La niña is the opposite of el Niño.
El niño (spanish - "the boy") is the name used by inhabitants of the area it hits the hardest, South America (mostly spanish speaking).
The western part of South America has its usual rainy season from late Dec to April.
The "el nino" boy is a reference to birth of Jesus. Chrstianity is the predominant faith in most of south america, so christmas is celebrated by all. Fishermen would thus say Jesus' birth brought extra "gifts" in the form of a stronger and longer rainy season, starting from late Dec.
So the the Spanish baby jesus boy brings brings miracle heat and rain upon his birth.
Invert the weather for la nina.
Now you you know what it means to you if you live in an affected area.
Edit - took out wrong statement about northern hemisphere
Australia gets the opposite weather to South America for the cycle.
So for La Nina, it's dry in South America, but wet here in Australia.
If anyone is interested: "La niña" translates to "the girl" according to google translate (perhaps I saved someone extra clicks :)
El chico -> the boy.
I know it’s normal for lots of areas of the world (and I’ve lived in those places) but we’re generally not equipped for it here.
One thing he noticed is that the water has pushed ants to find new places to live (including his growing enclosure, where they’ve made a home in his electrical box), and they’ve brought aphids to farm along with them. Obviously this along with extremely wet weather is terrible for his crops.
He has mentioned the $10 lettuce (initially $4, then $6, then…) and somehow it seemed so unlikely still, like there must be somewhere you can still buy normally priced lettuce. But I guess not. It’s wild how quickly food supplies can get gutted by climate fluctuations.
Suffice to say, I’ve begun hydro gardening for fast turn around essentials with the idea that in a time of crisis, perhaps I can avoid buying $10 lettuce. Thanks Hoocho, you’ve made my 3D printer far more useful and made hydroponics way more fun.
And this local supply disaster noted, we kinda like it that way.
The ants thing is very random and very real too. My paint cupboard in the shed (where I keep all my spraypaints/chemicals) became an ants nest a few weeks ago thanks to the rain. I opened it up and every single surface was crawling with a full blanket of ants. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Things we're going to see more and more of I guess.
Many roofers have automated messages saying "we're too busy, no point". There is backlog in getting mold tested. Also affects general trades who don't give dates, they just come when the whether is good enough.
I got flooded out of my house and took 3 months to find a new rental.
I watched as the fungus invaded my house and started to eat everything. Mould on the walls, fabrics, paper, rubber, leather. Anything that had any sort of digestible organic matter on it went mouldy. Glass had a think layer of spores. Black loud coming down from the ceiling (this is a very bad sign, your property is seriously sick if you have black mould on your ceiling).
This whole area has been dealing with this stuff since they started building here, every house is affected. These wet periods just highlight the danger. Our country doesn’t have the resources to clean this issue up. That means millions of people are inhaling spores all day every day.
Spores won’t kill you, but they will ruin your life. They get into your lungs and cause health issues. I was sceptical about it until I moved to a dry area. My health shot way back up!
Good luck getting any tradies let alone building supplies.
I can get my lettuce local though for $3 a bunch from the farmers market! So there’s that :)
But the mould ... that was the worst. I'm going to smell of vinegar and clove oil for the rest of my life.
Is the mold a recent thing related to el Niño or has it been a problem for a while?
In the US at least, many houses built in the 90s-2000s have mold issues because they were built without proper water vapor permeability and also with materials that are also not moisture resilient.
This is even an issue in dry areas like California.
But the predictive powers of climate science is low, which this article (among others) illustrates. We know we are in a period of relative high flux (compared to previous centuries), but we don't know what comes after the immediate future.
People may draw different conclusions from this, mine is that we need to get away from the thinking that there is a "natural climate" that we can revert to. We need to stop the focus on how we can influence the changing climate and start thinking about how we can adapt to various scenarios.
For example, whatever scenario that wins out will likely create massive migration pressures. How do we deal with that, humanely?
I agree. These tools should make our crash landing softer than a laissez faire policy. But
1. I'm pessimistic about the true intent of the powers that be. While paying lip service to climate action there is hardly any real action: renewables are just an extra energy source on top of the existing cheap fossil fuels that give nations some independence vs the gulf states. There is a scramble for every newly discovered oilfield - and it's not because they want to prevent the extraction. And
2. If governments succeed against all odds in phasing out fossil fuels we would still be faced with massive climate change sooner or later - be it a new ice age or whatever. These are things that are out of our control - we need to make sure we can adapt, not try to control it.
It's much easier to tell people to buy a Tesla than to tell them their children/descendants will have a much worse time on this planet.
There are many things we could do to adapt and curve the issue, but it looks like we're going to suck every last bit of resource of this planet until it kills us.
