#bay area climate

[remembertheplunge]

I attended the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley today.

I listened to 3 different panels of authors discussing their books and writing.

One said that in her writing group, they don’t just criticize another’s work. The group discuses the positive aspects of a writing piece. They then ask the writer who composed it what issue areas they, the writer, would like to discuss.

I like that approach. The group doesn’t shut the writer down through attacking the work. They help the writer explore areas of concern and thus creat an environment of expansion.

Another writer said talent is not enough . You must also have persistence.

And, I think that 3 of the authors said that an inspiring Author for them was James Baldwin. His writings were featured in the 2016 film “I am not your Negro” a great movie I highly recommend.

[thechembow]

Hi Sharon - the "smoke" has been awful in San Jose this week - we have been forced to have indoor lunch time at my school 2 days this week (kids can't be outside at lunch) due to the "Bay Area Air Quality Management" District's "Spare the Air" alert. I've been wondering if it really was smoke - I've had several students say they can smell it. I haven't been able to, but I really can see it up close, things look foggy even a few yards away. How can we tell if it is smoke or just DOR?

It would be great to see a photo if you have one. From the news footage I've seen, the air looks very similar to how it was in LA in the 80s and 90s when they used to call the DOR "smog." I saw a report in which people in the Bay Area were still walking their dogs and enjoying their normal routines, and one lady even said this was nothing compared with actual wildfires she had lived through in Lake Tahoe.

For people new to the science of orgonomy, lingering air pollution is caused by positively ionizing radiation mostly from cell tower arrays throughout cities, which causes stagnation and inhibits the earth from removing the pollution. Air pollution from cars, wildfires, and other sources is naturally cleaned from the atmosphere by the upward movement of orgone energy, which the earth constantly generates naturally. When an energy shift takes place in which the atmospheric energy transmutes, the DOR goes through several phases. I explain the different looks of DOR in this recent post.

With that said, there could have been smoke involved in the air pollution and DOR would hold it in. However, because of the widespread neutralization of cell towers in the Bay Area, it would be transmuting, which gives it the hazy whitish look. If there was smoke, it was most likely from unreported local prescribed burns (there is no way the fire up north from a month ago is still burning after being repeatedly rained on). This is how they do it in Southern California and many other places. They create smoke nearby, and then tell us that it's coming from a fire in the wrong direction of the wind some several hundred miles away from us. The post I referenced also shows this smoky looking DOR in our area in Southern California and explains their reporting tactics further.

Another possibility is that there was no smoke at all, just the usual air pollution from the city acted on by DOR in various stages of transmutation. The news also said it would be gone in a couple of days, coinciding with a rain storm moving into Northern California. As you know, once DOR transmutes, the OR not only lifts air pollution, but also promotes rainfall through the negative ionization of the atmosphere, which allows hydrogen bonds to form between water molecules. The news always confounds cause and effect to obscure the true science of weather and climate, orgonomy.

Remember also that since you didn't smell smoke, and you are an aware orgonite gifter, the ones who did smell it may have just been mind controlled by their smartphones to perceive the AI's digital reality rather than what's real. Mind control is also a huge part of the atmospheric problems on earth, because the mind creates our reality and people are manipulated through negative media combined with the mind control signal of their phones to create a negative world. But in reality, orgone energy is much stronger than DOR and one orgonite gifter can undo the damage of a million negative minds!

A multi-dimensional question gets a multi-dimensional answer! Hope this helps your understanding, and thanks for the thought provoking question! Keep on towerbusting!

[raginggrannies]

[yuumei-art]

