I’ll go out in my shop and build things with wood, but I’ve been very slow to get into CNC and printing work despite my interest. I think the stuff he does made it click. He’s just making little clips, plant pots, and other small utilities, but he’s using them to create new and interesting solutions.
In other words he uses a little to do a lot. It’s really cool. Such a great way to lower that barrier and make 3D printing fun and useful.
Good luck with your projects, too. I added a small greenhouse years ago and it was so worth it, and it’s become a major part of how I plan my garden and think about growing.
It’s actually going great! I do have it under lights, though I hope to get the hang of it and eventually set up some vertical systems outdoors to make them more cost effective. Maybe next spring.
Right now my lights, air pump, and fan cost around $25/month to run. Nutrients are remarkably inexpensive (perhaps pennies per head of lettuce assuming they mature on schedule). All said it’s maybe a $30-35 per month hobby which might generate far more than that value in real, edible food. It’s surprising how many plants you can fit in a 1m x 1m grow tent when you use hydroponics.
I’m sure I’ll mess up several times before I get it working smoothly, but I’ve loved the learning process so far.
Before this I got kind of hooked on growing micro greens. It’s such a great gateway to indoor gardening, the results are awesome and it’s very low effort.
Edit: I hadn’t worked out the math yet, but my “break even” would be growing just a few bundles of herbs and 3 or 4 lettuces per month. The system has 24 plant sites so by all means, if I don’t totally blow it, I should be plant-profitable pretty soon! And that’s excluding the micros which develop under the same lights. The cost of micro greens is wild.
That's amazing to read. Thank you for sharing. The economics that you describe are really good! And I can see it is a rewarding experience to grow your own. Keep growing!
People consider PLA filament food grade, but the only plastics touching nutrients or plants are explicitly rated as food grade.
I don’t worry as much about the exposure to PLA so much as I worry about the layer adhesion being poor and causing build ups of bacteria or disease that I can’t clean out of my system.
Anecdotally, including us, anyone you talk to here is dealing with mold issues, and it is often a very expensive problem to fix. Having no let up period from I think Dec -> May where the property can dry out, in addition to rain bombs causing roof leaks.
Many roofers have automated messages saying "we're too busy, no point". There is backlog in getting mold tested. Also affects general trades who don't give dates, they just come when the whether is good enough.
The mould issue are intense. I live in the Northern Rivers region. A lot of houses here are situated in forests. These forests are immensely powerful and are fuelled by massive fungal and lichen growths.
I got flooded out of my house and took 3 months to find a new rental.
I watched as the fungus invaded my house and started to eat everything. Mould on the walls, fabrics, paper, rubber, leather. Anything that had any sort of digestible organic matter on it went mouldy. Glass had a think layer of spores. Black loud coming down from the ceiling (this is a very bad sign, your property is seriously sick if you have black mould on your ceiling).
This whole area has been dealing with this stuff since they started building here, every house is affected. These wet periods just highlight the danger. Our country doesn’t have the resources to clean this issue up. That means millions of people are inhaling spores all day every day.
Spores won’t kill you, but they will ruin your life. They get into your lungs and cause health issues. I was sceptical about it until I moved to a dry area. My health shot way back up!
Good luck getting any tradies let alone building supplies.
I can get my lettuce local though for $3 a bunch from the farmers market! So there’s that :)
Yes, I'm in the sunshine coast and have experienced all of the above. We were cut off from school by flooding for about a week, a drive that usually took 15 minutes was taking at least an hour because of the long detour. And our roof has leaked. At least we didn't need to put water in the pool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the mould ... that was the worst. I'm going to smell of vinegar and clove oil for the rest of my life.
They are, and we've found them effective (thankfully my area in Brisbane has been mostly dry this past month, so we seem to have it under control). They've been so popular they were selling out of the supermarkets for a little while; when the rain was dogscatting down some wag on reddit asked what we rename 'The Sunshine State' and my suggestion of 'The Vinegar and Clove Oil State' was universally well received.
> Anecdotally, including us, anyone you talk to here is dealing with mold issues,
Is the mold a recent thing related to el Niño or has it been a problem for a while?
In the US at least, many houses built in the 90s-2000s have mold issues because they were built without proper water vapor permeability and also with materials that are also not moisture resilient.
This is even an issue in dry areas like California.
