Friday, August 5, 2022

Rain Here And There

 But wildfires rage in Texas and there has been no real dent in the epic drought. More moderate temps in my neck of the woods. Alex Jones is crashing and burning. About time. Good news from Kansas, of all places. Estimates of 70,000 to 80,000 Russian troops killed in Ukraine thus far. And Monkeypox cases still increase exponentially. Zoonotic diseases are going to keep on coming. We live in interesting times. I'd like to see Dominion win its multi-billion dollar suit against FOX "news". I'd like to see Dominion win ALL of its lawsuits. Most of those stupid "Trump won" flags have vanished around town. In one neighborhood in particular I used to see a lot of those things, but all are gone. What that means, if anything, I don't know. 










I'm kind of happy to see that the UFO thing is still with us. I remember the epic sightings of the early fifties with great nostalgia. Self-replicating Von Neumann probes moving through the galaxy at sub-light speeds would answer most of the objections to alien visitors. It would only have taken one advanced technical civilization anywhere in the galaxy in the past half-billion years to litter the entire galaxy, every planetary system in the galaxy, with high tech beer cans, so to speak, given the enormous power of exponential growth. Hardly anyone gets exponential growth. 


Thursday, August 4, 2022

82 F Is The Morning "Low"

 Over 100 F yesterday with minimal cloud cover but as the sun sets clouds build, a sort of heavy overcast, which kills radiation cooling, trapping heat, so that we start the day hot and go on from there. That's been a pattern the last few days and it's nothing if not diabolical. And it's very calm. No breeze to speak of. That does not help. 











Within a very few years, deaths due to heat will outnumber deaths due to gun violence in this country, if that hasn't happened already. In fact more people are now dead due to excessive heat than any other weather related phenomena. Flooding? Nah. Heat alone is killing more people each year. It's a trend, you see. If you don't see, you are truly effing blind. 

I've added more interesting links to the bottom of the blog. Check them out.

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Over 100 F Today

And the rain chances are nil. I see a lot of dead lawns around town. Several nearby cotton fields have not been planted and are full of weeds. It's even getting hard to grow cotton around here. Just a preview of climate catastrophe to come, and human over-use of fossil fuels is the reason. Many climate scientists agree-- it's too late to prevent the worst case, and the changes are taking place faster than predicted. The greenhouse effect is very real, plus, human activity on the current scale generates enormous amounts of waste heat, and that waste heat is being trapped in the atmosphere rather than being radiated away, as it was prior to the industrial revolution. At any rate, people my age won't have to live in the next generation's hell hole.  And I don't feel very guilty because my carbon impact has been minimal in terms of energy use over my life span, and I chose not to breed. Excellent decision, that. 











We might get some local relief after a few more uncomfortably hot days.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Same Old Same Old

 Hot. No relief. No rain. This is a decidedly rough summer. Sooner or later we'll get some of that seasonal change I like so much, but it's a long wait. At least we're starting off at 77 F this morning, rather than 80 F. I'm finding that I'm having a wee bit of trouble staying on top of things, but that might be a consequence of my efforts to withdraw, insulate, isolate, and build walls, keeping human life at bay and well away from me. Hard to do and to some extent things get more complicated rather than less. Non-human life is another story. I can't get enough of that. 











Monday, August 1, 2022

Cloudy This Morning!

 Lots of clouds! But will it rain? No. It did rain a lot north of us, enough to flood parts of Palo Duro Canyon. That's encouraging. I hope that event put some water into Lake Meredith! It was mild enough this morning for me to work outside, creating clear space for paths. It's nice to have a jungle but I don't want to be hacking my way through it with a machete. So I'm making a little nature trail. This is always a work in progress, and work I enjoy. 










Later it is supposed to reach 100 F, and do that again, day after day, with no end in sight, and no rain in sight. Welcome to the world the monkeys made! What an interesting thing it is, to be part of a failed and failing and most likely doomed species.