It’s raining outside. And not the little, insignificant rains of earlier. I can hear the drops on the roof even though I’m on the first floor. And I hope it continues for a while—there’s a need for a good soaking to restore the water table. Oh, and I hear thunder. It’s muted, which means the lightning is a bit off. I haven’t seen even a flash.
Based on the current forecasts, Post-Tropical Cyclone Hermine is a storm without a good historical comparison. Originally Hermine was once a tropical cyclone that made landfall in Florida, but that seems like ages ago. It has now transitioned to its post-tropical stage after moving northeast across land, off the coast of North Carolina, where it’s…
via We Haven’t Seen Many Storms Like Hermine — Features – FiveThirtyEight
But before we get to how weird and rare of a storm Hermine is, let’s highlight its forecast. Hermine won’t be as big or as powerful as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, but its impact might be worse for some communities for a simple reason: It’s supposed to spend most of a week in roughly the same spot, just off the Mid-Atlantic coast.
It sounds like a rough holiday weekend for the East Coast.
Some days I am reminded of the magnitude of writing I have yet to achieve.
(The Agonist) Almost always I get lost in the process. There are too many hyperlinks to draw you away, and after moving two or three degrees away from what I was reading, I forget where I had started from altogether. There’s so much news and analysis to absorb, that I rarely remember to bookmark the interesting ones. I should have bookmarked one I came across yesterday; it chronicles climate change activity around the world, with some great maps from NOAA and data from various climate centers at major universities. I do remember it was linked here on The Agonist by raja, and it’s a blog by the anonymous robertscribbler. Did you know Queensland, Australia is now entirely in a state of extreme drought? A high pressure dome has formed over Oklahoma that promises to worsen the 10-year old drought over the Southwest US. Temperatures exceeding 100 degrees F. were experienced this week in Nebraska and Kansas, the earliest such high temperatures have been recorded ever in those states. How are farmers responding to these conditions? They’re continuing to irrigate by drawing water from stressed-out underground aquifers. The winter wheat crop is many parts of the US is nearly 95% destroyed, but so is the wheat crop in Ukraine, which has its own geopolitical stresses to add to its problems. A very serious global shortage of wheat is looming. Siberia is once again battling forest fires, and all of southeast Alaska has been put on alert for forest fires. The monsoons that normally arrive in Singapore and Indonesia are over a month late, and what is normally considered jungle terrain is so parched that it can no longer be called a rainforest.
I am in awe. And frightened at the collective denial of the majority of the United States population.