Call me after the first direct hit by a major monsoon.
Enough slack for tides means enough slack to bump into each other. This sounds great, but I don’t believe they’re ready for prime time. Even oil platforms sink in big storms, imagine if they had tens of thousands of people on them.
The Dutch do this better imo by making floating homes that ride up and down on poles…stationary except for up and down.

Uh oh….the border “wall” in Arizona has been destroyed in many places by monsoon flooding. This during a major drought. This happened because they ignored environmental laws, construction regulations, and common sense and just built them across arroyos and washes without preparing for water. Now they’re smashed to bits.

I wouldn’t expect them to be replaced. More Trump wasteful spending for nothing but short term political gains and future costs. Maybe Mexico will pay to haul off the remaining garbage.

I've been in every type of winter storm you can name (from Canada eh!), sandstorms in Saudi, monsoons in Thailand, typhoons in the Philippines, several wet seasons in northern Australia, and a fair few hurricanes here in Texas. But tornadoes - the tricky unpredictable bastards that you can't predict, plan for or gear up for, Mother Nature's switch blade, are the only things out there that freak me out.

"Holy shit, this is crazy" is the right response.

Your video, Monsoon V, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Yeah people are moronic about flooding during monsoons, that's why we in Arizona have a "stupid motorist" law that charges them for their own rescue.

Not only a month ago I was driving back to AZ from San Diego and it was pouring the whole way back. Got back to Tucson and it was cold and clouds everywhere. Next day decided to go to this awesome canyon because I knew there would be water and after a rain like that the Sonoran desert becomes gloriously green. Basically the whole canyon park is split by a wash that turns into a raging river and on this occasion the water was flooding over all of the bridges essentially making half the canyon park inaccessible.

Then, out of the blue comes this young guy walking super fast holding his two daughters' hands, began to cross the flooded bridge, the water was about two feet deep but it was moving fast. Luckily, a park ranger stopped him, but those two little kids probably would have been swept away and drowned. Later, on we saw a rescue heli go up and saw on the news that someone had been swept away because they tried to cross.

You and me both. Years ago I had a job at White Sands Missile range, where the main entrance road was named after PFC Marvin R. Owen, an MP who had been on duty during one of those monsoon rains. Some guy reporting for duty from New Jersey, or some such station, didn't want to be late. So he drove into the running arroyo that separated him from post HQ. He had his wife and two kids with him as I recall, and they all started floating downstream. PFC Owen drove his pickup into the arroyo in an attempt to stop the car, but they were all swept away.

They all drowned in the middle of the desert, and the next day most likely there was hardly any water to be seen.

I tend not to be the first one to cross.

I moved to southern Arizona last year - still have yet to experience one these - but I surely will in the next two months. These dust storms are actually called "haboobs" and are prominent during the monsoon season which is typically June-August throughout Arizona & New Mexico. Which is quite interesting because those are the hottest months and although somewhat dangerous (floods/lightning) the monsoons begin a cooling down process (and immediate relief) which correlates with another 6 months of really nice weather.

"[the] world is actually healthier, wealthier, better educated, more tolerant, less violent than it has ever been."

Not in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Jemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, downtown Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland. Not in Greece. And I'm not entirely sure it's a better place for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who left their rural areas to become work nomads. Also not sure about the all the millions of people in Africa whose livelihood gets crushed by subsidised produce/corn from the West. Not sure about all the Indian farmers who are driven into suicide by the monopoly powers of seed suppliers. Not sure about India as a whole, now suffering from the third year in a row of a belated monsoon and horrific drought.

"Democracy means you don't everything you want, when you want it, all the time" ... "and occasionally comprise, and stay principled, but recognise that it's a long march towards progress"

He talks the talk, but even for a center-right guy, he doesn't walk the walk. Principles went out the window in Gitmo. Principles went out the window when the drivers behind the illegal war of aggression in Iraq were not prosecuted in accordance with the Nuremberg Principles. Principles went out the window when carpet surveillance pissed all over the Constitution. Principles went out the window when US military forces aid Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria just because they oppose Assad. Even mentioning principles in the face of the gruesome, drone-driven terror campaigns in at least half a dozen countries makes me want to vomit.

And don't get me started on compromise. If you ban single-payer and drop the public option before negotiations begin, that's not compromise. That's theatre meant to mislead us plebs while you add an additional layer of "market" to an already dysfunctional market, which ends up profiting the insurance companies yet again.

