As our Abrupt Climate Change Catastrophe becomes more extreme the leading cause of death on the planet will be humans hitting their Wet Bulb Temperature.
“It has been widely believed that a 35°C wet-bulb temperature (equal to 95°F at 100% humidity or 115°F at 50% humidity) was the maximum a human could endure before they could no longer adequately regulate their body temperature, which would potentially cause heat stroke or death over a prolonged exposure.”
“Wet-bulb temperature is read by a thermometer with a wet wick over its bulb and is affected by humidity and air movement. It represents a humid temperature at which the air is saturated and holds as much moisture as it can in the form of water vapor; a person’s sweat will not evaporate at that skin temperature.”
“But in their new study, the researchers found that the actual maximum wet-bulb temperature is lower — about 31°C wet-bulb or 87°F at 100% humidity — even for young, healthy subjects. The temperature for older populations, who are more vulnerable to heat, is likely even lower.”
Humans can’t endure temperatures and humiditie’s as high and previously thought”
Short cut to calculating Wet Bulb Temperature
“In a recent study with Matt Huber, we showed that it doesn’t take that many degrees of global warming to permit peak heat summertime heat stress to (occasionally) become unsurvivable, in many parts of the world that are currently highly populated.”
“We came to this conclusion by considering a meteorological quantity called the wet-bulb temperature. You measure this quantity with a normal thermometer that has a damp cloth covering the bulb. It is always lower than the usual or “dry-bulb” temperature; how much lower depends on the humidity. At 100% humidity (in a cloud or fog) they match. In Sydney and Melbourne, even during the hottest weather, the wet-bulb usually peaks in the low 20’s C. The highest values in the world are about 30-31C, during the worst heat/humidity events in India, the Amazon, and a few other very humid places.
Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) – The University of New South Wales Sydney NSW Australia, paper shared here: ‘What is Wet Bulb temperature?‘
Orange – Heat stroke probable, Red – Heat stroke imminent
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Mamals especially will be suseptable to hitting their wet bulb temps. Sadly, that’s us as well, not just the 200 species that go extinct every day.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/07/falling-out-of-trees-dozens-of-dead-possums-blamed-on-extreme-heat-stress?fbclid=IwAR3sCd2Z8f7Z6q6Up0S755TSEk5RxbVA2aUN3tSecfoK52HTJnKtZtqso74
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Around the 12 minute mark in this chilling ( pardon the pun) episode of Radio Ecoshock Alex’s guest discusses nuclear power stations having to shut down in heatwaves in Russia, so much for Nuclear being an alternative to fossil fuels.
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KEVIN NOTE: my dial-up disconnected while this was posting and didn’t do anything when I re-connected. The page was froze. Please delete if it doubled!
This may be what knocked me down three weeks ago. I’m on the ‘dry’ side of Washington State but the humidity in these mountains has been abnormally high even with the somewhat cooler temperatures (compared to last year). Haven’t cracked 38C/100F here yet but I’ve been pretty close. It was around 35C/92F and maybe above 50% when I dropped after coming back inside after cutting firebreaks for a couple of hours. Today it’s 32.5C/90′ in the shade and 23%…but I was cutting firebreaks last night after dark! I learned my lesson no doubt. Stay the hell out of the heat ’cause I’m getting too old for that shite!!!
But having to breathe in 53C/123’F in India in JUNE? Look up the city of Chennai and the drought and water crisis they are in. Trainloads of 2.5 mil litres of water each being brought in daily, and all the reservoirs are dry. Combined with “a daily water deficit of at least 200 million litres” and the monsoons (IF they happen on time, no telling with the crazy Jet Stream) is months away.
I’m sort of guessing that area of the planet may be where the Great Dying that is coming will probably start. Too many humans, too hot, not enough water, and radical Wet Bulb Effects are already in progress.
Here’s a thought. The Colorado River Aqueduct comes from Arizona to Riverside SoCal. I have a friend that just drove a Uhaul to Salton Sea (people moving from here to there no less paid him to!) and stopping for the night in Ridgecrest where the 7,1 earthquake and hundreds of aftershocks continue to hit. Said the motion of the ground was causing seasickness and the locals in the motel and local restaurants were very, very nervous. The aqueduct is stretched across east to west maybe a hundred miles south. What do you think is going to happen when a major quake hits (it’s overdue) and suddenly there 14% less water coming in? Maybe the Federal Government will be hauling trains…oh wait the railroads get destroyed by large quakes. And the roads. And it’s getting hotter earlier in SoCal these days…might have to let all those lawns in the desert go, eh? There I go, being the cynical surfer dude again!
sealintheSelkirks
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More evidence from the London School of Economics and Political Science;
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/danger-of-chronic-heat-exposure-for-people-in-developing-worlds-largest-cities/?fbclid=IwAR3UXPuPOnec1roLFuH6ypyIDcm_kH9MdtnLPEIOWu78-S-uTvx0dZtum0Y
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Another domino falls, this time in Paraguay
http://laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=351988&CategoryId=12394&fbclid=IwAR2-RA0v5r0g-oAV9k4dDML54Gyn011XdOanUQuYbs6f4vMUsS78Ja6nQdQ
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Whoa, that was an interesting quick read as I didn’t know that country is boiling at the moment, and then you put up the 2nd article about a newly discovered pattern in the atmosphere that links chains of heat waves across the planet. Why am I not surprised that they are all linked somehow? It’s a small freaking planet after all…
May we live in interesting times, eh?
This has an excellent graph linking parts of the world tipping points; this then that then those:
Climate Tipping Points Are Closer Than We Think, Scientists Warn
From melting ice caps to dying forests and thawing permafrost, the risk of ‘abrupt and irreversible changes’ is much higher than thought just a few years ago.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27112019/climate-tipping-points-permafrost-forests-ice-antarctica-greenland-amazon-nature
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I lost the link somehow but there is a sat pic of a major crack in the Arctic icepack shifting (a moving pic) that was completely freaky! It was at: https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/ but I can’t figure out where though I cut & pasted it in my picture file. It’s near an Arctic survey ship of some kind that continues having weird happenings all around it…
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And this:
The Scariest Climate Stories Emerging From the Arctic
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-scariest-climate-stories-emerging-from-the-arctic/
This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment.
