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

[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.