Lofi Cali Girl - beats to relax/study to during the climate change apocalypse. Lots of people have messaged me with well wishes for the LA fires. I'm lucky enough to live in a different part of California (in the SF bay area) so please do not worry about me. I do used to live in LA and have a lot of friends who live there still. My heart goes out to everyone affected by this tragedy. For the people whose houses did not burn down, they still surfer from horrendous air quality caused by the fires. The house I lived in during my teenage years is right next to the Eaton Fire, and it's so scary to think about the what ifs. I painted the Lofi Cali Girl drawing during the 2020 wildfires that affected the SF Bay Area and turned the sky red. Since then, I repost this every time another disastrous fire ravages my state. Small wildfires are a normal part of the CA landscape, but these mega fires are not. These are caused by climate change. For the 2020 fire, it was a dry lightning storm that ignited over 2000 wildfires in the middle of our dry summer. For those not familiar with California's climate, we almost never get lightning storms, especially not in the summer. For the 2025 LA fire, it was caused by a dry winter when we would normally get winter rains, and by 100mph wind that spread the fires faster than anyone can put out. This is not normal, and no amount of controlled burns or regular fire prevention could have prevented this. This is just the beginning of the climate change disasters. Some people say this is the new normal, but the reality is things will only get progressively worse. Whatever "new normal" you think this is, just know it will be even worse next year, and every year after. What can you actually do to help the most? For Americans, it would be vote for climate friendly policies and politicians. The 2024 election just ended with a grim outlook for our climate future, but don't give up. There are local elections, and the 2026 midterm elections for House and Senate. All of these can make a real lasting impact on the future of our planet, our one and only home.

[midpenmedia]

New episode! Diving deep into climate change.

Our latest episode of Make it Real, tackles the pressing issue of climate change! We explore research findings, innovative solutions, and interesting stories

Tune in to learn more and discover how YOU can make a difference!

[fhear]

Pres. Biden announces $600M climate initiative during Bay Area visit

[reasonsforhope]

"Many people know about the Yellowstone wolf miracle. After wolves were reintroduced to the national park in the mid-1990s, streamside bushes that had been grazed to stubble by out-of-control elk populations started bouncing back. Streambank erosion decreased. Creatures such as songbirds that favor greenery along creeks returned. Nearby aspens flourished.

While there is debate about how much of this stemmed from the wolves shrinking the elk population and how much was a subtle shift in elk behavior, the overall change was dramatic. People were captivated by the idea that a single charismatic predator’s return could ripple through an entire ecosystem. The result was trumpeted in publications such as National Geographic.

But have you heard about the sea otters and the salt marshes? Probably not.

It turns out these sleek coastal mammals, hunted nearly to extinction for their plush pelts, can play a wolf-like role in rapidly disappearing salt marshes, according to new research. The findings highlight the transformative power of a top predator, and the potential ecosystem benefits from their return.

“It begs the question: In how many other ecosystems worldwide could the reintroduction of a former top predator yield similar benefits?” said Brian Silliman, a Duke University ecologist involved in the research.

The work focused on Elk Slough, a tidal estuary at the edge of California’s Monterey Bay. The salt marsh lining the slough’s banks has been shrinking for decades. Between 1956 and 2003, the area lost 50% of its salt marshes.

Such tidal marshes are critical to keeping shorelines from eroding into the sea, and they are in decline around the world. The damage is often blamed on a combination of human’s altering coastal water flows, rising seas and nutrient pollution that weakens the roots of marsh plants.

But in Elk Slough, a return of sea otters hinted that their earlier disappearance might have been a factor as well. As many as 300,000 sea otters once swam in the coastal waters of western North America, from Baja California north to the Aleutian Islands. But a fur trade begun by Europeans in the 1700s nearly wiped out the animals, reducing their numbers to just a few thousand by the early 1900s. Southern sea otters, which lived on the California coast, were thought to be extinct until a handful were found in the early 1900s.

In the late 1900s, conservation organizations and government agencies embarked on an effort to revive the southern sea otters, which remain protected under the Endangered Species Act. In Monterey Bay, the Monterey Bay Aquarium selected Elk Slough as a prime place to release orphaned young sea otters taken in by the aquarium.

As the otter numbers grew, the dynamics within the salt marsh changed. Between 2008 and 2018, erosion of tidal creeks in the estuary fell by around 70% as otter numbers recovered from just 11 animals to nearly 120 following a population crash tied to an intense El Niño climate cycle.

While suggestive, those results are hardly bulletproof evidence of a link between otters and erosion. Nor does it explain how that might work.

To get a more detailed picture, the researchers visited 5 small tidal creeks feeding into the main slough. At each one, they enclosed some of the marsh with fencing to keep out otters, while other spots were left open. Over three years, they monitored the diverging fates of the different patches.

