Green Group discussion
Climate Change
>
Flooding
Mod
"Guizhou, Anhui, Hunan and Hubei provinces were expected to record 250-280 millimetres (10-11 inches) of rain on Tuesday, according to the China Meteorological Administration. In the central city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus epidemic first erupted in December, a record-breaking 426 millimetres (16.8 inches) of rain fell on Sunday, the official China Daily reported, and authorities were using giant pumps to remove water from flooded roads."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ch...
Mod
"China is preparing for flooding in its northern regions that could potentially hurt crop output amid torrential rain that’s lasted over a month and caused billions of yuan in economic damage.
The floods have killed 141 people and affected more than 38 million residents in 27 provinces, Zheng Guoguang, vice minister of emergency management, told reporters in Beijing on Monday. The downpours caused more than 61 billion yuan ($8.7 billion) in direct economic losses as of July 9, the ministry said last week.
China suffers from floods every year, but more unpredictable weather has made the task of managing them more challenging, especially with this year’s rainfall among the worst on record. Since June, average precipitation in the Yangtze River has reached the highest level since 1961 and water in 433 rivers has risen above flood alert levels, according to official data.
China’s Worsening Floods Highlight Extreme Weather Threat
“China is about to enter a critical period of flood prevention and control in late July and early August,” said Ye Jianchun, vice minister of water resources. “We expect rainfall to move northward and the Huai River and other rivers in the north are expected to experience large-scale floods in certain areas.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday urged officials to implement more forceful and better measures to fight the floods, underscoring the severity of the situation.
Already reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, authorities are under pressure to ensure the floods don’t undermine China’s nascent economic recovery. An easing of lockdown measures plus a modest amount of policy stimulus should be enough to post a positive growth rate for the second quarter, after the historic 6.8% collapse in the first quarter.
From 2020 to 2022, China plans to push forward 150 major water works projects worth roughly 1.29 trillion yuan ($184 billion) combined, according to Ye. The projects are expected to bring 6.6 trillion yuan in direct and indirect investment and provide 800,000 jobs annually on average, he said."
For water works, read dams I would expect. Also canals / aqueducts bringing water from the wet south to the dry north where most of the cities are located.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...
Mod
Of course, you would release water if you knew the upstream tributaries were filling up from weeks of rain.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news...
Thanks to Taiwan News.
They report a worrying suggestion:
"Vinayak told Taiwan News that based on his estimation, all the flood gates were at least partially open with at least five large gates fully open. He said that given that the dam had the structural integrity to withstand much higher water levels in the past, there was no need to open the floodgates as soon as June 24.
He then alleged that the purpose of opening the floodgates so early was "so that all evidence is washed away before the WHO representatives visit the Wuhan hospitals and lab." Two World Health Organization (WHO) experts went to Beijing over the weekend to discuss their plans to visit Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic."
Mod
According to this weather channel operating out of Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsF6...
This rain will be flowing downhill off the Tibetan plateau, through swollen rivers with creaking dams, onto land already saturated and flooded.
Chengdu, in the south of China, is industrial. Much farmland is flooded. The water is in the Three Gorges Dam catchment.
Mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtUtT...
From the same Aussie site two days ago.
At 5.30, a graphical representation (from China) of what would happen if the TGD burst.
Footage from China: Severe flooding. Homes destroyed. Algal blooms. At 8 minutes, the Chinese are breaking a dam to release water onto farmland.
The rain is easing off at the end, but it's the middle of rainy season, and there's the most recent forecast of my previous post.
Mod
https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-ha...
Mod
"With the stormy season approaching, the regional government is providing €500,000 so Vega Baja town halls can employ experts to help draw up their emergency plans for flooding."
https://www.costa-news.com/costa-blan...
Mod
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0812/115...
"The alarm was raised today when experts in helicopters realised that the Planpincieux glacier, at an altitude of about 2,800 metres in the Ferret Valley in the Mont Blanc massif, was slipping dangerously.
A heatwave has created a layer of water under the glacier, which is made up of about 500,000 cubic metres of ice - roughly the size of the Milan cathedral - making it more prone to a break....
