Permission to freak out now?
Jul. 15th, 2011 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justalurkrWas watching NBC Nightly News last night and saw a story about the heatwave in the US southern States. The popped up one of those diagrams that incrementally shows the spread of heat alert and drought conditions and I thought "Hey! that looks a whole lot like a drawing of the jet stream I saw once."
The I found this from 2008:
Jet stream moving slowly northward
Part that freaked me out the most:
WASHINGTON — The jet stream — America's stormy weather maker — is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows.
That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North. And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study's authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.
From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it.
(Award for Most Freakishly and Presciently Descriptive Line in bold.)
Google is not my friend anymore, because now I understand waaay too much about why water wars are going to make more trouble long term than energy shortages ever will. See, if the path of the jet stream oscillation keeps move toward the polar areas and the equatorial climate zone doesn't expand in its wake, the dry dusty band in between just keeps growing and in 50 to 100 years, the whole USofA (currently home to 300,000,000 plus) will look like Arizona, New Mexico and most of Texas did -- or at least the parts that grow the most food. Coupled with what the Discovery and History Channels have already done to freak me out about the effects of weather (Little Ice Age, super volcanic eruptions like Tinatubo or Krakatoa and freakin' sunspot activity) I need a happy pill.
While I was on vacation, I pouted a bit over the last Shuttle launch and got a little gripe-y about underfunding NASA before it has a chance to figure out how to move a lot of people off the planet. My dad asked if I'd really want to go somewhere else and said hell yes, but failing that, we actually need a place to put people that isn't here or do what the Fertile Crescent civilizations did and figure out how to move more water than existing techology seems able from places where there's lots to places where there isn't, because we sure as hell can't pull off the pre-historic mass migration thing with over seven billion people.
Or even 330,000,000.
The I found this from 2008:
Jet stream moving slowly northward
Part that freaked me out the most:
WASHINGTON — The jet stream — America's stormy weather maker — is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows.
That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North. And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study's authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.
From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it.
(Award for Most Freakishly and Presciently Descriptive Line in bold.)
Google is not my friend anymore, because now I understand waaay too much about why water wars are going to make more trouble long term than energy shortages ever will. See, if the path of the jet stream oscillation keeps move toward the polar areas and the equatorial climate zone doesn't expand in its wake, the dry dusty band in between just keeps growing and in 50 to 100 years, the whole USofA (currently home to 300,000,000 plus) will look like Arizona, New Mexico and most of Texas did -- or at least the parts that grow the most food. Coupled with what the Discovery and History Channels have already done to freak me out about the effects of weather (Little Ice Age, super volcanic eruptions like Tinatubo or Krakatoa and freakin' sunspot activity) I need a happy pill.
While I was on vacation, I pouted a bit over the last Shuttle launch and got a little gripe-y about underfunding NASA before it has a chance to figure out how to move a lot of people off the planet. My dad asked if I'd really want to go somewhere else and said hell yes, but failing that, we actually need a place to put people that isn't here or do what the Fertile Crescent civilizations did and figure out how to move more water than existing techology seems able from places where there's lots to places where there isn't, because we sure as hell can't pull off the pre-historic mass migration thing with over seven billion people.
Or even 330,000,000.
