Got both the Moderna COVID vaccine and the flu shot yesterday. Uncomfortable night, and running at about 60% this morning.
Anyway, caught this story on the news yesterday evening. (Flooded housing complex in St Marys, Georgia.) Seems like this is a growing problem.
The problems are three-fold:
First, the climate we're presently living in has never existed before on this planet. Yes, it's been hotter. Yes, there has been more CO2. But this particular climate is a transient, with significant ice caps that don't historically exist with this level of CO2 and average temperature. Plus, it has a couple of centuries of human developmental impact altering the landscape. Our present climate has no historical precedent. It has never existed before, so it's uncertain how it will behave.
Second, our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists. All of our recurrence intervals are, if not useless, of far less value than they were when we built the existing infrastructure.
Third, we don't maintain the inadequate infrastructure we do have, exacerbating its deficiencies.
Looking forward, there's a fourth problem in that we continue to develop in regions that are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and building inadequate infrastructure based on historical data that is no longer relevant.
That doesn't mean we're in a Noah-type, "better build an ark," situation. It just means that we're going to have far greater economic losses due to extreme weather events than our current institutions are designed to mitigate. (Insurance and government assistance. Some private efforts.) Economic losses that will be cumulative and exponential.
Here's an interesting web site from the Miami office of the National Weather Service, addressing the Fort Lauderdale extreme rainfall event last year. I haven't looked for similar sites covering the events in Vermont and New England, but similar phenomena have occurred, and are occurring, there.
We could have addressed this earlier and be confronting a more manageable problem today. But we didn't, chiefly because of greed. But we're in deep shit now, and the sooner we figure that out and start working on it, the better.
It's not clear to me that we've figured it out yet. We seem to think we have a lot of time to do something. We don't.
So, go ahead and "OK, doomer," me. Just sayin'. We squandered all our best opportunities while the scale of the problem grew larger, and the solution set of effective responses grew smaller.
Demand action.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:32 Friday, 30 August 2024