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Heat » Evaporation » Clouds » Rain » Flooding

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Scene of Flooding in Delhi, India

This isn’t altogether scientific, but I think I might possibly see how global warming translates into disastrous weather such as tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, and other types of storms associated with heavy rains and flooding.

It all begins with hot weather. According to National Geographic Magazine, the hotter it gets, the more evaporation takes place;

The National Weather Service in the United States measures the rate of evaporation at different locations every year. Scientists there found that the rate of evaporation can be below 76 centimeters (30 inches) per year at the low end, to 305 centimeters (120 inches) per year on the high end.

The variability is based on temperature. The evaporated vapors form clouds until the air in a place just can’t take any more. The article continues:

Once water evaporates, it also helps form clouds. The clouds then release the moisture as rain or snow. The liquid water falls to Earth, waiting to be evaporated. The cycle starts all over again.

Many factors affect how evaporation happens. If the air is already clogged, or saturated, with other substances, there wont be enough room in the air for liquid to evaporate quickly. When the humidity is 100 percent, the air is saturated with water. No more water can evaporate.

Then—you guessed it!—it comes down as rain. Sometimes, lots of rain. Such as Los Angeles received when a hurricane hit Southern California a couple weeks ago with record rainfall. Those record rainfalls have been happening all over the globe: Burning Man at Black Rock City in Nevada; Derma in Libya, at the edge of the Sahara Desert; and Delhi, India.

So I think that the whole cycle of drought and flood will become ever more extreme, sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Phobias for Fun and Profit

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Trypophobia: Fear of Clusters of Holes

I am currently reading Kate Summerscale’s The Book of Phobias & Manias: A History of Obsession. In it are discussed an incredible array of things that frighten people. Summerscale takes it all very seriously, examining in each case when the phobia was first discovered and by whom and possible cures, when available.

Presented here are some of the stranger and less commonly known phobias, here more for their humorous side.

Koumpounophobia. Fear of buttons. Apparently Steve Jobs had this, which is why he always wore turtlenecks.

Pogonophobia. Fear of beards.

Telephonophobia. A fear of making or taking telephone calls. I sort of have this.

Triskaidekaphobia. Fear of the number thirteen.

Nomophobia. Fear of not having your cellphone on your person.

Aibohphobia. Fear of palindromes, such as “Able was I ere I saw Elba” or “Lewd did I live evil I did dwel.”

Hippopotomomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. An aversion to long words. The “sesquipedalio” means a foot and a half long in Latin.

This one is not discussed in the book, but I can string together Greek roots with the best of them. This is the most terrifying phobia of them all:

Enochlogynopogonophobia. Fear of being in a large crowd of bearded women.

“A Certain Apprehension of Darkness”

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This is not what one usually hears when talking about the settlers who crossed the continent in wagon trains to settle California. I am currently reading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which presents a much-needed corrective to the prevailing boosterism. This is interesting because Joan Didion’s ancestors came to California in the same wagon train that included the Donner Party. Joan’s ancestors split off and settled in Oregon at first.

To read these crossing accounts and diaries is to be struck by the regularity with which a certain apprehension of darkness enters the quest, a shadow of moral ambiguity that steadily becomes more pervasive until that moment when that traveler realizes that the worst of the Sierra [Nevada Mountains] is behind him. “The summit is crossed!” one such diary reads. “We are in California! Far away in the haze the dim outlines of the Sacramento Valley are discernible! We are on the down grade now and our famished animals may pull us through. We are in the midst of huge pines, so large as to challenge belief. Hutton is dead. Others are worse. I am better.” By this point, in every such journey, there would have been the accidents, the broken bones, the infected and even the amputated hands and feet. Sarah Royce remembered staying awake all night after a man in her party died of cholera, and hearing the wind whip his winding sheet like “some vindictive creature struggling restlessly in bonds.” There would have been the hurried burials, in graves often unmarked and sometimes deliberately obliterated. “Before leaving the Humboldt River there was one death, Miss Mary Campbell,” Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s son recalled. “She was buried right in the road and the whole train of wagons was driven over her grave to conceal it from the Indians. Miss Campbell died of mountain fever, and Mother by waiting on her caught the fever and for a long time she lingered between life and death, but at last recovered. Miss Campbell was an orphan, her mother having died at Green River.”

