Brown ocean effect

What maps would look like if they showed only solid land. The light blue indicates swamps, marshes, and wetlands.

Hurricane Ida grew quickly powerful after just a couple of days before roaring ashore and inundating people who have seen it before and likely will again:

By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, La., on Sunday, it was the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster. The fast-growing, ferocious storm brought 150-mile-per-hour wind, torrential rain and seven feet of storm surge to the most vulnerable part of the U.S. coast. It rivals the most powerful storm ever to strike the state.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going to have to get used to as the planet warms,” said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the physics of hurricanes and their connection to the climate.

And the recent UN Climate report aside, scientists have been talking about this for years:

previous NASA-funded research by Theresa Andersen and J. Marshall Shepherd making the case that a “brown ocean effect” — evaporation from moist warm soils — can energize tropical systems.

A NASA news release on the 2013 research explained:

Before making landfall, tropical storms gather power from the warm waters of the ocean. Storms in the newly defined category derive their energy instead from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture – a phenomenon that Andersen and Shepherd call the “brown ocean.”

“The land essentially mimics the moisture-rich environment of the ocean, where the storm originated,” Andersen said.

The map above says it all, and when we look at the photos from Sunday-Monday, listen to what we tell ourselves about what we see.

Image via the New Yorker

The National Holiday

I posted something about this on the new other place, but a far more elegant rumination was made available by Mr. Pierce. The last graph:

We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.

Read the whole thing, because this cannot be hammered enough – and we can be too nice about it. Good thing Johnson decided not to be. But you can see it did not get in the way of his eloquence, which arrives in tact even today.

Democrats and most other decent people (see Venn diagram) are just too damn passive about all the racist crap hardening the arteries of our culture. Enough. It’s killing us and needs to be called out – there is no benefit of the doubt to give to people who poke around with euphemism about ‘other’ people. And there’s barely any euphemism, it’s not even offered with any delicacy any longer – check any group of headlines from the Republican primaries. The nature of this bypass surgery needs the courage of King and the brutal honesty and arm-twisting of Johnson. Celebrate by looking the haters in the eye and not looking away. They already know that you know, and are merely counting on you to let it go. How about taking a break from that?