Homes tend to stand up to harsh rains, as that is normal. What is not normal is 100 almost consecutive days of the heaviest torrential rain I have every witnessed, similar to a tropical wet season.
With this much rainfall, you get your building tested like never before. Our back lawn was flooded most of the time, with the water seeping into the building whatever way it can. There are new roof leaks, persistent puddles that seep into the brickwork. A stream of water running like a river around the property. High humidity means nothing is drying out. And so on...
That makes sense, and rhymes with climate change. What are the mitigation steps that can be taken at this point without completely reconstructing the house to exist feet above the rainy season water level?
This year seems the worst we've ever seen in our parts of Eastern Australia - we've also had some of the worst ever floods thanks to La Nina (and climate change), so that's more water than ever. And mould being a living thing keeps spreading when not managed, so it's lingering long after the floodwaters receded.
Seems to me like Australia either has catastrophic droughts or catastrophic rains. The engineer in me wants to create massive reservoirs during the wet spells to carry over the dry spells. But I guess it's not that easy?
I believe those are called aquifers aka geologic water reservoirs. There's a lot that can happen, especially in urban areas with lots of hard scaped surfaces, to encourage rain water to enter aquifers instead of run off into the water shed or sewer/storm drain system.
Climate science is in its infancy. No I'm not a "climate denier": we can can be reasonably confident that the science is correct in asserting that we are in a period of climate warming, caused in large part by increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, to the most part caused by the accelerated burning of fossile fuels.
But the predictive powers of climate science is low, which this article (among others) illustrates. We know we are in a period of relative high flux (compared to previous centuries), but we don't know what comes after the immediate future.
People may draw different conclusions from this, mine is that we need to get away from the thinking that there is a "natural climate" that we can revert to. We need to stop the focus on how we can influence the changing climate and start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios.
For example, whatever scenario that wins out will likely create massive migration pressures. How do we deal with that, humanely?
It's not reverting to a natural climate, it's trying to not make it worse by pumping even more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The adaptation we have to make is finding a way to keep most of our comforts in a sustainable way, and that won't come from recycling plastic or driving an EV, but from industry and regulation.
I agree. These tools should make our crash landing softer than a laissez faire policy. But
1. I'm pessimistic about the true intent of the powers that be. While paying lip service to climate action there is hardly any real action: renewables are just an extra energy source on top of the existing cheap fossil fuels that give nations some independence vs the gulf states. There is a scramble for every newly discovered oilfield - and it's not because they want to prevent the extraction. And
2. If governments succeed against all odds in phasing out fossil fuels we would still be faced with massive climate change sooner or later - be it a new ice age or whatever. These are things that are out of our control - we need to make sure we can adapt, not try to control it.
I'm actually not against oil extraction, it has many, many uses besides burning it as fuel. Renewables could fill that gap. I agree that governments seem to drag their feet, tossing the hot potato to the future.
About the next big climate change, you're right, those are inevitable given enough centuries. If it happens, people will deal with it in their time, but let's try not to cause one ourselves.
> We need to stop the focus on how we can influence the changing climate and start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios.
It's much easier to tell people to buy a Tesla than to tell them their children/descendants will have a much worse time on this planet.
There are many things we could do to adapt and curve the issue, but it looks like we're going to suck every last bit of resource of this planet until it kills us.
> we need to get away from the thinking that there is a "natural climate" that we can revert to.
Very hard disagree. This is about all that matters. We've turned up the bunson burner heating up the Earth. What we don't know is _precisely_ how the entire climate system will respond to it, but it is a pretty good guess that if we leave it long enough and keep cranking it up that it'll eventually get really bad. We already see the weakening of the temperature gradient between the arctic and lower latitudes and the weakening of the jet stream and the formation of atmospheric blocking that is creating both large and persistent record heat spells in the northern hemisphere summer and cold snaps in the NH winter. We need to stop making that worse and rolling the dice to see how bad it'll get (which is a dictionary-definition _Conservative_ viewpoint).
I think it should be clear that we agree on that. My gripe is with the notion that we might be able to turn back the clock to some sort of pristine natural state - and keep it at that.
We can't and we won't. There is no such pristine natural climate "balance". We have enjoyed a few millennia of climate that has been exceptionally conducive to our present way of life (based on crops and livestock) - during which our species has prospered. This as been an anomaly in terms of geological ages, and instead of putting our efforts into calling names and casting blame for the current predicament we should concentrate on how to continue surviving under new and probably harsh conditions. That's all.
