EARTH....

[Motor City]

Study: Exxon Mobil accurately predicted warming since 1970s

Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming, even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists' conclusions, a new study says.

The study in the journal Science Thursday looked at research that Exxon funded that didn’t just confirm what climate scientists were saying, but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists.

This was during the same time that the oil giant publicly doubted that warming was real and dismissed climate models’ accuracy. Exxon said its understanding of climate change evolved over the years and that critics are misunderstanding its earlier research.

Scientists, governments, activists and news sites, including Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, several years ago reported that “Exxon knew” about the science of climate change since about 1977 all while publicly casting doubt. What the new study does is detail how accurate Exxon funded research was. From 63% to 83% of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about .36 degrees (.2 degrees Celsius) a decade......

[ZoWie]

The second Highway through Hell episode aired last night, and it further chronicled what happened last year in BC. It was just like what happened this year in Northern California, only 100 times worse. Both times it was an atmospheric river moving gigatons of water evaporated from the ocean, and dumping it all on the same land area. Climate change chaos math at its worst.

That's got to be the world's luckiest, or unluckiest, reality TV shoot in recent media history. The exact one of those two descriptions depends on whether you're above or below the line on that show. They had a full crew positioned in the mountains ready to chronicle the winter's usual traffic chaos and the heroic marathon efforts of tow truck companies to keep everything from collapsing. They didn't expect to have the only footage of a flood that the Nooz couldn't get anywhere near, and the footage is spectacular. It's also scary. You have people trapped, major highways eaten by river beds, and rescuers risking their lives to get victims out. One can only imagine lugging gear and scared crew members around to actually take pictures of the mayhem, but it's good they did. It's not only a good show but it's the only footage extant that shows the real craziness.

Some of the shots of people are framed tight, and likely picked up later, but it's hard to pick up a river knocking down a bridge.

Maybe someone got footage this year in Santa Barbara. About the same craziness, on a smaller scale. Lots of retired show business folk and a few young wanna be moguls up there. Lots of places to rent equipment and hire talent. Hope someone got something.

I knew a line producer on a reality show, a big one, and he vanished without a trace. No, not dead, but no one knows where he went. He got his fill of location craziness in Alaska and disappeared. Deserted. Went over the hill. Just like in a war. Not always a lot of difference, actually.

[Number6]

California has seen a lot of rain over the past couple of weeks and here are some of the rain totals. The amount of rain is from July 1st to January 16th and the percentages represent the amount above normal.

San Francisco (Downtown) - 206%
Sacramento Executive Airport - 171%
South Lake Tahoe - 231%
Stockton - 255%
Fresno - 201%
Bakersfield - 151%
Death Valley - 205%
Santa Barbara - 209%
Los Angeles Airport - 207%
San Diego Airport - 186%
Riverside - 168%
Palm Springs - 100%

https://ggweather.com/seasonal_rain.htm

This is a lot of rain for California in so short of a time period. There's good news and bad news about the rain. The good news, besides filling reservoirs, is there will be a plethora of flowers, grasses, as well as increased snowpack. The bad news is with all the new growth from the rain means if we have a hot summer the new growths will dry out and be fuel for more wildfires.

[ProfX]

It's interesting how much effort Exxon-Mobil and the other oil corps. put into denying something their own internal research said was happening.

[Number6]

It's interesting how much effort Exxon-Mobil and the other oil corps. put into denying something their own internal research said was happening.

I'm not surprised they did this because if their research was known decades ago we might have been able to transit to electric vehicles and alternate sources of energy production. What surprises me is how many people, mainly conservatives, believed the oil companies BS and still believe it today. They remind be of a person who denies their house is on fire when there are flames coming out of the roof.

[ZoWie]

It was always kind of a background process in journalism to understand how large corporations suppressed inconvenient data. There was always some source who had the real poop, but who wasn't as credible as the CEO or board chair. The facts usually had to go out with weak or no attribution, and people discounted them.

[bradman]

I haven't seen any of these here. Our soil is loam meaning that is mainly sand and silt so it soaks up water pretty fast but storms can over-saturate the ground.

Interesting. Sounds like California is making some headway.

https://news.yahoo.com/california-storm ... 26989.html
Associated Press
California storms feed systems set up to capture rainwater

LOS ANGELES (AP) — As Californians tally the damage from recent storms, some are taking stock of the rainwater captured by cisterns, catches, wells and underground basins — many built in recent years to provide relief to a state locked in decades of drought.

The banked rainwater is a rare bright spot from downpours that killed at least 20 people, crumbled hillsides and damaged thousands of homes.