The threatened part of the valley was divided into a "red zone" that could take a direct hit and a "yellow zone" that could suffer from shock waves caused by the displacement of air and other secondary effects."
Mod
Mod
https://www.theguardian.com/environme...
"Michelle Jackson, at the University of Oxford, UK, who was not involved in the report, said: “The population declines are certainly very drastic, but I am not surprised. The outlook gets worse each time [there is a new report].”
She said migratory fish were often the driving force in food chains because they transport nutrients: “If these fish populations continue to decline, there will be far-reaching consequences for many species which rely on them.”
The decline in migratory fish populations is higher than that for land and ocean animals, whose populations have fallen by an average of 60% in the last 50 years. “Freshwaters are disproportionately at risk to human pressures, since they are affected by everything happening in the surrounding catchment,” said Jackson.
Previous research by Hogan found many giant river fish are on the verge of extinction, with populations from catfish to stingrays down by 97% since 1970. Other studies have shown only a third of world’s great rivers remain free-flowing, while in Britain, for example, 97% of the river network has been interrupted by human-built structures.
The report, led by Stefanie Deinet at the Zoological Society of London, examined data from 1,406 populations of 247 species. There are 1,100 species that must migrate to survive. The researchers said much more data was needed for regions outside Europe and North America to go beyond the general trends presented in the report.
The analysis did show management plans for rivers and fishing helped curb the losses, with populations down 54% in such circumstances, compared with 87% for those that were unmanaged."
Mod
"Liu Xiaobo, an influential financial columnist on WeChat and Weibo, also told Asia Times that even though rice was the staple food for most Chinese, China still imported close to 100 million tonnes of soybean to produce cooking oil and feedstuffs amid the nation’s stronger appetite for beef, chicken, pork and lamb.
Worse still, almost two months of deluge along the Yangtze River since May has drenched a large swath of croplands in southern agrarian provinces such as Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi.
China’s National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration revealed on its Weibo account this week that Anhui turned over 5.92 million tonnes of wheat as of August, 2.22 million tonnes less than the level a year ago, and nationwide, the overall decrease in wheat production was more than 9 million tonnes.
Zhou Xuewen, Undersecretary for Emergency Management and chief of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Office, said in July that “not a single grain was reaped” from about 11.4 million hectares of farmlands in southern China due to the devastating Yangtze flooding.
Yet Zhou stirred controversy as netizens found unpalatable his notion that downpours and flooding could bring more water and help irrigate farmlands and in turn ratchet up output.
In the same month, Xi inspected Jilin, a northeastern province whose wheat, rise and fresh produce feed the entire country. Xi reminded Jilin cadres and the Minister of Agriculture when visiting a massive wheat warehousing facility there that historically a famine would usually follow a plague and “higher stakes” had been attached to this year’s food production and security."
https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/covid-1...
Mod
"TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping's call for an end to food waste is a sign that the communist country is facing a shortage of grains and pork after months of flooding, insect infestations, the African swine fever (ASF), and the impact of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
According to China's state-run media mouthpiece Xinhua, Xi called for an end to food waste describing the problem as "shocking and distressing." In a quote of Xi posted by state-owned TV channel CGTN, he does not directly acknowledge a shortfall in food production but describes the coronavirus outbreak as a warning sign: "Though China has reaped a bumper grain harvest for years, it is still necessary to have the awareness of a food security crisis. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic this year has sounded the alarm for us.""
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news...
Mod
No real mention of the food problem yet; just displacement of people and compensating the rural areas for taking the brunt to spare cities.
We learn about 'sponge cities' which is the term for a city that absorbs and stores or re-uses water rather than the SUDS effect.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14...
Mod
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13...
The artificial coastal reef for NYC has one glaring problem that is hardly mentioned. The entire east coast is affected by climate change, as are the coasts everywhere. In The NYC instance, the barrier will have a beginning and an end. Under normal circumstances the disruption to the flow of water is barely noticed. In the situation with extremely large storm surges, the water is going to go around the barrier at its end points. If there are no people located at the endpoints, only the land gets flooded. In the case of NYC, it is an area where the entire stretch of coast line is heavily populated. The people at the ends of the barriers would be impacted worse than if no barriers existed.The other point is that there are dozens of situations impacting lower income people. That is why Andrew Yang proposed giving everyone who needed it a thousand dollars a month to pay for whatever is dragging down their ability to get ahead. Insurance, mortgage, rent, medical, food, energy, transportation costs all go up to keep in step with the increasing values of stock markets and real estate. This help comes from the federal level. This help is still needed.
