Well, my neighborhood - and many others here in SoCal - have finally made the national news as we await the arrival of Hurricane, er, I mean Tropical Storm, Hillary, the first time one of these things has come far enough north to do more than give us high clouds and some late-summer/early-fall rain, with the only other one recorded as having come ashore 84 yars ago in September 1939, competing with the news that Britain had declared war on Germany that day.
I hesitate to say thoughts and prayers - so I won't. But I hope you and everyone will be able to ride out this thing with some measure of safety themselves as well as for their families/friends and extended connections. I am very glad you posted. May you and all others stay as safe as is possible. I think of all the homeless folks needing shelter somewhere inside off the streets. Hope they will be able to access whatever is made available.
“Hilary has sped up a bit, along with a slight shift eastward in its track. This results in Sunday morning through Sunday evening being the time frame of most impact,” the National Weather Service in San Diego said. (as opposed to Sunday night/Monday morning)
The threat has triggered California’s first ever tropical storm warning extending from the state’s southern border to just north of Los Angeles.
The Southwest is forecast to see heavy rainfall through early next week – with the most intense conditions on Sunday into Monday – as Hilary approaches.
The storm is out of San Diego County now. We got maybe 2” of rain on the coast and 6” in our local mountains (elev. 4,000’) to our east. No flooding I know of other than in parts of Mission Beach (elev. 2’), and the locals probably didn’t notice (too much beer on that beach). There was a power outage in our north county area--because some guy slid his car into a power pole. San Diegans are notorious for not being able to drive in the rain; we blame it on oil saturated roads because we don’t get enough rain to keep it washed off. At my house we got one noticeable gust of wind in the mid afternoon, otherwise balmy. Didn’t even whistle through the windows.
I feel cheated.
Now what am I going to do with all that bottled water and toilet paper? 🤦🏻♂️
I live in high desert country and they telling us we will get a lot of rain it heads to Nevada. But we are ready-flash lights all charged yards cleared. Stay safe TC! Looking forward to your report of what it was like at your place!
I’ve closed up the umbrella on the sun deck, taken off table coverings and other odds and ends and am going to hunker down with my puppy. I can see major clouds around Mt Wilson now. Hope TS HIlary isn’t too interesting.
I hope all of you out there on the West Coast stay safe. I live on the NC coast and am well acquainted with hurricanes. Even if the storm is a low wind event, there can still be significant damage from rain and even tornadoes embedded in the hurricane. 2018 Hurricane Florence flooded my house. 2019 Hurricane Dorian's tornadoes ripped through my neighborhood and tore out all my big oak and pine trees. It looked like a war zone. Insurance doesn't cover loss of landscaping. For instance, if a large tree falls in your yard but doesn't hit your house, too bad, but it still needs to be cleaned up. If the tree lands on your house , different story. If the eye of the storm passes over you, don't go out. The storm will return but from a different direction. Everyone take care, even a tropical storm is dangerous.
Even the large church where I usher(All Saints-Pasadena) has advised parishioners to stay home tomorrow and live stream the service. That’s really being cautious!
The level-headed will get through this as long as they remain pro-active. Know when to fold and when to go. Fingers crossed that folks don't lose power which would make everything worse.
In days of yore Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts learned how to survive such events (We learned how to make beds in trees, for Dog's sake.). Don't know what they're up to these days, but along with those duck-and-cover shooter drills kids are learning in school, schools may also want to use some of the phys. ed. classes to teach basic survival skills--as an antidote to cell phone dependency.
I’m on the lower southwest facing slope of Mt. Soledad, so I don’t have to worry about flooding, but I expect a considerable number of clay roof tiles are gonna get peeled off.
I have a friend outside Luzerne Valley who is battening down the hatches & hoping for the best. She's all by herself without any help she can call on so I worry about her.
Hang in there Tom - we always hear "better days are coming" but boy, its taking a long long time between climate change & politics.
Hope you make out better than Vermont did last month when a no name storm dropped as much as 9 inches in a day. Montpelier, the capitol “city”, has been basically destroyed. All stores and offices
in town were flooded basements full and 3or 4 feet on the ground floor. The issue now is what to do as this will become much more common........ what would you do as your building needs renovating and you lost your stock. No insurance for most.