Los Angeles County, which has 88 cities and 10 million people, collected enough water from the storms to supply roughly 800,000 people for a year, said Mark Pestrella, director of the Los Angeles County Public Works department.

In the four years since Californians approved a measure to invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year to build small and medium-sized infrastructure projects that collect rainwater, experts say progress has been gradual, but not insignificant.

In Santa Monica, a new water project captured nearly 2 million gallons (7,600 cubic meters) of runoff that once treated gets used for plumbing, irrigation or pumped back into the city’s aquifer.

Sunny Wang, water resources manager for the city, said the project will eventually save an average of about 40 million gallons (151,000 cubic meters) per year.

The vast majority of rainwater in California's cities eventually flows into the ocean. In Los Angeles, a complex system of dams and paved flood control channels steer water away from roads and buildings and out to sea as fast as possible. The century-old infrastructure was designed to prevent urban flooding.

From the concrete-lined Los Angeles River alone, which starts in the San Fernando Valley and ends in the ocean in Long Beach, 58,000 acre-feet of stormwater was sent out to sea during the recent storms, said Kerjon Lee, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. That's about 20% of Nevada's allotment from the Colorado River each year.

“It’s a big number we’re capturing, but it’s a small percentage of the watershed,” Wang said. “Billions of gallons of stormwater enter Santa Monica Bay each year, so 40 million sounds like a lot but it’s just a first step towards more investments we need to make."

Whoops, a snag?....

https://news.yahoo.com/environmental-ru ... 07044.html
Environmental rules stoke anger as California lets precious stormwater wash out to sea

Environmental rules designed to protect imperiled fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have ignited anger among a group of bipartisan lawmakers, who say too much of California's stormwater is being washed out to sea instead of being pumped to reservoirs and aqueducts.

In a series of strongly worded letters, nearly a dozen legislators — many from drought-starved agriculture regions of the Central Valley —have implored state and federal officials to relax environmental pumping restrictions that are limiting the amount of water captured from the delta.

"When Mother Nature blesses us with rain, we need to save the water, instead of dumping it into the ocean," Assemblymember Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield) wrote in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Since the beginning of January, a series of atmospheric rivers has disgorged trillions of gallons of much-needed moisture across drought-stricken California, but only a small fraction of that water has so far made it into storage. In the delta — the heart of the state's vast water system — nearly 95% of incoming water has flowed into the Pacific Ocean, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The calls by lawmakers have reignited a long-simmering debate over where — and to whom — the state's precious water supplies should go.

"With so much excess water in the system, there is no reason that exports south of the Delta cannot be increased," read another letter that State Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger) and Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains (D-Bakersfield) addressed to Newsom.

But experts say it's not that simple.

While the delta provides drinking water for about 27 million Californians and supports the state's massive agricultural industry, it is also a delicate ecosystem that is home to threatened and endangered species — many of which have been suffering amid warming waters, increasing salinity, dangerously low flows and other ecological stressors. The tiny delta smelt are dangerously close to extinction.

[ZoWie]

I don't have a solution for Sacramento or the Central Valley. It's a battleground between several interest groups, all of which have vastly differing needs and values.

LA is a little more comprehensible. The good burghers in the 1920s realized they couldn't have a land boom if it was going to flood every ten years, so they entombed the natural watercourses in cement, so that the one year in 10 that had a lot of rain would simply wash it all out to sea.

Dumb idea. It's up there with getting rid of unwanted industrial chemicals by dropping them all into the ocean that sustains life on Earth, or pumping them into oil faults to increase flow... and earthquakes...

Now we go to war with the LA we have, not the one we want.

Humans, being humans, are much more interested in who gets to keep all the money and who should be forced to sacrifice to let it happen, leaving little energy for all that fancy stuff like having a future at all.

[Number6]

Interesting. Sounds like California is making some headway.

https://news.yahoo.com/california-storm ... 26989.html
Associated Press
California storms feed systems set up to capture rainwater


Whoops, a snag?....

https://news.yahoo.com/environmental-ru ... 07044.html
Environmental rules stoke anger as California lets precious stormwater wash out to sea

The problem with Southern California capturing rainwater is we don't have the infrastructure to do that. There was a report on CBS Evening News about Los Angeles County only capturing about 20% or storm water runoff. One of the things I've advocated for years is building more reservoirs and linking most of them together so with canals or underground pipelines to transfer water to other reservoirs when they get full. With most of the population of Southern California living between the mountains and the ocean it might be hard to find suitable sites for a new reservoir and perhaps somewhere in the mountains they could create new lakes the size of Big Bear.