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

Ha. You know, when I first got into LA back in 1999, it had started to lightly drizzle, and I was on my way to buy a book from Barnes and Noble at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

I got no more than a few steps onto the Promenade before I see a news team with a plastic wrapped camera. The instant they see me, it was like Christmas morning to them, because I was wearing a short sleeve shirt and carried no umbrella. In fact, I remember thinking how odd it was to see people covering up as if it were a monsoon sweeping through LA. They sprint for me. The camera goes up. And the mic goes into my face, and it's like, "Why are you dressed like this in the rain?" It was surreal. To them, this was fucking news!

But I must admit that since being in LA for 14 years, I am not a big pussy when it comes to rain. Time in a place changes you. Now, to me, the light drizzle feels like a monsoon and I have to get out of it pronto! Ha.

dannym3141:

Claiming that people should stop burning fossil fuels would HEAVILY dent the income of just about every country because of how much tax they can charge from it. Britain's economy is almost based on fossil fuel tax. How can you possibly argue that they are a politically influenced source over fossil fuel use when they criticise such a money earner?

Politics aside, fossil fuels remain the cheapest, most abundant source of energy, and new supplies of it are being discovered all the time. I never said people should stop burning them.

I hesitate to even mention that "science" as a global community is above reproach in ways that hardly anything else can be due to the method of a scientist. If you are not performing science for truth and discovery, you are not a scientist, so you're not part of the community anymore. That's why it's above reproach. I'm sure you'll argue with me about that, but i know that you'd argue about the time of day if you were proven to be wrong.

I'm not arguing, but I am astonished you would believe scientists are above politics (and reproach), not because the scientific method is flawed, but because scientists are fallible humans with their own beliefs and interests. As W. Pennypacker said in so many words, governments reward scientists which confirm a pre-determined outcome (like secondhand smoke killing 100 billion people a year). Junk science is real; it may not be everywhere, but it's out there. And not just "the oil companies" which have "scientitians" in their corner.

Another thing, gang. Over the last few years, global warming hysteria has been relentless. It's the alarmists who declared, "The debate is over." There was even one smug a-hole who compared "climate deniers" to Holocaust deniers. Classy! There was the faked data scandal. These are not the actions of scientists confident in their conclusions. Yet the lazy media continues to back the alarmists without question.

100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem:

1. The deaths of Aspen trees in the West
2. Incredible shrinking sheep
3. Caribbean coral deaths
4. Eskimos forced to leave their village
5. Disappearing lake in Chile
6. Early heat wave in Vietnam
7. Malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa
8. Invasion of jellyfish in the Mediterranean
9. Break in the Arctic Ice Shelf
10. Monsoons in India
11. Birds laying their eggs early
12. 160,000 deaths a year
13. 315,000 deaths a year
14. 300,000 deaths a year
15. Decline in snowpack in the West
16. Deaths of walruses in Alaska
17. Hunger in Nepal
18. The appearance of oxygen-starved dead zones in the oceans
19. Surge in fatal shark attacks
20. Increasing number of typhoid cases in the Philippines
21. Boy Scout tornado deaths
22. Rise in asthma and hayfever
23. Duller fall foliage in 2007
24. Floods in Jakarta
25. Radical ecological shift in the North Sea
26. Snowfall in Baghdad
27. Western tree deaths
28. Diminishing desert resources
29. Pine beetles
30. Swedish beetles
31. Severe acne
32. Global conflict
33. Crash of Air France 447
34. Black Hawk Down incident
35. Amphibians breeding earlier
36. Flesh-eating disease
37. Global cooling
38. Bird strikes on US Airways 1549
39. Beer tastes different
40. Cougar attacks in Alberta
41. Suicide of farmers in Australia
42. Squirrels reproduce earlier
43. Monkeys moving to Great Rift Valley in Kenya
44. Confusion of migrating birds
45. Bigger tuna fish
46. Water shortages in Las Vegas
47. Worldwide hunger
48. Longer days
49. Earth spinning faster
50. Gender balance of crocodiles
51. Skin cancer deaths in UK
52. Increase in kidney stones in India
53. Penguin chicks frozen by global warming
54. Deaths of Minnesota moose
55. Increased threat of HIV/AIDS in developing countries
56. Increase of wasps in Alaska
57. Killer stingrays off British coasts
58. All societal collapses since the beginning of time
59. Bigger spiders
60. Increase in size of giant squid
61. Increase of orchids in UK
62. Collapse of gingerbread houses in Sweden
63. Cow infertility
64. Conflict in Darfur
65. Bluetongue outbreak in UK cows
66. Worldwide wars
67. Insomnia of children worried about global warming
68. Anxiety problems for people worried about climate change
69. Migration of cockroaches
70. Taller mountains due to melting glaciers
71. Drowning of four polar bears
72. UFO sightings in the UK
73. Hurricane Katrina
74. Greener mountains in Sweden
75. Decreased maple in maple trees
76. Cold wave in India
77. Worse traffic in LA because immigrants moving north
78. Increase in heart attacks and strokes
79. Rise in insurance premiums
80. Invasion of European species of earthworm in UK
81. Cold spells in Australia
82. Increase in crime
83. Boiling oceans
84. Grizzly deaths
85. Dengue fever
86. Lack of monsoons
87. Caterpillars devouring 45 towns in Liberia
88. Acid rain recovery
89. Global wheat shortage; food price hikes
90. Extinction of 13 species in Bangladesh
91. Changes in swan migration patterns in Siberia
92. The early arrival of Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas
93. Radical North Sea shift
94. Heroin addiction
95. Plant species climbing up mountains
96. Deadly fires in Australia
97. Droughts in Australia
98. The demise of California’s agriculture by the end of the century
99. Tsunami in South East Asia
100. Fashion victim: the death of the winter wardrobe