Hale, thank you for reporting about flooding in Vermont. It is the awful truth of Global Warming. I've had wonderful visits in your beautiful state. We must take much stronger action to address this deadly process.
Hale, you don't know that as I do not. The following Analysis by F.D. Flam | Bloomberg, July 19, 2023 at 6:47 a.m. EDT:
'Research published last year in Science suggests the risk of a global tipping point that triggers accelerated climate warming starts to become significant once average worldwide temperatures rise 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. That’s likely to happen in the 2030s.'
'In popular usage, tipping points refer to anything that changes suddenly. In science, it usually refers to a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back phenomenon, where a small change in input makes a big difference in outcome.'
'When climate scientists talk about tipping points, they’re looking at a shift in feedback loops — the disruption of stabilizing feedback loops and the start of new ones that amplify change. Physicists refer to this as a positive feedback loop, but from our standpoint it won’t be beneficial.'
'Scientists have documented dozens of regional and local climate tipping points. And long ago, the Earth experienced planet-wide tipping points when the climate whiplashed from an ice-free hothouse to a snowball and back again.'
'Looking at some of that long-term history for an Earth Day column a few years ago, I talked to scientists who marveled that Earth has been habitable for almost its entire existence — nearly 4 billion years — thanks to stabilizing feedback loops. Even so, for most of that history, there was no complex life — only bacteria. And sudden shifts in climactic feedback loops did roil the planet. After the advent of complex life, some of these led to mass death and extinction.'
'And one more reason to be concerned today: The rate of change we’re imposing on the planet is “geologically unusual,” as planetary scientist Andy Knoll told me then.'
'What scientists are most worried about now are regional changes that tip into global catastrophes. Timothy Lenton, chair in climate change and earth system science at the University of Exeter, refers to “tipping elements” — systems of glaciers, forests and coral reefs whose collapse could trigger a form of global warming that feeds on itself. He and colleagues first identified a number of these in a 2008 study, but he said they’re generating much more interest now.'
'He also led a more recent review of studies highlighting the tipping elements that pose the most immediate threat — the destruction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the thawing of the permafrost and the destruction of the world’s coral reefs.'
'He said the extreme events making the news this summer might represent an early warning sign he calls flickering — a brief visit to the other side of a tipping point. “A complex system can sometimes start to sample a different regime or state before it takes a more permanent shift into that state,” he said. “I hope it’s not the case.”
'The tipping point phenomenon has led to the collapse of local ecologies before, said Simon Willcock, an interdisciplinary researcher at Rothamsted Research in the UK. One good example is the Sahara Desert, which has gone from lush to dry in cycles, the most recent one possibly helped by humans.'
'In a paper published last month in Nature Sustainability, he and colleagues created complex models of ecosystem collapse, using two examples where tipping points happened in relatively recent history — the Chilika Lagoon in India, where fish populations collapsed, and Easter Island, where deforestation and other environmental stress led to extinction of the local human population.'
'What he found, he said, was that ecological tipping points can happen much faster than previous models had shown, once they took into account multiple stresses — not just temperature changes, but factors such as overgrazing, deforestation, agricultural runoff and overfishing.'
'Natural fluctuations — noise — also make tipping points more likely. Think of standing on the edge of a cliff, he said, with random gusts buffeting you toward and away from the brink. And consider someone nearby in still air on a similar cliff. “Who’s going to fall off the cliff first?” he asked. “It’s obvious, right?”
'He also worries that too much clearing of the Amazon might dry things out just enough to start a massive fire. That would make the region drier, killing more trees, fueling more fire and lofting more carbon into the atmosphere, making the climate warmer and drier, and accelerating forest loss in a vicious cycle.'
'Our civilization is delicate — our dense population centers dependent on agriculture and lots of clean water. Although humanity survived shifts from ice ages to warm interglacial periods, our species has enjoyed an unusually quiescent period for the last 12,000 years, the point when we settled down and started farming.'
'A climate tipping point could make life a lot harder for our species. We’re not yet over the cliff, but we’re dancing dangerously near the edge.'
Interesting and very “scientific”. I still believe man has set the destruction of the planet in motion. I don't have much faith in us doing what is necessary to stop it. If humans die out lets hope that wildlife will adapt as they have around Chernobyl and survive.