The situation in Lake Mead is horrific. I’ve been watching a YouTuber that has been filming various locations around the basin for the past couple months. It’s one thing to hear “the lake is doomed” and another to see it disappearing as the days go by:
All that people waiting for hours in huge pickups, with the motor on, in order to put their huge boats in the water, while complaining how the water just go down and down every year. There is a metaphor there somewhere. I get some Rapa Nui vibes.
Oddly, California officials are trying to decide right now whether to save Lake Mead or the Salton Sea. One is a stinky polluted accidental lake and the other is the primary water source for Las Vegas. What the heck?
"He said the district will again seek binding guarantees from the federal and state government to help with the fast-drying Salton Sea before agreeing to reductions to preserve Lake Mead."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sophies-choice-water-off...
> Oddly, California officials are trying to decide right now whether to save Lake Mead or the Salton Sea.
Not California officials.
It's the Imperial Irrigation District, which is the water utility for largely agricultural Imperial County, which is inland from San Diego. They grow a huge amount of produce there, so the water rights are primarily for farming, not for restoring the lake, which is fed by farming runoff.
So a better comparison is farming in the Imperial Valley vs Las Vegas.
incredible energy consumption, its impacts on marine life, projected sea-level rise and the cost of the resulting water itself -- with that cost being passed on to customers.
I read another article that phased the commission's argument that water recycling would be cheaper to rate payers and less environmentally destructive.
I think the government views the stinky polluted lake as more of a shield over the pollution that is keeping it from being flung everywhere in the next dust bowl.
We learned as a result of the dust bowl that many aspects of the environment that we thought were useless were actually providing a stabilizing affect on the local environment. This is how we got infrastructure projects like the great shelterbelt[1].
Given this historical context the situation looks like the inverse to me. Like how the hell can the government prioritize keeping an artificial oasis supplied with enough water for a city in the middle of the desert vs prioritizing keeping a man made disaster caused by our ancestors from affecting large swathes of the country?
Off topic, but is it common to just bring your boat with you for recreational purposes? The whole idea seems pretty wild to me. Where are the boats for the rest of the time, just in people's backyards? Or do they have a permanent pier spot in some other, more stable body of water like you'd usually expect with boats?
Why would you count in 3 year slots? You're saying that it could happen on 1950, but not 1951, and not 1952, but again on 1953?
What if there was La Niña on 1952, 1953 and 1954? Your method does not account for that. Natural events and climate do not adhere to someone's made up "mod 3" date statistics.
Let’s try going from contrary. You said 2 in 72. Imagine a situation when it’s 72 in 72, which means, 72 years straight, each year had a three-year streak. This doesn’t make any sense. Surely the maximum amount of three-year groups in 72 years is far fewer than 72.
Hmm, good point. I suppose you could count `0,1,1,1,1,0` as 2 occurences of 3 consecutive 1s, but we'd probably call it a single quadruple niña event instead, so I see where you're coming from now.
Really starting to feel dangerous to live anywhere in the US southwest. Lake Meade approaching deadpool and massive wildfire nearing my house this summer. Plus the government is led by people who refer to much of the southwest as “fly over country” doesn’t help.
All eight Senators from CA, AZ, NV, and NM are Democrats, and I assume they "believe in climate change," although I'm not sure whether simply believing is going to make much of a difference.
that was a reply to the suggestion that "maybe" the area should elect senators who believe in climate change. we already have. it wasn't a suggestion that this is actually the answer.
CA and NM both have Democratic "trifectas", and it can reasonably be assumed that they are dominated by anthropogenic climate change believers.
However, I would dispute your claim. The majority of the land (and thus resources) in the SW is under federal, not state control. Ergo, federal representatives play an outsize role in deciding questions central to the SW role in and sufferer of climate change.
I'm not posturing when I say there is no way people are going to be able to vote their way out of this in a sensible fashion. Not only are smart people in a minority, some of them are in the 'fuck you' bloc which is the most sizeable and quite motivated.
Rather cause and effect. We need efficient mitigations to problems occurring right now, not gestures that would have an effect 50 years from now, if only the rest of the world followed suit.
Yeah exactly. We need to solve this current problem with immediate solutions (if those exist), but we need need need to start thinking 50 years into the future now with the choices we make.
