How does a region that is nearly 500 miles from the Gulf become devastated by flooding?
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We’re only beginning to understand the historic nature of Helene’s flooding
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I feel like modern humans have forgotten how devastating even transient, local climate events can be. We'd take a future of inevitable, prolonged, and severe drought a fuck of a lot more seriously if we remembered, in our core, the horror of watching your children and neighbors die after a failed crop. Even in our species' history of a mellow and generally amenable climate, an outlier - drought, heat wave, flooding, wildfire - was something that could obliterate you and everything and everyone you'd ever known. The last hundred years of reliable insurance and services and so on is a wild departure from our norm, and I fear it has just insulated us from the consequences of our collective and cumulative bad decisions until those consequences are even more devastating than they were in the past.
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I don't really want to address the rest of your comment any more than I already did. If you're getting downvoted heavily, in a generally thoughtful and respectful thread, that is usually evidence that you have missed the point or failed to communicate yours effectively.
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I agree humans are bad at planning for transient events. After several decades of adult life in California I was almost the only person I knew who made any significant preparation for a major earthquake.
I admit I might have strayed over the 'prepper line,' by not just depending on, say, a flat of bottled water. But most folks I knew didn't even do that. I rotated a couple of 55 gallon drums of water (duration depending on what I put in it to stabilize them), dehydrated foods & long-life rations, medical trauma kit, spare rechargeable batteries (tried to standardize on AA's, later adding some solar panels & larger power stations), enough propane and kerosene (mostly "Kleen" analog, stores longer and burns cleaner) to feed some lanterns and stoves of each type, bucket style toilet lid (& additive), and such.
But all my neighbors seemed woefully unprepared for even a few days of lost power water, food, and shelter.
I admit I might have strayed over the 'prepper line,' by not just depending on, say, a flat of bottled water. But most folks I knew didn't even do that. I rotated a couple of 55 gallon drums of water (duration depending on what I put in it to stabilize them), dehydrated foods & long-life rations, medical trauma kit, spare rechargeable batteries (tried to standardize on AA's, later adding some solar panels & larger power stations), enough propane and kerosene (mostly "Kleen" analog, stores longer and burns cleaner) to feed some lanterns and stoves of each type, bucket style toilet lid (& additive), and such.
But all my neighbors seemed woefully unprepared for even a few days of lost power water, food, and shelter.
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Apologies if someone's already asked this, but can someone ELI5 what the cursed unit "kilograms per meter per second" means? Is this how many kilograms of water every second the hurricane pushed 1 m further inland? Seems like that would depend on the width of coastline measured, so that can't be it ..
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Or ... being entirely serious, maybe we should be building less serious, less intense structures? Imagine something like tiny house culture being normalized -- everyone's house so small they can tow it away when things get weird.
The "2-6 people in a 2300sqft house" lifestyle to which we've become accustomed? It's bad for us. Real bad. When my wife and I first got together, we lived in a studio for 2 years. There were definitely parts of that that stank, but, all in all, it was a good life. The resources we put into our historically very large single-family dwellings could be best spent elsewhere.
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And in 1948 the rivers rose two feet further than they did this time, and washed much of the town away - if you look at stream gauges, the ones not marked as ‘not responding’ are a bit short of the record.
“Rebuild the access roads at least thirty feet above mean river level” is going to be easier to sell next week than it was last month, but that’s a lot of compulsory purchasing and a lot of bridging and tunnelling in what’s not especially stable geology, and a lot of property suddenly going from river view to feeder road view. You’re not going to build works on the scale of the Los Angeles flood defences in a town of a few thousand much of whose reason for existence is people coming to see the pretty artificial lake.
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Oh no, I said "Puritans" instead of "Pilgrims" in a throwaway comment. Definitely worth a snide and condescending lecture!
EDIT: Did I just get butthurt over the tone of someone correcting me? To the point of calling it snide while being snide? Yes, yes I did. Not going to stealth edit and whine about it, just adding a revised version:
Yeah yeah, you're right, of course -- I should have said "Pilgrims" instead of "Puritans".
(And apologies to RockEko for being an ass, natch)
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Heck, Harpers Ferry had floods of 27.6 feet in 1924, 36.5 feet in 1936, 33.8 feet in 1942, 29.7 feet in 1972, 29.8 feet in 1985, and both 29.4 feet and 29.8 feet in 1996, along with "minor" (<21 foot) floods since 1996 in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2018, but the town's still there.
