Aspiring Meteorologist Seeks Good Trouble/Revenge As I Would Put It, Against 2013 Oklahoma Tornado Calamity

An injured Aria Vargyas, then age 8, right side of photo,
being carried out of the tornado-destroyed Briarwood
Elementary School in Moore, Oklahoma on May 20,
2013. The tragedy killed her two sisters, and 
powered her fascination with meteorology so she
can work to prevent deaths in similar storms.
She's now 20 years old and a meteorology student 
at Texas A&M. Photo by AP 

 On May 20, 2013, a powerful EF-5 tornado swept across Moore, Oklahoma. It was one of the worst tornado disasters in recent American history, 

It killed 24 people, injured 212, destroyed 1,150 homes and caused $2 billion in damage. 

Among those injured was Aria Vargyas, then eight, when Briarwood Elementary School, where she was a student, was hit by the twister and collapsed around her.  

Her sisters, Karrina, 4, and Sydnee, 7 months died in their house near the school as the tornado blew the home apart and scattered it to the winds. 

There's even an iconic photo out there of a rescue worker carrying an injured Vargyras out of collapsed remains of the school 

As Texas A&M University of Arts and Sciences and CBS reports, Aria Vargyras, now 20, is in a way seeking revenge against the tornado. 

She is now a meteorology major at Texas A&M, wishing to build a career studying tornadoes and how to predict, understand and ultimately find ways to dissipate storms that produce these deadly tornadoes.

If you insist on a Hollywood connection, her story echoes the plot of the two famous "Twister" movies.

In the first one, the protagonist is a woman who as a child lost her father in a tornado. The character is now a researcher and tornado chaser who is trying to figure out the mechanisms of tornadoes to better understand them and mitigate them.

In the second Twister movie, the protagonist is a woman who, earlier in life lost friends in a tornado chase that went awry and is now studying ways to dissipate and stop tornadoes in their tracks. 

Hollywood isn't reality, of course, but Vargyas has an incredibly compelling story.

A locket around Aria's neck holds a photo of the three sisters. She still has the letters she wrote to them after the storm as she tried to cope with the pain. '"I hate that you're never coming back....And I hate that I have to realize that," she wrote, 

 As Texas A&M explains.

"In dealing with the loss of her sisters as she grew up Vargyas found herself increasingly obsessed with meteorology and the mechanisms behind storm formation. She eventually made it her goal to pursue an education that would enable her to become a meteorologist and work toward preventing weather disaster and their devastating impact on other families and communities.

'My passion for meteorology fully stems from my sisters,' Vargyas said. 'I am doing this for them. I want to do research to help find a way to dissipate storms, but it was because of my sisters that I wanted to do that. I wanted to make sure no one went through what I went through at such a young age.'"

Vargyas just completed her freshman year at Texas A&M. "It's fascinating to delve deeper into the dynamics of weather systems....Understanding the intricacies of atmospheric processes is crucial to my quest to improve prediction and response. Ultimately, I do want to storm chase, looking at the radar, taking pictures and mapping."

Her passion for meteorology and writing, has helped with the grief of losing her two sisters, Texas A&M reports. 

"I started writing, journaling and trying to write my feelings down, and that's what gets me through the rough patches.... Somewhere along the road, it got easier. I didn't cry as much when I talked about them...When I would think of them, it would be a good memory instead of a sad one." 

Right now, we live in a time when a significant portion of the population denigrates science and scientists. We have people in positions of power who do that. The discoveries and truths scientists learn about and tell us don't always match the world view that some politicians want. Or more accurate, a world view that would make them more money than the truth. 

Most scientists don't have as dramatic a story like Vargyas has. But they also don't go into their respective fields to somehow screw over would-be billionaires. Or foist a "climate change hoax" on the population to control them.  Or something. 

Sure, there are bad apple scientists out there, just like there is in every profession. A small minority of scientists cheat, or find ways to make lots of money instead of, you know, actual science.

But honestly, those fools are few and far between. 

As I wrote some of this past Friday afternoon, meteorologists were watching storms in southern Vermont like hawks. The storms risked bringing  life-threatening flash floods, and those scientists were ready to warn the public and save lives  as soon as the first sign of trouble loomed.

It's just what they do.  

We clearly need scientists like Vargyas and so many of the others out there. Too bad not enough people recognize this. Until it's too late.  

Canadians To The Rescue Again: Montreal University To Preserve Endangered U.S. Climate Data

Since the United States has apparently given up
on science, Canada is stepping up, as usual. 

Seems like lately, it's always Canada to the rescue. 

Unlike some in the United States, Canadians are really in the habit of making sound decisions, based on you know, facts, And reality. 

Sure, every nation has its nutcases. I'm sure Canada does. But overall, if we want an example of an adult in the room, we look to Canada.  

The latest example - at least in terms of climate and weather,  -is what's going on at McGill University in Montreal.

The Trump people are destroying - or at least are threatening to destroy -  years of climate and environment research. Mostly because the facts arising from the research conflict with the world they want.   

So, a group at McGill University is working to preserve that research. 

This actually started about six months ago, when researchers at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management launched the Sustainability Academic Network (SUSANHub.com). It's a database that centralizes climate research and data.

At first, this wasn't necessarily an effort to preserve scientific research. 

The whole idea was to connect researchers and other professionals involved in climate change and sustainable developing, kind of a LinkedIn for that field of study, said Juan Serpa, a professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management.

Then Donald Trump came on the scene.

Already unimpressed by Trump's desire to make Canada the 51st state in the United States, they also knew that America's wealth of climate research was under threat. 

So, once again, the Canadians did the right thing. 

As the Canadian Press News reports:

"...at a time when the administration of United States President Donald Trump is firing climate researchers, banning certain words from scientific article, cutting funding for environmental research, threatening to withdraw financial support from universities and deleting scientific reports from government websites, the McGill platform has taken on a different significance.

'The goals is to protect scientific data against threats from the U.S. government,' Serpa said".

Just a couple years ago, I would have never thought academic freedom would be under siege in the U.S. like it is now.  Once again, thank gawd for the Canadians.

Canadian Press News continues:

"Scientific data that is on the chopping block south of the border is download and uploaded to the platform. 

Scientific data on wildfires, protecting forest from insects and diseases the impact of climate change on agriculture, flood risks, ocean plastic pollution, and the industries that emit the most greenhouse gases are just a few examples of the data that can be accesses on SUSANHub.com that would otherwise be at risk for being lost."

The Trump administration has launched a war on science, and that obviously includes climate and sustainability research. Information on climate has been removed from more than 200 U.S. government web sites. 

We know about the layoffs and funding cuts at NOAA and other U.S. agencies that deal with climate change and related issues. NOAA is one example of how science is dead in the U.S. thanks to Trump. 

BRAIN DRAIN

As a result of Trump, there's now an alarming brain drain from the U.S.  As grateful as I am for McGill University and their efforts to save climate and environmental data, it's just one of many shifts that are drawing the best minds in science away from the United States toward much more receptive nations.

As Le Monde reports, the European Union is encouraging U.S. researchers to relocate to Europe. They've announced an incentive package worth about 500 million Euros to make the bloc a "magnet for researchers." That equals about $566 million. 

The European Union isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They know that Trump is ruining one of the United States' most important economic engines: Scientific research that improves the lives of people, and increases markets for new and innovative products and ideas. And protects the public from expensive crises ranging from disease to climate change. 

It's a business decision on the part of the European Union, and who can blame them?

 It's not just Europe.  China and Russia are also trying to recruit U.S. scientists, and that's a whole other threat.   At least traditionally, Europe has been our friend. China and Russia, not so much, despite Trump's fondness for Vladimir Putin. 

As Fast Company and other outlets report, China seems to have embarked on an effort to recruit recently laid of U.S. scientists to relocate or contribute remotely to research operations based in Shenzhen.

China's goal, of course, is to gain technological knowledge and trade secrets to put them at an advantage over the United States.  So much for Trump's America First rhetoric. 