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I freaking read too much.
sealintheSelkirks
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Thanks heaps for your contribution to this dialogue
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Deadly Chains of Heatwaves Are Linked to Newly Discovered Pattern in The Atmosphere
https://www.sciencealert.com/deadly-chains-of-heatwaves-are-linked-to-newly-discovered-pattern-in-the-atmosphere?fbclid=IwAR3cH33ymc-7VT9hMpvEphP6b3wCCuxJNbbtMxPnqg3DYQ0qEq1AbSg1CJc
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Birds suffer from hitting their “Wet Bulb” temperature as well;
https://www.seniorsnews.com.au/news/birds-falling-dead-from-trees-in-heat/3908210/?fbclid=IwAR151nw-s973dkS6Uz80LkVseG3wFIKZRCCG0y3oU5YcSgvFWQgGnHTbhNo
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Another wide ranging interview from my co-host on Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM
Around the hour mark Guy discusses Wet Bulb Temperatures.
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More evidence should the reader need it!
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/fatal-heat-humidity-emerging/?fbclid=IwAR3chojm-H9tUfrPicecfFRj_52iD8EgfU-bM4-YbFFXGPniXZ-QVcn4lc8
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“Intolerable bouts of extreme humidity and heat which could threaten human survival are on the rise across the world, suggesting that worst-case scenario warnings about the consequences of global heating are already occurring, a new study has revealed.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/climate-change-global-heating-extreme-heat-humidity?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3N4L4eCroPhXKoup4iUrhjxlA0Re-XzrTg2fm6zCFMhqfJyPX_RC4-9Pw
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Robert Hunziker has now added his thoughts to “Wet Bulb Temps”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/12/the-wet-bulb-peril-has-arrived-way-too-early/
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Wet Bulb temps are discussed below;
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The latest from Radio Ecoshock on Wet Bulb temps;
https://www.ecoshock.org/2020/05/lethal-heat-warning.html?fbclid=IwAR2f8mRZalXvLRz6OElrM_sRBlPCxD1Cj6MKn_lDrV5UiI5uzf1VSz3KmJA
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And it just keeps getting more and more scary, doesn’t it? And is it me? But seems like this reality is running at us faster and faster. This came up yesterday:
10C Above Baseline
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/22/10c-above-baseline/
Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand.
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It has been raining here for two weeks at 49’N in the Selkirks. Since June 2nd it has rained 15 days. Mostly T-storm blasts, heavy overcast days, windstorms blowing my 30 meter red firs & ponderosa to 60′ of arc. Incredibly heavy deluge rains, too, often all night. In between, the few sunny days, there have been temps up to 81F/28C. Hottest April on record last month really does bode very ill for this coming fire season because, bluntly, I can’t keep up with the undergrowth’s growth the last few weeks! Everything stays so wet (night temp down to 3C) that pushing the mower just clogs it with wet everything. Still doing firebreak clearing, too, when it’s dry enough. Using a chainsaw when everything is wet I find seriously stupid… But then I think about this Pandemic and realize it is going to rip through fire camps and decimate the crews so I have to keep plugging away at it.
Too many people I know, including my oldest stepdaughter, did or still do fight fires for a living and I know how crowded together those big tent camps get. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier coming in. Oh my.
Then there was that monster hurricane blasting Bangladesh the other day before the season started…and, oh, the Arctic:
It Hit 80 Degrees in the Arctic This Week
https://earther.gizmodo.com/it-hit-80-degrees-in-the-arctic-this-week-1843606717
AT LINK: video: Nothing to see here. GlF: Climate Change Institute
This story will provide important context for the headline, and I encourage you to read it—but really, the headline tells you what you need to know: It was 80 degrees Fahrenheit above the Arctic Circle this week.
A little farther south, in Siberia—you know, the region of world we reference when we want to connote something cold—it was 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Arctic sea ice in the neighboring Kara Sea took the deepest May nose dive ever recorded. Oh, and random swaths of the region are on fire. Things are extremely wrong.
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This is bad. This is real, real bad. And all we get to do it watch it come. Sucks to be us, eh Kevin?
sealintheSelkirks
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Sooner than previously thought!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/16/climate-deaths-heat-cdc?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3xp2IwMAl5aFzXOA6KbUCoLS71g1d048rqcAAgmEOouiIZcaKsxZhrFVI
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Wed 17June
Since 2May I have had some amount of rain fall for 36 days!!! Still going, too, from deluge t-storms to all night rainfall to just daytime showers to squalls blowing in. That’s counting today’s massive T-storm at 4pm after the smaller one at 11am actually missed me as I watched it go by n/w to s/e around 11am.
Hot bright sunshine blue sky not a cloud in the sky all morning. I put out the cannabis plants into their garden area, then this wall of dirty dark gray front wall came barreling in but was just to the south of this property by just a few miles. It went by with bolts flying and thunder booming and gray swaths of rain falling from the mass. And I was still in sunshine.
The one that hit in the late afternoon at 4pm was a freaking doozy. This is the dry mountains of Washington State, I’m 300 miles from the Cascades across the very dry Washington Scablands, and it’s not supposed to be 60% humidity here. Bolts blowing out of the sky everywhere again, major deluge rains, and I beat it home from Chewelah by 10 minutes which gave me enough time to lash things down.
This is nuts. Back to sunshine and above 28C today. Not quite as hot as last year but I’ve already hit 34/35C and that was in early May…
Faster and faster we swirl around the drain, Kevin. I’m getting dizzy!
