...How Much Can NASA Say?
NASA satellites can identify 'thermal bands' that detect actively burning fires the world over as shown above, in red, from Wednesday, August 22nd.
Which led to a post from the fine folks at the American aeronautics and space administration titled 'A World On Fire' that was published Thursday.
The text of the post, overall, is both explanatory and careful.
For example, that mass of solid red in Africa is predominantly due to agricultural burning. In Brazil it is a combination of agricultural and wildfires.
As we know, in much of North America (and Chile) all those red dots are wildfires that are being driven by, surprise!, low humidity, high winds and extreme temperatures.
But what about Australia?
Well, here things got a little interesting, not so much with the explanation, which is that they are bushfires, but in the explanation which likely has certain members of the Trumpublican administration seeing red:
"...As the climate continues to change and areas become hotter and drier, more and more extreme bushfires will break out across the entire Australian continent..."
Gosh 'climate' and 'change' in the same sentence explaining how the so-called 'new normal' of today is very likely not the status quo of tomorrow.
Imagine that.
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Tip 'O the Toque to the Mound of Sound at 'The Disaffected Liberal'.
Post-script....The whackadoodle and me (sic) got up early and headed to the edge of the big muddy at the break of almost dawn in an effort to beat the coming rain...We were not successful, which turned out to be fantastic indeed...The only member of the gang that was not impressed was the beach guitar, but she'll be just fine once we clean up the keys and change the strings...Maybe by late November in the run-up to this year's Advent Jukebox.
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4 comments:
Quite right: it appears as though we have only reached the preface of what too many are mistakenly referring to as the New Normal. The preface to a novel already written by Cormac McCarthy. Hence the romantic gaze being cast upon Mars by those who think they might rocket off to that distant planet before the Hounds of Hell have their way with them.
Beer--
You speak of 'The Road'?
Jeebuz!
The way things are going, I have to admit that there is a certain logic to such a terrifying end to all of humanity.
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Hotter, even in places it isn’t drier, is just as lethal.
“…vast areas of coral graveyards that look like they suffered an underwater forest fire.”
"It's more than an alarm bell," says Veron. "It's an air raid siren."
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/world/great-barrier-reef/
If you believe in natural selection, the last paragraph in the story is a slap upside the melon.
I believe there is no limit to the size of an extended phenotype. It could in our case be planetary. And Homo sapiens will join a very long list of species that became extinct because they carried the wrong genetic code to fit the planetary environment. But at the same time join a very short list of one whose genes created the environment that caused the extinction.
Lew--
Good point about how devastating changes in water temperature can be.
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