I doubt that humans will die out. But the human population could easily be decimated, along with civilization as we know it. If that happens, I hope it happens after I'm gone.
Wildlife survived the meteor strike 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Wildlife will undoubtedly survive global heating, although it may take a few hundred thousand years before things look normal again.
And lets pray the Fat Man with 90+ indictments never becomes president as he will halt all environmental progress we have made. Actually lets hope he dies real soon!
That has been my wish since the Obama was born in Kenya bs. Back then I thought nobody was stupid enough to take that seriously. I was the stupid one it seems, or…
According to what I've read, Brazil has done what it needs to in order to ensure that Bolsonaro never holds office again, and in fact I think he has fled the country.
But the GOP must never control the US again, and hopefully the orange guy will be imprisoned in the near future or dead.
I saw this piece in Bloomberg, which is Flam's employer. It's conceivable that it also appeared in WaPo, but I doubt it, unless WaPo has some deal with Bloomberg that I don't know about. Anyway, well worth posting here.
How horrible. We were insured since we lived south of Houston, all that area is flood plain. Houston replaced wetlands with concrete. Vermont is not in a flood plain and such was unexpected by all, I presume.
25 degree rolls? On the LST, we called that "clearing Point Loma." 🤣. I got adept at using bulkheads to run on when our ship was in heavy seas, and timing the leap onto and off of ladders just right.
But seriously, even a tropical storm can do damage. Hope you and others in the Basin can stay safe.
Stay safe. I remember Hurricane/Tropical Storm Kathleen coming through San Diego in 1976 -- September 10, 1976, the date of our son’s and daughter-in-law’s wedding. The next morning we were to head back to Athens, Georgia, using Hwy 8, except one very large piece had broken off from the main road. So we headed north to the 10 to go back home. Lived in Miami and Houston, went through a couple of “hurricanes” with no damage. It’s no fun. Sometimes the waiting and worrying are worse than the storm. I have family in San Diego, so will be praying and thinking of them. They have been through this before, so hope all will be well.
Again, take care and stay safe. Thinking good thoughts for all in the path of Hilary.
As a veteran of many Florida hurricanes, waiting is the worst. But I would rather have it "hit" during the daylight than at night, when you can hear it but not see what is happening. Much scarier in the dark.
Fill ziploc bags with ice cubes now while you have power. Put them in freezer....Will help keep your frig cold if power goes off and you can drink the water when it melts. Also fill any lidded jars or containers with filtered water and put in freezer now. ( same principal- can use them in a cooler to keep perishables and when water melts use for drinking.
Also, the water in the washing machine is a great idea. Makeshift toilet: big plastic bag with kitty litter in bottom draped over toilet bowl. I know you have kitty litter.??? (Hopefully will not come to that)
All the best, TC. We want you to be safe. Let us know how you are when you can!
Thanks, Carol. We also are veterans of many Fl hurricanes(and dog owners🐾) and had no idea about the adult litter box. Will now add kitty litter to my list for hurricane preparedness.
Any green seas over the bow would have been too much for me. Hope you have fresh batteries in your flashlight, and some high ground for the 4 legged friends in your home.
I hesitate to say thoughts and prayers - so I won't. But I hope you and everyone will be able to ride out this thing with some measure of safety themselves as well as for their families/friends and extended connections. I am very glad you posted. May you and all others stay as safe as is possible. I think of all the homeless folks needing shelter somewhere inside off the streets. Hope they will be able to access whatever is made available.
UPDATE FROM NWS:
“Hilary has sped up a bit, along with a slight shift eastward in its track. This results in Sunday morning through Sunday evening being the time frame of most impact,” the National Weather Service in San Diego said. (as opposed to Sunday night/Monday morning)
The threat has triggered California’s first ever tropical storm warning extending from the state’s southern border to just north of Los Angeles.
The Southwest is forecast to see heavy rainfall through early next week – with the most intense conditions on Sunday into Monday – as Hilary approaches.
Thank you for reporting, pilot Tom.
Thoughts of Gary & family and all TAFMers facing Hilary, no softy according to forecasts.
