Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
“What the forecast path does not show is that significant impacts from a tropical storm or hurricane, including flooding rainfall, storm surge, strong winds and tornadoes, can occur well outside of where this so-called cone is plotted on a map,” The Weather Channel’s Chris Dolce explains.
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Climate research would get a massive boost if Congress agrees with the administration’s proposal to significantly bolster the agency’s funding. NOAA is one of America’s most important scientific agencies.
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“The need for a Green New Deal can rendezvous with the imperative of anti-depression public investment. Much of this sweeping proposal is on the drawing boards and has not been done for lack of funding. Some of it will take some advance planning. The time to start is now.”
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“What better platform is there going to be than the Olympic Games when the world has pulled through the virus… You’ve got a dynamic that will be even more powerful for Japan and the rest of the world. But you are going to have a tough road getting there.”
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Unlike several years ago, when President Barack Obama ordered the Department of Defense to mobilize to respond to the ebola outbreak, Donald Trump has failed to involve the military in the United States’ response to the rapidly worsening coronavirus pandemic.
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“Trump gambled very early and very often on the idea that the coronavirus wouldn’t turn out to be nearly as severe as some health officials have warned it could get,” Aaron Blake writes.
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The United States isn’t the only prominent democracy with a fossil fuel loving chief executive who refuses to act on climate. Australia’s current prime minister is an ignoramus who has no solutions to offer as the country chokes on horrific smoke from devastating brushfires.
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Watch a tsunami wave simulation for Washington State from a hypothetical magnitude 9.0 earthquake (L1) scenario on the Cascadia subduction zone.
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“It’s become our new reality… I don’t like to say ‘normal,’ because that sounds like a plateau, and we’re on a trajectory where we’ll get more and more fire.”
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We can’t build our way out of future floods with better levees, just as we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion with wider highways.
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“Mexico City and Seattle have a lot in common when it comes to earthquakes. One example, the soil the cities sit on can actually amplify the effects and length of the shaking. KING5’s Glenn Farley is here to talk about what that means for us here in the Pacific Northwest.”
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“September has, in one sense, been an unlucky month for Mexico. But there are few places on the planet besides Mexico where the bad luck of a severe earthquake and a hurricane might actually converge,” The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explains.
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This National Weather Service radar mosaic shows Hurricane Irma’s movement through Florida and into Georgia. Irma first made landfall in the Keys before moving up Florida’s west coast. The storm is now a Category 1 hurricane, but still very dangerous. (NOAA/NWS animation)
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Interstate 84, Oregon’s main east-west link, is closed indefinitely in stretches between Hood River and The Dalles due to the Eagle Creek Fire and unstable slopes produced by the fire. That’s hurting truckers like David Cassidy, whose livelihood is made possible by the availability of public infrastructure paid for by taxpayers.
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“The French company that says its Houston-area chemical plant is spewing ‘noxious’ smoke — and may explode — successfully pressed federal regulators to delay new regulations designed to improve safety procedures at chemical plants, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times.”
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A strong earthquake has caused serious damage in the central Oklahoma oil town of Cushing, which is home to the United States’ largest commercial oil
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“It’s one thing to hear about the crumbling condition of Seaside’s high school, middle school and Gearhart Elementary School. It’s another to take a tour and see them firsthand,” writes The Daily Astorian’s RJ Marx, beginning a report on the appalling, abysmal conditions of the Oregon coastal city’s schools.
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A series of storms are headed towards the Pacific Northwest — and one could be a devastating event that will be “long remembered”, the National Weather Service warns.
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The Seattle Times reports on Washington’s failure to seismically retrofit public schools and ensure schoolchildren in tsunami hazard zones have a way to get to higher ground.
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We can’t do any work right now… The phones work, but the computers don’t. And attorneys are pretty much helpless without their computers. — Barbara
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