188,000 Evacuated As California's Massive Oroville Dam Threatens Catastrophic Floods (washingtonpost.com) 457
Mr D from 63 quotes a report from The Washington Post: About 188,000 residents near Oroville, Calif., were ordered to evacuate Sunday after a hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam threatened to flood the surrounding area. Thousands clogged highways leading out of the area headed south, north and west, and arteries major and minor remained jammed as midnight approached on the West Coast -- though by early Monday, Lake Oroville's water level had dropped to a point at which water was no longer spilling over. The lake level reached its peak of 902.59 feet at about 3 a.m. Sunday and dropped to 898 feet by 4 a.m. Monday, according to the Sacramento Bee. Water flows over the emergency spillway at 901 feet. "The drop in the lake level was early evidence that the Department of Water Resources' desperate attempt to prevent a catastrophic failure of the dam's emergency spillway appeared to be paying dividends," the Bee reported Monday. Officials doubled the flow of water out of the nearly mile-long primary spillway to 100,000 cubic feet per second. The normal flow is about half as much, but increased flows are common at this time of year, during peak rain season, officials said. But water officials warned that damaged infrastructure could create further dangers as storms approach in the week ahead, and it remained unclear when residents might be able to return to their homes.
Big news in California... (Score:2)
Re:Big news in California... (Score:5, Informative)
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But hey, we got more welfare and crony projects like the Bullet-CrazyTrain.
New and shiny will always attract funding. Old and boring, not so much.
FTFY (Score:2)
New and shiny will always attract funding. Old and boring, not so much.^W^W^W^W^W^W^W Corrupt politicians don't care about people once elected, they care about more power.
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Not sure why you're bringing up Trump in this discussion.
If you think this has something to do with Trump, you're just a partisan hack. The real question you should be asking is why California ignored this for decades(there were problems in the 1980's that were ignored). Why the state threw money at illegals and pet projects, then insuring their infrastructure was sound. And at the end of the day who's going to be responsible. I'll give you a hint: It won't be the feds or Trump. This is all directly on the hands of California, their in-action, and their mism
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Yes, the train that will cost $68.4 billion and fulfill the same transportation demand as spending $119.0 billion on 4,295 new lane-miles of highway plus $38.6 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways ($158 billion total). Let's not build it because we need that $68.4 billion for other things, right?
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Every claim you just repeated by the State has been proven _False_ by other agencies who did not "fluff" numbers and use hyperbole to determine usage. To be cost effective the train will need to cost more money than an airline ticket and the overall commute time cuts small percentages off of driving. Usage of the train will be minimal, just like Amtrack who requires massive federal funds each year to operate.
Every penny of that train is deficit spending by the Government with minimal private investment be
Re:Big news in California... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's false. The Legislative Analyst's Office questioned the assumptions but did not find anything in the CAHSR's numbers that were factually incorrect. The State Auditor found some risks and weak oversight but again could not disprove the numbers. We see the same thing over and over again, and each time it helps California improve its planning and oversight.
Meanwhile, every HSR line in the world that's at least a few years old is already making a profit.
Every.
Last.
One.
Even Amtrak's Acela Express makes a profit [businessinsider.com]. So why would California's HSR be any different?
Hate to admit it, Trump got this one right. (Score:2)
Reg
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Most dams in the US were built in the 20-30s and had an engineered life span of 50-100 years.
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Would they have drowned if they were lying down?
Oh, no. The dam is 185 miles away from Silicon Valley. We would be safe from the imminent collapse of the dam. However, a 30-foot-tall wall of water would eventually end up in the delta and flush out the endangered smelt fish. That would be a tragedy.
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Were any of them kneeling?
Nope. I forgot to order a blow job with my skinny vanilla latte this morning.
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So, you live in southern CA.
Re:Big news in California... (Score:4, Funny)
So, you live in southern CA.
If I was in Southern CA, I would have a muffin to go with my skinny vanilla latte. ;)
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My bad. I thought blow jobs came with skinny vanilla lattes only in Southern CA.
That's a lot of wasted water (Score:5, Funny)
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considering the state is in a drought half the time. If only there was a way to build a wall or something to hold the water until it was needed.
