Quote of the week
“One cubic metre of air at a temperature of 30°C can hold about 30 grams of water vapour. A cubic kilometre of such air contains the same energy as the Hiroshima bomb…. Hurricanes can be hundreds of kilometres in diameter and so contain tens of thousands of Hiroshimas.”
-Dr Stephen Salter, writing in Arctic News (14 Sept.).
How to stop a hurricane. (Warning: You will need $40 billion a year…)
Stephen’s topic is hurricane mitigation. He reckons that by using 600 times the mean output of all the electricity generated in the USA over 200 days, you could cool the volume of seawater it takes to kickstart a season’s worth of Cape Verde Atlantic hurricanes by 2C, thus probably preventing them from forming (unless the water is even warmer…).
A more practical way of preventing hurricanes then would be to spend $40 billion a year on building and maintaining a fleet of 100 ships specially designed and equipped to spray saltwater droplets of a particular size into the air, causing hurricanes to turn into ‘gentle tropical storms’. That’s just the Atlantic, by the way.
For those of us who remember his entertaining columns containing madly logical ideas in New Scientist magazine, the name of the late ‘Daedalus’ comes to mind.
“Comrade, famous spire is 123 meters! Who knew?”
“Now we know. He’s the real ‘little rocket-man’…”
Stormy Weather
So, “Full Disclosure”, the short-awaited memoirs of Ms Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, award-winning porno movie director, grande horizontale and Trump Nemesis, is hitting the stands about now and threatens to out-best-sell even last week’s Get Donny! best-seller, Bob Woodward’s fearless White House exposé, “Fear”.
Apart from the obligatory stories of her abused childhood, the key to rocketing sales of Stephanie’s tell-all tome is obviously going to be the more descriptive passages concerning That Night of seemingly not so steamy Passion at the Golf Club, and the exact dimensions of the priapic pussygrabber’s orange junk.
Reviewing the book, The Guardian‘s Tom McCarthy writes that Stormy reveals all in “excruciating detail”…
SPOILER ALERT
“She describes Trump’s penis as ‘smaller than average’ but ‘not freakishly small.’
‘He knows he has an unusual penis,’ Daniels writes. ‘It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool… I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart…
‘It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.’”
So now we know. He’s the real “little rocket-man”…
Presidential image (boingboing.com)
“Fear” on the other hand has had a lukewarm reception in Washington. Apparently, journos inside the Beltway are yawning, rather. There’s nothing the doyen of investigative journalists has dug up that tells them anything they – or we – didn’t already know.
And, opines Politico, since the Kennedy era, as expectations of the rectitude of the office-holders have waned over the years, we’ve learned that all Presidents are pretty inconsiderable people on the inside. Trump especially is benefiting from public neurasthenia: nobody cares how badly he behaves, how dangerously incompetent, capricious, corrupt, vindictive, money-obsessed, narcissistic and ignorant he might be, it’s all hard-wired into the political mindscape.
(It doesn’t bode well for Number 46, whoever that’s going to be….)
“…the combination of decades of disillusion, along with decades of Trump’s behavior hiding in plain sight, go a long way to explaining why Woodward’s merciless account has changed so little… Long before Trump, our would-be leaders began to strive to convince us not of their heroic stature, but their human dimensions.” (Politico Magazine)
The knowledge therefore that, to go with the Hobbit-like dimensions of his tiny hands and feet, the Leader of the Free World has a winkie like a button-mushroom and not much clue what to do with it; even banging a porn star while his undocumented new wife was still nursing their infant son, and being spanked on the bare bottom with a copy of Time magazine, might once have been Trump’s electoral undoing; not now.
Likely, the image will evoke feelings of maternal sympathy among the more matronly dumbfucks, and among those of his MAGA hat-wearing supporters for whom a very big gun collection has to substitute for whatever.
(Or a mushroom cloud? Ed.)
Retail news extra
Jumpin’ Jack’s Not So Flash
“The perfect metaphor for post-Brexit Britain: a chain of bog-standard discount stores where stuff comes pot-luck in crates.”
Tesco has opened the first of a chain of discount mini-supermarkets, branded ‘Jack’s’. The report in The Guardian says:
“Heavy rain and winds did not deter bargain-hungry shoppers on the opening day of Tesco’s new discount chain, Jack’s, with long queues to enter the store and the car park overflowing. At 10am on Thursday, the formal opening time, 150 people were waiting to enter the new supermarket in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. The store is Tesco’s attempt to fend off the German discounters Aldi and Lidl.”
They got a free cupcake, and a jute bag-for-life. Grateful shoppers apparently then took the empty bag along to Aldi, down the street.
“Or we could just stand in the street and chuck groceries at you…”
What the report doesn’t really explain is why Tesco feels it needs to go to the extra expense of adding another chain of convenience stores to its existing stable of, er, convenience stores – and why, just to compete with Aldi and Lidl, it has given it a patronizingly downmarket name, weakening its own famous brand, and briefed its store design team to make it look as completely shitty as possible?
