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Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

nature.com

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Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#111

Post by lovich »

bagels wrote: post #99
lovich wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not change the fact that the area is becoming unliveable without massive investment. Why should the rest of the country subsidize these people lifestyle choices to live in an inhospitable area? I’d be willing to support subsidizing moving them to a new location that’s better suited to living in, but I have no interest in helping pay for people to spit in reality’s eye so they can live in a place they have emo…

Unfortunately this thinking applies to many places in the US when it comes to weather and climate disasters. Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently. What place is so perfect for people to live in that doesn't face any challenges from climate change?

Probably no where permanent. They’ll have to move to the locations that fit their current needs much as I and many other economic migrants.

If they do not have the resources to make the move, I have complete empathy for them and am willing to vote for politicians who will allocate my tax dollars towards helping those people out of their current issue.

If, however, they refuse to move because of some non economic reason then that is a lifestyle choice they will have to shoulder the burden of. If one of my representative politicians tries to use my tax dollars to help them continue their untenable lifestyle choices I will vote for their competitor.

Also

> Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently

Don’t include Texas in that. The other groups have had weather systems of increasing severity that are massively expensive to build against. Texas had weather they declared was unforseeable when they had hit the temperature multiple times in the previous 20-30 years and refused to spend a relatively small amount of money to winterize their generators and mitigate the problem.

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#112

Post by jsemrau »

igitur wrote: post #97
paranoidrobot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really just northern/southern hemisphere. It's also linked to location. Australia gets the opposite weather to South America for the cycle. So for La Nina, it's dry in South America, but wet here in Australia.

In South Africa La Niña is also associated with a wetter season and El Niño with a dryer season.

That sentence was much more confusing to me than it should have because "wetter" in German means weather. Thought it was interesting.

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#113

Post by lovich »

pram wrote: post #46
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I was going to let this go, or just post a snarky "totally not what I said, but you do you, ace," but no. What you did was take what I said, rephrase it to something that I absolutely did not say, and then attack your own rephrasing. You're right. That is an absolute load of shit.

“virtually always” and “have never encountered evidence” uh huh

Was he supposed to prove that this is true in every situation for all time or were we talking about general trends? Also New York at least sends aid to Texas in their time of need[1] unlike in the reverse when Texan senators make sure no aid goes to New York in the event of a natural disaster[2].

Actions speak louder than words and I don't see New York as a state treating Texas as a state to abandon while Texas is advocating for anything against NY.

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co...

[2] Grep for `TX` to see the Texan senators vote on aid to New York for Hurricane Sandy relief https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#114

Post by steve_adams_86 »

jillekuipers wrote: post #95
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I follow an Australian hydroponic gardener and general tinkerer on YouTube named Hoocho and he has documented a bit of the mess the weather has caused lately. It’s extremely disheartening. One thing he noticed is that the water has pushed ants to find new places to live (including his growing enclosure, where they’ve made a home in his electrical box), and they’ve brought aphids to farm along with them. Obviously thi…

very nice to read that you are exploring something new, how is it going for you? and are you using growlights?

It’s actually going great! I do have it under lights, though I hope to get the hang of it and eventually set up some vertical systems outdoors to make them more cost effective. Maybe next spring.

Right now my lights, air pump, and fan cost around $25/month to run. Nutrients are remarkably inexpensive (perhaps pennies per head of lettuce assuming they mature on schedule). All said it’s maybe a $30-35 per month hobby which might generate far more than that value in real, edible food. It’s surprising how many plants you can fit in a 1m x 1m grow tent when you use hydroponics.

I’m sure I’ll mess up several times before I get it working smoothly, but I’ve loved the learning process so far.

Before this I got kind of hooked on growing micro greens. It’s such a great gateway to indoor gardening, the results are awesome and it’s very low effort.

Edit: I hadn’t worked out the math yet, but my “break even” would be growing just a few bundles of herbs and 3 or 4 lettuces per month. The system has 24 plant sites so by all means, if I don’t totally blow it, I should be plant-profitable pretty soon! And that’s excluding the micros which develop under the same lights. The cost of micro greens is wild.