The results showed that otter presence made a dramatic difference in the condition of the marsh. They also helped illuminate why this was happening. It comes down to the otters’ appetite for small burrowing crabs that live in the marsh.

Adult otters need to eat around 25% of their body weight every day to endure the cold Pacific Ocean waters, the equivalent of 20 to 25 pounds. And crabs are one of their favorite meals. After three years, crab densities were 68% higher in fenced areas beyond the reach of otters. The number of crab burrows was also higher. At the same time, marsh grasses inside the fences fared worse, with 48% less mass of leaves and stems and 15% less root mass, a critical feature for capturing sediment that could otherwise wash away, the scientists reported in late January in Nature.

The results point to the crabs as a culprit in the decline of the marshes, as they excavate their holes and feed on the plant roots. It also shows the returning otters’ potential as a marsh savior, even in the face of rising sea levels and continued pollution. In tidal creeks with high numbers of otters, creek erosion was just 5 centimeters per year, 69% lower than in creeks with fewer otters and a far cry from earlier erosion of as much as 30 centimeters per year.  

“The return of the sea otters didn’t reverse the losses, but it did slow them to a point that these systems could restabilize despite all the other pressures they are subject to,” said Brent Hughes, a biology professor at Sonoma State University and former postdoctoral researcher in Silliman’s Duke lab.

The findings raise the question of whether other coastal ecosystems might benefit from a return of top predators. The scientists note that a number of these places were once filled with such toothy creatures as bears, crocodiles, sharks, wolves, lions and dolphins. Sea otters are still largely absent along much of the West Coast.

As people wrestle to hold back the seas and revive their ailing coasts, a predator revival could offer relatively cheap and effective assistance. “It would cost millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these creek banks and restore these marshes,” Silliman said of Elk Slough. “The sea otters are stabilizing them for free in exchange for an all-you-can-eat crab feast.”"

-via Anthropocene Magazine, February 7, 2024

[montereybayaquarium]

The beauty of the monastery kelp forest

We get by with the help of our fronds! Sea-riously! A new study by Monterey Bay Aquarium scientists found that denser kelp forests can better handle serious stressors like sweltering seawaters!

The study looked at kelp forests before, during, and after an extreme marine heatwave that hit west coast waters from 2014-2016. It found that denser and more sheltered forests, and the animals living in these forests, fared better against the extreme heat. These persistent forests were also able to keep hungry sea urchins from roaming around the reef and gobbling up the remaining kelp.

Another Aquarium study showed a certain species supports strong kelp forests by snacking on  sea urchins — you guessed it — sea otters!

You can dive deeper into this research here!

Healthy kelp forests not only provide homes for a wide range of marine life — they also absorb carbon dioxide — naturally pushing back against climate change (hurray photosynthesis!). 

Globally, kelp has been declining for a half-century and warming ocean temperatures present a serious threat to cold-water species like kelp. 

Studies like these help us understand what makes kelp forests strong, and how we can implement restoration efforts in areas with less kelp coverage.

[aurifulgore]

Ok, y’all. I just want it to be understood how important the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is.

Tampering with NOAA would have more impacts than just the main one I've heard - privatization of weather tracking. Of course it would be catastrophic. That means their weather forecasts, guidance, and warnings would not be available for free. Weather is going to go subscription based if this happens, I bet. This undoubtedly would cause the most immediate impact on our daily lives.

Before long, however, more will come.

NOAA also administers the Coastal Zone Management Act. Under this act are the National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERRs), National Coastal Management Program (CZM), and the Coastal and Estuarine Land Conservation Program (CELCP). 

There are 30 reserves established totalling 1.3 million acres. More are on the way.

No, this isn’t just our oceans! This impacts our freshwater coasts of the Great Lakes.

Grants and funding for institutions, including the University of Michigan. They manage the Science Collaborative, which funds research and exchanges to address coastal management needs of all 30 reserves or projects in collaboration with them.