There would have been, darkest of all, the betrayals, the suggestions that the crossing might not after all be a noble odyssey, might instead be a mean scrambling for survival, a blind flight on the part of Josiah Royce’s “blind and stupid and homeless generation of selfish wanderers.”

Like a Boss?

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I Think It’s Time to Retire This Meme

Speaking as a retired person, I am happy to say I don’t have to kowtow to any megalomaniacal bosses any more. I put in some forty years of work, retiring only in my seventies. And not once during that forty years did I deal with a boss who did not behave like a tinpot dictator.

What I would have like to have seen is a company owner who would consider himself as the first among equals, not ruling with the divine right of kings. Although I consider myself a good writer, everything I wrote was “corrected” in such a way that it was worse than my first draft.

Within a year after I retired, my health improved markedly. My blood pressure, glucose readings, and weight all were better. That’s because I was no longer under stress. Had I continued working, the stress would have killed me before 2020. Treat me like a boss? No, I am not a prisoner in a concentration camp.

The funny thing is that my bosses were also under quite a bit of stress. But why is it that that was the only thing they were willing to share with their workers?

A Royal Palace on American Soil

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Honolulu’s Iolani Palace (Built 1879)

Not far from the Hawaii State Capitol sits the Iolani Palace, home of the monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawai’i from Kamehameha III in 1879 until the overthrow of the monarchy under Queen Lili’uokalani by a group of American merchants in 1893.

As I prepare to go to Hawaii in a week or so, I am conscious once again that the United States ruthlessly stepped on the rights of the Hawaiian people just so that a cabal of American merchants could have their way. On this trip, I plan to read Queen Lili’uokalani’s autobiography. For eight months, the Queen was imprisoned in one of the second floor bedrooms until she was tried by a military tribunal on some trumped-up charge.

It was like the U.S. and the American Indians all over again. Fortunately, there were no massacres by the cavalry in this instance, though the takeover was no less final—and unjust.

Earth’s Answer

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Hurricane Seen from Above

If global warming was some sort of challenge to us, then I would say we lost. There are still multitudes that will think nothing of denying it until their own asses catch fire. Re-reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I am conscious of a kind of Celtic sadness as the Barbarians stagger up to the gates and unthinkingly push back against anything that will help our world as we knew it survive into the future.

There are just too many Barbarians, and they delight in making grimaces at us Libtards. We are to be pwned at all events. It as as Sly says in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: “Therefore, paucas pallabris, let the world slide. Sessa!”

Well we some some indications of what the world’s “slide” will entail. There are hurricanes, tornadoes, overheated oceans that cook the fish, floods, droughts, record heat. And that°s just the start.

Face it, we humans are toxic to the earth. So we can expect that the earth will just up the ante and make it impossible for us to live as we have done into the future. I can think of no better symbol for our future than the floods at Burning Man near Nevada’s Black Rock City:

Perhaps to come are cacti growing in the Amazon Basin, Hurricanes in Southern California (hey, we had one last week!), trees growing the northern Alaskan bush, accelerated extinction of plant and animal species, ever fiercer and more widespread wild fires, food shortages, water shortages, the disappearance of green lawns—and that’s just the beginning.

So continue to say there is no such thing as global warming, and get ready to run for your life.

Cries in the Streets

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Tents of the L.A. Homeless

In our 21st Century city of Los Angeles, there are tens of thousands of people who are living in scattered Medieval tent cities. Even though the city has banned tents from across the street from my apartment, there are a number of bums who “sleep rough” on the sidewalk. Martine and I can hear them when they raise their voices in anger in the middle of the night, particularly if they are competing for the attentions of a homeless woman.

I am very happy that I am not a politician, because then I would have to pretend as they do they these homeless are all poor unfortunates who need to be placed in public housing. That’ll work for some of them, the roughly 50% who really just need a place to bed down and are willing to follow the rules about drink, drugs, and violence. Except a very large percentage don’t want to follow any rules whatsoever. When they are offered housing, they will get drunk or stoned and smear their feces on the wall—whereupon they find themselves in the street again.

America is full of raggedy men who do not give a tinker’s damn about THE RULES. What they want is the freedom to live as they want to, even if they are burying the city of their residence in piles of fetid garbage. They don’t particularly care if their pursuit of freedom is toxic to others.