Seconding Linda's concern for the homeless - they need protection and care, ASAP!
Wishing for preparedness: Take Care, you all!
Thank you for the wishes, Fern. It will be a new experience for me.
GarySanDiego, hi, please keep in touch if you can. 🌿
Well...that was just plain boring.
The storm is out of San Diego County now. We got maybe 2” of rain on the coast and 6” in our local mountains (elev. 4,000’) to our east. No flooding I know of other than in parts of Mission Beach (elev. 2’), and the locals probably didn’t notice (too much beer on that beach). There was a power outage in our north county area--because some guy slid his car into a power pole. San Diegans are notorious for not being able to drive in the rain; we blame it on oil saturated roads because we don’t get enough rain to keep it washed off. At my house we got one noticeable gust of wind in the mid afternoon, otherwise balmy. Didn’t even whistle through the windows.
I feel cheated.
Now what am I going to do with all that bottled water and toilet paper? 🤦🏻♂️
Yeah! And all the batteries I bought for the lanterns!! :-)
Report is we go 3.8 inches of rain here in west valley. I guess I won't be running the sprinklers for a couple weeks.
The storm was sort of the Indiana Jones of tropical storms - didn't live up to the hype.
🤣🤣🤣
To the cheated GarySanDiego, good to hear from you. Glad you and family are fine.
Here's a brief gust of friendship from NYC,
Fern 🌿
Stay safe!! I just enjoyed 8 beautiful days in San Diego. The weather was perfect 🌞. Hope you fair well and stay safe and dry 🌤🌈
Glad you got to see it at its late summer best. This is just a minor set back. We’ll be back in the sunshine business on Tuesday.
I live in high desert country and they telling us we will get a lot of rain it heads to Nevada. But we are ready-flash lights all charged yards cleared. Stay safe TC! Looking forward to your report of what it was like at your place!
You report too.
I’ve closed up the umbrella on the sun deck, taken off table coverings and other odds and ends and am going to hunker down with my puppy. I can see major clouds around Mt Wilson now. Hope TS HIlary isn’t too interesting.
I hope all of you out there on the West Coast stay safe. I live on the NC coast and am well acquainted with hurricanes. Even if the storm is a low wind event, there can still be significant damage from rain and even tornadoes embedded in the hurricane. 2018 Hurricane Florence flooded my house. 2019 Hurricane Dorian's tornadoes ripped through my neighborhood and tore out all my big oak and pine trees. It looked like a war zone. Insurance doesn't cover loss of landscaping. For instance, if a large tree falls in your yard but doesn't hit your house, too bad, but it still needs to be cleaned up. If the tree lands on your house , different story. If the eye of the storm passes over you, don't go out. The storm will return but from a different direction. Everyone take care, even a tropical storm is dangerous.
Fortunately the forecast says conditions are "unfavorable for tornados" - rain expected to start falling in San Diego tonight.
Even the large church where I usher(All Saints-Pasadena) has advised parishioners to stay home tomorrow and live stream the service. That’s really being cautious!
Forecast is 100% rain tomorrow in LA.
Closed my own an hour or so ago. Still just overcast here in western San Diego but the Weather Channel has updated forecast to 90% rain this evening.
Yeah, I hope this storm turns out to be boring for southern California.
It appears that your wish is t he storm's command. So far.
The level-headed will get through this as long as they remain pro-active. Know when to fold and when to go. Fingers crossed that folks don't lose power which would make everything worse.
In days of yore Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts learned how to survive such events (We learned how to make beds in trees, for Dog's sake.). Don't know what they're up to these days, but along with those duck-and-cover shooter drills kids are learning in school, schools may also want to use some of the phys. ed. classes to teach basic survival skills--as an antidote to cell phone dependency.
What a novel idea! Certainly better than banning books & erasing history, right?
I made it into TC’s column!!!
And for the wrong damned reason. 🤦🏻♂️
I’m on the lower southwest facing slope of Mt. Soledad, so I don’t have to worry about flooding, but I expect a considerable number of clay roof tiles are gonna get peeled off.
Stay safe TC and all there in Hillary's path. Batten those hatches!❤
I have a friend outside Luzerne Valley who is battening down the hatches & hoping for the best. She's all by herself without any help she can call on so I worry about her.