Blending new technologies with indigenous knowledge with regards to management of wetlands and estuaries, strengthen food and economic stability, water quality, coral reefs, and resilience against climate change (ie. Ola i ka Loʻi Wai, Hawai’i) 

Restore ownership of indigenous ancestral lands (ie. Conservation of Cape Foulweather Headland, Oregon)

Identify for underwater archaeological sites for research and surveys, create a draft tribal climate action plan (ie. Penobscot Nation’s involvement in the Northeast Regional Ocean Council, Maine)

Work with each participating state (regarding the CZM, as it’s voluntary to participate) to address challenges along their coastlines. Maybe reach out to your representatives to see why they’re not involved - looking at you, Alaska!

Population enhancement of coral reefs, manage the Coral Reef Information System, minimize negative impacts of fishing on reefs, mitigate impacts of land-based pollution on coral reefs (Coral Reef Conservation Program)

And much, much more.  I’ll note that the aspects of the projects I highlighted above aren’t all they do. These are just a few I want to highlight here. Links can lead you further and I encourage you to take a few minutes to explore.

Another important note: both our oceans and freshwater lakes impact our biggest trade partners!! If dismantled, it would be yet another way that our foolish president will negatively impact our economy and relationships with our most crucial neighbors of Canada and Mexico. NOAA’s efforts also help support one third of the US's commerce. One third. 

Here is a map which breaks down the 1.3 BILLION in awards from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. This includes goals towards economic development, flood, etc…

Oh and they also help with oil spills. No one likes those.

And space weather, geomagnetic storms/solar flares ie. impacts to GPS, power grids.

I really stress people to look at what the agency does overall, as well as what they do in your state. It’s more than just weather. You can find that information here. 

Just please understand what we will lose if NOAA is gutted, or even just incapacitated for a long time. We already have little time to lose to slow the impacts of climate change and these are just some of the ways they're leading the charge with that.

It’s vital for us to understand what we will fundamentally lose, and it doesn't end at weather/hurricane predictions.

On a personal note, my dad has put what I can only estimate as hundreds of hours of work into one that was begun before the pandemic. If you can, I’d appreciate it if you’re in that area that you participate when you can, or if anything, donate to the UW Green Bay’s NERR General Fund. He’s also involved with portions of the Lake Superior NERR, so your time, if possible, or a donation if you can, would mean a lot to us.

[joy-haver]

Life is getting harder, and so, we must get better at it.

Climate change and species extinction and ecosystem collapse are happening quickly. They are spiraling out of control. Even many Ecosystems that are supposed to be the most stable in their regions are facing decline. There are runaway effects, each thing that gets worse makes the next thing get worse faster, more disastrously. Each of these systems becomes less resilient the more of its redundancies are stripped away.

And yet, we can also have cascading effects. I am seeing controlled burns turn the plantation pines into savannas again, for the first time in 200 years, they are burning now, right now, where they would never have imagined to burn a year ago. I am seeing people talk about planting native plants. The nurseries here are selling out of them faster than they can restock. If you ask, they will say “This did not happen last year”. The foundations that have been being built by ecologists over the past half century, and maintained against brutal colonialism by indigenous peoples, are seeping out into the community. I see people talking about river cane, and pitcher plant, and planting paw paw and persimmon and sassafras and spice bush. These things are returning. Even now, in the worst drought in known history of my area, I see more butterflies than last year, because we have put in more of their host plants, their overwinters. We are learning. We are beginning. We are being born into a world of ecology; we are breaking the green wall of blur that defines our settler nonrelationship with nature. The irises are returning to Louisiana, the black bear too. The oysters are returning to Mobile Bay. I hear talk of gopher apples and river oats from the mouths of children. I see the return of the chinquapin, and her larger sister chestnut. It is slow but it is also so fast. It is growing at new trajectories, new rises. Each of these becomes it’s own advocate when planted in space and put in relationship.

We are not doomed. We must claw back from the brink. We must find each other and we must exchange seeds. We must learn to pull invasive species. We must win others over through earnestness and full bellies, through kindling the spark of ecological joy, and then we must show them the way. We must be learning the way ourselves in the meantime. We must teach the children the names we were not told, that were forgotten; how to recognize these friends.

When things are spiraling towards despair and death we must be that spiral towards life and utter utopia. We must build ourselves into full participants in our ecological systems.