You forgot the part about: if only there was some way to move the excess water about 500 miles south to where the drought problem is centered.
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There have been multiple proposals to do just that, but between the environmental lobbyists and the people who would rather use the money for a train they're going to ride about once, it's just not happening.
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The folks who live in the North don't want to have our rivers run dry and to be in unending drought because our water is going to Southern California, where they have made a lot of desert from what was historically marshland, and having made it a desert continue to try to farm it.
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Re:That's a lot of wasted water (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem was lack of maintenance (Score:2, Interesting)
I was watching last week when the bad cracks in primary spillway gave way and limited its use. Of course, that didn't stop Governor Moonbeam last night, who finally addressed the issue at 11pm over a week after we knew this was going to be a problem, from playing politics and blaming global warming. The requirements for the dam were created in the late 1950's, and this hasn't exceeded the design capacity of the dam. The problem is that the damaged spillway can't be used at full capacity because of bad ma
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when the Sierra Club sued
So, are you folks going to sue the Sierra Club for the damages?
Political fallout (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting that everyone's trying to put a political spin on this, and finger pointing is starting.
First, T supporters say T should only give emergency assistance if CA swears away from "sanctuary cities". CA's response is that CA has always paid into the fed just like every other state, and that one political issue shouldn't be used as a threat against another.
Second, is the reason for not preventing this. There was concern of weakness in the dam's overflow systems going back years. Different experts gave different opinions. It seems it was on the borderline of being problematic, at least on paper. If it's only on the borderline of being a problem, then expensive fixes tend to get ignored.
It may also be a case of "cascading failure" whereby the backup (overflow handling) failed, and then the secondary backup also failed. Sometimes bleep just happens under extreme weather. Other CA damns and water systems held up; the chance of all them working perfectly is slim. If you have hundreds of water systems, at least a few will have notable problems during heavy rains just out of shear probability.
Large dams are probably a thing of the past, in part because they are a single big point of failure, and in part because they screw up the existing state of nature. Smaller sub-dams are the preferred way now, if any. But we still have to maintain the big old ones because many existing dwellings and roads rely on them to work.
Re:Political fallout (Score:5, Informative)
Second - yes, this is a 'natural disaster', because that's exactly the term we use when the natural phenomena dump ridiculous amounts of water in a particular location. In other places it produces devastating floods, like last year in South Carolina. Here California was somewhat lucky, because they had a dam like this in place with an empty resevoir that absorbed it - and that wall of water would otherwise be flooding the valley below, along with all the people who live there, and may yet still if the emergency spillway collapses.
Re:Political fallout (Score:4, Interesting)
2) While the source of the water was natural, the dam was built to create an artificial reservoir to hold fresh water to deliver throughout the state for drinking and irrigation. The dam didn't help absorb the rainwater. Without it, the water would've been sent down the river at a manageable rate over the last 2 months of heavy rainfall. Even now, as long as the spillway(s) are being used, the rate of water flow below the dam (which by definition, since the reservoir is full, equals the rate at which new water is being added to the reservoir by rainfall upriver) is manageable. The danger exists only because if the dam fails, all the water which has been artificially bottled up will come crashing through all at once. So if it fails, it will very much be a man-made disaster.
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It's really easy to say that from your easy chair. I've actually toured a good deal of Calfiornia's tremendous water system. It looks pretty well maintained.
Nobody knew that the spillway was structurally insufficient. Nor did anyone know that the Cypress Avenue overpass was going to fall.
Re:Political fallout (Score:4, Interesting)
Hi Martin,
Well, I think the environmental groups are blowing their own horn a whole lot over this, but I don't think they actually predicted a structural failure. What I believe they thought would happen was that the spillway would be over capacity. It actually wasn't over capacity, it just broke. And they were afraid that the emergency spillway would have had to be opened due to overcapacity, and that this would increase the turbidity in the river and we'd get a hillside of silt deposited somewhere.
I was a volunteer for one of those organizations for several years. They don't have the facilities to predict a concrete structural failure.
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The government folks also had the design drawings and specifications. The main thing you get from a visual inspection is an answer to these two questions: Is it built as specified? Are there material failures?
