Disasters, natural or otherwise

[Mongrel]

Florida community using 100% solar power endured Hurricane Ian with no loss of power and minimal damage

Florida man... managed to do a wise and sensible thing? Well. How about that.

[Mongrel]

Most of you have no doubt seen the toxic Ohio train derailment/fire disaster in the news (you know, the disaster that the chuds are all weirdly yelling "isn't in the news"). Anyway, everything's going to be fine, the railroad company wants to make some very generous amends.

[Upthorn]

The toxic disaster is gut-wrenchingly awful. Last I checked they were still doing a controlled spill-and-burn-off of the vinyl chloride to prevent a potential explosion, but like... one of the combustion products of vinyl chloride is phosgene gas.

There's also reason to believe that the evacuation radius was far too small, as there's been at least one report of someone half a mile outside the evacuation radius [CW: Harm to animals] letting their healthy two year old dog out to relieve itself, and finding it dead in their yard when they started to wonder why it hadn't come back in yet.

I think you can draw a direct line between this disaster and the contracts Biden forced all the freight unions to accept. The worst part is, I'm pretty sure rail freight is under the exclusive regulatory purview of the federal government, which has already announced it does not plan to tighten any regulations on chemical freight (shifting all blame to evil lobbyists forcing them not to take action), so this will happen again and even us Californians aren't safe from it happening here.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I've already seen multiple analyses drawing a direct line between recent railway union busting and these accidents.

[Büge]

[Upthorn]

Antarctic ice pack is not regrowing so far this winter

This is the kind of event that, statistically, if nature was left to its own course, you could expect to see about once every 7.5 billion years. (For reference, the Earth is ~4.56 billion years old.)

If I understand correctly, this event has long been predicted to be the inflection point wherein natural processes cease to work against the greenhouse effect and start working with it instead.

In other words, if I understand correctly, the window to avoid the worst-case scenario has now closed.

[Friday]

This is the kind of event that, statistically, if nature was left to its own course, you could expect to see about once every 7.5 billion years. (For reference, the Earth is ~4.56 billion years old.)

From the article:

"For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years."

Still insane, of course.

Oh, there's an edit. So you didn't misread, the article itself was a misprint.

EDITOR'S NOTE - July 24, 2023: The original version of this story said the sea ice level event occurred every 7.5 billion years. This has since been corrected to 7.5 million years.

[Mongrel]

It closed a long while ago. The way I look at it, the window isn't really based on what nature might or might not do, but what arm twisting of humans could possibly be done, and on that it was always far too little, far, far too late.

[Upthorn]

EDITOR'S NOTE - July 24, 2023: The original version of this story said the sea ice level event occurred every 7.5 billion years. This has since been corrected to 7.5 million years.

I find this irrationally comforting, even though it changes nothing about the actual circumstances of the present.

[Friday]

I mean, it's literally 1000 times more common than you thought. It's just that it's still so uncommon compared to human life spans that it doesn't matter practically.

[Mongrel]

Crucially, it means Homo Sapiens' early predecessors lived through similar events at some point.

If you're pegging it at exactly 7.5 million that would be very roughly in the bipedal, but pre-tool use, pre-Australopithecus era, so more like jumped up chimps still, but of course, like earthquakes, these things aren't regularly scheduled events. I didn't see if the article have an estimated core-dated time period for the last such actual event. If it's been a while, it's possible the last such event predated hominid divergence from chimps, but regardless, primates would have been around in some form through at least couple of these.

All that said, we know that this time around it's not just natural planetary fluctuations; it's our fault.

[Büge]

Meteorologist names heat waves after oil companies

[Mongrel]

Yellowknife residents ordered to evacuate as huge wildfire only 16kms from Northwest Territory capital

There's only one road out of Yellowknife, and it goes directly through the main fire zone. It's still passable, but can hardly be described as safe. Also, the first major town on the road south has already been burnt out.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

CNN: Tennessee factory employees were swept away by Helene. Their families say they weren’t allowed to leave work in time to flee

[Mongrel]

If the National Weather Service is typing in allcaps and making typos, you get the fuck out.

The people who write these things are not people who are prone to hyperbole or overexcitation. they have been doing this a long time. they are good at their jobs.

and they are scared.

EDIT: DeSantis is currently refusing to take Harris' calls.

[Mongrel]

Popular Science There's no Such Thing as a Natural Disaster

There are many ways to describe this summer’s calamities. But whatever you call these disasters, don’t ever call them natural. There’s nothing “natural”—which is to say, nothing inevitable—about a disaster.

Most of what we call natural disasters (tornadoes, droughts, hurricanes) are indeed natural, though human contributions may increase their likelihood or intensity. But they aren’t disasters—they’re hazards. If a hurricane slams into land where no one lives, it isn’t a disaster; it’s weather. A disaster is when a natural hazard meets a human population. And often, that intersection is far from natural.

Nothing new, technically-speaking, but the reframing attempt the author is making here is interesting and arguably reasonable.