In these new times, a lot of places need a lot of help for recovering from large scale natural disasters which also have coincidentally grown larger. The help is needed as soon as the weather related event starts, and sometimes even before the event starts. This help is going to be needed everywhere, not just in one state. The response needs to be immediate, and can not be held back by the question of who will pay for it. National response efforts have to be ready to go as soon as needed. Waiting for congress to authorize the money every time it is needed is going to cost everyone a lot of wasted time, effort, and money.
Puerto Rico is still suffering but no longer news worthy. The Bahamas and other islands are still rebuilding, still in recovery efforts, but it is no longer news worthy. Those areas as well as everyone else on solid land who have not recovered from last year's storm damage are now in the next cycle of storms, with more damage coming.
The same way the value of economies continue to increase, the negative value of areas not recovered back to normal are also increasing. These negative values are only now beginning to be placed on economies balance sheets. After Katrina, President George Bush said look on the bright side, the rebuilt areas will be worth more than before the storms hit. Unfortunately there are plenty of areas that were never rebuilt and the people impacted by those situations have been moved to other areas, and they still need help getting their feet back on the ground, and still aren't getting any help. It is no longer news worthy.
Besides that, the "news" "cooperates" with local economies and buries news about areas that never recovered. It is bad for the growth of local economies if it is wide spread knowledge that people lost everything and never got rebuilt. Very bad for the real estate business. This is inadvertently accomplished by the "news" believing they only have to report the new news, they don't have to keep the old news alive. It would take up too much time, money, effort, materials, and would only make people unhappy.
When the current corona health crisis is over, we can get back to normal, the normal where we were already forgetting about all that unrepaired damage that only keeps growing in negative values. The money made repairing the damage is no longer a boost to the local economy, but instead, the difference between what was needed and what was supplied.
When the current health crisis is over could become just another excuse not to do what is needed to be done. Everything else seems to be leaving the one off type of situation, why should health be any different.
Looks like it is going to be 2 hurricanes hitting the same region of the gulf coast within days of each other. Last time that happened was in 1860. The storms were 19 days apart. This time the storms will be 3 days apart. The second to form, Marco, will be the first to hit. The second storm to hit, Laura, might turn into a powerful hurricane.Since 1851 there has been 4 recorded instances of two named storms in the gulf at the same time. It is not always 2 hurricanes, can be named tropical storms. The last time, in 1933, it was a hurricane and a tropical storm. 2 storms trailing each other usually causes the second storm to weaken, as the first storm sucks up a lot of the heat energy. Due to warmer waters in the gulf, the second is predicted to strengthen as it heads towards shore.
New Orleans has 99 giant pumps pumping water inland to keep the water levels low. All 99 pumps are running now. The news did not say how many of the pumps will keep running if the power goes out. Breaking levees and and storm damage might also impact the pumps performance.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904674...
Mod
"There was widespread flood damage to properties in Bantry in west Cork, with roads in the county described as dangerous, with debris and surface flood water along with a risk of falling trees.
Up to 50 homes and businesses in Bantry town were damaged during a period of prolonged heavy rain between 10pm and 2am.
Cork County Council said the local drainage system could not cope, with up to 25mm of rain falling within two hours."
https://www.rte.ie/news/weather/2020/...
After the announcement of the estimated global tonnage of melted ice, its clear to see what is feeding the storms. The heat coefficient of fresh water is higher than salt water meaning it takes more energy to evaporate it. Layers of freshwater over salt water could make the salt water heat up faster than it normally would. I don't know if the warmer salt water would increase the speed at which the fresh water evaporates off the salt water it is floating on.
Hurricane Marco continued to weaken and was not a big threat to the gulf coast. Hurricane Laura continues to strengthen and could be a category 4 storm by the time it reaches land. Not all the damage has been fixed from previous storms, including Katrina, whose 15th anniversary is Aug 29.