We will probably eventually find out why it was inadequate. Today, we know it was inadequate but we don't know if it was underdesigned or if it was not built as specified.
Another Katrina (Score:5, Informative)
I just wanted to post some info before everyone spins this as a partisan failure of one sort or another.
1) The dam was built and is owned by California.
2) California was warned about the potential problem (the one we are currently seeing) in 2005.
3) In 2005, as part of the federal re-licensing procedure for the dam, several groups urged federal officials to require that the dam’s [earthwork] emergency spillway be upgraded to concrete. The federal government declined.
4) The dam was built at a time when requirements were less strict in comparison to today's standards. The dam foundations were dug down to "weathered" rock, which is less structurally sound than "bedrock".
And finally,
5) As much as people feel the need for karma or justice or revenge or whatever, we DO NOT punish people's lives and homes over partisan bullshit. The federal government should (and most probably will) assist in any way that they can to help avoid a disaster.
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop while letting this particular bit of infrastructure upgrade get ignored. Both California and the Federal government (viz: the licensing mentioned above) can share the blame for this.
It's another Katrina-like situation: both governments (Cali and Federal) were warned, did nothing, and now it's an emergency.
Also of note, and I'm trying to look at the big picture here and not point fingers, it's been pointed out that the infrastructure in our country has been neglected for a long time (especially roads, bridges, and the electrical grid), and we really need to start fixing up things.
Fixing our infrastructure was one of the campaign promises of the party in power, perhaps this will galvanize them to action.
Re:Another Katrina (Score:4, Interesting)
Summary: life is more complicated than the current tribal cold war has people believe.
But I'm pretty sure CA has not spent billion dollars on a hyperloop project.
Re:Another Katrina (Score:5, Insightful)
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop while letting this particular bit of infrastructure upgrade get ignored.
Perhaps you mean the California high speed rail, which was paid for (so far) by a bond measure, the money for which cannot legally be designated for something else?
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California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop...
Can I see a citation for that?
Re:Another Katrina (Score:5, Informative)
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop
This would be what's known as a lie, but it's convenient so it's repeated frequently.
CA passed a measure to sell bonds for high-speed rail between (roughly) LA and (roughly) SF. The money can only be used on that rail project. It isn't hyperloop or anything else with technical risk. It's a straightforward electrically-driven train like you see everywhere else on the planet.
Oh, and the alternative was massive upgrades to the Interstates, airports and other transportation infrastructure for double the price. How foolish to go for the cheaper, proven option.
Re:Another Katrina (Score:5, Informative)
I was at this reservoir less than a year ago, and it was nearly empty. It filled to the brim in two months. This probably corresponds to a 400-year flood (one not expected to occur more than once in 400 years) if anyone even thought about such a thing happening.
Although there was a filing by a number of ecological groups (one of which I used to volunteer for extensively), those groups did not know that there was a structural problem in the dam spillway. The state was very definitely not warned about that by those groups or anyone else. The groups felt that the spillway capacity could be overrun. That has not happened. The spillway failed due to a construction issue. Had it not failed, its capacity would have been adequate.
California hasn't spent on the hyperloop. Caliifornia has spent on a high-speed rail, which it desperately needs dispite the whining of farmers who wish the public to build yet more free water storage for them so that they can continue to farm what they have already made into a desert.
California's central valley was swampland before the farmers came. The removal of that hydrological buffer makes the long droughts that we suffer much worse.
Re:Two spillways (Score:4, Insightful)
The earthen emergency spillway would never have been used if the concrete spillway had not failed. The problem with the earthen spillway is that once used, there was an indication that it might erode back to the weir, which is a door the width of the spillway at the top. When the weir is opened and the water is high enough, it is released. If the weir was undermined, water might have started flowing out under it, and the flow would have been uncontrolled until the water level fell to a level that would be blocked by the dam wall.
None of this would have happened if the main spillway did not fail.
While we will probably avoid a flow high enough to flood Marysville (again - Marysville has been no stranger to floods), the real problem, and the one that the ecological groups were really warning about, is that a whole hillside of soil got dumped in the river. This is increasing the turbidity all the way out the Feather and Sacramento rivers to the San Francisco Bay, which is not going to be good for the Salmon run. Fish need cold, clear water. We're going to get all of that silt deposited somewhere, too.
