23 thoughts on “As If We Didn’t Have Enough Problems”

1. “But it would be both Bush’s fault, and due to global warming. Or climate change. Or whatever.”

   Global warming *is* Bush’s fault… or at least Halliburtons.

   Oh I forgot..it’s not Global Warming any more, it’s Climate Change. Yes tha’ts right….

   “But Climate Change *is* Bush’s fault…….”

2. Heh. I wonder if a lake hundreds of miles long and dozens wide would alleviate our perennial drought concerns? Would this expand or contract the Delta Smelt’s habitat?

3. When I lived for 8 years in NorCal I was constantly astonished by most Californians ignorance of their natural environment.

   This is hardly a shock to anyone with any understanding of Cali’s climate, sadly people like that are very few and far between.

   Might I suggest though one the best novels about earth sciences ever: George R. Stewart’s “Storm” which is about a not atypical winter storm and its path of destruction across California

4. “Could California be hit by a superstorm?”

   feinstein,boxer,brown ain’t big enough?

5. I have no idea where we are in the El Nino/La Nina cycle. Is it relevant?

   A few hundred years is a fast enough cycle to adapt to. We’re due for the Yellowstone caldera to go boom. That’s a big one.

6. Currently we are in a La Nina phase, and there is some evidence we may be going into a period of quietude similar to the 1940-1980 period when large storms were very rare, but the ENSO cycle is not the only thing controlling storm chances on the Pacific coast. It has just been the dominant one for the past thirty years, so it has been a very useful tool. The problem is that when you get a new tool, say a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

7. La Nina – a rather persistent one this year.

8. The risk is gathering momentum now, scientists say, due to rising temperatures in the atmosphere, which has generally made weather patterns more volatile.

   Is there nothing Global Climate Warming Chaos Change can’t do? Or can be blamed on it?

   We’re due for the Yellowstone caldera to go boom.

   Yeah, sometime in the next couple hundred thousand years. And it’ll probably be preceded by a few thousand years of minor volcanic activity.

9. This has nothing to do with global warming, truly epic flooding events are part of the Pleistocene/Holocene record in California. Anyone doing sequence stratigraphy in the Great Valley has seen the evidence of them, and the periodicity is less than 500 years. It will happen Global warming or not. That reference to “climate change” is just there to give the story a hook so media will talk about it.

   Calofornia is for a huge number of reasons an area of extreme climate volatility, there is a reason that the first society to make a go of agriculture successfully was a very technically advanced industrial society. It is a very inhospitable place on a long timeframe.

10. At least the delta smelt will then have enough water, which is apparently the most important thing imaginable in CA.

11. Such a superstorm is hypothetical but not improbable, climate researchers warn. “We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes,” Geological Survey scientist Lucy Jones said in a press release.

    Man, it sure is a shame that we have no historical records of that area from the last 100 or 200 years. That kind of stuff could really be useful right now.

12. What would be an appropriate award to give Bush for unleashing calamitous weather on CA?

13. Nobel Prize, obviously.

14. If it cleans out Excramento the congressional medal of freedom would be more appropriate.

15. Nobel Prize, obviously.

    What category – peace, or physics?

16. Well, Alan, I don’t think the physics prize has been totally debased yet…maybe economics. The California economy would certainly create a few extra billion $$ if Sacramento were washed away.

17. My ex would be out of a job. She lives in Sacramento and does accounting for forest fire control for the state. Every year like clockwork they have major fires. This is why Los Angeles had smog long before Americans got there. Yes, before there were freeways and cars there was smog in the valley.

18. “16,380 Comments”. Sounds like a spam problem.

19. Man, it sure is a shame that we have no historical records of that area from the last 100 or 200 years. That kind of stuff could really be useful right now.

    That’s at least as old as the US Constitution, maybe more.

20. It would be Sarah Palin’s fault. Jeez, people. Get with the times.

    Blaming Bush is sooo 2006.

21. We had 26 inches of rain in 10 days in Toowoomba about 15 years ago. Last week we had over 2 inches in one hour and the next day between here and Brisbane over a foot in 4 hours between 9AM and 1 PM.

22. it’ll probably be preceded by a few thousand years of minor volcanic activity.

    Volcanic activity is a release of pressure. Minor activity is happening at this very moment. Yes, it could be thousands of years from now, but it’s due now. The pressure release is likely to be sudden and all at once.

    It repeats on about a 65k year cycle with no evidence that it knocks on the door first.

    It’s one of those things you really can’t prepare for other than to live on a different continent.

    Sort of like those cosmic things you really can’t prepare for other than to live on another planet or solar system or if really big, another galaxy.

23. In California’s current financial state, this would probably be the best time for such a storm to hit. It would be like the 1947 explosion of a ship loaded with 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate. It killed 583 people, and leveled Texas City, Texas, doing over $100 in damage…

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