It’s kind of like American politics as a whole, which can best be summarized by who can say EFF YOU the loudest and longest. We used to have two political parties with platforms. Now we have one party that has a platform, and the rest have EFF YOU as their platform.

The homeless who don’t want to be homeless I can understand. The ones who want to spend all night drinking, shouting, getting high and meth and Fentanyl, and whoring with female ratbags do not have my sympathies.

Travis McGee and Others

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Mystery Writer John D. MacDonald (1916-1986)

When the dog days of summer roll around, I like to look for a good mystery novel, especially if the scene of action is in a steamy place like Florida. Ever since I discovered that I could “check out” up to ten books from the L.A. public library to read on my Amazon Kindle, I have been looking for John D. MacDonald titles. In the last few weeks, I have picked out four titles. To date, I have read eleven of his books.

In many ways, MacDonald reminds me of Georges Simenon, another of my favorites. On one hand, Simenon wrote some 75 novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret, and hundreds of other of what he calls his romans durs, or “hard” novels. You guessed it: The latter group tend to be much more hard-bitten than the Maigret titles.

In the same way, MacDonald has his score of Travis McGee novels set in Florida and featuring the very sympathetic captain of the Busted Flush, the yacht on board of which he lives. Like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he is a knightly presence in the Southern California darkness. MacDonald’s non-Travis-McGee titles also tend to be a bit tougher sledding, with his detective’s humane presence absent.

I am just now starting to read some of MacDonald’s other fiction, such as Border Town Girl.

Third Time’s a Charm

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Martine at Kapiolani Park in September 2022

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, Martine and I are headed back to Honolulu for another visit. Looking back at last year’s pictures, I noticed that Martine looked genuinely happy in most of them. Returning to L.A., Martine has had a difficult year—especially when she broke her wrist in two places after a fall at home. And recovery has been painfully slow, especially since the cast which she war was too tight and affected her ability to bend her fingers once it was removed.

Although I would probably be happier traipsing off to Latin America, Martine’s happiness matters to me; and I can certainly enjoy myself in Hawaii provided I stay away from most mainland tourists of the luau-frequenting variety.

We will be staying at the same hotel we stayed in last year, the Malia. Last year, it was a hotel in the Outrigger chain; now, it is the Waikiki Malia, apparently no longer part of a chain. It is not exactly on the beach, but that is no matter to us as we are not beach types. We prefer the corner of Kuhio and Lewers because of its convenient access to public transportation.

The big success story of last year’s trip was our discovery of the Honolulu bus system, the best we have seen in any American city. As senior citizens, we picked up a Senior Citizens discount Holo card, which enables us to unlimited rides for the entire month of September for $20.00 US for each of us. Compare that with high car rental fees and hotel parking rates of up to $50-60 US per night.

Amazingly, the Honolulu buses go not only all around the city, but along the Southeast (Hanauma Bay, Hawaii Kai), the Windward Coast (Kailuka, Kaneohe, La’e), the North Shore (Waimea, the Banzai Pipeline), and Central O’ahu (the Dole Pinapple Plantation). Where we would need a car would be the Leeward Coast (Ko Olina) and certain trailheads on mountain trails. If you’re thinking of going to Hawaii on a budget, I firmly recommend the public transportation and a non-luxury-priced hotel, preferably on Kuhio Avenue.

We booked our trip through the Southern California Auto Club, which I also recommend.

Kahuna Lapa’au

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In preparation for an upcoming trip to Hawaii in a couple of weeks, I am reading the work of a distinguished novelist and microbiologist: O. A. Bushnell’s The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawai’i. Never before have I read a book about what happens to public health when a 19th century Western power takes over a primitive aboriginal society.

Bushnell claims that the native Kahuna Lapa’au healers were not inferior to American physicians of the period. When you consider that 19th century medicine was into bloodletting, blistering, and the ingestion of mineral poisons. it is not surprising that aboriginal healers were in now wise inferior.

Unfortunately, they were dealing with a whole new range of illnesses introduced by the white man, diseases such as measles, smallpox, malaria, leprosy, and the various venereal diseases. This led to widespread confusion among native healers as to which treatment to use, at a time when neither American nor native Hawaiian medical practice was effective.

In this book and in his novels—The Return of Lono, Ka’a’awa, Molokai, The Stone of Kannon, and The Water of Kane—Bushnell created an impressive body of work on the interface of the two cultures.