by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Yesterday in this space I posted about the "Flat" forest fire that is currently raging in Central Oregon and has consumed more that 22,000 acres. That fire had been threatening the scenic little town of Sisters, which I also discussed, and although it had been diverted away from Sisters, it was still less than ten percent contained. I also quoted a finding on Google Search which backed up my belief that climate change impacts the frequency and intensity of forest fires.
Today I would like to again emphasize the dangerous impacts of climate change on another weather-based phenomenon, the massive dust storms of the American West.
A dust storm is referred as a "haboob" by the people living in the areas where they occur, and there were two enormous ones which hit within hours of each other this past Monday. The storms were separated by more than eight hundred miles. One was in Phoenix, Arizona, an area where dust storms are not all that uncommon. (I lived in Phoenix a little over five years more than a decade ago and endured three fierce ones while I was there. Now I understand they are even more common and smaller ones may occur several times a month during the summers.). The other one that made news this week was at the "Burning Man" festival in Black Rock City, Nevada.
My first query to Google Search was to see if the two storms were connected, and the AI-powered search engine assured me that:
"Yes, a single monsoonal weather system brought severe winds and a massive dust storm, also known as a haboob, to both the Phoenix, Arizona, area and the Burning Man festival in Nevada this week."
The one in Phoenix knocked out power to large parts of the city, and forced the closure of the city's major airport, Sky Harbor, for several hours. The haboob that hit Burning Man closed the festival for an extended period of time and destroyed some of the makeshift structures at the site. Both caused significant interruptions in the lives of thousands of people.
I also queried Google Search as to whether the frequency and intensity of dust storms were impacted by climate change (essentially the same question that I asked about wild fires yesterday - and the answer was basically the same as the day before):
"Yes, climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of dust storms by creating conditions like prolonged drought and reduced vegetation that expose soil and fuel wind erosion."
(Of course that finding is essentially a no-brainer, and even Elon's Grok could have probably sussed it out eventually.)
But, long story short, climate change is real, and it is showing itself so frequently and intensely that even our government may soon have to admit that it is a major concern to the health and well-bieng of all Americans. Well, it will admit that if it is honest!
1 comment:
Timely subject in many ways. I just read a report this morning that the new administrator of NASA is going to close any NASA science programs that aren't directly related to space exploration. Among other things, the original NASA charter says, it has a responsibility "(t)he expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space". But nope! the Trump administration only wants to look up and not down. So shut down all them commie pinko satellites that measure CO2 and stuff in the atmosphere.
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