[ZoWie]

LA is full of spreading basins which double as recreational areas in the long intervals between flooding weather phenomena. It's not like no one ever heard of storm water retention. There was an early consciousness of the problem. There has been a groundwater replenishment tax district for decades now. I know because our money goes into it.

In the days of Native American tribes, this particular area was full of lakes, streams, and springs. This lasted until maybe the turn of the 20th century. Now, it's bone dry. The Chumash Native Americans, what's left of them, still give historical lectures on the subject. Our local high school has a large puddle which at one point was a spring surrounded by a small city in its own right, until the Europeans did the same thing they did to native tribes the world over. Now there's a tiny museum in a little rickety building that you can't really get to.

We did neglect to retain enough of this ecology. It's still there, but only as cement flood channels and a few water wells which get pumped out by small companies no one's heard of, and added to the drinking water supply. Santa Monica has a bunch of these. Culver City has been dug up in a few places for years to update the infrastructure that no one knows exists.

Farther south was a vast swamp. It went from the ocean clear to Beverly Hills. It's now a very small wetland next to a small boat harbor, just in from the beach. Several of the cement channels empty into the ocean next to this harbor, making it a pollution hot spot. The wetland is not a recreational area. It's not much of anything. It's mostly homeless camps, which may or may not be evacuated when a storm is predicted. When they aren't, you see the result on the Nooz.

What happened was that the full scope of the problem was not addressed, because up until the turn of the century, LA was completely about selling the most real estate to the most people and worrying about the consequences later.

Now is later.

[ap215]

Thunderstorm watches expire as storms move out of central Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Severe thunderstorms watches and warnings issued Thursday for central Ohio have expired after storms moved through the area.

Wind advisories that were in effect for much of the region are expired as well.

https://www.10tv.com/article/weather/se ... e49cdccf1a

[ap215]

4.2 earthquake, flurry of aftershocks off Malibu coast rock Los Angeles

Los Angeles County was rattled early Wednesday after a magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck 10 miles off the coast of Malibu, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The initial quake was reported at 2 a.m. followed by a magnitude 3.5 just three minutes later, magnitude 2.8 about 2:22 a.m. and magnitude 2.6 at 2:38 a.m.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-wor ... s-angeles/

[ap215]

Tornado watch: 'Extremely dangerous' tornado slams Texas; storms sweep across Florida

More than 150,000 homes and businesses were in the dark across Texas, Arkansas and Missouri on Wednesday and a tornado watch was in effect across much of Florida as a line of severe weather brought havoc to much of the South.

In Texas, at least one tornado late Tuesday tore off roofs east of Houston, downing utility poles and power lines and flipping cars, trucks and even a train. There were no immediate reports of serious injuries.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/torna ... li=BBnb7Kz

[ZoWie]

The US has been having its spring time tornadoes all through this entire winter, though the flood in northern CA got all the publicity.

We felt two of those Malibu earthquakes. At our distance from the center, they barely qualified as dish rattlers. Swarms like these are pretty common when the ground adjusts to motion on faults. Better 15 little ones than one huge one and two medium sized aftershocks.

[ap215]

NYC Snowless Winter Streak Ends, Brutal Cold Snap Looms: What to Know

It took us long enough.

Central Park recorded its first measurable snowfall of the season early Wednesday, with nearly half an inch of snow as of 5:30 a.m., according to the National Weather Service. While it's hardly a blizzard, or remarkably in any way at all, really, Feb. 1, 2023 is officially encoded in city history as the latest ever date New York City saw accumulating snow.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/weather/nyc- ... e/4079259/

[ap215]

Mount Washington Facing Wind Chills Of Minus 100 Degrees, Adding To Its Extreme Weather Reputation

W​ind chills will be in the minus 90s and minus 100s into Saturday at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, adding to this observatory's long history of weather extremes.

What's happening: Situated in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire at 6,288 feet, the Mount Washington Observatory is facing a combination of extreme cold and strong winds from an intense blast of arctic air.

https://weather.com/news/weather/news/2 ... wind-chill

[ap215]

Earthquake shakes western New York

WEST SENECA, N.Y. (WIVB) — An earthquake occurred Monday morning in western New York, registering at magnitude 3.8.

The epicenter of the earthquake was located 1.3 miles east northeast of West Seneca.

https://thehill.com/homenews/3845281-ea ... -new-york/

[ap215]

White House ‘profoundly concerned’ by reports of earthquake in Turkey, Syria; 1,600 dead

National security adviser Jake Sullivan on Monday said the White House is “profoundly concerned” by reports from Turkey and Syria, where a massive earthquake has killed more than 1,600 people.