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Stand next to I-5 somewhere between Patterson and Castaic. Or just look at it on Google Maps satellite view. Those vehicles are going 70 MPH and there are more than enough to fill lots of trains, and we have Highway 99 and 101 as well. Plus all of the jets between Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose and LAX, Ontario Caliifornia, John Wayne Orange County, Bob Hope Burbank, Long Beach. Say a dozen per hour.
I don't think the cost is "ballooning out of control". It's much lower than a highway of similar capaci
More info, with pictures (Score:5, Informative)
There's actually 2 things going on.
The existing spillway is made of concrete, and suffered some structural damage.
Here is an image [htvapps.com] of the damage, from a couple of days ago, and here is that same spillway today [hdnux.com].
The lower half of the spillway is probably completely gone. The raging water might erode up to the level of the dam, but that's not likely.
The actual problem was the emergency spillway, which is an earthen bank to the left (looking up to the dam) of the regular spillway.
You can see the damage in this image [htvapps.com]. Note that one of the eroded canyons reaches almost up to the level of the water.
If the erosion had reached the emergency spillway it would have burst, releasing a whole lot of water downstream.
Here's a closeup [hdnux.com], and note the middle lower portion of the image. We were that close to a breech.
That didn't happen, and the waters are now below emergency levels.
However, the situation is rather precarious and the emergency spillway could still burst. There's still a lot of water still coming in to the reservoir, which is being frantically lowered.
(And yes, I wrote "Hyperloop" when I meant "High Speed Rail" above.)
Rock/Earthen Dams in California (Score:3)
Guess how many of these quickly build damn dams exist in California.
The next 160 year cycle of Pineapple Express mega-floods is due in 2022. Geologists know the cycles from core sediments, which are indisputable.
Can they retrofit dams in time? Will they even try? Will it make any difference if they do retrofit? Will any bureaucrat get fired? I am betting NO.
Do the dam and water engineers already acknowledge this and the bureaucracy keep quiet on it, just like at Oriville Dam?
I have an idea! (Score:3)
I have an idea!
Why don't we put all the water back into the aquifers we've been taking it out of, instead of letting it out, and down to the pacific?
What a lamentable situation! If only someone could invent something to do that!
Oh. Wait. They did. In 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1992, though, was 25 years ago.
What a lamentable situation! If only a millennial could reinvent old technology in ignorance, thinking it was new, to do that!
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You want to pump water under high pressure into the ground.
We already know what happens when you do that in non-earthquake-prone geology thanks to fracking. Oklahoma now has frequent earthquakes.
You think it's a good idea to do the same thing in a place that is prone to earthquakes and has (estimated) tens of thousands of unknown fault lines.
legislature? (Score:3)
Americans Against Scary Dams (Score:3)
When the Banqiao dam system failed in 1975, killing 230,000, the hydro lobby's excuse was that because Chinese dams were built to different design standards from the US, such an accident could never happen here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But this failure of a modern American design means that the hydro lobby has finally run out of excuses. No matter how up-to-date the design, no dam is walkaway safe. No large project can be built without the possibility of corner-cutting by some person at some time. Some of this country's largest dams are approaching 80 years of age, and there are no provisions for dealing with the costs of eventual decommissioning. And after all these years, nobody knows how to deal with the increasing amount of leftover silt.
Better than China, I guess (Score:2)
At least the people of Oroville got a warning.... :P
Re:Desert (Score:5, Informative)
Answer: Hydro of course. Everyone's favorite renewable. The source so many countries credit for high renewable percentages.
Other interestig tidbits: Deforestation due to hydro results is reduced carbon sequestration. Also, decay of plant material under hyrdo reseviors and active aquatic microbial digestion is a source of added methane emmissions. Studies show these emissions may be quite high.
I think Hyrdo is a great power source. But nothing comes without trade-offs. I think most here are willing to trade off the things I listed above for the benefits of hydro.
Re:Desert (Score:5, Informative)
This dam is primarily for water supply, the hydroelectric aspect is secondary.
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That does not negate any of his points.