Per Fast Company:

"Laid off federal employees with security clearances or institutional knowledge are considered particularly vulnerable. Analysts suggest that financial strain and professional uncertainty may make these individual more susceptible to overtures from foreign entities."

So great, on top of everything else, Trump is creating a potential industrial espionage or spy crisis.  

Ocean Temperatures Have Gone Full Year At Record High Temperatures, Worrying Scientists

An Atlantic Ocean sunrise on an usually warm 
morning in Bethany Beach, Delaware, December, 2022.
Oceans worldwide are now experiencing
record high temperatures. 

The world's oceans have been at record warm levels now for over a  year.  

They have been gradually warming under the influence of climate change, but for the past year, they've heated up at a much faster rate. The oceans are hotter than ever, by a long shot. 

That's bad news for us humans. Hotter oceans make hurricanes, typhoons and other storms that eventually hit land stronger and more destructive. 

The hotter oceans put more water vapor into the air, sometimes helping to turn downpours on land into catastrophic flooding torrents of rain.

The record ocean temperatures are also screwing up food chains in all that water, which could have effects on world food supplies.

So what gives?

Scientists aren't sure, but they are concerned, as Elizabeth Kolbert noted in The New Yorker:

"'We don't really know what's going on,' said Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies told me. 'And we haven't known what's going on since about March of last year.' He called the situation 'disquieting.'"

As Wired noted, ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic are already where they should be in June. That's the start of hurricane season, and those warm temperatures now are theoretically enough to support a tropical storm or hurricane, 

"It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long,' said Brian McNoldy, a University of Miami hurricane researcher.

Scientists are wondering if the year-long unprecedented global ocean heat wave is just a blip, an outlier in what has been a gradual warming of the oceans created by climate change? Or is something else going on?  

Kolbert in the New Yorker again:

"For the last twelve months, the seas have been so feverish that scientists are starting to worry about not just the physical impacts of all that heat but the theoretical implications. Can the past year be explained by what's already known about climate change, or are there forces at work that haven't been accounted for? And if it's the latter, does this mean the projections for warming, already decidedly grim, are underestimating the dangers?"

Explanations are mostly speculation at this point.  

El Nino usually makes both Earth's atmosphere and oceans warmer. And we've been in an El Nino for the past year. But the oceans have warmed in the past year much more than we'd expect from an El Nino.

An enormous volcanic eruption in the South Pacific back in 2022 released a huge amount of water vapor high into the atmosphere. That might have temporarily added a little heat to the world. The solar cycle is now active. Perhaps that's contributing a little to heating the world, including its oceans. 

And as I've previously reported on, environmental regulations have sharply reduced sulfur emissions from ships, which meant there was less pollution in the air to block the sun. Or this past year's hot oceans could be just a weird blip, some sort of odd natural variability.  Or some or all of the above.

Nobody is really sure. 

Kolbert's New Yorker article says a good test is coming up to help determine whether we should panic over the oddly hot seas.

El Nino is transitioning to the cooler La Nina ocean and weather pattern.  Normally, La Nina tends to blunt the effects of climate change a bit by having a cooling influence on both the lower atmosphere and the oceans. 

If La Nina brings ocean temperatures more in line toward what scientist had expected, then we can breathe a slight, partial sigh of relief.  

In recent days, scientists have started to notice global sea temperatures hinting at a cooling as El Nino fades, but the ocean warmth is still at record heights.  

There is precedence for a big spike in ocean temperatures like we're seeing now. El Ninos in the 1940s brought ocean temperatures from well below normal to a fair amount above normal.  The increase in temperature back then was of a similar scale we're seeing now.

The trouble is, climate change had made oceans warmer. So the latest El Nino appears to have taken a much warmer than normal ocean system and brought those temperatures to extreme heights. 

The New Yorker said that Susan Wijffels, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution thinks the real test will be over the next 12 months. "If temperatures remain very high, then I would say more people in the community will be really alarmed and say, 'OK, this is outside of what we can explain.'"