I may have already posted this somewhere on this site but…don’t remember so:
Living With Global Warming
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/16/living-with-global-warming/
I modeled mathematically the thermal imbalance of our biosphere, which we call global warming, so as to gain my own quantitative understanding of the interplay of the two major effects that give rise to this phenomenon. This is a “toy model,” an abstraction of a very complicated planetary phenomenon that teams of scientists using supercomputers have been laboring for decades to enumerate in its many details, and to predict its likely course into the future. (continues at link)
sealintheSelkirks
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Should anyone need more evidence;
https://www.weather.gov/media/safety/heat/2020-WBGT-Handout.pdf?fbclid=IwAR26Myd16OiO3Gxrbt63cq5c7NrhBbHNYadkY7af8QZI8D-kV1rgvc9Tg7A
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More stuff you may have not read:
In Dozens of Cities East of the Mississippi, Winter Never Really Happened
Something called the Arctic oscillation helped keep the polar vortex at bay. And then there’s climate change.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04032020/winter-southeast-united-states-polar-vortex-warming
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Fading Winters, Hotter Summers Make the Northeast America’s Fastest Warming Region
Connecticut’s average temperature has risen 2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, double the average for the Lower 48 states.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26062020/hotter-summers-northeast-united-states-warming
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This one seems…optimistic. I expect it will happen much quicker thinking about how the term ‘exponential’ just isn’t a concept the human mind grasps very well:
50 Years From Now, Many Densely Populated Parts of the World Could be Too Hot for Humans
Unless steps are taken to check global warming, up to 3 billion people will find themselves in areas too warm for human comfort, a new study finds.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04052020/hot-climate-niches-50-years-human-population
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‘Genocidal Negligence’: New Democratic Climate Action Plan Criticized as Woefully Inadequate
The roadmap “underscores the establishment’s continuing refusal to address this existential crisis with the scale, speed, and intensity required to ensure a future for our next generation.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/30/genocidal-negligence-new-democratic-climate-action-plan-criticized-woefully
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Locust Swarms, Some 3 Times the Size of New York City, Are Eating Their Way Across Two Continents
Climate change is worsening the largest plague of the crop-killing insects in 50 years, threatening famine in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032020/locust-swarms-climate-change
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Yeah, as if we need more evidence! Kevin, I’ve been hit by another t-storm this afternoon, after a whole 4 days without rain. Five days since the last massive lightning storm/heavy deluge downpours. Nobody has ever seen anything like this last couple of months of rain. It just DOESN’T do this here. So far there hasn’t been any of the predicted lightning, and I haven’t heard any thunder off in the distance but the music has been pretty loud in the house today. Maybe around dark, the t-cells are obviously building out the window and getting darker as I write.
sealintheSelkirks
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“Humans’ ability to efficiently shed heat has enabled us to range over every continent, but a wet-bulb temperature (TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit, and much lower values have serious health and productivity impacts. Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. However, a comprehensive evaluation of weather station data shows that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported a TW of 35°C and that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979. Recent exceedances of 35°C in global maximum sea surface temperature provide further support for the validity of these dangerously high TW values. We find the most extreme humid heat is highly localized in both space and time and is correspondingly substantially underestimated in reanalysis products. Our findings thus underscore the serious challenge posed by humid heat that is more intense than previously reported and increasingly severe.”
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838?fbclid=IwAR2s2-jsilU_TnM199Na0LV73WMbIcTaDIq-mgkvvYsQHINsHMhEZA7UOwI
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Yeah, well, I’m really glad I’m on the dry side of Washington State at this point because my thermometers read 106F/roughly 42C by 4:30 in the afternoon. It was take your breath away hot. It’s on the northside of the woodshed under the eves, no direct sunlight, so I’m assuming air temp not sunlight on skin temp which felt much worse. Yesterday was 103F, the day before 101F. At least the humidity is pretty low…and the nighttime temps start kicking in as soon as the sun drops behind the Huckleberry Range to the west.
Last night I was out watering my cannabis garden at 1am. Trying to not shock the girls with the quite cold well water, so I’m letting them cool down for a few hours beforehand. The fabric grow pots I make are drying out but they are doing wonderfully well as long as I put lots of water in to get them through the next day.
It was about 60’F last night, felt wonderful, and all my east-facing windows go open as it gets dark because this property is on the west-facing south side corner part of the ridge of an east to west heading down into the valley creek-fed canyon, and the cooler air starts trickling in after dark. The house cools down by midnight and keeps that air in for most of the day if I get up early enough to close up the windows. I’ve been trying to do that lately!
Today’s inside temp hit 79’F but only because of an old style metal-body swamp cooler/floor fan in the music room facing the front room that also had a ceiling fan going, plus the dojo/meditation added-on room on the house’s n/e corner that opens into the music room had a big floor fan blowing air towards it, too. Upstairs in the office is miserable, southside of the house and blasted by direct sunshine all day. Even with an identical swamp cooler going and a Bioaire tower fan on the other side of the office blowing at it the room was not habitable without a wet towel around my neck. I stayed downstairs all day… Never had AC anywhere I have lived, always have used fans and swamp coolers.
We went to extreme heat danger notices yesterday, but this evening they were gone from the weather site! I have no idea WTF is going on as it’s now saying a high of 91’F tomorrow. After 106 today? Highly unlikely!
Okay, about all I can take up here because it still is pretty dang warm. Inside thermometer says 27C…the cooler night air hasn’t made it in yet. Back downstairs to the more comfortable environment.
seal
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Coming ready or not;
https://theprint.in/health/humans-are-crossing-wetbulb-temperature-limit-new-climate-change-research-shows/427069/?fbclid=IwAR17RAlfgeGfXWUyvNYjtN56Cc1YtD8a1DruKUci9icBNENFjMQIX01rqxg
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“Climate change: Summers could become ‘too hot for humans'”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53415298?fbclid=IwAR3JhERBysSXF8Dk5ve1HnOsQR5y3r1PPpI-g-RfyGkIwKqUISQkS9nkxP0
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Well dang, it’s already becoming too hot for me! It’s been…35-40C+ this summer after a seriously strange sopping wet Spring that started in freaking January at my elevation. But haven’t had rain in months now. And yesterday I got slammed but not by rain!
A freaky howling windstorm came through in the morning with 50mph sustained at least, with higher gusts. Weather.com was calling for 48mph but I think it was higher here in these mountains. Canyon effect channeling and increasing the wind speed I’m sure. The 3 meter + conifers were bending through 30′ of arc, broken limbs and twigs and needles flying sideways, and major dust devils whirling across the property. Big dust devils! Mini tornadoes.
