Saturday, August 18, 2018

as the deaths increase through Global Climate change

Note: I realized what I wrote is not entirely fair. What I should have said was the poorest of the poor who never had any education even 1st Grade often are the ones who don't have electricity and who can choose between gathering wood to stay alive and cook and stay warm or not be around anymore. This is what really happens in the Himalayas of India and Nepal.
end note.

India in some ways is a special case and I studied that while I was visiting India. So, part of the problem there is people don't have electricity much. So, the women come up into the Himalayas and they take the leaves off of trees one by one until they die for leaves to heat their homes with. Then after the trees die from all the leaves being removed the men then cut the trees down. When this happens far enough into the mountains up to tree line, this causes erosion during the monsoon season which brings down mud and water and rocks out of the Himalayas in greater and greater profusion over the years. Then you add to this the evaporation rate increasing off the oceans which brings increasing amounts of rain in monsoons which then increase erosion much the same as the fires in Montecito caused mud slides because they were within a month of the incredibly bad fire there in Santa Barbara. So, whether you take the leaves away and cut the trees down for fire to cook and heat your home in India or whether you can't stop a fire that burns up a hillside and the water and mud comes down in the first storm, you get the basic idea why people are dying all over India more now in the monsoons than ever before.

note: They also said that the monsoon rains are bringing Twice as much rain as a normal year this year by the way. end note

25 died from the mudslides in Montecito, Santa Barbara California last January by the way because of the quick succession of fires and then heavy rains. I went there recently and it was much worse still than most people would imagine. The problem is that all electricity is gone, all gas lines are cut, all plumbing and septic lines are gone from the 17 foot boulders that came down the mountain and took cars and houses into the ocean there. You would have to see it to believe it. And since it is now a flood plain (de facto) even though it wasn't before, the city, county and state won't let people rebuild there because it is going to flood again year after year now. And we are talking about 1 to 10 million dollar homes in this area that are now gone forever. So, there are a lot of really unhappy people about this.

My wife who grew up in Santa Barbara told me "look at the high hills there. Do you see the streaks coming down from the top of the mountains all along there?"  I said, "Yes." She said, "Well. Those bare places aren't going to have any vegetation on them and are going to bring more rocks and mud down next year because there are no root systems because they have already come down last year. So, the flood plain is likely permanent."

She was right. We realized after driving near Birnum Wood and  (to the west of there) on 192 and there it was (and there are several places like this only this was the worst I saw) where all the homes had been destroyed all the way to the ocean from boulders up to 17 feet across (if you can imagine that) that came across 192 from the coastal range of mountains there.

The vibration from huge boulders had the effect of  small earthquakes which also kept the huge things moving in some cases all the way to the ocean. But, I also saw boulders there almost as big as whole houses too that had stopped just because they were so gigantic to begin with and couldn't make it to the ocean even with grinding and bumping along the ground carried by extreme mud and water and rocks. So, locals expect more of the same this year or next whether or not there is another fire there or not between now and then. And these fires that caused this are also a direct result of global warming which is causing the desertification of California in many places. Or in this case creating new floodplains in mountains and hillsides caused by fires and rains coming quickly after turning into Mudslides which can create new floodplains as in this case.

So, what I'm saying here is that as fires and rains increase many places there will be flood plains and mudslide floodplains in places where there were none before and people won't be allowed to rebuild there either.

No comments: