I'm not a scientist, man, as Senator (and presidential candidate) Marco Rubio said. But more than 97 percent of the scientists who actually specialize in climate science agree that climate change is real, heavily human caused, and getting worse faster than expected.
I'm also a witness. Sure, having moved to Phoenix in 1990 now makes you a "pioneer," but my experience goes back a but further.
The dust storms that make such good visuals, and popularized as "haboobs," are not new. They, like the monsoon, have been a part of the Phoenix and Sonoran Desert landscape for tens of thousands of years. The same is true of intense rains and floods.
What seems to be different is the severity of monsoon storms that come into the city, especially destructive "microbursts" and tornadic winds.
One hit Midtown a few years ago and mowed down telephone poles along Third Avenue, as well as uprooting trees, including priceless old-growth trees in Encanto Park. The events have increased since then, including a severe storm Monday night. Trees came down all over the metropolitan area.
Monsoon season was always spectacular, with wind, vivid lightning, and rain. Things began to change in the late 1970s, when the rain often stopped outside the urban footprint. People commented on this at the time. It inspired the opening sentence of my first David Mapstone Mystery, Concrete Desert: "The storms don't come into the city anymore."
I left in 1978 and returned in 2000. The storm pattern still seemed off, very different from my youth. When rainstorms came into the city, they were often accompanied by violent winds. A meteorologist explained that one likely cause was the cooler monsoon storms hitting — and being intensified by — the heat radiated by the city, especially the vast concrete sea of Sky Harbor International Airport. Research also showed that overnight low temperatures had risen 10 degrees over the past 50 years and the summers were hotter and lasting longer.
All this made sense. When I was young, Phoenix was smaller and surrounded by citrus groves and farm fields. The city itself was an oasis. Sky Harbor was smaller and graced by a grassy parkway. Since then, the urban footprint had massively expanded, while most of the agriculture had been obliterated and replaced by heat-radiating concrete, gravel, asphalt and the holy surface parking lots and freeways.
Much of this is the result of local warming. But urgent questions need to be asked about how climate change is now kicking in. August was the second hottest month on record here. It's not only Phoenix. After a historic hot summer and severe drought, Seattle was hit by a windstorm last weekend. Trees came down, at least partly because they were weakened and made more brittle from lack of water.
But Phoenix is one of the American cities in climate change's target zone. I'd like to believe the "change" would mean more rain. That's not how it is playing out.
Someone asked me why microbursts were also hitting Pinal County. First, most people don't realize how much concrete and asphalt have been laid down in much of this once-rural area. But, unlike the (genuine) Salt River Valley, much of Pinal is a basin that is particularly prone to severe dust storms. But the historical data seem to be lacking. I went to Kindergarten in Coolidge and have no memory of a microburst.
Will Rogers supposedly quipped, "If you don't like the weather just wait a few minutes and it'll change." He was from Oklahoma, where that is literally true. But we're in a new era, facing an existential danger, doing little to address it.
What a tragic payback from Mother Nature if the "new normal" takes down the trees Phoenix most needs. We can be sure the new residents won't plant replacements. More gravel, please.
Read the latest news on climate change on Rogue's Climate/Energy/Water page.
Note: Monsoon signs: Read the reading list I left for Ruben on Bernie blog.
It was a record-breaking summer in Portland. Oldtimers and natives were, in particular, shocked by the intensity of the heat here. I even heard one saying he would consider spending summers elsewhere if this became a pattern.
We Who Are Not Scientists But Respect Those Who Are can see the sharpening outlines of an unfolding catastrophe. I was in the northern Rockies last week and saw glaciers that have retreated so far that there’s hardly anything left except the talus. Glaciers move, we are told, very slowly. Something is happening. Maybe it was all the smoke from the forest fires in Oregon and Washington, but there was something nearly apocalytpic in the air itself. This will not end well.
Of all the myriad reasons to wish a speedy demise to the Republican Party and its base of old, stupid, white people, climate change is foremost on the list. Scientists tend to be careful and conservative in their prognostications because science is not a body of political opinion. It’s painstaking empirical evidence correlated to replicable experiments in hard sciences like atmospheric physics. Right-wing propagandists who insist that the data is “not in” or that there’s even a debate about the actual facts are engaging in something as old as time: toadyism on behalf of the wealthy and powerful.
If you think scientists are engaged in a global conspiracy just for the sake of grant money, what do you think Big Oil’s motivations might be? Crikey. We know what they are as surely as we know how greed twists human beings into ethical pygmies.
This subject puts me in a bad mood. If this were a gigantic, ugly spider ready to devour a town in New Mexico, we’d be screaming at the top our lungs. But because it’s just slow enough to dull our sense of urgency, we switch the channel to something less alarming, say Donald Trump’s latest boorish tirade or maybe a cute kitty video on Facebook. In the meantime, the necessary political actions we should be undertaking in the face of a clear-cut threat are not even being discussed.
Our grandchildren will curse us.
Please don’t talk about old stupid white people. I’m old, but I’m not stupid.
Read The Good News by Abbey.
I just returned from my first visit to Phoenix since moving to Denver two years ago. Even though the days were not that hot (100-107), I was struck by the radiating heat rising up from the pavement and bouncing off buildings. I guess I’d grown numb to it prior to leaving. There is no relief from it at night. Today, I looked at all the “cool haboob” pictures friends were posting on Facebook and marveled at the lack of concern. Yes, there’s always been monsoon storms in the Valley, but they used to hold the promise of rain. That seemed to change after 2000, when new housing starts were everywhere. It’s scary, folks.
This is good. I have to share.
Republican/Arizona view of life.
” I GAGG’s”
Immigration, Guns, Abortion, God, Gays
People with brains view of life.
“WRECKERS ”
World overpopulation, Refugee crisis, Environmental collapse, Climate change, Knowledge deficiencies, Extinction crisis, Resources depletion, Science denial.
Just read it. passing it along.
Side Bar for Koreyel.
“If new genes that wipe out malaria also make mosquitoes go extinct what will bats eat?”
Hattie,
You denied being stupid.
You admitted being old.
I’m guessing you ignored the white issue due a deep Hawaiian tan.
You’re Caucasian mocha.
Keep dodging those hurricanes.
Aren’t coastal cities the most at risk for damage from global warming?
Catastrophe losses are down 35% in north America in 2015. Most of the CAT losses are wind/hail in the interior of the country. The changing weather patterns are widening and lengthening the area of the old “tornado alley”.
Hurricane season has just left the starting gate, so let’s see what happens.
Climate change will eventually drown coastal cities so, yes, they are most at risk. The next question is why the Big Money people still build and buy real estate in those cities. You might then think they’re hard-nosed types who check everything twice before they take a single step. Ergo, the danger of climate change must be overrated. Yet we see over and over how money is actually a kind of intoxicant, that it blinds many people into essentially self-sabotaging kinds of behavior (see: Donald Trump making hash of his own brand). Or engineering slick financial instruments that implode the global economy. Our “masters of the universe” are both brilliant and blind, talented and self-destructive.
If you worship money as most right-wingers do, you have lost your bearings. You cannot trust you own judgment because sociopaths are, by definition, impaired in that arena.
Well, I think Soleri and I have a different view of the world.
Soleri thinks its only (primarily?) irrational rich people driving up prices in coastal cities in the US. Their wealth somehow insulates them from judging risk (understand the implicit contradiction??) and they continue to act foolishly as they buy and build in cities, that if anyone really is afraid of global warming, might be faced with catastrophic events.
I, on the other hand, think it’s not just the masters of the universe who are driving those prices up but rather a pretty broad spectrum of folks. I don’t think you have to be rich to live in Seattle (Rogue?) or Portland (Soleri?) or Los Angeles, or Miami, or New Orleans, or other Florida coastal cities (Tampa Bay?) or some parts of coastal California.
So, Soleri thinks its a small universe of rich people who must not have faith in global warming.
I think its a pretty broad spectrum.
