Weather Service

[greenstorm]

3C forecasted to get up to 6C. Rained all yesterday, gently, on the snow. Heavy winds today. Almost December. Still snow on the ground though.

Huh.

Last winter was pretty mild. This winter will be too if this continues.

I know Canada's heating at roughly twice the rate of the southern parts of the globe, and up here in the north it's more like 3-4x, but this seems like a lot for somewhere that used to have the lake freeze over enough to have heavy equipment drive on it?

Granted there's a lot of winter left to come. January is the worst.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

it is very warm here, too; days still in the 50s & 60s, leaves gold & brown & still on the trees because it hasn't frozen hard enough to knock them down yet. we did finally get a few nights solidly below freezing, but it's back to shirt-sleeves weather most days. we're planning to hold our thanksgiving potluck (with only a few people who don't already live here) outdoors this year, as it seems the weather will allow it. i used to envy my friends in Tucson their ability to hold Thanksgiving outdoors, as it used to be consistently much too cold for that here. Tucson is 7 hours drive time south and about 3000 feet lower in elevation; substantially warmer at all times.

i hadn't known that Canada is warming 2-4x faster than here. that seems... ominous. there needs to be winter in the north, doesn't there?

[greenstorm]

I feel like it's finally down to shirt-sleeves weather here after that weird wet cool period. Frost really helps with that!

Oof, that's an unsettling change. Enjoy your thanksgiving outside though?

Our systems are certainly built around winter, and sometimes deep solid freezes for a long time. The pine beetle epidemic up here happened because of warmer weather that failed to knock back the populations in winter so they sort of took over (there were some other factors but that was a huge contributor). Permafrost is basically frozen solid greenhouse gasses and we'd like it to stay down there.

So we really would like to keep our winters, yes. Though I remember reading something about dinosaurs that migrated above the arctic circle during summer, when the earth was warm enough that we had real summers up there. I wish I could find that again.

[yarrowkat]

The pine beetle epidemic up here happened because of warmer weather that failed to knock back the populations in winter so they sort of took over

yes, it's the proper balance of things. without the cold there are consequences, contributing to species loss, contributing to everything. it's all such a huge cacade failure - everything touching everything; individual processes (like cold kills bark beetles, or warm winter + bark beetles + dry summer = epic wildfires) somewhat (or sometimes entirely) predictable but then touching something else off in an unforseen way, or being more than was expected and that touches something else off, and now every part of it is touching every other part and there's no route back.

all in all, it is better, and not just for humans, in the years that you have winter and we have rain and no-one has hurricanes or uncontrolled wildfires. i'm not convinced those years are gone forever, just that there is no way of knowing when we will have one, and when it will be like it is today, or weirder.

[greenstorm]

This is fertile ground for new species and adaptable old ones, but perilous for many established ones. Humans are pretty well established, unfortunately for us.

[yarrowkat]

we are definitely an invasive species.

[greenstorm]

I've been finding it useful to distinguish between invades-established-ecosystems invasive species and thrives-in-disturbance-but-can't-necessarily-penetrate-established-systems invasive species from time to time. We're the former; it's the latter that will thrive.

[yarrowkat]

ah, we have both of those on the land, yes. elms for the first, and tumbleweeds for the second; loves disturbed areas; won't take root in non-disturbed areas. elms take root everywhere without exception and then basicaly can't be killed. we're elms. right.

i should see if i can make something useful from elm samaras. besides salad. :)

[greenstorm]

"basically can't be killed"

I think the archaeologists say a 4 year drought is what it takes to move cities, historically.

[yarrowkat]

sobering thought.

[greenstorm]

Truly. Though I think less true in the modern era.

[yarrowkat]

we have all these oil pipelines. i want someone to build a water pipeline, or a dozen of them. bring the extra water from all the flooded places to all the dry places. when it leaks, well, it's water. it can be repaired but it probably won't do the kind of damage oil pipelines do. but there isn't money in water the way there is in oil. only life.

[greenstorm]

We... kind of don't want that. There are a sufficiency of continent-shaping dams up here. But some folks do. This is the plan for literally moving my water (and water from north of me) to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance

[yarrowkat]

died of its own grandiosity, says wikipedia. lol. technically, we don't want to move oil that way either. we just do. speaking of environmentally destructive. it would be best if the water would fall out of the sky in the right proportions, but, as you say, that is now called "the past." they are seeding clouds in southern Colorado this winter, to keep us all alive. (a safer, less destructive technology, that.)

we're already doing smaller scale ones from closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan%E2%80%93Chama_Project. that project is keeping Albuquerque alive already. water from Colorado. technically the Rio Grande is also itself water from Colorado, in that it starts there, but it's also water that historically and ecologically is already here. the Rio Grande is going dry. https://artmuseum.unm.edu/exhibition/river/

^hauntingly lovely sound art interpretation of river flow data from the last century (file under: i love the people i work with. several of these artists are/were my students.)

really Abq and Santa Fe (and Phoenix, Tucson, etc) need to completely stop expansion, and probably shrink some to a more sustainable level, but people aren't willing to see that. "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," said Edward Abbey.