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Which is why I like anthropogenic global climate disruption, AGCD. It hasn't caught on though.
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I don't.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/thou...ng-and-being-rebuilt-fema-insurance-louisiana
Good fishing in that lake? Did the salty's move in?
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Well, it might not be a "great" time for gloating, but, yeah, I think some tragically motivated gloating is in order if that's what it takes, you Nazi.
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History proves that we learn nothing from history.
See: 1.Houses rebuilt in frequently flooded zones.
2. Vaccine resistance.
3. Etc.
I'm sure many of you could easily add to 5he list. Feel free to do so.
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I spend a lot of time in western NC, along the Brevard - Hendersonville - Asheville - Black Mountain axis. There are towns that literally no longer exist with thousands of people unaccounted for, but there's not a lot of media coverage of this, mostly because there's places you can't really get to any more. But from what I have heard, this is worse than Katrina. The death toll is artificially low because they can't find the next of kin to tell first.
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That was a problem 40 years ago. Now, unfortunately, it's a "I will be dead and gone WHEN it's an issue" type of thing.
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sheesh
This is going to be a national slow trickle of worse and worse and worse news then.
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carbon60Unit
Ars Centurion
Hopefully their backup generators and other critical infrastructure are located well above ground level so as not to do a Fukushima.
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I couldn't find much about it, but there is a brief mention of the unit of measurement on the atmospheric river wiki page. To me it sounds like a mass flux measurement related to the size of the weather system in question. In the context of an atmospheric river, it would be the mass of water in a cubic metre of air passing through the cross sectional area of the atmospheric river every second. I suppose that means in this case they were looking at how much and how fast Helene was bringing in water from the ocean.
Atmospheric Science isn't my specialty, but I have seen similar units during my work with groundwater where volumetric flow rates (m^3/day) gets divided by the cross sectional area of a given aquifer (m^2) to give you a volumetric flow rate per unit area of aquifer in m/day. I guess the analogy to the article would be mass concentrations of some solute in groundwater using the same volumetric flux unit would give you something like kg/m/day or something else.
This is just my best guess and I could be wrong of course.
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
IVT is a measure of water vapor (i.e., the gaseous state of water). So not clouds (which are water droplets or ice crystals). The atmosphere is made up of a mixture of various gasses (mostly nitrogen with some oxygen and other trace gasses, including water vapor).
But more importantly, IVT is a measure of water vapor flow (it's actually a vector but all we are talking about here is its magnitude) . Moving water vapor. I'm no expert so there could be subtleties in the definition that I don't know about but basically your understanding is partly right.
To compute IVT you take the total mass of water vapor up to some height over some region (what height/region are two of the subtleties I don't know) and divide by the surface area of that region (so an areal density). You then multiply that by the velocity that that region of vapor is moving. This gives a number, the IVT, with these units:
(Mass/area)*velocity = (kg/m^2)(m/s) = kg/(m*s)
Working backwards, I just did a quick "back of the envelope" calculation and got a sensible value for the partial pressure of water vapor:
Assume IVT = 4000 kg/(m*s)
v = 50 mph = 22.4 m/s
g = 9.8 m/s^2 (we'll need this to convert from mass to force to get pressure)
So the partial pressure = [(4000 kg/(m*s)/22.4(m/s))*1m^2*9.8m/s^2]/1m^2
= 1750 N/m^2 = 1750Pa = 1.75 kPa
Which (according to the internet) seems reasonable.
Eidt and note: In some places when I tried to use "*" for multiplication I wond up with italics. So I've removed those but it might be a little harder to read. Sorry.
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Not a lot of "accessible" (i.e. straight forward wording for non-atmospheric scientists) info on the inner workings of IVT, but from what I've read it is the horizontal movement of water in the atmosphere. It's calculated as;
IVT = −1 /g ∫ ptop p0 qVdp (forum code doesn't really let me post this, the integral is between ptop and p0)
where q is specific humidity, V is the horizontal wind vector, g is the acceleration of gravity, dp is the vertical thickness of each atmospheric layer, in pressure units, p0 is the surface pressure and ptop is the top level pressure in hPa.
Sources with tons of info
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/94/4/bams-d-11-00154.1.xml
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/9/1639
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/150/5/MWR-D-21-0198.1.xml
Edit: And thankfully Ninja'd by someone with a clue above, to explain it better.