Re:Desert (Score:5, Insightful)
It actually does negate most of Mr. D's point -- Mr. D suggested that there are alternatives worth considering for hydro power to avoid the eco damage. He's right about that. But there is no alternative to storing water. You either dam the water up somewhere so that you have it available during droughts or you don't. And water takes up space.
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The reason they're saying the hydro downsides don't apply is because it has little to do with hydro power. The storage and damming is going to happen regardless, because having water supply is going to outweigh any other type of consideration. If you can get the hydro power for free, then you have no reason to not do it except for spite. But you can't blame the downsides of damming on hydro power if damming will happen with or without power generation.
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the main reasons the dam was built was to provide a water supply and flood control.
Well which was it? Water supply would mean you'd keep it as full as possible. Flood control means the opposite. Given what's going on, i.e., worse flooding than if the dam hadn't been there, even if it doesn't fail, it's fairly clear that flood control was given almost zero priority in operating this dam.
Re:Desert (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really anything to do with hydro though, is it?
The dam was built to manage the water supply and prevent flooding. They just added hydro as a nice bonus because why not make use of all that free energy? It wasn't build for hydro, it was built for water management.
It's like blaming radios for car accident deaths because many of the cars involved happen to have them. Banning hydro wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference, the dam would have been built anyway. And even if this dam didn't have hydro, it would still have failed in exactly the same way.
Besides which, few places are building new hydro dams because most of the places where a dam is beneficial already have them. Small scale hydro perhaps, but it's mostly wind and solar and some geothermal now. Oh, and tidal of course.
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Hydro means water, I guess you know this. It is greek.
Your post would make much more sense if you would add the missing word you are talking about.
Obviously considring the context of the post, the parent etc. we know the missing word is 'power' ...
Just saying.
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Also, decay of plant material under hyrdo reseviors and active aquatic microbial digestion is a source of added methane emmissions. Studies show these emissions may be quite high.
No headlines make these emissions sound "quite high" relative to every other energy source they're in-line with solar and wind. They aren't perfect, but they aren't worse than fossil fuels by a factor of 10.
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Also, decay of plant material under hyrdo reseviors and active aquatic microbial digestion is a source of added methane emmissions. Studies show these emissions may be quite high.
No headlines make these emissions sound "quite high" relative to every other energy source they're in-line with solar and wind. They aren't perfect, but they aren't worse than fossil fuels by a factor of 10.
Actually we don't have the data yet to make those claims. Also, if you just look at electrical generation sources you get a different balance as much fossil fuel burning is for transportation and other.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Answer: Hydro of course. Everyone's favorite renewable. The source so many countries credit for high renewable percentages.
It's not everyone's favorite renewable, environmentalists hate it. It's basically impossible to build a new dam in California because of it. San Francisco decided against draining Hetch Hetchy because they were afraid environmentalists would prevent them from filling it again.
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Actually all points against hydro you make are wrong: ...
A) the energy source with the most devestating loss of land is nuclear energy, due to open pit mining of uranium. Oh! That does not happen in your country but in another country far far away
B) woods and trees don't "sequester" CO2. They use it to grow, and release it again when they die and rot. It is a zero sum game.
C) while methan is released (and a given size of methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbondioxide) the methan is destroyed by UV
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B) Forests hold a set amount of CO2 at any given time, but that is released and no longer held. Forests are important for CO2 control. What worse is that what would be CO2 release is now release as methane from decay.
C) Methane is considered one of the most potent greenhouse gasses. Much more than CO2
John Prine (Score:2)
So does Mr. Peabody [youtube.com], but he recently declared bankruptcy [slashdot.org].
Re:Desert (Score:4, Insightful)
What percentage of climate change is due, solely, to fossil fuel burning? We all agree that the number is less than %100, but what is it?
How much area, in square kilometers or whatever area unit you wish to use, has been affected by climate change so that people have been displaced?
Until you can answer those two questions, you have no place in this discussion -- your assertion is little more than mere conjecture.
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Exact? No. How about ballpark-range?
Re:Desert (Score:4, Interesting)
Until you can learn to communicate in a post-elementary-school-playground manner, neither do you.
