You had to know this was coming eventually, right?
What Burning Man’s rain debacle tells us about climate change
Burning Man is supposed to arrive and disappear like the desert breeze.
Near the end of every summer, attendees of the multiday mega-festival venture to the Nevada wilderness. Their motto: “Leave no trace.”
Except for the massive use of fossil fuels to get there, from airplanes to SUVs to campers. Then all the food and drink, all the drugs, all the fast fashion, and all the electricity from fossil fueled generators, including for the concerts.
This year, thousands got stuck in the mud instead after about a half an inch of rain hit what is normally the driest state in the nation. Instead of leaving no trace, many self-described “burners” abandoned bicycles and vehicles on the drenched, muddy Black Rock Desert.
Once an underground carnival for free spirits, Burning Man today is famous as a party spot for Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley tech bros and other jet-set elites. The latest event offers a glimpse at how extreme weather can — and more frequently will — dramatically transform the environment in a moment’s notice.
Yeah, it’s basically an urban yuppie paradise, along with all the “influences” and celebs.
“It’s a teachable moment, as far as climate disasters and extreme weather” go, said Anya Kamenetz, a Burning Man attendee forced to flee the festival. “This is very much just a trial run under really, really easy conditions for what a lot of people go through.”
No single storm can be attributed to climate change. But flooding in Nevada is expected to become more frequent as storms intensify and snow shifts to rain due to higher temperatures, according to state officials.
Stupid culty people. The real sad part is that it has driven a real disaster, Maui, and, to some degree Florida post-hurricane (though, they seem to be moving forward well), from the news. And it is a ridiculously long article from the Washington Post. More than Maui gets. But, the WP knows that Democrats have the votes in Hawaii, so, blowing off Maui is not a concern. They have to take care of all the “activists” and “influencers” who attend BM, though.
whadda buncha whimops.
my generation (ya, i’m old) had woodstock
woodstock was attended by 3-4 times as many people, had fewer port-a-pottys,
no food vendors, and a lot more rain.
woodstock didn’t become a “national disaster” it became a legend.
some peoples kids….
More frequent flooding in teh Desert? Seems like a good thing. Replenishing Aquifers drained by agriculture, Replenishing the reservoirs along the Colorado River and making drought conditions less severe. Why on Earth would anyone think this is a bad thing? Even stranding 70 thousand hippie wanna-bes for a few days wasn’t a terrible high price to pay. So they got a little muddy. Next year they will be boasting about “being there”, just like the Woodstock generation did.
“About global boiling…”
I have four words I am going to offer to these climate know-nothings: Tonga-Hunga volcano eruption.
That eruption dumped over 161 million tons of water into the atmosphere, increasing the amount of water in the lower and upper atmosphere by 13%. