As someone who moved north, I'd recommend it. Summer is incredible (its 65 degrees here right now) and winter is fine once you embrace it and take up winter activities. There's been a handful of 80 degree days thus far and that's about it. The highs are in the low 70s all week.
Heat burst Not to be confused with heat wave. In meteorology, a heat burst is a rare atmospheric phenomenon characterized by a sudden, localized increase in air temperature near the Earth's surface. Heat bursts typically occur during night-time and are associated with decaying thunderstorms.[1] They are also characterized by extremely dry air and are sometimes associated with very strong, even damaging, winds. Although the phenomenon is not fully understood, the event is thought to occur when rain evaporates (virga) into a parcel of cold, dry air high in the atmosphere, making the air denser than its surroundings.[2] The parcel descends rapidly, warming due to compression, overshoots its equilibrium level, and reaches the surface, similar to a downburst.[3] Recorded temperatures during heat bursts have reached well above 40 °C(104 °F), sometimes rising by 10 °C (18 °F) or more within only a few minutes
Vegetable and fruit shortages in Ireland through the winter because drought followed by heavy, heavy rains significantly delayed the planting of crops. "We are now depending on imported produce from Spain and from other countries, but it's not coming in because they're experiencing the same problems with the weather as we are, only they're getting it worse. "Europe in general, is running out of water to grow vegetables.” https://www.independent.ie/farming/...e-irish-fruit-and-vegetables/a1371745606.html
Here in the “frozen north” we’ve already had 12 days where it was over 90. In a typical summer we have 13 days. Last year at this time we already had 15 days with 6/20/2022 over 100.
I'm visiting the family in Houston next week. Its in the 70s here this week. I'm utterly terrified by your weather.
Uruguay in drought and running out of fresh water, has been mixing fresh water with salty estuary water to have enough: Uruguay, grappling with a multi-year drought and high temperatures, is running dry. The situation has become so bad that residents are being forced to drink salty tap water and workers are drilling wells in the center of the capital to reach the water beneath the ground. On Monday, President Luis Lacalle Pou declared a “water emergency for the metropolitan area.” The situation is sending shockwaves through this relatively wealthy South American nation, which has long defined access to water as a human right. It’s also a warning sign for countries’ vulnerability in the face of drought, which is set to become more frequent and intense as climate change accelerates. The impacts in Uruguay are stark. Canelón Grande, a vital reservoir that normally provides water to more than a million people in the country’s capital Montevideo has been reduced to a muddy field that locals are now able to cross on foot. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/25/americas/uruguay-water-crisis-climate-intl/index.html
This is interesting: Humans’ unquenchable thirst for groundwater has sucked so much liquid from subsurface reserves that it’s affecting Earth’s tilt, according to a new study. Groundwater provides drinking water for people and livestock, and it helps with crop irrigation when rain is scarce. However, the new research shows that persistent groundwater extraction over more than a decade shifted the axis on which our planet rotates, tipping it over to the east at a rate of about 1.7 inches (4.3 centimeters) per year. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/world/pumping-groundwater-earth-axis-shifting-scn/index.html
Skies over Spain and Portugal today, and no, they don't have a lot of fires going. It's all smoke from Canada, 3,000 miles away.
rr, how do you separate "disaster" (which is a human, anthropocentric evaluative term, i.e., a normative term) from more value-neutral descriptors, such as "phenomenon"? In other words, what makes a disaster a disaster, and distinctive in comparison to a simple event?
There's a lot (by emergency management/disasterology metrics) of literature that struggles with this question. Generally, I think any manifested risk that is out of the ordinary--the unpredictable--that affects human lives and livelihoods in a negative way such that the "normal" societal/economic/political systems are stressed or temporarily broken and that necessitates a collective response qualifies as a disaster. In this instance, Portugal and Spain expect more hospital cases related to respiratory issues, which will stress the health care systems in a way that was not planned for or expected. It won't be as severe as what we saw earlier in New York, but it will not be benign. Some folks might call the smoke in Iberia an emergency and define that as being confined to a small area or stretch of time where the immediate needs of those affected are met with reasonable speed. For this thread, splitting those hairs seems a bit too in the weeds and those who want to make that distinction struggle when asked to describe the transition/dividing line between emergency and disaster. But there's more. During my career, anything we responded to was an incident. Then, some want to create an incident that is more than a disaster: catastrophe. The same transition problems apply here, so I usually just go with disaster. (There's also crisis, but it has been coopted by business schools and IT people to mean something different than people like me would use it for. A CEO questioning the Holocaust on tape is not a crisis to me but it is to that company.) Of course, disasters are by their nature full of uncertainty, so any definition has to be somewhat flexible, but it is also much broader than hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, fires, and tornadoes. For instance, a heat wave doesn't match the visual cues for disaster that many people have, but heat waves routinely kill more people than hurricanes. A heat wave can be a disaster. Hope this helps.
Was there for it. But if my very old parents lose power during one of these heat waves.... won't be good.
“Disaster” is a subset of “phenomena”. It’s also not necessarily human as the Chixculub asteroid impact is considered one of the largest disasters yet there wasn’t a single human alive when it happened.
not sure I agree with that. I think disaster is a human/anthropocentric evaluative term--in the absence of humans an event such as the asteroid impact is evaluatively neutral, it is simply an event. This relates to the familiar philosophical view that here is no value in the absence of a valuer. That impact paved the way for all subsequent evolution--which can be viewed as a "benefit" to those who followed. Rather than being a disaster it was an opportunity . . . but note that both terms (disaster and opportunity) reflect the values of the valuer.