It certainly does if you're trying to ascertain whether fossil fuel burning has caused enough climate change to displace people, as the OP asserted.
Your hypothetical interview scenario is moot and useless. Calculation of population displacement due to climate change would never be based on interviews -- it would be linked directly to (habitable land mass before change) - (habitable land mass after change).
Protip: Use more logic and reason, and less emotion when composing your arguments.
Re:Desert (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY (Score:2)
"You are mistaken. Climate change due to fossil fuel is blamed for ALL displacements of people for weather events like flood and drought." That distinction is critical, and not maintaining the distinction is intellectually dishonest. History is full of records dating back thousands of years describing floods and droughts which caused mass migration, famine, and all of the illness that comes with those things. Those are not from "fossil fuel", but normal natural events.
Rational discussion with people who
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Oh, and you are dead wrong on the your methane also, but nice attempt with the 'might'. its almost as if you dont know that normal land with mammals living on it also produce methane, and that lake bottoms are notoriously anaerobic..
You didn't even try to check, did you? Here is one source of many.
http://www.climatecentral.org/... [climatecentral.org]
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You have no idea how big California is or how many biomes it spans, do you?
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This comment is what you get when you have a very poor understanding of geography.
CA is large. Only parts of it are desert.
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Most of the nations food can be easily grown in the midwest.
If you want tomatoes in January, you aren't going to get them from the Midwest. You also aren't going to get grapes, almonds, or a wide range of vegetables. You will get sweet corn in July and August, and nothing the other 10 months.
The #2 state for agriculture is Texas, #3 is Iowa. In dollar value, California produces more than both of those combined.
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In the event that you didn't know there are 5 vineyards within an hour drive from my home in Kansas. California's growing seasons span the year round at least in some parts where as Iowa is 6-7 months of the year so I'm not surprised it produces almost twice as much.
no clue what last year was but heres 2015...
https://data.ers.usda.gov/repo... [usda.gov]
Re:Just another example of dirty hydroelectric ene (Score:5, Insightful)
The dam is for water management first, electrical power generation second, and flood control third. You can concern troll about hydro if you want, but it's mostly inappropriate here.
Re: Just another example of dirty hydroelectric en (Score:2)
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As far as I know, the Banqiao Dam was build for flood control.
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Insert 40 quarters to play
Not a desert [Re:Drought is over!] (Score:5, Informative)
First, Oroville, California, gets 52 inches of rain per year. NOT a desert.
According to US climate data 30.7 inches of precipitation per year
http://www.usclimatedata.com/c... [usclimatedata.com]
which is about 20% less than the national average
https://rainfall.weatherdb.com... [weatherdb.com]
Still: not a desert.
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The good news is that Sacramento will be wiped out. The bad news is that Los Angeles will go dry without the California Aqueduct. If you still own a bathtub in LA, fill it now. You will soon be able to parcel it out for a hundred bucks a gallon.
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That 'blister' is a football field sized hole that's 40' deep.
Also, they thought it was going to slough off completely because they were dumping 100,000 cfs (or 6,200,000 lbs of water per second) to get the water off the earthen emergency spillway.
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The "blister" is in the main spillway, not the emergency spillway. However, it seems to be holding out fine.
The problem is that the emergency spillway isn't really a spillway, it's just the side of a hill which is rapidly eroding from all the water running over it. This undermines the emergency spillway at the top, weakening it, and could lead to failure of this part of the dam. The main dam (highest in the US) seems to be fine for now.
Re:Failure of Big Science (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what rock you've been living under. For years, client scientists have been saying that AGW will bring about more droughts and more floods. Those two items are in no way mutually exclusive.
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Ok, post your citations demonstrating that the predictions have not come true. All you need is
A link to the published prediction
A link to confirmation of the prediction not coming true.. Outside, say, 20% of the predicted value (if quantifiable)
The two links must be published at least several years apart. Inaccurately predicting tomorrow's weather does not count.
The prediction must be marginally useful.
Read? Set! Go!
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This is not symmetrical — what you demand is that I prove a negative. It is equivalent to demanding from a man claiming to be single an affidavit from every woman, stating, she is not his wife.
