I;m down with a moderately lousy AS flare up watching some news and it’s all Sandy. Hurricane Sandy is now making landfall in southern New Jersey. She’s not a bad hurricane as far as bad hurricanes go, but she’s fixing to mutate into something novel. What makes this storm so unusual isn’t the wind or the rain, they are causing relatively minor and mostly moderate damage respectively as best we can tell or predict right now. It’s huge. For act two Sandy will feed a nor’easter just to the west of Sandy’s eye. All the moisture held by this vast heat engine is going to pour into a frigid layer of air and turn into snow and ice, it’s already starting. This is a hurricane powered blizzard in the making. Call it a Blizzacane or an ice-cane. It’s something we don’t see often, so no one knows exactly what sheets of ice and/or several feet of snow will do to communities and infrastructure when dumped into 50mph plus winds and widespread flooding.
If the FTB bloggers would bump this:
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/helen-kromm/46254/huricane-sandy-and-the-poor
The coolest damage from hurricanes is what happens to internally lit signs at gas stations and fast food places. You’d think that thick plastic on the outside would be hard to break, and you’d think the florescent lights would shatter if the plastic broke. But no, countless signs were blown out by Ike, but as the power came back, the naked florescent tubes shone bright.
I had seen this before in Alicia back int he 80’s and in a few other storms that were weaker or did not hit directly, but nothing like the huge display of light after Ike.
Article on The Drum website here :
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4341984.html
About one possible set of implications from Sandy.
Horrible if it takes disasters like this to wake people up to the reality of Global Overheating and consequent climatic change.
But perhaps true?
Not than anybody deserves the suffering here which no doubt will hit those least responsible and worst off hardest. :-(
One of my friends on Facebook posted that someone somewhere was calling Sandy an “Apocalyptic Snor’eastercane”. The gusts sounded pretty bad between ten and midnight last night and my neighbors lost one of their trees and it somehow missed their house and the fence between our yards, but it was really just a nor’easter with some extra wind by the time it got near Philadelphia. the New Jersey shore got smashed, though.
Meteorologists everywhere are getting drunk and slurring, “I dunno what the fuck’s gonna happen!”
Can we call the Nor’easter Danny? Please?
Also, I’m in southern Massachusetts; Sandy is swinging around my area like a pole dancer. The first hit was windy and rainy and we got some minor flooding (I am fortunately inland enough), but I’m curious about what the rest of the week will bring, and what I’ll see when the remnants of Sandy heads out.
The oblivious majority will only ever listen when one of two things happen:
(1) Events hit them in their wallet (i.e. it costs them money, they can no longer get by on what they have).
(2) Events hit them where they live (i.e. job losses, environmental damage, loss of their way of life, deaths of many people).
If people can get away with temporarily sticking their heads in the sand, they will, no matter what the reality. Examples:
* Idiots in the US who “think” that drilling ANWR is a “long term solution”. The ground in Alaska contains only four years worth of oil at the current US rate of consumption.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.htm
* Idiots in Canada who “thought” the east coast fishing industry could continue without controls until cod was on the verge of extinction. With one more year of fishing in 1992, it would have been extinct. Twenty years later with a fishing ban still in place, the fish have not made a significant comeback. People there still think they can go back to the way they were fishing, as if it were a limitless supply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery