Are there any odd or interesting little items you keep track of? From time to time
you look them up on the 'net to see if anything new has occured. Here are
a few of mine:
TikTok videos of a crazy neighbor who thinks she owns the sidewalk and street
in front of her home. She has set her sprinklers to spray water onto the sidewalk 24/7
and piles junk in the street next to the curb so no one can use these areas. The
person who posts these videos says that this has gone on for years and the authorities have done almost nothing about it.
An evil stepmother who locked her stepson in an attic room for over 20 years and gave
him very little to eat. The case has been slowly making its way through the courts
and it looks like her trial will start early next year.
A body found in a barrel after Lake Mead dropped to its lowest level in years. The person was murdered and now, four years after his body was discovered, who he was is still a mystery.
Speaking of Lake Mead, every few days I check on various global warming/climate signs, one of which is the water level of Lake Mead which is at an all time low and getting lower every day. The super el nino is supposed to bring a lot of rain to the southwest but it will have an uphill battle given how low the reservoir will be. Plus, if you get the rain to quickly that can also cause problems (like the recent Grand Canyon landslides.)
Lake Mead won’t be much improved by increased rainfall in the desert regions. It’ll need decades of much-increased snowfall in the high Rockies to make a real difference.
While we’re at it, stopping all water extraction upstream would be a good idea too. Shame about all those cities with dry taps and farms not allowed to irrigate.
But your larger point, that Lake Mead is a well-instrumented bellwether indicator of the ongoing slo-mo catastrophe of AGW + regional excess human development, is well founded for sure.
Here’s my contribution …
This US national drought map is updated every Thursday morning and often makes for grim reading. I don’t stop by every Thursday, but often enough. Current Map | U.S. Drought Monitor.
Hurricane Polo will hit the Southeastern and other parts of Arizona which could see increased cloud cover and heavy rainfall or a risk of localized flash flooding as the tropical moisture moves into the region. But it will not refill the lake by any means, still six inches of rain will certainly help.
AIUI, reservoirs may actually contribute to AGW by the ways in which they restructure the local ecosystem. Aerobic lake residents increase in number and generate more CO2 per acre than the land around the river did before the dam was put in.
It depresses me, because I live in an area that gets a large fraction of our juice from hydropower. We want to think it is “green”, but, maybe not so much.
Now that’s an interesting factor I’d never considered. There are a bunch of confounders though.
What is the AGW impact (plus or minus) of the floods and dryouts avoided by the active management of streamflow downstream of the dam? What is the AGW impact (plus or minus) of the conventional fossil-fueled power generation avoided by the dam’s powerplant?
As always in ecology, everything is connected to everything. But I suspect these three are the biggest direct impacts of a dam+reservoir. I have no clue what the net really is. And it varies by reservoir, stream, & powerplant configuration.
Here’s a whole 700-post thread dedicated to monitoring an odd or interesting thing:
The US Geological Survey (USGS) maintains 3 cameras V1, V2, & V3, that watch the volcano continuously and stream to YouTube with a 12-hour lookback available. For the last couple of years you could see monster lava fountains 500-1000 feet high for 6, 8, even 10 hours at a time roughly every 2 weeks.
Starting a couple weeks ago things are different with some new fissures releasing pressure. Nobody knows what’s next. We’ve had lots of little spews that last 20 minutes. Several per day most days. Still fun to watch when it’s busy: USGS - YouTube.
