lol. I have a former co-worker who moved up to the area years ago and still dreads the winters. He's all gung-ho during Spring and Summer, then griping about winters and always threatening to move. I've wanted to check out Mackinac Island, but ... not in the winter.
Duluth is an extreme example. They get real lake effect snow and its incredibly hilly. Just driving there in winter is terrifying because of the hills and ice/snow. Its basically north of every other city on the Great Lakes so it gets extremely cold. Its a beautiful place to visit when it isn't winter but even I wouldn't live there. But honestly you can start from Milwaukee and just go south along the lakes and you'll find tons of metro areas that sit on the Great Lakes and are affordable (Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, Rochester, etc.. And the winters in these places are much milder than Duluth. Although Buffalo has some horrible lake effect snow so I'd rule that one out myself. I realize no one is rushing to move to these places now but eventually Americans will recognize that those cities will end up with the best combination of climate moderation and affordability.
This writeup has a mix of Climate, foreign policy, business and economics. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/04/tsmc-taiwan-arizona-semiconductors-climate-canada-labor-water/
Zombie Apocalypse afficionados, you know where to go now... As climate change worsens, military eyes base of the future on Gulf Coast Might need to bring some digital dog cookies for robo fido.
Federal workers told to leave early as severe weather threatens DC, Northeast https://thehill.com/homenews/state-...rly-as-severe-weather-threatens-dc-northeast/
People always have to be reminded that for fire, structures are merely another kind of fuel--just like trees, shrubs, and grasses. When you have an established drought of continuous fuels that bump up to the edge of the town's continuous structural fuel combined with a hurricane's outer-band winds, it's trouble. Add in a few ignition sources--some of which I'm sure will be downed power lines (as I doubt you could get that kind of uniform burning across a town without multiple power line ignitions)--and this is what you get. Nowhere is our infrastructure close to what we need for the coming years. For one, there should be no more above-ground wires ever and we should start burying the ones that are. But that means either higher utility bills or higher taxes or torn-up streets and yards, so even though we know what needs to be done, it likely won't get done because it's inconvenient and we lack the willpower to do it. That's the story of this whole era.
One of the big changes over the course of my career in wildland fire is that we now too often measure loss of life in double digits.
It's sad to see what happened to Lahaina. My wife and I were there 4 years ago and I recognize a lot of the landmarks in the before and after pictures since we stayed in Ka'anapali.
Stopping it at :22 and you can see this was almost certainly a failure of infrastructure. The fire did not hit from the fields as there are unburned fuels on the outskirts surrounding the town. This has to be power lines dropping in the high winds and then fire moving from structure to structure with lots of ember wash hitting eaves, roofs, decks, etc. that were not Firewise. The destruction is about as complete as anything I've ever seen--even in Paradise, CA there were a few homes and structures that made it. This was thoroughly preventable except for the fact that nobody beyond a few firefighters would ever think the level of prevention needed was worth the cost and effort.
Damaged power lines are usually the culprit in SoCal when Santa Ana winds and prolonged dryness make the whole region a tinderbox. SCE gets perpetually dinged for their negligence yet they do nothing different in the aftermath
My understanding is that Lahaine is a historic town and I’m wondering if the buildings were up to current fire codes.
And No-Cal and Mid-Cal, with the exception of the rare cluster of lightning strikes that started one particularly large one a few years ago.
