WTF

First we have waaaay more rain than normal -- nearly three times the average at this point.  Everything is fluffy and green and lush, which makes my arid Westerner's brain go into little spasms at thought of it (when I'm not speculating on the effects on late-season fire fuel loads). 

Now they say there's a tornado warning.

We're turning into the Midwest!

Comments

[Harrison]

Halloooooo

[Chris Clarke]

"I don't think we're in SoCal anymore, Toto..."

[Katherine]

We're experiencing much of the same here in the desert southwest; I've never seen so much rain, and my little bit of lawn has never been greener. Thankfully, we're not having the mudslides and sink holes So Cal is experiencing, but we've had more than our fair share of overflowing washes and flash floods.

Couldn't possibly have anything to do with global warming, right? That whole thing is a left-wing conspiracy, right?

[Rana]

Harrison! You're alive! :)

All of a sudden, I have this image of Toto wearing sunglasses and a little doggie coat whizzing through the air and raining down in Arizona.

Katherine -- no kidding. Global climate change, ayup. But it's a _natural_ cycle, don't you know, and we don't know if humans are involved, and, anyway, it's too late to do anything! /sarcasm

No, I suspect its an aspect of the same thing that thinks fighting random wars is a better use of our funds than providing mosquito nets for poor children and health care for the elderly. If ya can't blow it up, ignore it!

Yes, I am being simplistic. But I just don't get this mentality, no matter how many lovely little logical rationalizations get spun to cover it up.

[yami]

I thought the latest climate models were predicting a global-warming-induced drought for California, something something something El Nino something?

We do need this rain, though; we've been in quite the dry cycle. Hopefully it'll help the trees in the San Bernardinos fight off the bark beetles.

[Rana]

You're probably right, yami. It's just hard not to shake the feeling that this is not merely unusual but part of a larger pattern of increasingly extreme weather.

I think the rain is good too -- but not in the quantities we've been getting. Spread it out a bit, please, so it has a chance to soak in!

[yami]

Good point about the soaking - it's a pleasant exercise in schadenfreude to think about how we could be taking advantage of all this free water, rather than guiding it into the ocean...

I've already tried to sneak permeable paving as a potential water resource mitigation measure into the EIR I'm working on today, and TPTB weren't having any of it. Yar.

[Katherine]

I'm convinced that this is part of a larger pattern of extreme weather. My nephew in Seattle tells me they're having days in the mid-60's and very little rain, and my friends in the north east have complained about an extremely wet summer and colder than normal winter. So Cal is getting hammered by storm after storm, and there's lots of flooding elsewhere.

But hey, global warming is a myth, so why should the US sign the Kyoto treaty?