Wet please click each pictureLast Saturday I saw, felt and heard the heaviest rain I've ever seen, felt and heard. The picture on the left shows the street corner at the top of our drive – the bus stop, Motor Doctors the vehicle service station across the road standing out in green and Phoenix Takeaways to its left. The flood rushed through Motor Doctors, out the other side, down a bank, across our drive and through our gate – right hand picture. That water then transformed our back lawn into a lake, as the sidebar picture shows. Damaging wet on the West Coast Westport (4,600) floodedOn Thursday 22, the latest reports showed 820 households displaced. So far 89 houses have been red stickered (irreparable) and 400 have been yellow stickered (average harm, probably reparable). A New Zealand scientist says
Not here onlyMore - China!Now, Thursday, as I write tomorrow's post while the rain is pouring down on to the path outside my study, huge accumulating floods in China are dominating the news waves. In one city 25 are dead – 12 of them from a flooded subway. In parts of China a 1,000 year flood is being talked about. If you want to watch a video of the flooded subway, obviously taken on a passenger's cell phone, click on the YouTube video below. Don't watch it if you don't want to. WhyI've read that as the earth warms there is more moisture and that a wet weather system will stay longer over one land area, hence a region is likely to get more rain (and large dumps of it) than it previously received. To read a more detailed discussion of these points and their relation to human caused global warming, have a look at a current academic paper in The Conversation, please click here. Nonchalance shakenAs I read various articles and papers this week to try to understand what 'this rain thing' is all about, I came across a piece in Time, a magazine I respect. Here's an interesting section worth a read. The author is Ciara Nugent Developing countries have long borne the brunt of extreme weather events, especially those with few resources to deal with them. In Madagascar, for example, the worst drought in 40 years is currently pushing 400,000 people into famine. But the summer of 2021 is showing us that nowhere is safe in the climate change era. In June, a normally temperate village in western Canada briefly became one of the hottest places on earth before 90% of its buildings were razed by a wildfire. Dramatic—though far less devastating—disruption also visited New York and London this month, when several inches of rain fell in a few hours, gushing into subway systems and leaving shocked commuters to wade through waist-deep dirty water.
AccustomedI think Albi Roebke is right, both when he asks us to be afraid and when he concedes that that concept is very difficult for people to understand. I have wished for some years now that we could be scared of climate change. We might then change our ways. Climate change has been something abstract 'away out there', unlike Covid 19 which has impacted quickly and up close.' Or it was something only the greenies were excited about – labelled 'tree huggers' and dismissed. Many scientists knew about it ("we've known about climate change for decades," I read one scientist saying just the other day) but not many proclaimed it publicly. And, most importantly, many of us in 'the rich countries' have been too comfortable materially to take seriously difficult-to-believe far-off threats. I have been alive as an adult for a good deal of the period when we have been pushing out emissions at a harmful rate. I've done little about it until more recent years. Now, I am taking some responsibility for my cultural complicity. You too? □ John McInnes 23 July 2021 Postscript: Albi Roebke is intriguing to read about about. Just click his name. Translated from German, the English reads oddly. This is clearly part of a longer programme. Just ignore other non-related items. References: please click the text of choice. Stuff writer Lawerence Gullery quoting James Renwick Ciara Nugent in Time July 19 & 21 - Exposed: Europe's Climate Change Hubris #########
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