Mod
Hurricane Laura Strengthening and Is a Category 4; Catastrophic Strike Ahead Near Louisiana and Texas Border
Mod
Mod
One cited here is the Great Artesian Basin which is the largest aquifer in the world. This takes rain from the tropical northeast of Australia and feeds it down through the country to the interior and southeast. The process takes thousands of years, but humans drained the majority of the resource in a hundred years. So to hear that the landmass is gaining ground water is incredibly good news.
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-majorit...
Mod
"rebuilding over and over after successive floods makes little sense.
The shift threatens to uproot people not only on the coasts but in flood-prone areas nationwide, while making the consequences of climate change even more painful for cities and towns already squeezed financially."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/cl...
Mod
There are endless numbers of reasons and rationalizations for explaining why decisions are made. It has become apparent that no one is thinking clearly. The decisions are clearly flawed, defended only by the concept of compromise. The acceptance of flawed decisions is in itself a flawed decision that compromises reality with human desires.In the far past, for people to survive, they had to fight other people, as well as fight the weather on a daily basis. As time went on, people still continued to fight each other, but fighting the weather became less and less important. For the recent past, it was really only people fighting each for survival. Fast forward to today, and we are back to square one, lock, stock, and barrel. People are still fighting each other, but people are also back to fighting the weather/climate/environment on a daily basis, and losing.
Parts of Louisiana look like Puerto Rico, which still has houses using blue tarps for roofs. We will be able to see if all the damage gets repaired before the next round of storms come through the area. It should be interesting to see if google satellite maps shows the damage in updated pictures or will time stand still.
Mod
Mod
Mod
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0902/116...
"The manager of the Abbeyglen Castle Hotel in Clifden said the flooding is like nothing he has seen before, describing the deluge as "absolutely terrible".
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Brian Hughes said the flooding has caused more damage to local properties and lands than the recent storms did.
He said rising river waters have closed roads and blocked off bridges into Clifden and Roundstone, with one local holiday village evacuated of residents and closed after the bridge leading to it was below water."
The big question of climate change is whether the equilibrium that is eventually reached has calmer weather or is it simply resetting the intensity of the weather to a higher level of destruction.
Mod
Yeah, The Mississippi River Delta is in trouble. Per this summary:
"The Mississippi River Delta and coastal Louisiana are disappearing at an astonishing rate: a football field of wetlands vanishes into open water every 100 minutes. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land, an area roughly the size of Delaware."
The article goes on to enumerate some of the main reasons. Interesting (and concerning) read.
Mod
Once there is sufficient energy in a system that storms are the norm, I don't think it ever settles down. Look at Jupiter.
I've read Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
which was based on the best scientific evidence, and it predicted storms continuing, right up to the point where humanity had been killed off from several causes.
Mod
Mod
"Right now, a lot of folks can probably sum up that mood in one word: fear. Some of the most damaging wildfires in recent memory are raging across the West Coast right now, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes and killing more than 30 thus far. Meanwhile, states like Mississippi and Alabama are gearing up for the second massive hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast in less than a month. In situations like these, where sticking your head outside to check the weather means getting a lungful of ash or worse, digital tools for tracking the weather—apps included—are less of a luxury and more of a necessity. And as far as IBM’s concerned, it’s a necessity that’s extremely lucrative, whether you realize it or not."
https://gizmodo.com/your-weather-app-...
"In other words, The Weather App isn’t just telling marketing types whether it’s raining where I happen to be, but also how I’m gonna respond to that particular bout of bad weather, and whether I’m the type to stay inside and bake, stay inside and binge drink, or stay inside and not do anything at all. It’s not just about tracking the weather, but tracking the way it’s impacting our collective moods as a whole."I install very few apps in my phone, use just a handful of what came with the phone. When you use a laptop there is a lot of freedom of choice as to where you get your information. You can go to the website or keep searching.
The phone is another story. With my browser/provider set up there several sites that won't let me use the web site, I have to use the app, which I don't install. I wait until I get home. The solution seems to be to find the smallest laptop to carry around.
Mod
The phone is useful for citizen science and we are able to make more and more use of the camera.
