Obviously, God intended for Seattle to have crappy weather, and that’s what we’ll have until the end of time. In four billion years, when the Sun boils the oceans, some atmospheric anomaly will cause Steve Pool to confidently forecast 58 degrees with intermittent showers. Continue reading Thanks for Nothing, Global Warming
The view above is of the near term–so long, SoDo!–but it gets very exciting around around 2100, when Lake Washington joins once again with Puget Sound. That requires a rise of about nine feet. Hard to credit? Their summary notes that: “Global warming has raised sea level about eight inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating.” Continue reading Hey, Seattle! Time to Play “Who Drowns First?”
Still, because Mass does offer critiques of climate change science from time to time, he ends up on the receiving end of emails from the disinformation brigade. His recent post, “Bogus Arguments of Some Global Warming ‘Skeptics’,” focuses on the supposition that “volcanoes put out way more CO2 than human activities. So it doesn’t matter what we do!” Continue reading Cliff Mass to Deniers: “It’s Not the Volcanoes”
The Weather Underground’s meteorologist Jeff Masters has posted a La Niña wrap-up for you: “U.S. had most extreme spring on record for precipitation.” While the driest spring on record dessicated Texas, and one of the top-ten driest springs dehydrated New Mexico and Louisiana, northwesterners in Washington and Oregon were grumbling their way through one of the top-five coldest springs the region has seen in the last century or so. Washington was one of nine states deluged by the most precipitation seen in 117 years of record-keeping. Continue reading Seattle’s Cold, Wet Spring Part of National “Extreme Spring”
“Where is the last place that I would want to be, during a big Seattle Fault earthquake or a subduction zone quake if there was a reasonable-sized tsunami in Puget Sound?” Montgomery added, finishing his thought. “The last place I’d want to be is in a big hole under the waterfront.”
However compelling he is in laying all this out, short-term catastrophes are not what Montgomery spends most of his time thinking about. His last book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is required reading for anyone who’s read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Continue reading The Dirt on Seattle’s Tunnel-Vision Future