Oceans that stay hotter than climatologists had expected can can create a "positive feedback" in which the warmth causes more warmth. Wired explains: 

 "....when the surface warms, it creates a cap of hot water, blocking the nutrients in colder waters below from mixing upwards. 

Phytoplankton need those nutrients to properly grow and sequester carbon, thus mitigating climate change. If warming-induced stratification gets bad enough, 'we don't see what we would call a spring bloom,; says Dennis Hansel, an oceanographer from the University of Miami. 'Those are much harder to make happen if you don't bring nutrients back up to the surface rot support the growth of those algae." 

Whether or not oceans come off their big fever in the past year, those seas will continue to be a growing problem for us in the decades to come. The upward temperature trend will continue, causing more storms and sea level rise. We just don't know how fast that upward trend will become. 

Scientists: We're Not In A New Geological Era Created By Humans/Climate Change

The planet pictured here has not entered a new
geological epoch, a committee
of scientists recently decided. 

Scientists are not ready to declare a new geologic epoch that takes into account how us humans are wrecking Earth. 

As the New York Times reports, people have proposed declaring we're now in a geologic era called the Anthropocene.   

We're going to stick with the era we've been in for the last 11,000 years or so.

Says the New York Times:

"By geologists' current timeline of the Earth's 4.6-billion-year-history, our world right now is in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent retreat of the great glaciers. Amending the chronology to say we had moved on to the Anthropocene would represent an acknowledgment that recent, human-induced  changes to geological conditions had been profound enough to bring the Holocene to a close."

Those changes caused by humans are nuclear bombs, which spread at least a bit of radiation worldwide, global trade, and of course climate change. 

There's no question us humans have done those things, but not to the extent that we need to declare a new era, said a committee of scientists.  Declaring a new geologic era is too limited and recent as signposts for humans' reshaping of planet Earth.

Also, these epochs should be judged with a heavier slant toward geography than anthropology or human history. 

The NYT again:

"'It constrains, it confines, it narrows down the whole importance of the Anthropocene,' said Jan A. Piotrowski, a committee member and geologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. 'What was going on during the onset of agriculture? How about the Industrial Revolution? How about the colonizing of the Americas? Of Australia?

"'Human impact goes much deeper into geological time,' said another committee member, Mike Walker, an earth scientist and professor emeritus and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. 'If we ignore that, we are ignoring the true impact, the real impact, that humans have on our planet.'"

Other eras Earth has gone through seem pretty big ticket and differ greatly from each other. These include the Triassic, which featured the dinosaurs, the Paleocene, in which mammals took hold, and the Pleistocene, which include the ice ages. 

The decision by this committee of scientists not to declare the Anthropocene surprised some observers. In any event,  in the zeitgeist of social media, the back and forth over the subject will continue. 

In fact, there's activists who want to declare not the Anthropocene but the Pyrocene, which is an era in which man introduced fire and more importantly, the fact that man has introduced an era of rapid-fire climate change. 

Stephen Pyne explained this more in a 2021 Grist article:

"The Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefined the Anthropocene according to humanity's primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative - the long alliance between fire and humans. It proposes an analogy for the future - the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene."

It's true that climate change has the potential to be as dramatic as the Ice Age - though obviously going in the opposite direction of that era.  I think calling our current era the Pyrocene is good for climate activism.

I'm just not sure if it's a full geologic era for Earth.

What do you think?

 

Vermont Is No Climate Refuge. No Place Is. It's Up To Us To Adapt, Or Try To

A sign outside a Johnson, Vermont church after destructive
floods swept the town and much of the rest of the state
earlier this month. Adapting to climate change is
going to take the ethos seen in this sign. 

 I have to delve into something I touched on just after the worst of Vermont's flooding in July. 

In a July 14 post when I was explaining what caused the July 10-11 cataclysmic flood in the Green Mountain State in, I mentioned a 2021 study that said Vermont is one of the best places in the United States to shield oneself from the effects of climate change. 

That study by Pro Publica and the New York Times said the top four safest counties in the United States from climate change are the Vermont counties of Lamoille, Orange, Franklin and Essex. All of Vermont was regarded in the study as a pretty  protected from climate change. 