Hang in there Tom - we always hear "better days are coming" but boy, its taking a long long time between climate change & politics.
Hope you make out better than Vermont did last month when a no name storm dropped as much as 9 inches in a day. Montpelier, the capitol “city”, has been basically destroyed. All stores and offices
in town were flooded basements full and 3or 4 feet on the ground floor. The issue now is what to do as this will become much more common........ what would you do as your building needs renovating and you lost your stock. No insurance for most.
Hale, thank you for reporting about flooding in Vermont. It is the awful truth of Global Warming. I've had wonderful visits in your beautiful state. We must take much stronger action to address this deadly process.
I am afraid we have passed the tipping point!
Hale, you don't know that as I do not. The following Analysis by F.D. Flam | Bloomberg, July 19, 2023 at 6:47 a.m. EDT:
'Research published last year in Science suggests the risk of a global tipping point that triggers accelerated climate warming starts to become significant once average worldwide temperatures rise 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. That’s likely to happen in the 2030s.'
'In popular usage, tipping points refer to anything that changes suddenly. In science, it usually refers to a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back phenomenon, where a small change in input makes a big difference in outcome.'
'When climate scientists talk about tipping points, they’re looking at a shift in feedback loops — the disruption of stabilizing feedback loops and the start of new ones that amplify change. Physicists refer to this as a positive feedback loop, but from our standpoint it won’t be beneficial.'
'Scientists have documented dozens of regional and local climate tipping points. And long ago, the Earth experienced planet-wide tipping points when the climate whiplashed from an ice-free hothouse to a snowball and back again.'
'Looking at some of that long-term history for an Earth Day column a few years ago, I talked to scientists who marveled that Earth has been habitable for almost its entire existence — nearly 4 billion years — thanks to stabilizing feedback loops. Even so, for most of that history, there was no complex life — only bacteria. And sudden shifts in climactic feedback loops did roil the planet. After the advent of complex life, some of these led to mass death and extinction.'
'And one more reason to be concerned today: The rate of change we’re imposing on the planet is “geologically unusual,” as planetary scientist Andy Knoll told me then.'
'What scientists are most worried about now are regional changes that tip into global catastrophes. Timothy Lenton, chair in climate change and earth system science at the University of Exeter, refers to “tipping elements” — systems of glaciers, forests and coral reefs whose collapse could trigger a form of global warming that feeds on itself. He and colleagues first identified a number of these in a 2008 study, but he said they’re generating much more interest now.'
'He also led a more recent review of studies highlighting the tipping elements that pose the most immediate threat — the destruction of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the thawing of the permafrost and the destruction of the world’s coral reefs.'
'He said the extreme events making the news this summer might represent an early warning sign he calls flickering — a brief visit to the other side of a tipping point. “A complex system can sometimes start to sample a different regime or state before it takes a more permanent shift into that state,” he said. “I hope it’s not the case.”
'The tipping point phenomenon has led to the collapse of local ecologies before, said Simon Willcock, an interdisciplinary researcher at Rothamsted Research in the UK. One good example is the Sahara Desert, which has gone from lush to dry in cycles, the most recent one possibly helped by humans.'
'In a paper published last month in Nature Sustainability, he and colleagues created complex models of ecosystem collapse, using two examples where tipping points happened in relatively recent history — the Chilika Lagoon in India, where fish populations collapsed, and Easter Island, where deforestation and other environmental stress led to extinction of the local human population.'
'What he found, he said, was that ecological tipping points can happen much faster than previous models had shown, once they took into account multiple stresses — not just temperature changes, but factors such as overgrazing, deforestation, agricultural runoff and overfishing.'
'Natural fluctuations — noise — also make tipping points more likely. Think of standing on the edge of a cliff, he said, with random gusts buffeting you toward and away from the brink. And consider someone nearby in still air on a similar cliff. “Who’s going to fall off the cliff first?” he asked. “It’s obvious, right?”
'He also worries that too much clearing of the Amazon might dry things out just enough to start a massive fire. That would make the region drier, killing more trees, fueling more fire and lofting more carbon into the atmosphere, making the climate warmer and drier, and accelerating forest loss in a vicious cycle.'