The gusts just shredded tarps into tatters, picked up and lofted everything possible into the air (too much grit in the eyes, had to put on safety goggles), and the wind was trying to lift the roof off the house which I need to get up on and check today along with the shop roof. Even blew a couple of my cannabis girls over in their pots, poor dears! Power went out immediately, about 11am after the initial wall of wind slammed into the area, and that was not just up here in the mountains. Ate soup and crackers on a butane camp stove reading by camp light last night sitting in the kitchen with the window open to suck out the residual gasses…
The weirdest thing about this storm was it came down from Canada. Some off the wall low pressure front racing over the border heading south/southwest. Huge black/dark gray cloud masses brought extremely low humidity so an instant Red Flag Alert for catastrophic wildfire danger came out, and there were fire crews everywhere battling downed power line arcing over the entire my county. So many that the electric utility didn’t have enough people to send out which wasn’t good news when a fire truck went screaming up the dirt road past me and stopped within hearing distance. Then my neighbor called saying there was a bunch of fires on the next property that has been being butchered of its trees this last month and one went over taking the power line to the house so the new owners were in deep stinky with it (trees need other trees to survive windstorms after all!), and she said it was arcing and snapping like a snake with a broke back so bad the fire guys couldn’t get close to it. There were no crews left to come shut it off…and the winds were freaking screaming through. Looked around my house and wondered what I would be able to save… in the three minutes it would have taken to burn me down from there if the fire would have run…probably just the dog and the backpack/tent/bag Earthquake bag I’ve kept since the Alaskan quake evacuated us off my beach as a kid…
Didn’t happen. I’m happy about that. It did keep heading down into the valley but n/w to me instead of due south into me. My retired biologist neighbors were directly between me and the fire, and his wife called again and let me know it shifted directions. They were out watching it across the creek canyon…
So it’s been so hot here for months that a huge cold front got sucked down from Canada. How odd is that? I expect (and hope for) those Canadian ‘Yukon Express’ blizzards in winter because it brings incredibly light powder. But this is September and the wind pattern is only from the s/w or west. Always. And humidity has been higher this year, no doubt about that, but this drop was radical.
The BBC article pretty much sucked to read by the way, and I moved this far north for more than one reason 16 years ago. And Covid does nothing but make it all so much worse. People with AC are breathing in everybody in the building’s exhalations. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier…bad enough in summer but what happens when it starts snowing? Of course it will get cold and the heat will go on and people will congregate where they can to be warm and….oh my hell.
sealintheSelkirks
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Sam Carana
TEMPERATURES THREATEN TO BECOME UNBEARABLE
Many people could face unbearable temperatures soon.
Temperature anomalies on land in the Northern Hemisphere (red) are spread out much wider and they are more than 0.5°C higher than global land+ocean anomalies (blue).
Red and blue trends are added to show the potential rise due to El Niño, changes in aerosols and feedbacks kicking in more strongly as tipping points get crossed.
The second image shows two such tipping points. Crossing the latent heat tipping point threatens to cause the methane hydrates tipping point to be crossed.
Keep in mind that above images show temperature anomalies from the 20th century average. As an earlier post points out, when using a 1750 baseline and when using ocean air temperatures and higher Arctic anomalies, we may already have crossed both the 1.5°C and the 2°C thresholds that politicians at the Paris Agreement pledged would not get crossed.
Also keep in mind that there are further tipping points. As discussed in an earlier post, at least ten tipping points apply to the Arctic.
From the post ‘Temperatures threaten to become unbearable’, at:
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/09/temperatures-threaten-to-become-unbearable.html?fbclid=IwAR2gRDrcinMyYOvjcV6TeRYIzlzo6VCm9Jgs_Ob49lW1YPEOuXi3SvfyE_4
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Yeah, there has been a couple of articles out recently on this that I’ve read, from other sources. CommonDreams had one I think, and maybe another was on InsideClimateNews. Sure isn’t something to look forward to as I’m just not a ‘desert heat’ kind of guy. Too much the old surfer I guess. When the thermometer reads 90’F/32C I’m kind of looking for shade to sit in with a book and a jug of cold water (or chilled sun tea!).
That recent 50’C/121’F temperature in Los Angeles a week ago…Woodland Hills in the Valley. How the hell does one survive that without AC? And in a city with all that heat-soaking reflective asphalt and concrete glaring it back at you? It’s like living in Arizona, millions of people in Phoenix and when the power goes out, if it happens in summer, they’re all freaking dead within a couple of days! Along with those incredibly stupid cotton fields they are growing there in the desert…madness!!
The hubris of our species, eh?
I’ve been talking about the total evacuation of SoCal/AZ/Nevada/Utah for a long time based on the science I was reading, but those figures were expected to be decades in the future. Somehow I don’t think that applies at this point; it’s closer than that.
I’ve never lived in a house that had AC. And when I walk into a building that has it I…don’t like it. I don’t know if it’s the machine smell to the air or what, but I just don’t like it. If it’s that hot…don’t live there is how I look at it. Here in these dry mountains I use swamp coolers and fans which at least doesn’t change the air, just wets it down and moves it around so the body can cool down better. It does get damn hot on this side of the state, no doubt about it, but AC feels like it’s shocking my body when I walk into somewhere with it running, and then it shocks again when I walk back outside. Adapted somewhat to the heat seems like a better idea for some reason. And, as I said, too hot I find a spot to sit!
Temps went to 82F/28C yesterday, even under the smoke cloud which is thinning a bit and starting to let in more heat. It is, after all, September here and what were the normal patterns of weather…aren’t valid any longer. It stays hotter and dryer longer now, into October and even into early December some years. I’ve seen the changes in the 16 years I’ve been here, my retired biologist neighbor has seen massive shift in the 50 he’s been here! He used to talk on NBL about it many years ago…
sealintheSelkirks
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Cooked from the inside out;
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-and-humidity-are-already-reaching-the-limits-of-human-tolerance/?fbclid=IwAR2cDA372AWdK9-HmFhsf3R3kgspZ0aYbv4J1niwXbEomGe3cZ891U_S2iE
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Yeah, like a microwave.
My last post here on 17Sept pretty much said the same thing as this article, didn’t it? I mean, 49’C in the LA Basin? It isn’t just Pakistan that is going to see the great dying from Wet Bulb, it’s going to spread north from the equator in both directions and already is. Death is coming, enormous piles of it.
And Tropical Storm Eta is about to hit Florida tonight and possibly as a Cat 1 or 2 hurricane. Heat…more and more heat. What does Eta make, 27, 28…30 hurricanes? Have we broken the all-time Atlantic hurricane record yet? I know it’s pretty dang close.
Sometimes it seems like Scientific American publishes articles on what we here already understand is happening. Or is it just me?
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Sprinkled snow late last night as the old blind girlie dog took me out for a walk. She doesn’t like to be out alone in the dark in the woods, and after watching a mama cougar and her two kits crossing the south end of the property near the treeline early yesterday morning, I can’t say as I blame her.