Very hard disagree. This is about all that matters. We've turned up the bunson burner heating up the Earth. What we don't know is _precisely_ how the entire climate system will respond to it, but it is a pretty good guess that if we leave it long enough and keep cranking it up that it'll eventually get really bad. We already see the weakening of the temperature gradient between the arctic and lower latitudes and the weakening of the jet stream and the formation of atmospheric blocking that is creating both large and persistent record heat spells in the northern hemisphere summer and cold snaps in the NH winter. We need to stop making that worse and rolling the dice to see how bad it'll get (which is a dictionary-definition _Conservative_ viewpoint).
I think it should be clear that we agree on that. My gripe is with the notion that we might be able to turn back the clock to some sort of pristine natural state - and keep it at that.
We can't and we won't. There is no such pristine natural climate "balance". We have enjoyed a few millennia of climate that has been exceptionally conducive to our present way of life (based on crops and livestock) - during which our species has prospered. This as been an anomaly in terms of geological ages, and instead of putting our efforts into calling names and casting blame for the current predicament we should concentrate on how to continue surviving under new and probably harsh conditions. That's all.
All that people waiting for hours in huge pickups, with the motor on, in order to put their huge boats in the water, while complaining how the water just go down and down every year. There is a metaphor there somewhere. I get some Rapa Nui vibes.
"He said the district will again seek binding guarantees from the federal and state government to help with the fast-drying Salton Sea before agreeing to reductions to preserve Lake Mead." https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sophies-choice-water-off...
Not California officials.
It's the Imperial Irrigation District, which is the water utility for largely agricultural Imperial County, which is inland from San Diego. They grow a huge amount of produce there, so the water rights are primarily for farming, not for restoring the lake, which is fed by farming runoff.
So a better comparison is farming in the Imperial Valley vs Las Vegas.
We learned as a result of the dust bowl that many aspects of the environment that we thought were useless were actually providing a stabilizing affect on the local environment. This is how we got infrastructure projects like the great shelterbelt[1].
Given this historical context the situation looks like the inverse to me. Like how the hell can the government prioritize keeping an artificial oasis supplied with enough water for a city in the middle of the desert vs prioritizing keeping a man made disaster caused by our ancestors from affecting large swathes of the country?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt
Doesn't seem all that rare, then.
>"Lake Mead would reach dead pool if the water level dropped to 895 feet, said Patti Aaron, public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Region. As of Wednesday, the level of Lake Mead is 1,049.65 feet, she said."
>“We’re not in danger of hitting dead pool,” Aaron said. “It’s not an imminent problem. It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow, and it’s something we don’t think is going to happen at all. We would take every action to not have that happen.”[1]
Perhaps this is also politics? There doesn't seem to be a lot of slack in that system and it almost seems like this person is doing a disservice with that statement.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/may/26/understanding-dead-...
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/lakemead_line.pdf
Edit-I know far too little to extrapolate from that. It looks like this time of year and into the fall is when the water recedes due to agricultural use. It’ll be interesting to see the elevation at that lowest point.
The people who (you assume) don't use the term "flyover country" are the people stopping Congress from spending money to fix environmental crises like drought.
Even so, the White House has ordered studies and gotten Congress to spend a lot of money on the Southwest already[1].
What else are you looking for, exactly? My understanding is that the current crisis is mostly due to agriculture and water rights, and I don't know how they could legally legislate agriculture in a state. That is the responsibility of the state's own government.
1. https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2022/06/01/biden-h...
If and when the Colorado River Compact implodes, it's going to be immensely painful to all the states -- but especially Arizona, which doesn't have the same senior rights as other states under prior appropriation.
It's go-to solution for dealing with climate change is pretending it doesn't exist (and punishing state employees who say otherwise), and with freak weather events by blaming renewable energy, so I can only expect that things in that region can only get worse, before they can get better.
This especially applies to any sort of libertarian psycho who wants to live in the middle of nowhere with minimal govt and then when nature shtf they bitch about the govt.
Some researchers argue that the record is simply too sparse to show clearly what is going on, or that there is too much natural variability in the system for researchers to spot long-term trends. But it could also be that the IPCC models are missing something big.
In spite of all the hand-wringing about Global Warming -- which should more accurately be called climate change -- we don't know as much as we so often seem to think we do. The actual data sets don't go back as far as most people imagine and errors in assumptions for models are not uncommon.
How far do you imagine they go back?
But the house prices in the low-lying suburbs that were hit hardest are still very strong. And my home insurance has gone up by 30%.
I definitely remember discovering the shoddy shortcuts taken in my roof and how un-waterproof they are.
Present spring is looking to be both the coldest and hottest in recent memory. Really obnoxious.
For a couple weeks we got crazy powerful winds. Thrashed everything.
Right now we are in a drought.
La Nina results in little rain in this area. We want an El Nino, because it will help the drought. Triple La Nina is bad news.
