Wildfires have been raging in Turkey this past summer and are now breaking out in Greece. Hope our resident Greek poster @malakas and her family is doing OK.
Yeah the situation is dire. There are tens of new fires every day. There was a fire this afternoon a few kilometers from my house and I couldn't do anything but pray to be put out. Luckily it was but I am in constant fear we are going to be burned down. The temperature has fallen but the wind has picked up and the dry weeds and pine trees are overheated from the previous 44C temperature. There are hundreds of houses burned down all over the country and the navy is picking up the residents from the beaches. In Athens they can't even breath from the smoke. Hopefully Russia is going to rent us another huge Beriev firefighter airplane that is making the biggest difference. Turkey doesn't even have one helicopter and it has become a huge scandal that is threatening the Erdogan regime. He made it a terrorist offense to go on social media and post #help turkey and has forced the media to not show the fires. We here have one of the biggest fleet of rented and owned firefighting helicopters and airplanes in Europe but it is impossible to stop all the fires. All we can do is pray at this point.
A few years ago there was a rapid fire in a coastal holiday town that burned many people alive. After this now there are forced evacuations. The police comes in the houses breaks down the door like it's a swat team and lifts up the people who refuse to evacuate by force and takes them away in police vans Usually the elderly who decide to go down "fighting" with their house. That's why there are so far only one dead.
Just read about the Atlantic conveyer belt possibly weakening. It's mostly responsible for making Western Europe warm in latitudes similar to Boston. Will probably have extreme winter "freeze over" seasons if it stops. But that's what the science myths tell ya. Aint happen'd so can't prove it. Much like you haven't done a crime if it never gets to courts.
Too true. In Spain, they are fighting the "desertification" in the south of the country. Even in Madrid, in central Spain, hundreds of thousands of trees are being planted around the city in an effort to impact a slow process that has become too evident to ignore. Their climate is changing.
The ever-north-westward expansion of the Chihuahua Desert into Texas is kind of a big deal too. Shut down every golf course in CenTex and all yall in Austin start planting native lawns.
When there were drought conditions starting roughly a decade ago, the LCRA cutback/cutoff rice farmers around Eagle Lake - Wharton who had pulled water from the Colorado River. They have built some water storage south of Wharton so they could take rainwater from the Colorado River that fell below the Highland Lakes. The lakes above Austin still haven't bounced back after the adjustments by those downstream?
Sorry, rice farmers, but you are a blip in the financial ag bucket. The only water that should be sent downstream should be for ecological reasons (health of the bays, estuaries and fisheries, etc...) Travis, I think, is pretty much normal. The constant-level Highland Lakes are of course constant. Buchanan is lowish, iirc. Or maybe not: https://hydromet.lcra.org/riverreport eta: I also misspelled "north east" when talking about the Chihuahua Desert earlier
Malakas, I forget, where are you located? Chania? (No, I won’t be there, looking for the woman wearing the Rockets jersey.) The 45 days I spent in Crete, 30 years ago (wow, time flies), unfortunately the “wrong” time of year (December, i.e., no beach time) but just an awesome place. I’ve always wanted to get back to Greece. Wildfires everywhere now, just stunning and sad.
I am not arguing for rice farmers. Just used them as an example of an adjustment that has been made for usage/demand from the Colorado by those downstream of the Central Texas lakes. I don't know if water usage in Central Texas by municipalities is mainly from wells or if several depend on those lakes. Maybe they need to build some more storage capacity on the Colorado south of Austin to catch runoff during rainy periods.
I can tell you aaaaallllll about it (it's a big deal up here), and yes, they need 3 or so new reservoirs on the Very Lower Colorado (and Guadalupe, and etc...)
This summer alone just in Europe there has been devastating floods in Central Europe and massive Wildfires in Southern Europe. Similar story on almost every other continent.