Sprinkled snowflakes a couple hours ago, too, but nothing is sticking. Broken cloud, very cold windchill in the lite breeze outside. Weather.com shows snow tomorrow night through Tuesday afternoon with highs not much above freezing. Coat and boot weather, no doubt about it. And Covid infections are spiking in these NE Washington mountain counties as they are all across the US. Hey, wait a minute! Trump said it was all going to go away after the election!
sealintheSelkirks
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“after watching a mama cougar and her two kits crossing the south end of the property near the treeline early yesterday morning, I can’t say as I blame her. ”
How cool, how many people could say that ??
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Unfortunately not that many people would really care, Kevin. Reach for their cell phone, take a picture, and then go back to watching the corporate logging company tear the rest of the forest down as they check their ‘likes’ on their FaceBlech page seems to be the norm. It is what I’ve watched happening in these mountains for the last 17 years here. That there still are such moments shows the tenacity of life, though, right?
Kevin, the ridgelines in all directions look like a meth-head’s mouth, huge gaps of missing ‘teeth’ everywhere since the cute idea of leave a row of conifers across the tops to make it look like there is still a forest isn’t working out too well. I wonder what bright bulb thought that idea up?
Singular big trees in a row without a forest around them to support and break the wind in strong weather systems that are standing on the windiest damned places tend to fall over. After two or three years of this after a clearcut (and yes they are CLEARCUTTING) all that is left is a few stragglers that make it even more obvious what they came and did.
Big sigh. Sorry to be so depressing. I did get to see mama and the two kits who were rambunctious enough to be pawing and chasing one another around their mom as they walked through. Happy little kids taking a walk with mom…
sealintheSelkirks
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It will get us all eventually but a always it’s the poor who suffer first.
https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/phoenix/2020/12/19/phoenix-area-people-experiencing-homelessness-heat-can-fatal/6531345002/
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“Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy person sitting still in the shade with access to water will succumb to the heat.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-and-humidity-are-already-reaching-the-limits-of-human-tolerance/?fbclid=IwAR14p8b8gcP4v_jOCG11gj3zvVsWOo4DVeUWUvp9m8YAlx8yxqGjzp1-cM0
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Yeah that works as long as the electricity is on !
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/heat-refuges-may-be-one-solution-to-western-sydneys-climate-emergency/ar-BB1cJcfa?ocid=sf
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Does this mean that, being the only place with solar panels in the area, that I’m going to have visitors wanting to control the lightning when the power goes off permanently? Or after some wildfire burns through so many lines that the power is down for months? Probably. Won’t that be fun!
Rain, and more rain, this year. I’ve had maybe a little more than a foot of snow at my elevation so far, but days and nights of continuous downpour and above-freezing temperatures and it is mid-January and it’s still freaking raining. Not the 4 feet of snowpack around this house from Nov-April that use to be considered a ‘normal’ winter. Each year for the last 6 or 7 it has started raining earlier but this year it never really stopped even though there have been a few snowstorms (mostly melted off now or icy crap on top of thawing ground and mud). The snowline on the mountains at 49’N Latitude around me is way far above the valley at this point.
I’m not really looking forward to summer fire season this year. Not at all. Because I’m thinking it’s going to be worse than last year’s heat which was worse than the year before which was worse than…every previous year. There won’t be any ‘heat refuges’ built around these rural poverty-stricken mountain, that’s for sure. Big sigh.
sealintheSelkirks
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“Dangerous conditions in the tropics will unfold even before the 1.5C threshold, however, with the paper warning that 1C of extreme wet-bulb temperature increase “could have adverse health impact equivalent to that of several degrees of temperature increase”.
The corporate media continuing to pretend that a limit of 1.5C can still be met when in reality using 1750 as a baseline we’ve already passed it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heating-tropical-regions-human-livability?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1v3j0hSeNcFtAMQPa8pjFMu3e8z7FJiVmQGtZPqWUw-UUehmSHka7vfIs
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The paper authors used an index called “wet-bulb temperature” based on weather station temperature and humidity data.
https://climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/brief-periods-dangerous-humid-heat-arrive-decades-early?fbclid=IwAR2a_Te_eRr2VLYUaPM5P4KP8j4lXgjxB2f99myJCUybshFmZGZU5NrY1Gk
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53C in the Philippines which normally has high humidity
https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1140281?fbclid=IwAR0mbVRk5lZZjxE3NfnrXI5vL2kJX37ORaAbLRYaJ2Eisplwt-AwVx5SVt4
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More from Nick Humphrey
https://www.patreon.com/posts/emergence-of-and-51776846?utm_medium=post_notification_email&utm_source=post_link&utm_campaign=patron_engagement
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Yeah, 53C and that’s at ocean level in the Philippines on the 28th but the hoped for monsoon will drop temps. Unless it doesn’t and just makes the air wetter. With Humphrey saying extreme heat events have increased rapidly, it makes one wonder just how long people are going to stay in areas that are increasingly subject to these kind of temperatures. Too freaking hot to live becomes that tsunami of migration, eh?
And down in Cali the feds have cut to zero the water in the Delta. Not enough water. This continues to get too read everywhere, doesn’t it Kevin?
As California’s Drought Worsens, the Biden Administration Cuts Water Supplies and Farmers Struggle to Compensate
The driest year in four decades for the state’s water supply hub is hitting its richest agricultural valley hard.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052021/california-central-valley-drought-water
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Here it’s feeling like summer, 80s today I think though I didn’t check the thermometer in the middle of the afternoon. There’s been wind (a lot of it lately) so it’s still cooling things off a little in the shade.
The adopted old husky girl is having a very bad day as I heard her crying in the kitchen where she had gone down. Carried her outside and she’s more bones and fur than muscle now, and she’s been under the old apple tree all afternoon in the shade. Seems to be where she wants to be. Sides are heaving to breathe, and her back end doesn’t seem to be functioning very well. Her heartbeat feels fluttery. I keep going out to rub her ears and talk with her, bringing her water. She’s probably around 14 or 15 and the cataracts have gotten worse in the last couple years so she truly is essentially blind at this point. The new brown girl dog has been laying with her all day…they became friends the day I brought the golden retriever home nearly 6 months ago…
I have a bad feeling about the heat this coming Summer. It’s been far above ‘normal’ (as if that means anything any longer!) for months….
sealintheSelkirks
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“The Earth Policy Institute (EPI), based in Washington DC, warns that such deaths are likely to increase, as “even more extreme weather events lie ahead”.