Mod
"These warnings are issued for exceedingly rare situations when a severe threat to human life and catastrophic damage from a flash flood is happening," the NWS said in a statement Wednesday morning. "This is a life-threatening situation. Seek higher ground now.""
https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-sa...
Take care, anyone affected.
Mod
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2020/09...
"Governor Ron DeSantis as well had declared a state of emergency for counties in Florida's northwest. The state activated hundreds of national guards and rescue teams before the storm hit.
There have been so many tropical storms in the Atlantic this year that the UN's World Meteorological Organization, which names the tempests, is about to run out of names for only the second time in history.
The last time was in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans."
Mod
An interactive map from Inside Climate News showing where the fund sites are and which are near your home, if you live in USA. Search by state or click on a site.
The article suggests these will be 'battered, flooded and submerged' by storms and sea rise.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23...
Many of these sites operate on the clean enough philosophy. The surface is clean enough to past some sort of test such that the soil doesn't require further cleaning, yet the property can not be zoned for residential use. The underground water can be cleaned enough to drink but the main body of water itself is polluted with only minimal efforts being made to clean it at rates that will never result in its clean up.The bulk of the money to clean these sites ran out years ago, so they are mostly just idling, enough being done so it doesn't get worse but it never gets really better. A soil cap is all that separates much of the material from the surrounding environment. Hence the problem with flooding.
One of the ways these sites get cleaned up is when a large company with deep pockets buys the property and cleans it up enough to fit the use they have in mind. Usually that is clean enough to make almost all the officials happy with the money that is made from the redevelopment of the land. Many times the polluted ground material is carted away to another location and replaced by "clean enough" fill from another site somewhere else.
Mod
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2020/10...
""The situation is catastrophic in some communes," regional lawmaker Eric Ciotti told AFP.
"We are thunderstruck. We saw the (river) Vesubie burst its banks - everything was swept away, including part of the old iron bridge," said Serge Franco, a resident of Roquebilliere, some 50 kilometres north of Nice."
Lots of storms that start out in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa heading for the Americas now seem to end up circling back towards Europe by crossing the North Atlantic. The bigger size of the storms allows more of the storm to survive the cross Atlantic trip.
Mod
Mod
"By 10 a.m., all 78 floodgates barricading three inlets to the Venetian lagoon had been raised, and even when the tide reached as high as four feet, water levels inside the lagoon remained steady, officials said.
“There wasn’t even a puddle in St. Mark’s Square,” said Alvise Papa, the director of the Venice department that monitors high tides.
Had the flood barriers not been raised, about half the city’s streets would have been under water, and visitors to St. Mark’s Square — which floods when the tide nears three feet — would have been wading in a foot and a half of water, he said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/wo...
The flood barriers work for now. The water stagnation is a problem by cutting off circulation and by also not letting out what comes off and out of the land into the water. The problem of sea water corrosion is strange as that should have been solved before it was put up. It is probably a different story when the water gets delivered as rain behind the gates. Like the forts from a couple of hundred years ago that overlooked the water but the canons couldn't be pointed backwards towards the land.
Hurricane Delta is apparently hitting the same place on the gulf coast where hurricane Laura came ashore 6 weeks ago. The aerial view of the area showed a sea of houses with blue tarp roofs. It looks just like Puerto Rico. The debris is still on the streets from the wrecked buildings from the last hurricane. All of that left over wreckage will go airborne creating even more damage.
Mod
Green Group
Books mentioned in this topic
Cara: Builder of Dun Daen (other topics)The Road To Crescent Head (other topics)
Meet Me At Crescent Head (other topics)
My Heart Belongs In Crescent Head (other topics)
North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Kaitlynn Clarkson (other topics)Erica Ridley (other topics)
J.J. Mathews (other topics)
Elizabeth Forest (other topics)
Tanya Bird (other topics)
More...
With sea level rise, the seawater pushes further into the river at the delta and can force a course change or avulsion. As the sea continues to flood deltas, the sediment deposition is going to occur further inland and the river may jump channel more easily.
This would lead to flooding and avulsion further upstream, in some cases upriver of flood prevention barriers.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-major-r...
Beyond Control: The Mississippi River's New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico