This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1391722
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1391722
Paging Joe Manchin, please report to the nearest courtesy phone.
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John Mcfee wrote about this in his book The Control of Nature. He wrote about debris basins being constructed and emptied to protect against the tumbling debris flows. It was a reoccurring cycle. Drought, fire, rain, mud slides.
One factor I remember is that when the chaparral burns it burns so hot that it creates a waterproof layer 8 to 10 inches down. When it rains, with no roots to hold it the earth just slides.
Although it has been happening for a long long time, climate change doesn’t improve the situation.
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I have said for years that there is no kind of weather here in California that is not a disaster.
- Too dry – we get droughts and fires
- Too wet – we get floods and mudslides
- Just right – we get tourists
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An earlier version of John McPhee’s work on that subject appeared in the New Yorker.
(Ooops, there appears to be a paywall, or maybe I’ve looked at too many this month?)
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A great chapter in that book was describing how in Iceland, they were trying to re-route a lava flow threatening a harbor by spraying the lava with huge volumes of water. They called it “pissing on the volcano”.
It actually worked.
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Humans aren’t wired well for slow moving disasters it seems but the problem with that, pace Hemingway, is that things that develop slowly have a very strong tendency to move suddenly near the end.
ETA: There are reasons for optimism although we are already at 1.2 degrees C, and more likely to blow through the ‘target’ of 1.5 on our way to 2 than not, but it really does look like we could prevent it reaching 2.5 even given current trends never mind the kind of efforts a 2 degree rise would force: and force is the right word too because 2 degrees is, well …
At two degrees, it’s expected that 150 million additional people would die from air pollution, that storms and flooding events that used to hit once a century would hit every year, and that many cities in South Asia and the Middle East that are today home to many millions would become so hot during summer that it often wouldn’t be possible to walk around outside without risking death by heatstroke.
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A trip to the 1967 Rose Bowl got you two more long term residents and their offspring, all of whom have left the state.
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You’re wasting your pixels.
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I liked the 1st third about trying to hold the Mississippi from taking a new route to the sea. The corp of engineers has built a diversion dam that should it fail will leave New Orleans cut off from the sea.
With increasingly heavy rains across the Midwest, those betting the Corp can hold back the Mississippi are taking are fewer and fewer. It looks good right now up here at the headwaters. Minnesota is having a drought. The wind can change up here. Who knows how long it will be till we hear people singing “Louisiana 1927” once again.
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And when they drilled into the interior of the solid concrete diversion dam, they saw fish swimming inside the structure.
Genuwine military quality…
Sorry. We still haven’t reached 100% absolute certainty that climate change is real and human caused. As long as there is one person out there who still believes this is a vast conspiracy to keep college professors employed and that these are all naturally occurring cycles (or that God made just enough resources to get us to the apocalypse), we must continue to keep all those oil and coal barons happy by deregulating everything and cutting taxes.