As life gets harder, we must get better at it.

[thechembow]

Epic Rain for California the Week

Dec. 26, 2024

High orgone has fueled extreme rain in California this week, with a brief break on Christmas day. Rain and snow are returning in full force starting today and continuing through the weekend.

California has already had a blockbuster rainy season, with record breaking rains in late November, when many areas of Northern California received more than a foot of rain and the Sierras received several feet of snow. This was a sign of things to come this winter, which has just begun.

Rain & snow outlook for Thursday- Sunday from ABC News

A series of three storms have been drenching the Bay Area, with 2-5 inches of rain expected by Friday. There is even more to come over the weekend. The coast of Northern California, including Eureka, could receive 4-8 inches of rain in the next four days.

In Southern California, we had rain on Christmas Eve day and night. The storm has affected the northern half of the state much more. The recent gifting of Boise, ID, has had a big impact on the weather in the northern part of the US west. Northern California weather is now comparable with Oregon weather, as we continue to break down the rain suppression arrays and the weather normalizes throughout the west. Today's jet stream is fast moving, and steady from west to east.

Although downplayed in the weather forecasts, we may see a little rain in SoCal mountains over the weekend. We will need to fortify the southern orgonite grids even more, with another round of gifting needed in Las Vegas, about a third of which was gifted in 2017. The south is far higher in DOR than the north. The increased rain in the Bay Area, also a very high DOR environment, is encouraging for increasing rain in the south.

A possibility of rain in Central CA as the north continues to get soaked this Friday through Saturday

[transit-fag]

Here are my urban design predictions:

Detroit and Cleveland will make a comeback and start growing again, Gary will not

The outer suburbs of Miami and Houston will be some of the first cities in the US to start to decline due to the effects of climate change

Philadelphia will become more influential over the next 30 years.

Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Columbus, or Rochester will start building a proper light rail within 20 years

Chicago will get more expensive if they don't do housing reform

Seattle, Austin, and Minneapolis will continue to be national leaders on hosuing policy

The core of the Bay Area will start to shift to Oakland and Berkeley

Louisville will start losing population

Buffalo will expand the light rail

Portland will build the MAX tunnel

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Hello, this blog has been so helpful with writing tips.

Do you have any tips or information if you want to have a character that is Basque? Also if there's any information about the culture during the late 18th and early 19th century. Thanks!

Writing Notes: The Basques

Basque - member of a people who live in both Spain and France in areas bordering the Bay of Biscay and encompassing the western foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains.

In physique, the Basques are not notably different from the other peoples of western Europe; their language, however, is not Indo-European.

Basque language - language isolate, the only remnant of the languages spoken in southwestern Europe before the region was Romanized in the 2nd through 1st century BCE.

Today, the Basques remain physically somewhat distinct from their neighbours.

They are typically broad-shouldered and heavily built,

with distinctive triangular faces, and

they have light brown or medium brown hair and

often blue or grey eyes.

As is well known, they have the highest proportion of rhesus-negative blood in Europe (25 per cent) and

one of the highest percentages of type-O blood (55 per cent).

Many have interpreted these data, together with recent genetic data, as evidence that the Basques genuinely do represent a continuation of an ancient European population, comparatively little affected by millennia of the movement of peoples from east to west across Europe, just as their language indisputably represents the last survival of the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe.

As research has suggested, the Basques are a practical people par excellence.

They excel at business and commerce and they have produced notable industrialists and bankers.

The estuary of Bilbao is lined with blast furnaces and shipyards, and every city and town in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa is crammed with industrial concerns, large and small, though the recent economic recession has hit the country hard.

Increasingly there are signs that economic activity is moving from the crowded coastal provinces to the more spacious and comparatively undeveloped expanses of Araba and Navarre.

The French Basque Country has not shared in this industrial development: designated by the centralist government in Paris as an area set aside for tourism, it offers little employment apart from that available in the garish strip clubs and casinos of Biarritz and the rest of the coast.

Two miles from Biarritz, the quiet Basque farmhouses look much as they looked a hundred years ago, though more and more of them are being abandoned as uneconomic, and the region is suffering depopulation as younger Basques leave to look for work elsewhere.

