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October 06, 2016

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Every time I read about a hurricane, I'm glad I live on the far side of the country. Give me the occasional earthquake any time!

Although I suppose it's all in what you're used to. Some people seem amazingly tranquil about tornado season, too. Go figure.

wj:

Of the three, I honestly prefer hurricanes, because you get a lot of warning.

Right now, it looks as though FL has mostly dodged the high-winds bullet; too soon to tell about the storm surge.

Bets on how long it takes Drudge and Limbaugh to pivot from "NWS is exaggerating!" to "this is Obama's Katrina!" ?

My bet is that they'll have changed tack by Monday. No shame.

is there any place in the US free from extreme weather?

west coast has earthquakes and fire. east and gulf coasts have hurricanes. north has snow and cold. south has heat and drought. central has tornadoes and floods.

maybe that little pocket of north-western Appalachia: KY, TN? not too hot, not too cold, too far from the coast for much hurricane damage, just outside of tornado range?

My bet is that they'll have changed tack by Monday. No shame.

Short Attention Span Theater. Remember how Obama killed us all with Ebola?

is there any place in the US free from extreme weather?

How extreme and how often? Very, very rarely do people have to evacuate to avoid death and destruction where I live just outside of Philadelphia. Sometimes it's a matter of staying in and waiting something out, and possibly being without power for a little while.

Except for the Ogallala Aquifer drying up and that gigantic magma dome growing under Yellowstone Park, both long-term game-enders, we Coloradans are free pretty much free to depart this mortal coil individually and one at a time.

I'm not sure what the good news is, except that misery loves company.

A few guys get plucked off golf course greens by bolts of lightening every summer, but they chose the wrong sport, with apologies to bobbyp.

I've contracted Ebola twice. Aside from the explosive, massive hemorrhaging that had Ann Coulter and various Texas politicians mistaking my symptoms for a certain type of African character deficiency and fleeing before me, it was pretty much a non-event.

Extreme weather, biting locusts, and plague need to find this piece of shit as soon as possible:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/10/gary-johnson-thinks-barack-obama-and-bashar-al-assad-are-morally-same

Top 10 US States With the Best Weather All Year Round

I have trouble crediting any weather/climate ranking which ignores humidity (as opposed to just straight rainfall). No way anywhere along the Gulf Coast, whether Florida or Texas or anywhere inbetween) can be said to have great weather. "I could swim!"

Yeah, that list is absurd. I spent one spring and summer living in SC and Georgia. 1) Never again, and 2) that wasn't good weather even before the summer.

I spent a year on the southwestern tip of Iceland. On the whole, the weather there was better than a lot of places in the US.

CharlesWT's link's list:

1. CA - earthquakes count as 'weather', fires too.
2. HI - volcanoes! earthquakes! hurricanes!
3. TX - heat! hurricanes!
4. AZ - heat!
5,6,7. FL, GA, SC - heat! hurricanes!
8. DE ... maybe
9. NC. hurricanes, hot as fuck.
10. LA - hotter than fuck.

The state which really has the best weather? I think I'd go with West Australia. At least the southern portions.

Add to TX tornadoes and ice storms. And, this Spring, a couple of hail storms northeast of Dallas did about $2.5 billion in damage.

Adverse weather and climate cause a reduction in wealth. If there's little or no wealth, they cause a reduction in lives.

LA also gets hurricanes, obvs

CharlesWT, isn't SW Iceland more or less a synonym for Reykjavík? ;-)
I had planned a two week holiday tour this autumn but it got unfortunately cancelled. My previous experience (many years ago) was just 2 days and those had exceptionally good weather.
Btw, do you speak Icelandic? I try to learn it but with not overly much success. And there is a painful lack of up-to-date dictionaries covering even the basics. The newest German one is only German to Icelandic and is of limited use due to lack of indispensable grammatical info despite being otherwise very extensive. The standard Icelandic to German one has the grammar info but is far too thin. I'd go with an English one but those seem to be no better.