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#115

Post by htlion »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #72
toomuchtodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mitigations are to stop development and water intensive agriculture, and anyone who runs on that platform won’t be elected. The problem will, painfully, solve itself when water supplies are exhausted.

Agriculture typically uses 75-80% of the water in southwestern states. Residential is around 7% (similar to losses from evaporation). Residential per-capita use has been declining for decades. Agricultural use per acre or flat or rising. Stopping development has little to do with the water issues in the SW (it might still be a good idea, but this is not the main reason why)

Residential is only 7% if you put the burden on the producer (agriculture) and not the consumer (people). Every time that such numbers are shared, most people quickly jumps to "farmers should pay more attention / switch cultures". Very rarely someone will talk about the impacts: a change of diet for consumers, most likely with less meat (though depends on the area). It is easy to assume that the water you consume only comes from the tap, but 1kg of beef meat costs 15,000 litres of water to produce [1]. Moreover, at a larger scale: "One third of this volume is for the beef cattle sector; another 19% for the dairy cattle sector." [1]. So instead of trying to find the scapegoat that supposedly consumes most of our water, we should all remember that we, meat eaters, are one of the main culprits here !

[1] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#116

Post by sturadnidge »

dbetteridge wrote: post #61
Andaith wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wild to me is that apparently there's only one place on this continent that grows lettuce. It seems like a bit of an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket thing to have one valley in QLD(I think) that does lettuce for the nation, and they have some bad weather and suddenly we're all sans-lettuce.

WA has plenty of lettuce, not sure where that's coming from though.

Same in NSW… no $12 iceberg heads around here!

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#117

Post by stareatgoats »

sen wrote: post #5

It’s been intense here (SE Australia). It’s just been raining for weeks now without stopping. I think we’ve had 2 sunny days in the last 4 weeks? Crops are dying, lettuce costs $10 each (if you can find them), internet keeps dropping out cos of shittily buried lines, drains overflow and flood the streets constantly, and the kids are going up the walls. I know it’s normal for lots of areas of the world (and I’ve lived…

Seems to me like Australia either has catastrophic droughts or catastrophic rains. The engineer in me wants to create massive reservoirs during the wet spells to carry over the dry spells. But I guess it's not that easy?

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#118

Post by ainiriand »

takeda wrote: post #100
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #16

If you ever wonder what el nino /la nina means in terms of weather for your hemisphere, here is a heuristic: La niña is the opposite of el Niño. El niño (spanish - "the boy") is the name used by inhabitants of the area it hits the hardest, South America (mostly spanish speaking). The western part of South America has its usual rainy season from late Dec to April. The "el nino" boy is a reference to birth of Jesus. Ch…

Interesting, thanks. If anyone is interested: "La niña" translates to "the girl" according to google translate (perhaps I saved someone extra clicks :)

Not a good translation, it is the kid (a female kid). Problem is that we (spanish speakers) have letters to define the gender of the noun. The girl would be 'la chica'.

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#119

Post by ainiriand »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #16

If you ever wonder what el nino /la nina means in terms of weather for your hemisphere, here is a heuristic: La niña is the opposite of el Niño. El niño (spanish - "the boy") is the name used by inhabitants of the area it hits the hardest, South America (mostly spanish speaking). The western part of South America has its usual rainy season from late Dec to April. The "el nino" boy is a reference to birth of Jesus. Ch…

El niño -> the kid.

El chico -> the boy.

Re: Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely

#120

Post by stareatgoats »

Climate science is in its infancy. No I'm not a "climate denier": we can can be reasonably confident that the science is correct in asserting that we are in a period of climate warming, caused in large part by increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, to the most part caused by the accelerated burning of fossile fuels.

But the predictive powers of climate science is low, which this article (among others) illustrates. We know we are in a period of relative high flux (compared to previous centuries), but we don't know what comes after the immediate future.

People may draw different conclusions from this, mine is that we need to get away from the thinking that there is a "natural climate" that we can revert to. We need to stop the focus on how we can influence the changing climate and start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios.

For example, whatever scenario that wins out will likely create massive migration pressures. How do we deal with that, humanely?

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