The land inhabited by the Basques has a mild and damp climate and is largely hilly and wooded.

It contains mines of iron ore, which early on favoured the development of industries, particularly shipbuilding.

The Basques traditionally farmed small holdings of bottom land and carefully tended slopes of grass, which they cut by hand and fed to stabled cows.

Apple orchards and mountainous sheep pastures were also important to their economy. The farmhouses are loosely grouped into villages or are scattered over the lower slopes.

The household (including buildings, farm, and family) was an entity of great permanence that was formerly defended by a traditional law of inheritance which ensured the descent of the property intact to a single heir or heiress.

Traditional Basque culture therefore revolved around this individual farmstead, called the caserío, the isolation of which resulted in a strong sense of family kinship among its occupants.

Besides being farmers of small acreages and shipbuilders, the Basques were traditionally seafarers.

Basques played a leading part in the colonization of the New World, sailing with the conquistadors and being among the first to exploit the whaling grounds of the Bay of Biscay and the cod fisheries off Newfoundland.

The Basques’ ethnic solidarity and their position astride the Franco-Spanish frontier also made smuggling one of their traditional occupations.

The Basques have a strong allegiance to Roman Catholicism.

They were not converted to Christianity until the 10th century, however, and, although they are now among the most observant of Spanish Catholics, animism survives in their folklore.

Traditional Basque culture has declined with the pronounced urban and industrial development of the region, and emigration to France and the Americas has sharply reduced the population living in caseríos.

In most of the larger industrial towns, not only Basque customs but also the Basque language tend to be lost.

Basque is still spoken in remote inland mountain areas, but in the late 20th century, virtually all Basques spoke French or Spanish, whether or not they spoke Basque.

The Basques possess a distinctive culture and language, perhaps the result of their relative isolation from the rest of Europe until comparatively recently.

A BRIEF HISTORY. It has been suggested that their ancestors migrated to Europe from the Caucasus about 12,000 years ago and about 5000 years ago moved to the Basque country.

Although the Basque country is divided between France and Spain, the Basques have maintained an identity separate from both states.

From the 14th century onwards the Basques were renowned for their fishing and whaling skills.

18th-19th Century. After a period of relative independence, Basque self-government was abolished by the Spanish government in Madrid beginning in 1839. Over time, a growing Basque nationalist movement began to insist on political unity and agitate for a separate Basque nation.

Basque culture underwent a revival in the late 19th century, which ensured its continuance into the 20th century.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Basques supported the Republic; in reprisal, German aircraft acting on behalf of Franco’s Nationalists destroyed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937.

Under Franco’s regime, concerted attempts were made to suppress the Basque culture and language.

In recent decades many Basques in Spain have campaigned for an independent Basque state, some through the nationalist party Herri Batasuna or its violent military wing ETA (Basque Fatherland and Liberty).

In 2011, after several abortive ceasefires, ETA declared ‘a definitive cessation of armed activity’.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Thanks so much for your kind words, glad to hear! Choose which of these information would be most appropriate to incorporate into your specific story. Do go through the sources as well for more details. Hope this helps with your writing.

[tomatoluvr69]

But hey it’s cheaper than boulder or wherever the fuck by a long shot. For now. Until appalachia becomes bloated and swollen with the escapees from other parts of the nation who have the means to do so when their homes in Southern CA and FLA and Nola etc all try to kill them and they push all the people who have been living in appalachia for generations out of their homes during a huge climate based demographic shift. But thus is life I guess. Anyways I do think Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, WV, western VA, Kentucky, eastern TN like Johnson City etc are going to shift away from being stigmatized and avoided within the broader nation to being an extremely sought after place to be over the remainder of the century because of climate change. LOL! I will no longer be living in appalachia at that point probably