Is melanoma a weather related event, along with genetic susceptibility:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/07/02/worst-states-for-melanoma.html

Kind of counter-intuitive.

Hartmut, I'm under the impression that one of the (relatively) unique features of Icelandic as a language is how little it has changed over the centuries. If we try to read something written a thousand years ago in English or German or French, it's the next thing to impossible without a dictionary and a lot of patience. In Icelandic, you can (and grammer school students do) read stuff that old.

Which is by way of saying, perhaps the lack of a recent work on Icelandic is not that much of a problem as you might think. You might need a moment to consider that German doesn't use a particular word or phrase that much any more. But once you've got the modern German equivalent, the Icelandic word or phrase should be relatively unchanged.

Ironically I can read Icelandic the better the older it is. I have less problems with Icelandic texts written a century ago than with a newspaper article of today. The 'go for obsolete phrasing' trick works perfectly for e.g. Norwegian. Icelandic needs a lot more decoding work, splitting the words into their component parts (does this s belong to this or the following syllable, is that a an Umlaut chnage from ö etc.). The language itself has indeed changed little but the vocabulary has. In particular there seems to a deliberate loan word cleansing in the last decade or two (mostly concerning modern words). Additionally the way youngsters and adults talk now differs more than in the past (at least I get that from the few Icelanders I know personally). So for me Icelandic handles more like Latin (which I could speak if need be) than Italian (which I can't speak at all but read within limits and understand to a limited degree highly depending on context).
Btw, for some rather complicated reasons I acquired Icelandic translations of Homer (prose and verse, 19th century) and Vergil (prose, late 20th century) and can at least basically understand the text. Modern Icelandic literature is a different beast, even if I also own a translation.
With spoken Icelandic I am in the transitional phase where I can begin to mentally turn the sound into letters with some degree of accuracy but not quick enough to also extract the meaning before the speaker has proceeded too far (in the beginning it could as well have been Japanese). The correlation between sound and spelling is quite complicated because pronounciation has changed very much since the Middle Ages while the spelling stayed the same (they mainly eliminated the 'z' in favour of 's' and added a 'u' to the -r ending). Textbooks start with several pages of pronounciation rules that make English ones seem logical in comparision.
The language structure is very similar to German indeed. That's the actual problem given the numerous trapfalls that I rarely notice in my native language but curse when I encounter them in the foreign one.
It took me decades to achieve decent English which is a much easier task. I would be happy to get Icelandic to even my Latin level.

Hartmut, I was at Keflavik which is about 40km southwest of Reykjavik. I was there from October, 1972 to October 1973.

Other than a few words and phrases, I didn't learn the language. My knowledge of the language is about the same as wj's. My impression was that it was similar to German in having some long, compound words. I was told that the word for telephone is along the lines of "the long, magic string that talks."

When I was there, the record low and high temperatures for Keflavik were -17°C to 15°C. But quite a bit of weather could be packed into that temperature range. Such as 110km to 130km straight wind storms. Which weren't too bad since everything that could blow away had already blown away.

Hartmut, impressive.
My grandfather spoke seven languages - I can barely get by in French and German... plus a few Latin tags.

California has fantastic weather; you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

If German was not my mother tongue, I doubt that I would manage to learn it. My English became actively useable only after reading a few ten thousand pages, which I started because it was a way to not have finished all books I could afford by mid-month already (plus the thick English paperbacks were far cheaper than their German hardback translations). The (desired) slowing down effect wore off over time but I was too lazy to switch to a different language. What instigated the idea to try Icelandic was actually a movie that interested me but was only available in the original without non-Icelandic subtitles. Latin I had at school for 9 years. It somehow stuck and is the only reason that Italian is not totally alien at least at the receiving end.

Back to weather. Autumn has arrived here the day before yesterday. It's cool and wet and in no way out of the ordinary for the season.

I read some place that the two areas most likely to survive global climate change without developing horrible weather problems (drought, fire, tornados, hurricanes, snow apocalypses, Biblical rainfall and floods) are Arkansas and Western Washington and Western Oregon.