The EPI calculated the huge death toll from the eight western European countries with data available. “Since reports are not yet available for all European countries, the total heat death toll for the continent is likely to be substantially larger,” it says in a statement.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4259-the-2003-european-heatwave-caused-35000-deaths/#:~:text=At%20least%2035%2C000%20people%20died%20as%20a%20result,as%20%E2%80%9Ceven%20more%20extreme%20weather%20events%20lie%20ahead%E2%80%9D.
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Not surprising that they expect the death toll from that heat wave to be higher than already counted. And that many countries haven’t really wanted to add the numbers up because if they did, they’d have to change their way of living and can’t have that because profits would go down. Heavens no, that would be a disaster!
But I see that they are still quoting the outdated, always behind, politically corrupted, and very conservative IPCC predictions of coming attractions. We know that the IPCC self-censors due to the politicians who having veto power over what the scientists say! So the end result always is nothing they say will have the urgency that is probably needed.
Remember when it used to be ‘by 2100 this will start happening’ then it went to 2070 when bad stuff might come about. Then somehow 2050 became the magic date before the Arctic melts, Antarctica starts collapsing, and the Gulf Stream breaks down. It’s always ‘in the future’ and we don’t have to worry about it now because, after all, there’s stuff in the stores to buy and the giant cruise ships are starting up ‘covid-free’ and everybody who is vaccinated can now (this is off the radio) “not wear a mask or physically distance, and can resume all the activities one did before the Pandemic.” It’s like the rest of the world, and all of the radical mutating new strains of this disease, don’t exist for those in the US. I’m quite simply flabbergasted by what I’m seeing and hearing, but then this all ties right into the denial of the ongoing extreme climate catastrophe unfolding all around us.
Big sigh. It’s gets pretty depressing at times, doesn’t it? Especially to those who actually have a memory that stretches back farther than a week…
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Have read through about 2/3s of The Big Heat, Earth on the Brink by Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank the counterpunch guys. An extremely depressing read because it is a series of essays that go back years… As one endorsement put it, “If Hunter S. Thompson would have been a backpacker, this is the book he would have written…there are passages here that will break your heart.” It has. At times I have been floored because of how it’s just…all so viciously connected and I look around after reading one essay or another written decades ago and see where those thoughts and personal experience viewpoints led to here where I live in the NW corner of Western US in 2021. Far more accurate than the IPCC and it wasn’t even written as predictions, just what they saw happening back then (going way back not just last century or the last couple decades).
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Absolute weather shift since yesterday. It’s chill, still with large masses of very dark clouds going by overhead, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it rained a little more today. Not that it’s making any difference because the brown dog and I walked the property line through the trees this morning and I was kicking dust and dried-out limbs & needles off the extremely dry forest floor as we went. The microbursts of yesterday made absolutely no difference inside the treeline. I doubt the water even got to the ground it was so dry…
Read this morning one of the fire district people said we need a month of solid rain to catch up. Don’t think that’s going to happen.
sealintheSelkirks
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According to Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with MeteoFrance, the Sweihan high temperature beat out the 124.3-degree reading set there on July 2, 2017, thus becoming both a monthly and record high. It’s also the hottest June temperature ever observed in the United Arab Emirates and ties the nation’s record.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/07/record-june-heat-wave-middle-east/?fbclid=IwAR31shLpG6-eHy7LauAt2uL0qs9p9sf_j4S_Tmkw1v7Kb37Xd06J4sdJgWs
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Yet another entry from my cohost on NBL
https://guymcpherson.com/science-update-more-than-a-third-of-heat-deaths-are-related-to-climate-change/
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“On hot days, the highways and roads are littered with broken-down automobiles – commuter cars, ambulances, delivery trucks and buses that overheat as they made their way to and from the city-center.”
Don’t expect to out run the inevitable.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/19/las-vegas-heatwave-nevada-us-west-temperatures?fbclid=IwAR2NvdlODhWO7t7f62bXreHW9WZkpLL0VPA1JMCL7qr4ESUyJm-ms0_CG94
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Hell, Phoenix Arizona is gonna hit that temperature sometime. Bound to being in the northern Sonora Desert, ya know?
Probably sooner than we think. And with both the drained Lake Mead/Hoover Dam and Glenn Canyon Dam electrical complex being just all fucked up, I can see that city being one of the first to be evacuated…after a million or so die because the power goes out during a heat dome ‘event’ (don’t you love that term? An ‘event’ sounds so peaceful, like an opera or something) you can bet the dying will start within hours as the AC-cooled buildings turn into ovens.
I had pictures sent to me of Shasta Lake in Northern Cal the other day. Oh my hell. And I saw a snapshot of a bank in Vegas with 115’F on it today. Oops.
This one is as happy as your Guardian article:
The Truth About the California Water Crisis
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/15/the-truth-about-the-california-water-crisis/
“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.”
– Mark Twain
It doesn’t take too long once you’ve left the greater Los Angeles area, away from all the lush lawns, water features, green parkways, and manicured foliage to see that California is in the midsts of a very real, potentially deadly water crisis. Acres and acres of abandoned farms, dry lake beds, empty reservoirs—the water is simply no longer there and likely won’t ever be back.
continued at link,..
sealintheSelkirks
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“Its mixture of heat and humidity has made it one of only two places on earth to have now officially passed, albeit briefly, a threshold hotter than the human body can withstand.”
Five years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Wet Bulb Temperature Soon to Become Leading Cause of Death”
Sadly that possibility creeps closer and closer by the scorching day.
Soon we will see entire cities wiped out by exceeding our ‘Wet Bulb’ temps.
Contemporaneous with an event like that the world will wake up to the unfolding crisis and industrial civilisation will teeter and collapse.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/hotter-human-body-can-handle-pakistan-city-broils-worlds-highest/?fbclid=IwAR1zC8gs7wZzLcTBMzJ8gxpPC_4fK_iiTmVcKmBg5mB_Nva7EhtFftCZIXk
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I would rather have been proven wrong than right.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/more-than-25-people-have-died-suddenly-in-burnaby-mostly-due-to-the-heat?fbclid=IwAR0H9bY5P8sE8oab4cPvCHjbadnpcsRlKxrLxllq3tpn4lKzJMoPUIbySoE
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Yeah, I certainly wish that all the words I’ve said and emails sent out full of science articles in the last 30 years over what I thought was coming would have been totally incorrect and our species weren’t…well, you know, foolish primates. Guess that was too much to hope for!
No doubt, Kevin, I always wanted what I was reading to be proven wrong, too.