The mitigations are to stop development and water intensive agriculture, and anyone who runs on that platform won’t be elected. The problem will, painfully, solve itself when water supplies are exhausted.
I agree with you regarding the ratios you mention. Importantly, the Colorado River Compact was established during an atypically wet cycle, and even with ag reductions,
I’d argue no additional pressure should be placed on the watershed due to long duration droughts becoming more frequent. We might yet have to bring water from elsewhere, no further pressure should be incurred.
We would barely have to cut agricultural use in order to completely cover the water needs of doubling the entire population of the US southwest. Yes, surface and ground water sources are "stressed", but residential use is only going to get more and more efficient on a per-capita basis. Even though growing population creates more absolute need, in as world where agriculture is flood-irrigating fields or spray irrigating alfalfa (losing an outrageous amount to evaporation), we should start with the "easy" problems first. Pay farmers to install drip systems, for a start.
It does not change the fact that the area is becoming unliveable without massive investment.
Why should the rest of the country subsidize these people lifestyle choices to live in an inhospitable area?
I’d be willing to support subsidizing moving them to a new location that’s better suited to living in, but I have no interest in helping pay for people to spit in reality’s eye so they can live in a place they have emotional/cultural ties to
1. "the area" is not homogenous. the northern parts of AZ and NM (even CA) to some extent are climactically and geologically quite unlike the southern parts.
2. humans have lived in the area for thousands of years. Yes, it doesn't fit into a northern European notion of "the kind of place humans should live", but it fits entirely into the southern European, north African and Arabic culture and living patterns. These cultures (along with the native Americans ones that flourished here for millenia) have developed sophisticated ways of living in this sort of climate and landscape.
3. it's not unlivable, it's just unfarmable (note that this is different from subsistence ag. or gardening).
> “the area" is not homogenous. the northern parts of AZ and NM (even CA) to some extent are climactically and geologically quite unlike the southern parts
Well then it sounds like they have a local solution to the issue and don’t need to bother us
> humans have lived in the area for thousands of years.
And then humans changed the environment.
> it's not unlivable
If it’s not unliveable then they should be able to support themselves, no?
Unfortunately this thinking applies to many places in the US when it comes to weather and climate disasters.
Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently.
What place is so perfect for people to live in that doesn't face any challenges from climate change?
Probably no where permanent. They’ll have to move to the locations that fit their current needs much as I and many other economic migrants.
If they do not have the resources to make the move, I have complete empathy for them and am willing to vote for politicians who will allocate my tax dollars towards helping those people out of their current issue.
If, however, they refuse to move because of some non economic reason then that is a lifestyle choice they will have to shoulder the burden of. If one of my representative politicians tries to use my tax dollars to help them continue their untenable lifestyle choices I will vote for their competitor.
Also
> Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently
Don’t include Texas in that. The other groups have had weather systems of increasing severity that are massively expensive to build against. Texas had weather they declared was unforseeable when they had hit the temperature multiple times in the previous 20-30 years and refused to spend a relatively small amount of money to winterize their generators and mitigate the problem.
Residential is only 7% if you put the burden on the producer (agriculture) and not the consumer (people).
Every time that such numbers are shared, most people quickly jumps to "farmers should pay more attention / switch cultures". Very rarely someone will talk about the impacts: a change of diet for consumers, most likely with less meat (though depends on the area).
It is easy to assume that the water you consume only comes from the tap, but 1kg of beef meat costs 15,000 litres of water to produce [1]. Moreover, at a larger scale: "One third of this volume is for the beef cattle sector; another 19% for the dairy cattle sector." [1].
So instead of trying to find the scapegoat that supposedly consumes most of our water, we should all remember that we, meat eaters, are one of the main culprits here !
People will buy roughly the same amount of almonds whether they're produced in California or Ohio[0]. Claiming that we have to attribute agricultural water (ab)use to the consumer is just absolving the producers of any and all responsibility for destructive, short-sighted decisions about where and how to produce.
[0] Or any other place with a reasonable natural amount of rainfall. Nothing special about Ohio for this purpose.
I live in NM. The agriculture sector here produces less than 8% of both the calories and pounds of food consumed within the state. Most of the beef production in NM is exported out of state (and country).
So if the "burden is on the consumer", it's on people who don't live in US southwest, and that has to stop. The fever dreams of the 1930s/40s bureau of reclamation have done so much damage.
We need to compare the imported water from food and the exported water from food.
Also, considering NM is a bit tricky. With 7 inhabitants /km2, NM is a very rural state, so it is expected that it would export its food.
I would be very interested in the water balance for the US, knowing that we import a lot of soy for cattle.
Maybe, and you're making more of a cynical statement than a question, but if there's a crisis then it's worth asking if the government controlling the water supply of the Southwest isn't working out at all. I believe that's the case. I'd like to try full privatization.
I've seen the pictures of the "bathtub" lines on Lake Meade and agree it looks scary however I keep seeing conflicting reports of how imminent the dead pool threat is. Here's an example I came across a few weeks ago. I don't know what the politics of this newspaper are but the person speaking is public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Region. It's hard for me to reconcile the math provided with this individuals rather sanguine statement.
>"Lake Mead would reach dead pool if the water level dropped to 895 feet, said Patti Aaron, public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Region. As of Wednesday, the level of Lake Mead is 1,049.65 feet, she said."
>“We’re not in danger of hitting dead pool,” Aaron said. “It’s not an imminent problem. It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow, and it’s something we don’t think is going to happen at all. We would take every action to not have that happen.”[1]
Perhaps this is also politics? There doesn't seem to be a lot of slack in that system and it almost seems like this person is doing a disservice with that statement.
Edit-I know far too little to extrapolate from that. It looks like this time of year and into the fall is when the water recedes due to agricultural use. It’ll be interesting to see the elevation at that lowest point.
> Plus the government is led by people who refer to much of the southwest as “fly over country” doesn’t help.
The people who (you assume) don't use the term "flyover country" are the people stopping Congress from spending money to fix environmental crises like drought.
Even so, the White House has ordered studies and gotten Congress to spend a lot of money on the Southwest already[1].
What else are you looking for, exactly? My understanding is that the current crisis is mostly due to agriculture and water rights, and I don't know how they could legally legislate agriculture in a state. That is the responsibility of the state's own government.
The bureau of reclamation started building dams and irrigation systems in the 1940s. They enabled current patterns of agriculture. They could disable them too,
Desal can work for residential use in cities. But desal for agriculture is supplied by mother nature and it's called "rain." Replacing agricultural rain with man-made desal would require a 10x-1000x scaleup in cost and energy and area over the desal plants now feasible. In most cases it would probably be cheaper to move the farms to rainier areas.
I still don't think I understand how that helps Midwestern and Southwestern states other than California, unless you mean the goal is to give California a way to stop using as much.
Water markets are broken primarily because of water rights, some of which were allocated centuries ago via local and regional contracts. They are nearly impossible to untangle, and state governments are required by law to honor them.
Water rights were not allocated centuries ago. All water managements systems (more or less) in place when the US took control of the southwest were overridden and replaced by US-style private property rights, a totally different system than exists east of the 100th parallel/the Mississippi. Consequently, they date back at most 1.5 centuries, and in general, less than that.
The main agreement affecting the SW today is the Colorado River Compact, which dates back only the 1930s/40s. It is far, far from ancient history, and was demonstrably created in a state of willful ignorance of actual precipitation patterns in the region.
Can you walk me through how the Federal Government could use eminent domain to untangle the water rights? What exactly is the Government going to expropriate as part of eminent domain? There are seven states that depend on the water from the Colorado River.
> Can you walk me through how the Federal Government could use eminent domain to untangle the water rights?
Eminent domaining the water?
The federal government at the highest level(SCOTUS) have no problem using eminent domain for things as frivolous as an unfinanced mall with no strings attached for the _private_ developer. They certainly wouldn't pause to eminent domain this if they cared.
Unfortunately these are regions of the country that are populated by large groups of people who continually elect local politicians who will blame any convenient boogeyman on their problems. Look at this in 2021 their AG sued the Biden government over not doing enough to stop pollution causing climate change because his administration didn’t crack down on _immigrants_[1].
What exactly is political leadership supposed to do here? Kowtow to the demands that will cost money and absolutely not solve the problem? Or ignore it until the people living with the issue decide to accept that it’s real rather than blaming whatever let’s them continue their lifestyle without any change?
