Wednesday, November 21, 2018

He makes the tides go in and out, too


Hooray for traffic jams!  Under Trump, they're the best! (?)

The best response is in his Twitter feed:

This one I'm just tired of.
He is literally too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is.

And not really so much a response as an observation (v. whatever it is Trump does):

A report this month in Nature raises a different, intriguing possibility about how urbanization might be making rainfall flooding worse, or at least how it did in Houston’s case: by literally slowing down storms. Researchers at the University of Iowa and Princeton built a model to estimate Harvey’s rainfall totals in the region. Then they took the city out of the model. They found the storm would have dropped less rain, and in different places, on a Harris County made of cropland.

Why? Basically, they think, the scale of the urban agglomeration in and around Harris County is creating atmospheric friction, putting a drag on storm winds. Climate change is supposed to produce more slow-moving storms like Harvey, which increases the scope of rainfall damage by leaving storm clouds to linger over one place—but cities may be slowing them down further, according to a co-efficient the authors call “roughness.” (Their models also conclude the growth of the city since 1950 is linked to a “clear increase in the magnitude and variability” of flooding.) In the case of Harvey, the storm’s extremely slow speed caused it to linger over East Texas for three days, concentrating rainfall damage.

It’s one more threatening way that “natural” disasters are evolving into our own creations.

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