It was 116’F at 3pm this afternoon here. And some asshole started a fire 2 miles upwind to the south of me literally in the woods along the county gravel road I live on near the high school… Deliberately set so say the fire district and they are thinking it’s the same kid that started one in the exact same spot a couple years ago that they caught. Local high school dickhead now an adult but still living in there. There was absolutely no reason for a fire to start in that spot in the trees. Pretty scary to see the smoke column above my south treeline at 3pm when I got the first phone call from a neighbor…
Since the weather weenies at the National Weather Service have been wrong about the temperatures for days I’m guessing that tomorrow’s prediction of 106’F will be lower than reality again. Website also says temps will keep dropping to just under triple digits through the weekend. Not that I do anything outside when it’s 98’F, either! Don’t know about any ‘excess’ deaths around here until the weekly paper comes out but it sure wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
sealintheSelkirks
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This Isn’t a Heatwave — It’s a Dying Planet
Our Civilisation is Boiling Alive in the Fumes of its Own Waste
https://eand.co/this-isnt-a-heatwave-it-s-a-dying-planet-ac1c9eb529d1
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Thursday 100’F, Friday 102’F, Saturday 106’F, Sunday 112’F, Monday 113’F, Tuesday 116’F, Wednesday 115’F. These readings were all taken at 3pm on the north-facing side of a wood-walled woodshed that faces the treeline with a mercury thermometer that is always in the shade. This is after 2 1/2 weeks of mid-upper 90F temps. It was 100’F on June 2nd…
Today I’m not sure what it will do here because there are some very t-storm similar weird-looking clouds rolling in and I think it’s from mountain orographics air uplift and probably off the Columbia River which is about 25 air miles (or less) west of me behind the Huckleberry Range (peaks over 8,000 feet). It’s still hot of course, and it was 92’F at 9am… The humidity is going to go up with clouds I’m guessing… Wet Bulb no doubt? I’ve been jumping in the shower to cool off the body temps.
I’m too old for this shit. But we have known what was coming with no way to escape what our species continues to do even if we ourselves try to not contribute so much to it. Next year will be worse…for the rest of our lives.
sealintheSelkirks
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719 and counting.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heat-wave-719-deaths-1.6088793?fbclid=IwAR13wqxKfct8eUTaQ77e7ItQH5KxpnzHDGDpC40ozELPZbppdD8MMEyEhco
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No surprise. Very likely they’ll keep finding bodies of people who haven’t been noticed locked up in houses… Triple digits here again today and there is smoke drifting down over the border as I’ve got ‘fire haze’ showing in the sky and a neighbor called and said it’s from the Canada fires that have lit off. That town that hit 121’F and then burned down supposedly…
This is the new normal. Until, of course, it gets worse and then that will be the new normal. Until…yeah, well, you know.
2nd wildfire this evening 2 1/2 miles south of me in the last five days. First one was on the west side of the dirt road I live on in the woods and there was no reason for it, no lightning no campers no power lines. Probably human-set is what they are thinking at this point but DNR and local fire caught it pretty dang quick. People are really nervous here as the forest has never been this dried out in June before. Well, I did mention that we were at June dryness levels in March on another thread I think.
The one a couple hours ago was directly upwind and on my side of the road this time. Up the ridge in the rocks. I’ve hiked all over this ridge and know exactly where it started. It’s a dip between to high points and where I ran into a bear on year. It was a treed glade area, cool under the canopy, but I think the loggers killed it a few years ago. A fire crew is sitting on it all night but they knocked it down before it went much more than an acre. Timber company owns most of this 1,500 acre ridge,I’m the only house on this side of the road all the way south to the tiny dying town of Springdale. Investigator is already looking it over but nobody knows the cause yet. Sure is suspicious, two within a quarter mile of each other. The ridge gets dirt bikes, quads, horseback riders, target practice, hikers, hunters, poachers etc etc but it’s so damned hot why would anybody be up there? They’ll find the ignition point I’m sure, they always do, and if it’s a pyro lighting them… If people catch somebody lighting a fire around here they’ll likely shoot them since so many pack guns… No, I’m not kidding. Then drop the gun in one of the lakes I’d imagine…
Besides being killing heat it is climate collapse and this place is absolutely ready to burn. I’m almost 67 and can’t run fast so if I should quit posting and disappear, it’s been an honor talking with you all these years. Heat could easily drop me just like a wildfir could rip through on afternoon or night. The night temps aren’t dropping much more than into the mid-70s so it’s getting hard to sleep even with fans and swamp coolers and windows wide open hoping for a cooling breeze…
But in the meantime I’ll keep being noisy on your website! No articles to post at the moment…but yours are bad enough, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
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“But in the wake of this dangerous weather event, climate experts are pointing to another concept we might need to worry about: Wet-bulb temperatures.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/how-hot-is-too-hot-for-humans-understanding-wet-bulb-temperatures-1.6088415?fbclid=IwAR2y2pyoyRq3Bph4EkmaTCQT9m1UjABE3u_BX3txzLl9rUCg4AEWYo9RZgE
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Ahahahahaha! You posted this thread in May 2016, FIVE YEARS AGO! And NOW the climate ‘experts’ (who, Mann?) are saying we MIGHT need to worry about Wet Bulb? A little fucking late you conservative idiots would be my reply to them.
And this article is still talking about ‘in the future’ no less. Could happen “in this century”… “a major societal challenge”… “in the coming decades.” WTF? They have made themselves irrelevant at this point.
104’F at 4pm today. 4th of July is tomorrow (actually starts in an hour), and the firebug who lit the 2nd fire in the last week 2 miles south of me has not been discovered. The fire crew that put out fire #2 last night stayed the entire night up on the ridge checking for hot spots or any smoldering and left this morning calling it clear. The risks are enormous.
Firework SALES are banned tomorrow. But not today. The Hell’s Angels are planning a multi-thousand dollar gigantic fireworks display tomorrow night at Waitte’s Lake across the valley from me and up in the Huckleberry Range. How’s that gonna work out I’m wondering? I’m not in the wind pattern as the lake is NW of here.
Hope your day is going better than mine. All I’m doing is sitting and reading in a house with fans & swamp coolers and curtains closed because it is too damned hot to do anything. Today is a month since the first 100’F temp hit June 2nd. Welcome to climate catastrophe. Or at least a very obvious early stage of it all!