The United States' "safest" county, Lamoille, has been declared a federal disaster area no fewer than 12 times in the past decade. That includes two this year: The big July flood, of course, and a weird May freeze that ruined crops that grew too early because of an unseasonably warm early spring. 

As VTDigger points out, we end up on lots of lists as a great climate refuge.  We're far enough north so that extreme heat waves aren't as big a threat. There's no coastline to drown in a hurricane or  nor'easter storm surge. We aren't nearly as prone to forest fires at places out west or in Canada.  

This "safety" has prompted some people to move to Vermont to escape the ravages of climate change. However, as we've seen this summer, there's really no escape. 

A summer-like early spring led to the freeze that damaged so many crops in Vermont.  Like seemingly everywhere else, the weather seems to whiplash back and forth, from a developing drought in June to catastrophic floods in July. 

Algae blooms closed some lakefront beaches in Vermont. We didn't really have any wildfires to speak of, but boy, we've had a lot of smoke from those fires in Canada and the western United States.

"This summer has maybe burst the bubble a little bit in what probably was more of just a myth, of Vermont being in an idea climate refuge," Jared Ulmer, the climate and health program manager at the Vermont Department of Health told VTDigger.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

I think most of us knew, when those 2021 studies came out about Vermont being a climate refuge that there were some huge asterisks attached to those study conclusions. 

It's not that ProPublica and the New York Times were wrong. It's just that Vermont is not in a hermetically sealed utopia of steady climate, steady people and and steady safety. 

That's not to say we have to sit here and be victims every time a climate disaster rolls around. Like everybody else on the planet, Vermont has to adapt to a changing climate. It's wetter here now, at least most of the time. But droughts are also more likely to intervene. 

Winters are warmer, which mucks up our winter sports season. The weather around our iconic maple sugaring season is now all over the place. Weird late winter and early spring heat waves have hurt that industry. 

Summer is tourist season in Vermont. Among all the other problems our July floods caused this year, I'm sure the destruction discouraged some visitors from coming to the Green Mountain State. 

With each new climate-related calamity or mishap, we learn what to do next time.  Or try to. After Tropical Storm Irene's epic floods in 2011 Vermont rebuilt with, at least in some places, stronger bridges, bigger culverts and better drainage.

We also moved some people away from flood prone areas after Irene. But not enough people, apparently 

I think many of us think of climate change in making our life and property decisions.  A few years ago, we replaced a culvert under our driveway, making it much larger than the previous ones and reinforcing it with large rocks. 

That surely saved our driveway from this summer's floods, but still, we weren't unscathed. The water was so powerful that it moved some the rocks away.  That could make the culvert prone to damage in the next torrent.  It doesn't end, does it?

As with Gov. Peter Shumlin after Irene, our current Gov. Phil Scott is solidly leading Vermont out of the latest flood crisis, and his team is surely figuring out how to, as they say, build back better. 

There's only so much we can do, of course. Like it or not, Vermont, just like every other place on the planet, will keep facing newer and weirder climate challenges. 

Vermont is just one tiny dot on the map. All over the world, governments, individuals, organizations, corporations and businesses are now constantly calculating climate change into their plans. Even if some of these entities won't admit they're doing it. 

This state of affairs all snuck up without us fully realizing it, despite decades of hair on fire warnings from thousands of climate scientists. 

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying we're doomed, like the story I hear from some climate activists. It would be easier to reduce carbon emissions so we don't make bad situation worse. But so far, the fossil fuel industry and some greedy politicians are making sure that doesn't happen just yet. 

I just hope that with everything else going on in the world, sane heads prevail as we all react and batten down in the face of climate change. 

Frankly, I'm not that optimistic about many of our national and world leaders, or some corporations for that matter. But, as I've seen here in Vermont after this summer's floods, we're acting as individuals and small communities to recover from, and brace for the effects to climate change. 

That's probably the best path worldwide.  As best we can, we act locally, and hope the bigwigs catch up with us, eventually.