You didn't actually answer my question. It sounds like you might be confused on what eminent domain is. Eminent domain provides the Federal government with the power to take private property and convert it into public use. There is no single piece of land here. This is not only not land it's literally water that flows across the land. Further it's not private property. The Colorado River basin covers 250,000 square is almost 1,400 miles long. Not only do seven states depend on it but Mexico also has rights to it under The Mexican Water Treaty of 1944. To compare it to appropriating land for a mall is absurd.
You’re ignoring that they have the power to do so, they just don’t have the will. We have built mega projects before and taken land for it. This would be no different
I'm not ignoring anything. Eminent domain is not at all applicable here. You seem to be ignoring that eminent domain applies to private land in order to make it available for public use. The land involved is already public, it belongs to the states. Honestly you really don't seem to have much of any meaningful argument or explanation other than repeatedly using the phrase "eminent domain" incorrectly.
That is incorrect. The federal government can exercise eminent domain against the states, and that is not an old idea. I found it last referenced in a 2021 opinion authored by Roberts[1]
The pertinent text is
>Early cases also reflected the understanding that state property was not immune from the exercise of delegated federal eminent domain power. See Stockton v. Baltimore & N. Y. R. Co., 32 F. 9 (Bradley, Cir. J.). The contrary position—that a federal delegatee could not condemn a State’s land without the State’s consent—would give rise to the “dilemma of requiring the consent of the state” in virtually every infrastructure project authorized by the Federal Government.
It literally calls out that major infrastructure projects would not have been feasible without this power
> Geoengineering. I know that if they won’t do it someone will.
that's true for any terrible idea. in many way's terrible ideas is how humanity progresses. but it seems bad to double down on the same old ("more engineering") to solve the problem. Guess the alternative "spend less" is very unpopular because it's something anyone can do but it actually hurts.
I'm all in favor of "spend less / consume less / grow less / be more sustainable" ... trouble is: seems like most decision makers are not ... wildcat geoengineering is no longer a matter of if, but when.
Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you referring to iron rust being randomly distributed in the ocean or along the coast? All that will do is cause an algal bloom and die off, killing off even more of the depleted marine life. That won't sequester any carbon, at best 0.05% if you do it in a way that forms the sediment. Otherwise, you're just killing what little marine life is left for giggles.
I don't know what news you're plugged in to but I'm not worried at all living in the SW US. Phoenix and Tucson had by far their wettest rainy season in decades last year and are projected to have another wet season this year. And the state of AZ uses less water for 10x the population than it did in the 1950s.
It doesn't matter if historical per-capita water usage is down if the lower basin states are continuing to overdraw their water allocations from the Colorado river system.
If and when the Colorado River Compact implodes, it's going to be immensely painful to all the states -- but especially Arizona, which doesn't have the same senior rights as other states under prior appropriation.
Knowing nothing about Phoenix or Tuscon water management... are there reservoirs for Phoenix or Tuscon that stored this rainfall coming off the local mountains from your wet rainy season? It's hard to untangle where the water comes from, but if not, I'm not sure how it helps.
Correct. And most of the time, the federal government is controlled by the politics of flyover country. It has the Supreme Court, has a pretty solid grip on the senate, wins about half of the presidencies, and is looking to sweep the upcoming election.
It's go-to solution for dealing with climate change is pretending it doesn't exist (and punishing state employees who say otherwise), and with freak weather events by blaming renewable energy, so I can only expect that things in that region can only get worse, before they can get better.
If you live near the wilderness urban interface expect this. Spreading out into mountain/desert suburbs causes issues that you would've never noticed before because well... millions and millions of people never lived there before.
This especially applies to any sort of libertarian psycho who wants to live in the middle of nowhere with minimal govt and then when nature shtf they bitch about the govt.
People in NYC and SF NEVER have anything but noble and well intentioned thoughts and comments about places like Texas? lol what an absolute load of shit
You know, I was going to let this go, or just post a snarky "totally not what I said, but you do you, ace," but no. What you did was take what I said, rephrase it to something that I absolutely did not say, and then attack your own rephrasing.
Was he supposed to prove that this is true in every situation for all time or were we talking about general trends? Also New York at least sends aid to Texas in their time of need[1] unlike in the reverse when Texan senators make sure no aid goes to New York in the event of a natural disaster[2].
Actions speak louder than words and I don't see New York as a state treating Texas as a state to abandon while Texas is advocating for anything against NY.