Of course we live in fear of tsunami from an eartquake so anyone hwo oves here should settle at lest one hundred and fifty feet aove sea level.

Western Washington has the best weather I've ever lived in. It's like the 6 weeks of good weather Ohio gets ever year, but for 9 months.

Not wishing anything bad on your but NV, the reason your weather is so nice is because this

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

lj, a completely fascinating link, thank you.

Yes, but if you've experienced Ohio winters, including brutal ice storms (my tailbone can attest) and dirty, months-old piles of snow, (we'll leave aside the summer humidity) a little ole once in an eon Cascadian subduction zone cataclysm in which the entire northwest Pacific coastline coast drops with a bang into the Pacific Ocean and then springs back like a trampoline will be a walk in the park.

The news reports of the earthquake will begin: "Bob Vide, an Ohio transplant, was standing on the western shore of Bainbridge Island enjoying the brilliant sunset emblazoning the western horizon on a windless, virtually cloudless evening when the first tremor hit and then seconds later the beach dropped out from under him. Minutes later, the ground came back up to meet him and sent him into a 200-foot-high back flip in the direction of downtown Seattle and when he reached the apex of the arc is when he spotted the 450 foot high ocean surge racing toward him and it occurred to him, in a moment of surreal calm, that had he thought to bring his surfboard, he could be back in Columbus, Ohio by midnight to shovel snow ............"

He'll also regret his vote-trading scheme in the last Presidential election when he awakes in traction the next week and learns that all earthquake and monitoring monitoring and warning systems operated by the federal government had been deactivated months before by Secretary of Defunct Agencies Bobby Jindal, the entire rescue and recovery apparatus, including any domestic effort by the American military had been defunded and disbanded in favor of a loose, chaotic, libertarian voluntary charity scheme to bring aid, in the form of guns and strapless boots, to disaster victims via street corner cookie sales, internet crowd-funding, and prayer vigils, and FOX News will be interviewing some smug f*ck named Trevino/Tacitus, who has the facial visage of a character actor who specializes in depicting Mafia hitmen in the movies and TV, and will intone that perhaps the optimum, effective thing to do as a civilized society, is completely abandon the entire Northwest quandrant of the country to its fate because of the f*cking federal budget deficit and our overarching need to garrison the entire Mideast from Istanbul to Islamabad and south to Aden.

I kid.

President Donald Trump's first question to his cracked staff will be: "Can you losers check and see if anyone at a Trump property on the Left Coast spilled their drink? Christie, fat boy, get your ample gluteus maximus out there and start swabbing the decks. And do whatever it is you pulled with the bridge caper in Jersey to delay delay, tom delay and give me some time to pick up property cheap. Take this traffic cone with you, butthead. Hey, where you going so fast? Did you forget something? That's right, kiss the ring. Give my dick a little tug too. Now, scram!"

President Gary Johnson: "Portland's gone? What's that? Oh, you mean they canceled the TV show? No, well, has anyone thought to secure the pot supply out there, because that is some wicked weed."

President Hillary Clinton: "So what you are telling me is if I use my private cell phone to in any way federally manage saving the entire West Coast, the Republican Party and its filth base will have me shot at sunrise and hung for good measure like a witch.

Burned at the stake, too? Let's double dare the f*ckers, whattaya say, kids?"

Not wishing anything bad on your but NV, the reason your weather is so nice is because this

Wishing WA weather and disasters on me isn't wishing me bad. Well, okay, it sorta will be for the next 3-4 weeks, but after OH passes out of its autumnal flash of good weather, I'll be right back to longing for lovely WA weather, or at least disasters to rid me of OH's troublesome climate (or to rid OH of me - in a month or two I'll probably be willing to take either).

There's no hiding place down here, no hiding place down here. I went down to the barn not hide my face, but the Lord said to me, "There's no hiding place." There's no hiding place down here.