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At least 148 are dead in floods and landslides in Nepal
Someone upthread mentioned typhoon Yogi where I think it was Vietnam was rocked recently. The shit is hitting the fan all over the world already. That doesn't include feedbacks from amazonia or from the ice sheets melting in greenland and the arctic and antarctica or the permafrost in russia. These feedbacks would continue if we stopped ghg emissions today. Not only have we not stopped but we continue to break records for emissions. WORLDWIDE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS FROM INDUSTRY STILL HAVE NOT PEAKED
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The two things are orthogonal. How well you build a house has nothing to do with how big you build it. I fully agree with you that new home construction sizes in America are absurdly large these days (plot size, too, given that most yards are just mono-cultural sod that don't see much use anyway).
I don't know if I would go all the way to the other end of the spectrum to a trailer-sized home... 6 people in 2300sqft is not unreasonable, frankly. A good target would be 400sqft per person (or animal).
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I predict that the fear will set in, and the deniers will become that much angrier. Large parts of the population would physically attack anyone for even mentioning human-driven climate change, even as masses will be migrating from now-uninhabitable states.
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Since we're talking about important institutions and whether or not cities are in flood plains, it's worth pointing out that New York City is not built on a flood plain, and is indeed home to important institutions. Hong Kong is another city not on a flood plain.
Really, it depends on what you mean by "flood plain." Most cities started on the ridges surrounding the flood plains or within the flood plain, not the flood plain itself. And others were founded within permanently flooded swamplands that didn't have much of a history of changes in water level (I think Chicago would be an example here).
Also, Quito and Kathmandu are at very high risk for very destructive earthquakes. Putting important things in those cities isn't a great idea.
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You're getting downvoted for being obtuse. "The choice of these locations may well be worth the risk, that's not for me to say" is just willful ignorance. The history of human civilization gives you your answer: yes, it's worth the risk.
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When insurance no longer covers these super storms and the government no longer steps in to help, that is when it is going to sink in.
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What cities are now uninhabitable? Seems like when they get demolished, they are just built back up. Individuals may move but the communities are rebuilt. I don't see any uninhabitable cities, much less states. Just more hyperbolic fear mongering that will make people ignore future, more pertinent warnings.
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I was making a future prediction there. Once wet bulb temperature keeps above 37°C for prolonged periods of time, it becomes impossible to live without air conditioning.
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Where do you even go? Move away from the floods, you end up on the hillsides. Then you have to move away from the landslides, and you end up in the deserts. Then you have to move away from the heat waves and droughts, and it turns out Musk still isn't offering regular service to Mars. It's almost like it might be easier to stop fucking up the climate in the first place.
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31C - 34C is the current estimated ciritcal wet bulb lower range.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43121-5
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You don't see any uninhabitable cities because the ones that became uninhabitable are no longer inhabited.
There are plenty of them around though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_cityOf course, not all of them were lost specifically due to climate change rendering them uninhabitable, but quite a few of them were lost due to various combinations of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on. To name a few notable ones - Dvaraka was the subject of a well known archaeological investigation which confirmed that the stories of it suddenly being flooded by the sea were most likely true. The Netherlands has an area whose name literally translates as "The Drowned Land of Reimerswaal". The slightly misnamed Hampton-on-Sea (it's actually under the sea) is one of the more famous out of a great many examples of British towns being lost to the sea, and that happened in the 20th century. It's also notable how many of the examples on that list were incredibly important major cities - multiple capitals of Egypt, Carthage, Akkad, Karakorum (capital of Genghis Khan's empire), Angkor, Cahokia, Chichen Itza. Those last two might be the most relevant to Americans, being two of the largest cities of their time in North and Central America respectively, both of which collapsed and were abandoned before Europeans arrived, almost certainly due to climate change in both cases.
So yes, there are plenty of examples of cities becoming uninhabitable and being abandoned throughout human history. Climate change and flooding, along with various other natural disasters, are thought to be the primary causes in many cases. Often not just for single settlements, but for the entire civilisations they were part of. And it was not simply a problem for ancient primitive people who didn't have the benefits of modern science and technology, we keep losing settlements right up to the modern day. As many comments have pointed out, wholesale movement of millions of people, along with all the buildings and infrastructure to go with them, is kind of a big effort, so you won't find many examples of recent megacities being abandoned quite yet. But we see over and over again that when problems get big enough, individuals move away and communities aren't rebuilt, leading to once thriving places being abandoned and forgotten. Dvaraka may be unusual in probably having been flooded and abandoned pretty much in a single day, but climate change has often forced more gradual abandonment over the course of decades.
