Not just a meaningless blip
Yes, Virginia, this could be the new normal, and yes it is scary.
The dangerous heat wave enveloping the Pacific Northwest is shattering weather records by such large margins that it is making even climate scientists uneasy.
You mean especially. Not even, but especially.
Infrastructure, including heating and cooling, is built according to expectations of a “normal” climate. Human-caused climate change is quickly redefining that normal, while dramatically raising the likelihood of events that simply have no precedent.
All the air conditioners are running practically nonstop. Does that put a strain on the electricity grid? Gee, I wonder.
“Because of the fact that climate change has made heatwaves like this much more likely and intense, we might very well reach the tipping point of what our infrastructure and other societal systems are able to deal with,” Friederike Otto, of the University of Oxford, told Axios.
Roads are buckling here too, some so badly that they have to be closed.
“If our decision makers do not take this heat wave as a harbinger of things to come and act quickly to adopt the climate change policies we all know are needed, I fear for the future of humanity,” Jean Flemma, an oceans policy expert living in Portland, told Axios on Sunday.
Sure sure but meanwhile lets panic about Critical Race Theory some more.
What climate change policies can be adopted that will REALLY address this? I am a bit…skeptical. There are eight billion people, including at least a billion who want/have “middle class” lifestyles.
Over the precipice we go. :(
Yes, but the Republicans have stalled the infrastructure bill, because being in the majority only matters if you are Republican. No matter which party controls Congress, the Republicans run everything.
What’s more fun (for Americans of the PNW) is seeing the ravening hordes of Real America TM flee their oppressive desert for cooler climes… won’t that bit of friction be enjoyable?
Watch real estate prices go skywards in Alaska, Greenland and Patagonia. Particularly since one D. Trump is probably sitting on an option to buy one helluva lot of it. The news that he does not believe in the UN’s Paris Agreement is probably as fake as feathers on a wombat or a koala bear..
Predictions are that the Upper Midwest will also be a place to own property in the near future due to Climate change. I’m feeling rich all of a sudden.
Total aside, but interesting information to some, perhaps: the energy load placed upon the grid by counteracting heat is worse than that created by countering cold. Cooling things generally creates a reactive load, whereas heating things is almost always a resistive load; the former consumes resources without any benefit and is the ongoing bane of large-scale power generation facilities for a wide variety of reasons ranging from technical to capacity-planning reasons, whereas the latter is straightforward and rather more predictable in its effects. This is partially (perhaps largely) why one normally hears of power grids suffering rolling outages during heat waves, but not during winter cold snaps. (The recent winter problems in Texas notwithstanding: their Libertarian policies borked them for two seasons and not just one. They’re an exception.)
If I recall, the failures in Texas were due to frozen moving parts and not overload, as well as they were telling the Feds to “Just Keep Your Hands off my Power Supply.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHdH3XWUP8A
That is interesting information.