re: LRB (and lots of cultural punchlines in general lol) It is kind of funny how ppl still think Pittsburgh PA is kind of an industrial shithole and it’s like sure. There’s some rusted stuff around. But it’s subject to the same exact homogeneous flattening of American culture found in every city. Like the vast majority of people just go to chipotle and watch the office reruns. And the air quality is kind of bad and there’s a ton of lead poisoning in children due to the infrastructure. And also a good third of the many hundreds of bridges have been found to be in dangerous disrepair putting thousands of lives in jeopardy every day and a big one did collapse a few years ago with cars and a bus on it. And there used to be a bridge by my house that had to have a second bridge under it to collect the giant chunks of concrete falling from the first bridge so they didn’t crush cars on the commuter highway below. And they have a report based on the toxicity of the rivers and how fucked you are if you go in them. But genuinely like they had to power wash all the sandstone buildings in the 90s to get the soot off them because they’d been turned black. But the soot hasnt returned! Because the steel mills closed decades ago! And now it’s just a city like everywhere except you’re going to get way more asthma than if you lived in colorado. But who cares. and the distinct local culture has vanished as it has everywhere in the nation and every city is inhospitable and isolating to its inhabitants due to the extremely skewed ratio of how extremely expensive it is to live there vs the hostile infrastructure and rewards you reap by doing so. Like you’re basically just gonna suffer in every city at this point but in Pittsburgh you’re like 0.00000001% more likely to be injured or killed in a bridge collapse by doing so.

[nostalgebraist]

Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a legion of young radicals who know they have lost their influence but have no clear idea how to get it back again. “The alliance between hippies and political radicals is bound to break up,” he said in a recent letter. “There’s just too big a jump from the slogan of ‘Flower Power’ to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it.” Decanio spent three months in various Bay Area jails as a result of his civil rights activities and now he is lying low for a while, waiting for an opening. “I’m spending an amazing amount of time studying,” he wrote. “It’s mainly because I’m scared; three months on the bottom of humanity’s trash heap got to me worse than it’s healthy to admit. The country is going to hell, the left is going to pot, but not me. I still want to figure out a way to win.”

Re-reading Hunter S. Thompson's 1967 article about Haight-Ashbury, I thought: "huh, this guy sounds like he's going places. I wonder whether he ever did 'figure out a way to win'?"

So I web searched his name, and ... huh!

My current research interests include Artificial Intelligence, philosophy of the social sciences, and the economics of climate change. Several years ago I examined the consequences of computational limits for economics and social theory in Limits of Economic and Social Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).  Over the course of my academic career I have worked in the fields of global environmental protection, the theory of the firm, and economic history.  I have written about both the contributions and misuse of economics for long-run policy issues such as climate change and stratospheric ozone layer protection.  An earlier book, Economic Models of Climate Change: A Critique (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), discussed the problems with conventional general equilibrium models applied to climate policy. From 1986 to 1987 I served as Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. I have been a member of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Economic Options Panel, which reviewed the economic aspects of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, and I served as Co-Chair of the Montreal Protocol’s Agricultural Economics Task Force of the Technical and Economics Assessment Panel. I participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and was a recipient of the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. In 1996 I was honored with a Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award, and in 2007 a “Best of the Best” Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. I served as Director of the UCSB Washington Program from 2004 to 2009.

I don't know whether this successful academic career would count as "winning" by his own 1967 standards. But it was a pleasant surprise to find anything noteworthy about the guy at all, given that he was quoted as a non-public figure in a >50-year-old article.

[xhxhxhx]

I'm trying to write these earlier in the day.

I used to put off writing until I finished the smaller, more tractable tasks I set for myself. But by the time I finished the little things, I had no energy for writing.

Now, though, I find I don't have the energy for the little things if I start writing too late in the day. If I start writing late enough, I don't have the energy to exercise.

It's 10:15 a.m. Let's see if I can't finish this with energy to spare.

I.

I write to you from San Francisco, a small town on the Pacific Coast of California, servicing a patchwork of commuter suburbs around what we call the "San Francisco Bay Area."

Back in the 1950s, they called the City "Baghdad by the Bay," after its profound ethnic and religious divides, low-intensity urban warfare, and decrepit public infrastructure.

It's awful. Even here in the Green Zone.

II.

Americans like to say that San Francisco has a "Mediterranean" climate. And it's true that it has a Köppen climate classification of Csb, which we call a "warm-summer Mediterranean climate."

Köppen is a three-tier classification scheme. It designates climates by three-letter labels, with each letter dividing the world into finer and finer categories.

