Weather, or Not category archive

That was my brother’s reply when I texted him that it was so hot and humid here that I had turned on the A/C.

Meanwhile, the NOAA tells me that the temperature in Lost Wages, Nevada, is 50 Fahrenheits.

I’ve been for several bicycle rides wearing gym shorts and a tee shirt in the last week. When I was growing up in these parts about 40 miles north of here, I’d have been wearing hooded parkas and fur-lined gloves while waiting for the school bus by this time of year.

Don’t try to tell me that there isn’t something strange going on.

Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz, TV weatherperson, marvels at the hate mail directed towards persons who discuss without dismissing the existence of climate change.

The hatred and vitriol takes one aback.

Via Job’s Anger.

Meanwhile . . . .

The resident curmudgeon at my local rag gets one right. Weather channels and websites (whether they have the word “weather” in their name or not) pine for disaster, as their coverage of the recent storm indicated. No one pays attention to them otherwise.

You could sense the drama building as talk turned to the “catastrophic” scenario: The powerful hurricane would make landfall in Hampton Roads, push water into the Chesapeake Bay, cause biblical coastal flooding and turn Washington D.C. into “a swamp.”

By mid-morning Thursday, though, the forecasting mood began to change. I turned on The Weather Channel and was greeted by long faces. Anchors there and elsewhere were barely able to disguise their disappointment at the new projection for the storm:

Joaquin was predicted to take his fury out to sea.

My local rag has pictures.

When I emptied my rain gauge this afternoon, we had gotten about 7 1/2 inches in two and a half days, and it’s raining again.

It’s not affecting us directly. We’re at about 25 feet above sea level and we don’t try to drive through ponds. We went out this afternoon and did not see anything like what the pictures show on our drive to the local drug store.

My brother has not gotten nearly so much rain in Virginia’s Northern Neck, but he has high tides, as witnessed by this picture he sent me of his dock about two hours before high tide this afternoon. I haven’t heard whether high tide floated his boat.

Addendum:

Another inch over night, but the skies seem to be clearing.

Headline: Donald Trump rally in Virginia Beach postponed because of Hurricane Joaquin.

Meanwhile . . . .

Der Spiegel looks at water and finds the reflection disturbing. A nugget:

When we talk about water becoming scarce, we are first and foremost referring to people who are suffering from thirst. Close to a billion people are forced to drink contaminated water, while another 2.3 billion suffer from a shortage of water. How will we manage to feed more and more people with less and less water?

But people in developing countries are no longer the only ones affected by the problem. Droughts facilitate the massive wildfires in California, and they adversely affect farms in Spain. Water has become the business of global corporations and it is being wasted on a gigantic scale to turn a profit and operate farms in areas where they don’t belong.

The California experiment continues to shrivel in the sun.

On a recent afternoon at Guadalupe River Park in the heart of downtown, a couple strolled hand-in-hand, a mother pushed her toddler in a stroller, and soft breezes rustled the leaves of stately trees near the home of the San Jose Sharks.

But something was missing: the river.

The river that runs through America’s 10th-largest city has dried up, shriveling a source of civic pride that had welcomed back trout, salmon, beavers and other wildlife after years of restoration efforts. Over the past two months, large sections of the Guadalupe have become miles of cracked, arid gray riverbed. Fish and other wildlife are either missing or dead, casualties of California’s relentless drought.

Lake Mead gives up the ghost (towns).

The once brimming reservoir that straddles the Nevada-Arizona state line is now at its lowest point in more than 40 years, . . . .

Vestiges of St. Thomas, which was about 35 miles southeast of Las Vegas, have resurfaced over the decades with the fluctuation of the lake level, according to the park service. The town remained under water in the 1980s and 1990s, resurfacing in 2002. It’s been exposed since then due to the drought, a park service spokeswoman said.

The range wars are heating up in Cali.

Gazing at that canal, (Sacramento Delta area farmer–ed.) Gardemeyer asked: How do you tell the difference between his naturally occurring Delta water and the stored stuff channeled from reservoirs that’s supposed to go to all those people?

Maybe, he said sarcastically, they’ve dyed theirs.

“I don’t know what color their water is,” Gardemeyer said, “but the water I’m looking at out here is the same color it’s been for all the years that I’ve farmed.”