Do you really expect free people to surrender to THIS?

"Monsoon" season?

Strange, I'll have to look at the local properties -- it sounds like you guys flood the same way our areas flood here, specifically. Last major flood in Salt Lake City was in 82'-83' after monsoon rains and a heavy winter melt (this is 15-35 minute drive, but on one of two major highways going downtown.

That "flood" (City Creek flood) was something to behold as the community was driven into overdrive and created a man-made river going down Salt Lake Valley's state street (if you run google earth state street goes right into the middle of downtown, with LOTS of businesses. The flood river was pretty long from memory, like 6-10 miles. They built man-made river and then built bridges every block to get across (that is community power!). I remember standing on a bridge, amazed that humans could triumph over nature that well, sometimes.

The flood was bigger than what it says as there was flooding down all major canyon rivers and creeks (everything I-15, which goes into L.A., & east needed to be worried -- again google earth will show you the roads, rivers and creeks --, same with the Jordan River and next to the Great Salt Lake (which had been flooding over and over again for years -- they made a giant drain at one end of the lake and created an evaporation pond to dump excess into. No more floods for the lakes anymore and many flood rivers and creeks areas are cut-off and gone now (put underground).

Good luck to you guys. Hopefully, it lets up.

edit-Damn I was looking and some of the setups are the same except you get tropical (we almost never get tropical monsoons unless a hurricane hits off of California and moves in; otherwise, we get little garbage thunderstorms that cause "local" problems). No cyclones/hurricanes to ever worry about as the mountains would rip a tropical depression to shreds. Snowpack is our "cyclone".

>> ^dag:

The last massive flood in the Brisbane area was in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Brisbane_flood">1974. This is the monsoon season- but most years it just means thunderstorms.
Still raining heavily this morning. Animals are pairing up.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The last massive flood in the Brisbane area was in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Brisbane_flood">1974. This is the monsoon season- but most years it just means thunderstorms.

Still raining heavily this morning. Animals are pairing up.

>> ^kceaton1:

>> ^dag:
promote because it's still raining hard

Is that area prone to flooding every so often. I just thought it was interesting that the clay was so red, as that is what I've noticed in Red Rock (central-southern Utah here and some of the outlying "badlands")areas and gullies in canyons.
Is this more of a monsoon type event or tropical? We get monsoons (some big hail or "lots" of hail, sometimes a few inches worth and torrential rain), but not tropical ones that engorge everything with water just squalls of tiny thunderstorms (like the tornado that hit downtown Salt Lake years ago...)

>> ^dag:

promote because it's still raining hard


Is that area prone to flooding every so often. I just thought it was interesting that the clay was so red, as that is what I've noticed in Red Rock (central-southern Utah here and some of the outlying "badlands")areas and gullies in canyons.

Is this more of a monsoon type event or tropical? We get monsoons (some big hail or "lots" of hail, sometimes a few inches worth and torrential rain), but not tropical ones that engorge everything with water just squalls of tiny thunderstorms (like the tornado that hit downtown Salt Lake years ago...)