The first Köppen letter divides the world into five parts, each designated by the first five letters of the alphabet: tropical A; arid B; temperate C; cold D; and polar E.

Four of the five letters separate the world into mutually-exclusive categories by mean temperatures in the hottest and coldest months, making for a neat algorithm.

If it's above 10ºC in the coldest month, it's tropical A, else:

If it's above 0ºC in the coldest month, it's temperate C, else:

If it's above 10ºC in the hottest month, it's cold D, else:

If it's below 10ºC in the hottest month, it's polar E.

Arid B is an irregularity. It's based on a precipitation threshold, not mean monthly temperatures. It's also hard to characterize in a single phrase, since it varies with the seasonality of the precipitation. It's higher if the precipitation comes in warm months.

But never mind that. It's not arid in San Francisco. That's part of the problem.

In San Francisco's Csb, C stands for temperate, s for dry summer, and b for warm summer.

Temperate means it averages above 10ºC in the hottest month and between 0ºC and 18ºC in its coldest; dry summer means it gets less than 40 mm of precipitation in its driest month; and warm summer means it averages below 22ºC in the hottest month, but above 10ºC for more than four months each year.

Now, is that Mediterranean? It's not obvious to me that it is. Let's go to the map.

III.

Here's beautiful California, in all its climatic variation, courtesy of our friends at the Köppen-Geiger Explorer:

Let's start in the Los Angeles basin, along the borderlands between the yellow and sienna towards the bottom of the map.

Los Angeles divides into three primary climate regions, which provide a useful key to the California experience.

The coast of western Los Angeles, from Santa Monica down to Palos Verdes, and continuing along the coast of Orange County to the south, is a cold, semi-arid steppe, or Bsk.

It's a climate it shares with Colorado Springs, the Texas panhandle, and a swathe of the Eurasian steppe lands, from Crimea to Volgograd to Inner Mongolia.

South and central Los Angeles, south of the 10, but extending northeast to a frontier in Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown, and south through Anaheim and Garden Grove to Irvine, is a hot, semi-arid steppe, or Bsh.

It's a climate it shares with Gaza, the West Bank of the Jordan, Mosul, the Zagros foothills of Khuzestan, Amritsar, and the northern, or Turkish, part of Cyprus.

North of that, extending from downtown across the mountains into the San Fernando Valley, and east across the river to El Monte, Pomona, and Rancho Cucamonga, is the last part of Los Angeles, the hot-summer Mediterranean, or Csa.

This climate, the climate of Glendale and Pasadena, of Burbank and Sherman Oaks, of Van Nuys, Encino, and Calabasas, is what I think of as the actual Mediterranean climate.

Because it's the climate of the actual Mediterranean.

It's a climate it shares with Athens and Rome, Syracuse and Tunis, Jerusalem and Jaffa, Florence and Naples, but not, significantly, a climate it shares with San Francisco.

Because it's too warm for the city by the Bay.

IV.

Now let's look north, to the Golden Gate.

Here you can see that the Bay Area is, as you might have guessed, a homogeneous and indistinct stain on the map of California.

Does it have semiarid steppe lands? No. Does it have hot summers? No. From the South Bay to the Valley, from the West Side to the East Side, everyone has the same climate, and nobody's very happy.

San Francisco shares a climate with Oakland which shares a climate with Mountain View which shares a climate with Sausalito which shares a climate with San Jose which shares a climate with Berkeley and Richmond. It's a climate that stretches, like an open sore, down to Santa Cruz and Monterey.

It's all the same fucking climate.

It's called, as you may recall, the warm-summer Mediterranean climate, or Csb. Not hot summer. Not the summer of Glendale or Pasadena. No. A warm summer.

How warm is a warm summer? Is that a Mediterranean kind of summer? Is that the kind of summer you get in the south of France or the Greek islands? Well, no.

You know who else has a warm summer?

Fucking Galicia, that's who. The Parnassus Mountains. Mount fucking Lebanon.

You know who else has this fucking climate?

The Pacific fucking Northwest. Because it's cold and wet there. Just like San Francisco.

VI.

San Francisco: It's cold and damp!

I fucking hate it.