My point is twofold:
1. Coastal cities will probably be hit harder by global warming than Arizona.
2. Lots of folks may howl about global warming, but their behavior is inconsistent with the perceived threat.
.12 inches per year.
Point one two inches per year.
.12 inches per year.
Point one two inches per year.
Would you please pull you panties out of the cracks of your ass. Stop your shouting and let the grown ups deal with the serious issue while you sit quietly in the corner sucking your thumb.
It’s real. It’s serious. It’s being dealt with.
You’ll find the latest and most authoritative news on climate here:
https://www..com/rogue_columnist/climate-change-energy-water.html
People place their bets on information that reflects their values. Right-wingers, for example, don’t value the commons. It’s not an issue for them. That’s why they – largely – laugh at environmental issues, be it climate change, water quality, land use, or sustainable practices.
That right-wingers discount global warming is not a function of their high IQs or their savvy money sense. It’s a function of what I would call a mental illness. It’s a refusal to see the interdependence of life itself. Instead, they see themselves as titans astride a globe full of “losers”. They’re “winners”, and that’s why they really don’t care if other people live or die. If they’re making money, all is right with the world.
Science is not on their side, which is why they change the subject to nonsense like conspiracy theories where scientists are cooking the books in search of government grants. As is often the case in lunacies like this, the invention takes over reason itself. It’s a self-fulfilling idée fixe.
Unregulated capitalism, like unregulated demonology, aggression, or imperialism, is simply insane. I’m not sure what world someone has to live in to deny this basic fact. In 1914, Germany was the world’s premier nation, its culture admired everywhere for its achievements. In 1945, it lay in ruins. You begin to understand when reading history that smarts, money, and power are not enough. You really need something more than pride. You need a healthy skepticism about your own motives. I’ve met very few people on the right who even begin to understand this idea. Once we lose faith in reason itself, anything goes. Once again, this will not end well.
ALL IS LOST.
RR
You guys are TOO funny!
Soleri-the people on the right remind me of Satchel Paige”s comment-Don’t look back,somebody might be gaining on you.They cannot look back in retrospect because that would show weakness and God forbid that happen.They exist to be confident and convinced,just like Ronald Reagan.To even contemplate their mistakes is an act of treason IMHO.
Soleri:
I kind of liked your example about a giant ugly spider attacking New Mexico and how people would react differently in that case than with the global warming threat.
But that’s a fairly narrow example.
I think a better example would be dozens of Godzillas, marching ashore coastal cities and causing untold havoc.
10 foot rise in sea levels by 2050, according to NASA. (Link is from Rogue)
https://environews.tv/world-news/nasa-launches-operation-omg-after-10-ft-sea-level-rise-predicted-over-next-50-yrs/
Need U-Haul’s phone number?
Portland’s elevation is 50 feet with a high point of 1188 feet.
I imagine that more than a few ocean-side cities will rediscover this thing called a dyke (and I’m not talking about the other kind).
For the geographically challenged, Portland is an inland city. Sea rise will not affect every place equally. Florida, bye-bye. The Puget Sound has longer.
But this cute distraction aside, I was writing about climate change and Phoenix. Any thing to offer?
The last weather event to receive a CAT number was the hailstorm of 2010. Business as usual since then. Sorry, no earth ending events here.
Well. according to these guys, Portland is one of the most exposed (13th worst in the US)
https://stories.weather.com/disruptionindex
EC:
Soleri wrote:
“It was a record-breaking summer in Portland. Oldtimers and natives were, in particular, shocked by the intensity of the heat here. I even heard one saying he would consider spending summers elsewhere if this became a pattern.”
i thought this would allow broadening the discussion to encompass the potential global warming effect of different areas.
Fair enough, INPHX
The tree problem may also be wrought by man. A few years ago I had an intern do this story based on an observation someone in my church shared with me….https://www.straightbourbon.com/forums/showthread.php?5540-why-doesn-t-whiskey-age-in-the-bottle
Oops wrong story! https://archive.azcentral.com/style/hfe/outdoors/articles/20110830sculpted-trees-invite-damage.html