That said, I am adapted now to a temperature range of fifty to seventy-five with an overcast sky and light drizzle. I don;t worry about the earthquake looming in our future except when we go out to the west coast on vacation. Then I do spend my time scouting routes to the nearest high ground.

lj, that's a fascinating article. But I wonder, has anyone done any work on the impact of another major quake echoing the New Madrid quake(s) of 1811?

Granted, they were "only" in the range just below 8, rather than the 9+ forecast for the Northwest. But buildings in the middle of the country are not built with earthquakes in mind. No seismic building codes. Lots of brick buildings. Which means that the physical destruction will be far greater than what a similar magnitude quake would do on the West Coast (even in the Northwest).

Also, the Northwest has a fair number of folks who are transplants from California. They may be assuming that their new homes are not much at risk. But when a quake hits, they at least have reflexes for reacting. It won't help if they are in the tsunami zone, but it could make a big difference elsewhere.

I think they are still trying to figure out why the New Madrid earthquake happened

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/scientists-may-have-solved-mystery-giant-midwest-earthquakes

Thanks for that link, lj.

I hadn't realized that source of the New Madrid quake was such a mystery. I mean, the Ozarks had to come from somewhere -- mountains don't just magically appear.

I had thought that either there are plates moving over/past each other (the ring of fire), or there is a magma hot spot below (Hawaii). But either way, if you have mountains, you are going to get quakes . . . unless the mountains are really, really old ones (the Appalachians) where the cause is long gone.

wj,

The Appalachians are, tectonically, part of the same mountain range as the Scandes in Sweden and Norway. They are not that old, only a couple of hundred million years, but thankfully, seismically inactive. In North European scale of geological time, a few hundred milliom year is not much, though.

Otherwise than that, I would say that Stockholm has one of the most pleasant climates in the world. The city is located deep inside an archipelago, on the Western coast o the Baltic sea. As the prevalent wind direction is southwesterly, it means that storms don't hit it directly from the sea but are always mitigated by the continent or by the archipelago. The higjest temperatures are in low 30s centigrade, and it never gets really cold. The amount of precipitation is enough to keep plants green without irrigation, and takes place rather evenly throughout the year.

Helsinki is much worse, as it is almost directly by the sea, with very little archipelago to shelter it, and the prevalent wind comes from the sea, making streets really chilly. In this regard, e.g. Tampere is much nicer, but as it is inland, most people in the world would find it a bit cold in the winter.

I have been informed reliably that the best weather in the US is to be found in Alaska and Minnesota, though.

If you're looking for a mild form of having the full four seasons, Front Range Colorado is hard to beat. Of course, you have to put up with some anomalies: the occasional July day with a high around 60, and days in February in the 70s. It's a narrow little strip of land, though. Go a hundred miles east onto the plains, or 30 miles west into the mountains, and things are completely different.

I have been informed reliably that the best weather in the US is to be found in Alaska and Minnesota, though.

Sarcasm?

As a native Midwesterner, I assure you that appart from Hurricanes the Midwest has more of what nature can throw at a human than any other part of the US: drought, humidity, extreme heat, extreme cold, snow, floods, tornados,,,

In the course of one year a person can experience one hundred degree days with humidity so think you's think you were living in Brazil, the intense jungle experience broken only by theatrical thunderstorms and tornadoes, followed by a snowy winter with sub zero temps, made even colder by windchill (70 below not unheard of), and the air so dry your lips bled and you can't kiss anyone without zapping them in the face with static electricity.

There's a couple nice days every spring before the floods and a week or so of pretty fall color in autumn during the tornado-clean-up period.

If you fire up a camping stove in an ice fishing hut, both Alaska and Minnesota can be downright homey.

From what I know Stockholm had in the past problems with the harbour staying frozen for too long in the spring holding the fleet captive. As a result the new city of Karlskrona was founded farther South down the coast to house the Swedish navy.
A nice place btw if one has no problems with having to go steeply uphill downhill whereever one wishes to go. Worth a visit!

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