At least there is some reality being spoken but it certainly isn’t in any corporate-owned press:
A Deadly Summer In The Pacific Northwest Augurs More Heat Waves
And More Deaths To Come. Some Scientists See A Day When Heat-Related Deaths May Match Those Of All Infectious Diseases.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01072021/heat-wave-deaths-pacific-northwest-climate-change/
sealintheSelkirks
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Wet Bulb temperature is the scariest part of climate change you’ve never heard of.
View at Medium.com
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Holy crap.
I heard a plane blow over me at treetop level, literally, at about 12:20 (curtains were closed trying to avoid sunlight) then another 30 seconds later as I whipped open the south curtains up here in the office-I was online. It was a belly-dumper scooper twin engine that nearly clipped trees on the south end of my property as it turned right roaring full throttle up the canyon behind me. There was a freaking HUGE towering column of smoke going up into the sky directly south. I hit the front porch steps just as a heli dropped a bucket and hauled ass after the planes towards Loon Lake for more water (5 miles east). Heavy smoke smell. Immediately phone tree’d neighbors to the north and my other neighbor across the road called and told me we were Evac II, 15 minutes to pack and get ready to run. He said that it had just jumped the road and was blowing up my side of the ridge. Yeah, looking from the porch I could nearly see the flames on my ridgeline in the distance. Two miles is nothing to a fire that big.
Started loading the 4Runner. Documents, this computer, the bug-out pack with clothes/shoes/coat etc, tent/bag/ground pad rolled up hanging on it, then emptied the safe of property deed/cash/jewelry/my dad’s coin collection etc etc, then photo totes went in, partial bag of dog food, etc etc etc. Moving damned fast as you can imagine. Waiting for the auto-call of Evac III GET THE HELL OUT NOW. This isn’t my first rodeo. Look up the Carpenter Rd Fire in Stevens County 2015…I think it was that year.
By 1pm there were SIX bombers doing circles to Loon Lake and back to the fire and blowing over my house so close I could see the pilots. The canyon behind me was the run back zone so they were cranking it. Three heli, don’t know how many fire crews were down there on site.
How does one empty a 1,950 sq foot 1 1/2 story house into a 4Runner? My ’93 Toyota pickup still has a blown head gasket or I would have been loading it, too. Lot more room in that vehicle… 1/2 mile south my road splits and they had a cop there telling people to head down to Hwy 231 because it was burning on both sides of my road and it was full of engines. Shades of…images of the entire west coast the last few years I guess, flashed through my head. I know somebody that was burned out in the Paradise Camp Fire.
How does one pack the largest collection of vintage pre-1990 snowboards (60?) going back to 1965, or 30+ pre-1980 skateboards going back to a La Jolla 1949 homemade, or my 1980 squash tail channel bottom single fin Seal’s Ding Repair board and the ’86 Seal Team twinnie from the riversurfing vids both that I shaped and glassed in my OB shop? The 1960 Duke Kahanamoku 9’8″ lifeguard board standing in the front room that weighs 45 pounds? I live in a museum! What to take out of an entire karate dojo? A music room full of my instrument? I did grab my harmonica bag but the 6 drum conga set? The piano? All the percussion instruments? The multiple amps? Not a chance. How about the 1890s wardrobe or the 1890s hand-carved double bed frame? I had time to pull other (smaller!) sentimental treasures into totes and cardboard boxes and load them up, and even put one box of my Massacre Sites books in the back. Stuffed the front seat, room enough for the dog to squeeze in behind the passenger seat…and I was out of room.
It was 105’F and Day 12 (twelve!) of over 100’F temps with warning on the radio that this will continue. No break expected yet, not with what the not-corporate approved climate scientists like Dr Glickson and others are calling “a deranged Jet Stream.” Triple digit temps for the foreseeable future. Not good news.
The hot months don’t start until the end of this month through early September when the first frost used to be due. That hasn’t happened in years.
My calendar says 33 days in a row of above 90’F. The first 80’F day was back on May 5th. The first 90’F day was May 17th. The first 100’F was June 2nd. The first 70’F day was April 14th. I used to have it snow in mid-April, or at least be raining on the snowpack around the house as I’m 40 air miles from the Canadian Border in the mountains. Not anymore, either. It has barely snowed at my elevation the last few years. Not the 4 feet of pack from Oct-April…
Third human-set fire since last week, we’ve definitely got a goddam firebug. The tiny town of Springdale was being evacuated while I was doing all this…old people on O2 in wheelchairs, bedridden, COPD sufferers, etc etc. Utter panic and madness as you can imagine. There’s about 350 people in that town I guess…
And DNR and Fire District planes bombed it and bombed it and bombed it right up to about 5:30pm. Burned some people out on the other side of the road 2 miles down. Families all got out but they had zero time to evac, grab the kids and pets and GO. Nobody lives on my side of the gravel road on this ridgeline but there are a few mobiles down there on the other side that went up. As far as I know (which ain’t much) nobody burned to death or at least they haven’t discovered any remains yet, but the fire crews are still down there now after 9:30pm as it gets dark. Investigators already on it and a phone call from a friend said the local Spokane news is calling it ‘suspicious.’ YA THINK? Again there will be a crew on it all night. Hot spots, still smoke in the air, and there have been flare-ups already.
My 4Runner is still packed though I did take this computer back out so I can get online. I’m not sure I really want to unload at this point, ya know? Not until they catch this person because they will do it again. That’s what firebugs do…about every three/four days now.
And no, I don’t expect anything different as this has been predicted to happen for 30 years. The scientists have been screaming for at least that long. It’s just not going to get better, not with the highest CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere in the last 4 1/2 million years. Which has the methane clathrates melting (100 times worse short term than CO2) and just blowing out of the Arctic sea bottom and has for years (but that doesn’t make the corporate news much).
And the best part is that the oil companies execs KNEW what they were doing as they censored their own scientists in the 1960s according to documents that have been released. Psychopathic behavior in favor of…money.
Welcome to Catastrophic Climate Destabilization. Wish me luck. I guess you, too, because this ain’t a drought. This is a climatic shift from one stabile state to another state. One I doubt our species is going to like much. This is bad.
sealintheSelkirks
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Even CNN have come to the house wrecking party.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/17/opinions/deadly-heat-waves-wet-bulb-climate-change-ki-moon-verkooijen/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3Tjh_LpLvUE4ki8KY2T23JRJ3EK05o4eisMO2NmDxVHruwB_DJmICGzpw
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