But the thing about warnings is that they need to come before action needs to be taken. Climate change is a big problem and many places are likely to become effectively uninhabitable in the not too distant future. That's not fear mongering, it's a warning of things that are likely to happen unless we take action now. If we wait until places actually become uninhabitable, it's a bit late to start thinking about warnings. What those warnings actually mean will depend on the details in different places. Asheville is unlikely to be uninhabitable - it may need work on managing larger or more frequent floodwaters, but that's a very solvable problem. Coastal areas, on the other hand, will in many cases be virtually impossible to prevent from being either submerged or eroded away. Either way, prevention, mitigation and contingency plans need to be made now, not once the waves are lapping at our doors.
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Could someone explain like I am 5 how climate change did this and what we can do to stop this and/or reverse it ?
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Global Greenhouse Gas Overview
To add more substance to the claim I made before, the EPA has measured the WW GHG emissions going back to the rise of industry. The measurement on the left is gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year. Notice that having more people did not affect consumption by way of land use. It's all gas consumption.
To add more substance to the claim I made before, the EPA has measured the WW GHG emissions going back to the rise of industry. The measurement on the left is gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year. Notice that having more people did not affect consumption by way of land use. It's all gas consumption.
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I don't think most of us are accustomed to that, but I do think having a medium amount of space can allow a more efficient lifestyle than a tiny house, because in a tiny house you don't have enough room to do the things that an apartment dweller can't do, but the apartment dweller at least has the efficiency benefit of a single structure with shared resources. Part of what you get is things like a gym, pool, etc that are more of paid amenities included in the rent, but even row houses without all that will still have the HVAC benefit from the shared walls at least. Since renting fails to incentivize whichever party doesn't pay the power bill to use energy efficiently, I admit a lot of apartments are going to fail to make use of their natural advantage there, but hey.
But there's also opportunity costs. In a tiny space if something important like a fridge breaks, you need either an urgent repair or an immediate replacement where they haul away the old one of whatever it is. In a larger space you might have room to keep one or more second-best ones as spares, or even just as parts with which to fix the newest/best one. You also can't store and prepare as much food while maintaining minimal waste and minimal trips to the store if you don't have enough room. An apartment with bus service or a nearby store would at least make the repeated trips less of a waste, but a tiny house in a more spread out area? Not so likely. There's a reason trailer homes exist rather than just houses and travel trailers / RV's. Living somewhere with the ability to uproot at a moment's notice is not as cost-efficient, but the investment of a better home is beyond a lot of people especially when it's more profitable to build larger homes than needed.
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Well, I don't know any 5-year-olds who understand the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; but like you were old enough to understand that:
- Global warming has raised the average temperature of tropical and temperate air;
- Warmer air holds more water at saturation;
- Warmer surface waters in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico rapidly raised the absolute humidity of the air borne inland by the hurricane;
- ...
- Stopping the trend of hurricane severity will require stopping the emission of greenhouse gases, which requires collective intervention in energy markets to take the profit out of selling fossil fuels.
- Reversing it would mean accelerating the slow, natural withdrawal of GHGs from the atmosphere, and their sequestration in geologic strata again.
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No, it won’t. People are really good at rationalizing, reinterpreting and outright forgetting what they believed before.
There will be a few who will change their beliefs, possibly even their actions, but the core constituents will continue on behaving and believing as they have been. This is like 30% of the USA voting public here when it comes to global warming.
They will not believe that their lack of insurance stems from global warming. The obvious closer reason of it being from more destructive storms, fires, droughts, yes, but it won’t be because of global warming.
There are many doomsday cults, across every year and deep into the past. Failure of a prophesied doomsday never causes them to say they were wrong. They get additional messages, they push it to later, they redouble their beliefs, they change the nature of the belief, but they never admit they were mistaken and change their behaviors. A few do, but the majority of them, the “they”? No.
Like with every other thread here, I say do your part: vote, electrify, buy renewable power, get efficient.
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When the temperature outside increases, it is able to hold more water in it. That means it can rain more, rain longer. More rain then previously experienced overwhelms existing infrastructure that was designed for less rain.
The increased air temperature outside is caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 concentrations have increased 50% since the 1960s or so. The increased CO2 comes from burning coal, burning gas, burning oil, etc.
We stop it and reverse it by not burning fossil fuels. More solar, more wind, more storage, more EVs, being efficient, etc., to replace existing fossil fuel using infrastructure.
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