Weather, or Not category archive

The artist comments. A snippet:

I would almost guarantee that the Venn diagram of climate change deniers and people who think COVID is a hoax looks like a perfect circle.

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While northern California is in flames, elsewhere in the state, small towns are running dry. Here’s a bit from SFGate’s report:

Water is so scarce in Mendocino, an Instagram-ready collection of pastel Victorian homes on the edge of the Pacific, that restaurants have closed their restrooms to guests, pointing them instead to portable toilets on the sidewalk.

And the fire department has asked sheriff’s deputies to keep an eye on the hydrants in response to a report of water theft.

“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner at Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-of-town diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a time when we don’t have water at all. And only the people with money would be able to afford the right to it.”

Rebecca Watson reads the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change so we don’t have to.

She fears that our (initially inadequate and, in some quarters of our polity, inimical) response to the COVID pandemic provides a preview of our response (or lack thereof) to global warming.

Mendocino, California, a popular tourist spot, is running out of water.

Recently, Mendocino businesses like hotels have had trouble meeting their water needs, and water trucks making deliveries are now becoming almost as common as tourists.

Some hotels are charging extra for daily linen replacement and hot tub use, and other businesses are considering portable toilets to conserve water.

Most water had been purchased from Fort Bragg, a town of about 7,300 people whose primary water source is the Noyo River. But as the river’s flow has diminished, officials shut off the supply to Mendocino this week to safeguard supplies for its residents.

There’s been talk of shipping in water by barge to deliver to Mendocino and other cities in need on the southern Mendocino Coast, transporting it by railway from the inland city of Willits and trucking it to the coast from Ukiah in wine tankers.

Follow the link for the full report.

I fear for my grandchildren.

Siberia is on fire.

Afterthought:

Yeah.

Like they are going to admit it.

But you can picture the future.

Aside:

In the 25 years or so that I lived in the Philadelphia area, I never saw news stories like this one. The Brandywine flood a foot or two, rendering Brandywine Park in Wilmington, Del., unusable for a day or so, but flooding U. S. 1?

California’s Lake Oroville will no longer float your boat.

Lake Mead, the source of water for many cities and farms in the American west, is wasting away from what scientists have dubbed a “mega-drought.” Here’s a bit from Timothy Egan’s report:

Nobody wants a desiccated West, a place where dying trees outnumber the living ones in many places, where wildfires are not a seasonal siege but a year-round peril, where once-fertile fields are permanently fallowed.

But it’s here now, and a reservoir built to hold enough water to flood all of New York state 1 foot deep appears to be inexorably drying up.

The other day, I walked the floor of Lake Mead, a cracked and sun-baked Martian-scape that was once more than 100 feet underwater. On the horizon, the eerie geologic formations that freaked out early white explorers displayed the latest bathtub rings in the rock.

I find this somewhat disquieting.