“The United States is profoundly concerned by the reports of today’s destructive earthquake in Turkiye and Syria. We stand ready to provide any and all needed assistance,” Sullivan said in a statement.

https://thehill.com/policy/internationa ... 1300-dead/

[ap215]

Sudden dust storm leads to deadly 10-vehicle pileup in Oklahoma

Powerful winds kicked up a sudden and dangerous swirling dust storm Tuesday, causing a 10-vehicle pileup that killed a driver on US Highway 54 in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

The blowing dirt and dust became so thick that officials said it rapidly reduced visibility to “near-zero conditions” for motorists near Goodwell, about an hour north of Amarillo, Texas. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said the chain-reaction crash occurred around 11:30 a.m. local time when a car struck a vehicle that had stopped on the highway due to an earlier accident. That second crash, in turn, caused several collisions involving five tractor-trailer trucks and five cars that were unable to stop in time, police said.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- ... up/1483709

[ap215]

Deadly new quakes trap people under rubble in Turkey

Rescuers are once again searching for people trapped under rubble in Turkey after two new earthquakes hit the country, killing at least three people.

Tremors of 6.4 and 5.8 magnitude struck in the south-east near the border with Syria, where massive quakes devastated both countries on 6 February.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64711228

[ZoWie]

Aftershocks are completely predictable and should be planned for, but they never are. There's always too much to do with immediate relief, and the protection of people against further quakes always gets lost in the shuffle. It almost a guarantee that anything over a magnitude 7 will have at least one or two aftershocks in the 6 range in the next year or two.

[Number6]

Dandelions, who knew you could make rubber from them? The Air Force is spending millions of dollars to on a program to turn dandelions into rubber. The purpose of this program is reduce reliance upon rubber suppliers from Asia and Africa.

The Air Force is spending millions of dollars on a program to make rubber from a certain species of dandelion that grows in the United States and use it to produce items such as aircraft tires to cut dependency on foreign supplies, service officials said.

The program is being spearheaded by the Air Force Research Laboratory and involves three private companies — BioMADE, American tire giant Goodyear and small Ohio-based business Farmed Materials. If successful, the program could open a new domestic supply of natural rubber.

BioMADE, a manufacturing innovation institute sponsored by the Defense Department that specializes in biomanufacturing, has contracted Farmed Materials to cultivate the dandelions and Goodyear will produce the aircraft tires and make certain that they meet Air Force specifications.

For decades, the world’s natural rubber has typically come from Hevea brasiliensis trees in Asia and Africa, but the Air Force program plans to start getting it from the kok-saghyz dandelion, which grows in abundance in the United States.

The milky-like substance that produces natural rubber can be found in the leaves, stems and roots of rubber trees and kok-saghyz dandelions. In the dandelions, more commonly known as TK dandelions, the substance is harvested by crushing its roots.
https://www.stripes.com/branches/air_fo ... 08349.html

If this works, it could open up a new farming niche market in the U.S..

[ap215]

I have a tablet which i check out all the weather radars from what i saw it started out as a tiny innocent rain cell then it just fully blossomed if it reaches the air temperature or Dew Point it is completely different no matter what location month or season it is plus it is very rare we get Tornadoes this early in the Winter here in the Northeast.

Heavy damage reported after rare tornado warning in New Jersey

A possible tornado struck central New Jersey late Tuesday afternoon, a rare February event for the state, leaving behind heavy damage to homes and other structures and impacting local travel during the rush-hour commute. There have been no reports of injuries.

At 3:41 p.m. EST Tuesday, the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Mount Holly, New Jersey, reported a radar-indicated tornado in the Hamilton Square, Twin Rivers and Highstown areas of Mercer County, just north of Trenton. The NWS had issued a tornado warning at 3:41 p.m. EST for those locations through 4:15 p.m.

https://news.yahoo.com/possible-tornado ... 30231.html

[ZoWie]

In LA the weather forecasters have been predicting doom for a week now, but nothing happens. Last night there was a blizzard warning for Los Angeles County.

Turns out that it was for one small climate zone in the mountains. The emergency warning system is not granular enough to accommodate all our vertical climate zones. This makes it pretty much useless for anything short of a nuclear attack.

We have been assured that we're about to see the craziest storm in these parts in decades, but meanwhile the sun keeps shining and the wind is somewhere between zephyr and breeze level. We have been told to watch out for blowing snow, ice accumulations, and tornadoes.

In other words, the weather forecast is like the rest of the news.

[ZoWie]

Yow, we've made the BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64733809

longtime LA meteorologist: “I have to be totally honest with you guys: I’ve actually never seen a blizzard warning” pic.twitter.com/J8SS5uKTdR
— Mark Follman (@markfollman) February 22, 2023