My main objection to their response was that when I said I'd never heard 'flyover country' used unironically (which remains true, by the way, I haven't), they restated it as "People in NYC and SF NEVER have anything but noble and well intentioned thoughts and comments about places like Texas" and attacked that. They could have just left it at, "Well, I have heard it used unironically," and it would have been fine. Instead, they went on to create exactly the kind of judgmental snobbish coastal elite straw man my original post was complaining about.
I’ve started using it unironically but only after years of that section of a country attacking my part both physically and politically.
It’s flyover country to me because I refuse to give them a dollar in economic activity and will not land in their state. I have spent additional money to take longer flights that put the money into states who do not talk about killing mine.
The sort of ironic thing for me is that I've really liked the time I've spent in Dallas, as recently as this year, and loved Lawrence, Kansas, when I was in a residential writing workshop there some years back. Kansas City, Missouri, was great when I was there for a world science fiction convention. If the politics in Texas weren't on track to go full fascist I'd probably have given Dallas a serious look at a place to retire to in a few years.
But, yeah, my whole beef with "flyover country" is, to put it less gently than my original post (trying to be fairly neutral didn't work because I got attacked for what I didn't actually say anyway), I've historically almost always heard the term being used by conservatives to justify liberal-bashing. It's not California politicos who go around saying "flyover country"; it's QAnon-spouting bible-thumping tea partiers rallying their troops by yelling "Nancy Pelosi calls this 'flyover country,' are you gonna let her?" who do.
They are called wild fires because they burn in "wild land". It doesn't describe whether they were started by one human, one government or a lightning strike. It contrasts with fires in villages, towns and cities where what's burning is mostly human constructed.
Some researchers argue that the record is simply too sparse to show clearly what is going on, or that there is too much natural variability in the system for researchers to spot long-term trends. But it could also be that the IPCC models are missing something big.
In spite of all the hand-wringing about Global Warming -- which should more accurately be called climate change -- we don't know as much as we so often seem to think we do. The actual data sets don't go back as far as most people imagine and errors in assumptions for models are not uncommon.
I'm actually pretty amazed that it seems to go from east to west as well, I always thought that the weather system was strictly an American thing that went from south to north.
There's unexpected solar winds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31851572, and a rare triple La Nina, in a similar time frame. Does anyone with more knowledge on meteorology and the sun's effects on it than me have some reasoning and/or evidence on if these two events are connected or not?
From about December through to March it felt like it pretty much rained constantly in Sydney, and when it wasn't raining it was grey. You got a few gaps somewhere in there I presume, but I don't really remember having summer.
I definitely remember discovering the shoddy shortcuts taken in my roof and how un-waterproof they are.
In Anchorage, Alaska we’ve had less than an inch of rain in the last 41 days. We had a 13-acre wildfire in a park in town yesterday that they estimate they can’t fully extinguish for a few days. Statewide, over one million acres have burned so far this season. It is crazy dry and hot.
Your state is just catching up to California, Utah, Oregon, and others. Less rain, no controlled burns, insufficient resources for land management (clearing brush, etc.), Higher temperatures, and now you have a recipe for disaster. I'm sorry for your loss.
We just had one of the wettest, coolest springs in a long time here in the PNW - really haven't had a spring like this since 2011. And then right on cue the summer switch was turned on a couple of days ago and we're expecting to be in the 90s for a few days (up to 98 on Sunday). It's kind of jarring to go from ~60F cloudy&wet just about every day for the last couple of months to 90s over the course of just a few days.
Here in the high desert of northern NM, we've just been through the opposite. After a month of highs in the 90s, the last week has seen daily highs in the 60s, and finally some rain. It is weird but we're delighted.
Meh, that kind of weather change is normal for the inland American southeast. We had a temperature change a few years back in excess of 40 degrees in 18 hours.
La niña is the opposite of el Niño.
El niño (spanish - "the boy") is the name used by inhabitants of the area it hits the hardest, South America (mostly spanish speaking).
The western part of South America has its usual rainy season from late Dec to April.
The "el nino" boy is a reference to birth of Jesus. Chrstianity is the predominant faith in most of south america, so christmas is celebrated by all. Fishermen would thus say Jesus' birth brought extra "gifts" in the form of a stronger and longer rainy season, starting from late Dec.
So the the Spanish baby jesus boy brings brings miracle heat and rain upon his birth.
Invert the weather for la nina.
Now you you know what it means to you if you live in an affected area.
Edit - took out wrong statement about northern hemisphere