Why not just reduce your prices? It’s the perfect metaphor for post-Brexit Britain: a chain of bog-standard discount stores where stuff comes pot-luck in crates; a lowering of horizons to adapt to a dysphoric new world of food banks; of scrimping and saving and making-do for the down-at-heel.
The founder of Tesco, Jack Cohen would certainly recognize it. The son of Jewish migrants to the grim East End of London in the early 1900s, his first shops did away with doors, to make them – as his Wikipedia entry says – more like market stalls: a dog-eat-dog environment where, after leaving elementary school at 14, he survived on his wits.
Welcome to the future.
GW: “Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath, ‘long about a Saturday nite”
Your old Gran thinks you’ve probably heard enough about Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut to last a month or two, as even the MSM (mainstream media) seems to have woken up to the synchronous superstorms as a sensational news story this past week.
So here are some of the less reported wild and wacky weather scenarios we’ve dug up from the litter of the past ten days:
Algeria: the city of Tebessa was underwater (12 Sept.) after flash-flooding during a torrential rainstorm washed away hundreds of cars. A child died and another is missing.
Turkey: 13th, a powerful storm dumped 147 mm rain in a day, caused flash-flooding in Bandirma, in the north of the country. Again, cars seem to have been the main victims. Is the planet telling us something?
Spain: the narrow streets of old medieval towns prove ideal for heavy rains to turn them into raging torrents. Several towns have been affected by flash-flooding since the 7th September. On the 14th, 50 mm rain fell on Malaga in under half-an-hour. Video has just been posted of a powerful storm that battered Granollers, north of Barcelona, on 7 Sept., felling trees and ripping off roofs. Intense rainfall brought flash-flooding to the city.
Climate & Extreme Weather News #136/ Indianfoodies website/
USA: as remnant hurricane Florence (42 dead) moves north, Virginia has been struck by destructive tornadoes – 1 dead. Up to 6 inches of rain flooded basements, stranded cars and prompted evacuations in two locations on the east side of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Monday night. There’s been severe flooding around Raleigh, Va. “Where these clusters of thunderstorms stall for a period of a few hours, localized flash flooding is likely, with rain rates of 1 to 4 inches per hour. If these clusters stall over parts of Iowa, southern Minnesota and southern Wisconsin, flash flooding might occur faster, given soil moisture remains high after last month’s flooding.” – The Weather Channel
Hurricane season news: Wunderground’s Bob Henson reports:
“…every ocean basin in the Northern Hemisphere is now running above average for accumulated cyclone energy … The Atlantic’s ACE is running 28% above average for this time of year, and the 10 named storms and 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic are both well ahead of average counts for this point in the season. … At least part of every ocean basin on Earth saw record-warm SSTs during August, according to NOAA’s monthly climate report issued on Monday.
(The Carolinas are still struggling with the aftermath of Florence, which broke all State records, dumping up to 33 inches of rain before moving north. Rivers are still rising, and the city of Wilmington (pop. 120,000) may be cut off for a second time since the weekend, requiring emergency supplies to be helicoptered in.) (Wunderground)
Nigeria: Mrs May’s raindancing has done the trick… 100 people have died during two weeks of intensive rainfall. Many areas have experience localized flash flooding, (while) wide areas of the country now face flooding from the country’s major rivers after long-term rainfall in Nigeria and river catchments in neighbouring countries caused the Niger and Benue rivers to rise to danger levels. (Edited from Floodlist report)
Office workers in Hong Kong thought they’d been hit by an earthquake.
Philippines: Over 70 dead and 50 missing after 135 mph Supertyphoon Mangkhut clipped the north of Luzon island; widespread crop and property damage. At least 4 people died after the storm made landfall again 80 miles from Hong Kong, where it blew the windows out of high-rise office blocks and rained papers off the desks. As of 17 September, Mangkhut had dissipated into a tropical depression and will continue to weaken. However parts of south west China and northern provinces of Vietnam could see intense rainfall and strong winds. (edited from Floodlist report – also, see CEWN #126 for video)
UK: Remnant Cat 1 hurricane Helene continued weakening rapidly along its forecast track, out of the Azores and up the Irish sea… feared windspeeds and rainfall totals failed to materialize over Ireland and western Britain. Unrelated, Storm Ali is, however, heading in off the north Atlantic 19 Sept. with forecast windspeeds of 80 mph. (Various sources)
Update: First of the season, Storm Ali brought winds gusting in the Scottish highlands to 115 mph. 2 people were killed, a woman in the Irish Republic when a caravan blew off a cliff; a workman in Northern Ireland when a tree fell on him. A number of people were injured by flying debris. Thousands of homes in Scotland without power.
A second storm is forecast for tomorrow, 20 Sept, further south, bringing up to 4 in. of rain and possible flooding to Wales; and another for Sunday 23rd. The words ‘atmospheric river’ have not passed the forecasters’ lips, but that is what the map looks like as the fragmented jetstream winds (175 mph) ferry a belt of rainstorms eastwards across the Atlantic through northern Europe.