There are plenty of patently failed predictions by Climate Scientists, but that does not prove, none have come true. All you need to prove me wrong is find a couple of successful ones. And yet, you can't...
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I've seen you do this before. I'm not wasting my time going down your semantic rat hole.
The preconceived conclusions are so thoroughly baked in to your reactionary mind that there is no possible external input of information from the real world that could ever cause you to admit that you're wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
In the 20+ years since "Global Warming" became "a thing", there should by now be plenty of successful predictions. If you can cite just 3, I'll concede, that the discipline is not entirely hopeless.
Both happened before — and I do offer citations [jstor.org].
Yeah, and asteroids are passing closer and closer more [rawstory.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Climate change predicts a lot of things such as more extreme weather events becoming more common.
The California drought is the worst that's happened in the state in the last 1000 years.
If anything, many of the predictions were overly conservative. [scientificamerican.com]
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that sea level would rise 2mm/year. It's actually rising 3.3mm/year. They predicted that the arctic ice sheet would melt in 50-70 years in 2006. It's now predicted to melt by 2052.
Here are some predictions that came true:
1. The sea level [skepticalscience.com]
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Scientists rarely use stock photos of any kind in their publications, so you're not responding, just insinuating and deflecting.
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Well, that's just fucking delusional.
Try actually reading & understanding the second paragraph.
Even though the findings suggest that the drought is primarily a consequence of natural climate variability, the scientists added that the likelihood of any drought becoming acute is rising because of climate change.
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Yep. So, why worry about flooding, if we are in the middle of a drought — made worse by Trump and his Nazis?..
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Ah, the Ukrainian dumbass is back. Now he is too stupid to realise that a drought in one place doesn't mean a drought elsewhere. Let ke explain it so you can understand: Frankfurt am Main is on the roughly same latitude as Kharkov, but when they had -20 degrees Celsius and a shitload of snow, we had +8 and a drizzle, which is, by the way, not how a winter is supposed to be in Germany. It has been years since we had snow for longer than a couple of days. Last January I saw birds trying to find food for their
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No it is not weather, because:
A) it happens every year since decades, but 20 to 30 years go we had winters like you have, hint: latitude
B) the birds are supposed to have flown south, as they used to do when we had real winters
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Do you not understand the word 'variability'?
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Didn't they try that "shovel ready" stuff about 8 years ago? About the only thing I saw was a few roads that didn't need resurfacing were resurfaced with some kind of pork.
The stimulus wasn't big enough to make a meaningful impact. It should have been two to three times larger. Most of the states spent the money on other things like paying down their debts than infrastructure projects. For what little it did, it was better than nothing.
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Japan's been doing stimulus projects for 20+ years and still have not recovered.
However Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan cut spending and
Hmmm. Maybe if Hoover didn't go the stimulus route, and if the western Democracies didn't start trades wars the the 30s depression would have been simply a downturn.
The point is that gov't spending is not necessarily the answer to all our problems. In fact -
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The point is that gov't spending is not necessarily the answer to all our problems. In fact -- it can be the cause of future problems.
We needed infrastructure spending eight year ago after the economy cratered. Republicans gave Obama the bum rush. Now Trump is proposing $1T in infrastructure projects and $20B for THE WALL at a time when the economy doesn't need government intervention. The same Republican leadership will probably rubberstamp his executive orders without a second thought about the national debt.
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Nations that spent more on stimulus had slower recoveries. But it hard to find a true apples to apples comparison.
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Nations that spent more on stimulus had slower recoveries.
Spending cuts in Europe extended the Great Recession there. That almost happened in the U.S. despite repeated attempts by Republicans to sabotage the economy. Things would have turned out quite differently if the Republicans put the country first and cooperated with Obama.
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California probably pays for a lot of infrastructure in your state, so you might want to think twice about that statement.
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And no. We're not going to pick up shovels. This is the fu(king 21st century. We have things called bulldozers and backhoes and dump trucks. You can keep your fu(king shovels.
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Climate change was never going to produce never-ending drought. It will cause longer, more severe droughts and more flooding when it does rain. The people who "believed the lie" understand this. You don't.
That's why scientists changed from "global warming" to "climate change". Too many morons were unwilling to get beyond "duh! It was cold today".