'Our civilization is delicate — our dense population centers dependent on agriculture and lots of clean water. Although humanity survived shifts from ice ages to warm interglacial periods, our species has enjoyed an unusually quiescent period for the last 12,000 years, the point when we settled down and started farming.'
'A climate tipping point could make life a lot harder for our species. We’re not yet over the cliff, but we’re dancing dangerously near the edge.'
That is all there was to this piece in WAPO.
See you again, Hale.
Interesting and very “scientific”. I still believe man has set the destruction of the planet in motion. I don't have much faith in us doing what is necessary to stop it. If humans die out lets hope that wildlife will adapt as they have around Chernobyl and survive.
Flam is a prominent science writer.
I doubt that humans will die out. But the human population could easily be decimated, along with civilization as we know it. If that happens, I hope it happens after I'm gone.
Wildlife survived the meteor strike 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Wildlife will undoubtedly survive global heating, although it may take a few hundred thousand years before things look normal again.
The Amazon has been a danger zone for decades, hope the chump wannabe never has control over it again.
And lets pray the Fat Man with 90+ indictments never becomes president as he will halt all environmental progress we have made. Actually lets hope he dies real soon!
That has been my wish since the Obama was born in Kenya bs. Back then I thought nobody was stupid enough to take that seriously. I was the stupid one it seems, or…
According to what I've read, Brazil has done what it needs to in order to ensure that Bolsonaro never holds office again, and in fact I think he has fled the country.
But the GOP must never control the US again, and hopefully the orange guy will be imprisoned in the near future or dead.
I saw this piece in Bloomberg, which is Flam's employer. It's conceivable that it also appeared in WaPo, but I doubt it, unless WaPo has some deal with Bloomberg that I don't know about. Anyway, well worth posting here.
I read it on WAPO, David, and noted as such.
How horrible. We were insured since we lived south of Houston, all that area is flood plain. Houston replaced wetlands with concrete. Vermont is not in a flood plain and such was unexpected by all, I presume.
Wishing you "calm seas and fair winds," Tom. Fingers crossed.
25 degree rolls? On the LST, we called that "clearing Point Loma." 🤣. I got adept at using bulkheads to run on when our ship was in heavy seas, and timing the leap onto and off of ladders just right.
But seriously, even a tropical storm can do damage. Hope you and others in the Basin can stay safe.
Smiled at your description.
Stay safe. I remember Hurricane/Tropical Storm Kathleen coming through San Diego in 1976 -- September 10, 1976, the date of our son’s and daughter-in-law’s wedding. The next morning we were to head back to Athens, Georgia, using Hwy 8, except one very large piece had broken off from the main road. So we headed north to the 10 to go back home. Lived in Miami and Houston, went through a couple of “hurricanes” with no damage. It’s no fun. Sometimes the waiting and worrying are worse than the storm. I have family in San Diego, so will be praying and thinking of them. They have been through this before, so hope all will be well.
Again, take care and stay safe. Thinking good thoughts for all in the path of Hilary.
Please stay safe and dry, Tom. And please change the storm’s name to Hilary. Thanks.
done
Thanks, but I'm still seeing Hillary, not Hilary.
As a veteran of many Florida hurricanes, waiting is the worst. But I would rather have it "hit" during the daylight than at night, when you can hear it but not see what is happening. Much scarier in the dark.
Fill ziploc bags with ice cubes now while you have power. Put them in freezer....Will help keep your frig cold if power goes off and you can drink the water when it melts. Also fill any lidded jars or containers with filtered water and put in freezer now. ( same principal- can use them in a cooler to keep perishables and when water melts use for drinking.
Also, the water in the washing machine is a great idea. Makeshift toilet: big plastic bag with kitty litter in bottom draped over toilet bowl. I know you have kitty litter.??? (Hopefully will not come to that)
All the best, TC. We want you to be safe. Let us know how you are when you can!
Boy, you guys are really weather war veterans!
Thanks, Carol. We also are veterans of many Fl hurricanes(and dog owners🐾) and had no idea about the adult litter box. Will now add kitty litter to my list for hurricane preparedness.
Any green seas over the bow would have been too much for me. Hope you have fresh batteries in your flashlight, and some high ground for the 4 legged friends in your home.