Climate news:
“Bad things can happen when you’re talking about a storm this size. It’s called Mother Nature.” – So ran a tweet from the chump-in-chief, Trump, warning Carolinians to evacuate ahead of H. Florence. Think Progress website has a report of new research he won’t want to hear:
“The authors of a bombshell new analysis, ‘The human influence on Hurricane Florence,’ disagree (that it’s just ‘Mother Nature’). They find that human-caused global warming has supercharged the atmosphere so much that it is boosting the very worst of the projected rainfall totals by more than 50 percent. (And they were talking about 18 inches, not 33…)
“ThinkProgress asked coauthor Dr. Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) whether ‘your analysis allows us to say the storm is more than just Mother Nature?’ He replied in an email:
“‘Indeed. The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!’”
Local news:
After waiting until a quarter past one for the rain to ease off, Hunzi and I took the plunge before his bladder exploded.
Almost literally plunging: the brief lull ended within a few minutes and it came bucketing down again. Luckily I had my golfing umbrella, that I use to deflect passing traffic. Only my left sleeve bore the brunt.
On the way we passed the nearby river monitoring station, where I now realized why workmen had been so busy the past couple of weeks.
The new river level gauges they’ve installed will give the management authority an extra 6 feet to play with.
Should they need as much, I fear for my neighbours across the street, whose houses are 3 feet below road-level and were flooded out in a 2-day storm, June 2012. The rise in river level was down to a mistake at the hydro-power dam upstream, not to Mother Nature, so it hasn’t happened since. But….
There’s Something They’re Not Telling Us….
Yellowstone News: The Blessed Mary Greeley reports, the Steamboat geyser, biggest in the park, has gone off yet again – that’s the 19th time this year (17 Sept). Normally 1 or 2 times a year, if at all, the frequency is now roughly every 4-5 days and getting shorter, with longer and more violent outwellings.
20 Sept: Part of the Norris Junction area of the park has been closed to visitors, as another geyser, Ear Spring (‘A normally docile hot pool’), has been chucking superheated steam, rocks the size of bowling balls and discarded junk 30 feet into the air. It hasn’t erupted since 1957. (US Geological Survey newsletter)
Other, normally quiescent geysers are also showing unprecedented activity. Groundwater temperature has increased to 206F. USGS also reports, a new geyser has formed near Old Faithful, and an 8-foot diameter area around it is ‘breathing’, ie the ground is rising and falling by 6 inches – every 10 minutes! (This is perfectly natural, apparently. Although no-one’s noticed before. Think: boiling porage…)
Censorship news:
‘Dutchsinse’, alias Michael Janitch, the St Louis-based earthquake forecaster, looks like he’s been finally shut down by a concert party of USGS and international geo-agencies who have put out a joint statement claiming he’s just a big fat liar. Your Old Granny, who has sat through many of his three-times daily roundups at agonizing length, has to say there’s no evidence of that. A more painfully honest truthsayer would be hard to find.
He actually has a better-than 80 per cent record of accurately predicting timings, locations and magnitudes of quakes to within reasonable self-set tolerances, based on a simple theory of mechanical pressure distribution across plate boundaries that the experts say is scientific bullshit, as: “you can’t predict earthquakes”. The problem is, he can – and does; without pretending to have supernatural powers.
So what is the point of milking taxpayers to maintain those official agencies, if the best they can manage is to tell people there’s just been an earthquake or a volcanic eruption somewhere – something the people on the spot might have noticed for themselves? What purpose does that serve? What good do they actually do? Oh, right, they measure things. And attack anyone they don’t agree with.
The point is, surely, that as a US citizen Janitch has a 1st Amendment right to promote his theory and telecast his analysis free from libellous censorship campaigns by aggrieved parties? He invites subscriptions, but his website is provided free of charge, with no paywall. So he’s not cheating anyone – and he’s right far more often than chance. Given his extensive global following, unlike USGS and the other agencies he may in fact have saved lives.
Veteran Yellowstone watcher Greeley, although unqualified as a geologist, is clearly serious in her intent and fairly clued-up, basing her analysis on years of reviewing publicly-available ground monitoring data; although she’s been predicting an eruption at any moment for the past five years at least.
I hope I’m not being unfair, because the data are becoming faintly alarming.
She may believe, but she doesn’t preach; it’s not her fault most of her followers seem to be on their knees night and day, wailing and gnashing their dentures – some unfortunately praying for the volcano to erupt soon, an event the Parks Department estimates could immediately cause 23 million casualties, so they can meet Jesus. That’s a heck of a line even for a good book signing.
If Greeley, and some less informed YouTube supervolcano doomsayers piggybacking on her website; also many less credible phenomenologists, are allowed to carry on promoting their end-of-the-world, second-coming scenarios and conspiracy twaddle, how is it that a knowledgable, intelligent and serious amateur like Janitch, however controversial his ideas, can be forced off the internet by vested interests?
Is it purely because they find him embarrassing – especially at a time when science itself is under attack from corrupt and irresponsible, unqualified politicians led by a climate-change denying US President, who really ought to know better?
Perhaps we should be told. My conspiracy theory is, they’re afraid he might one night forecast some truly terrible event, information over which they would have no control and that might cause mass panic when it came true.
Just sayin’.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 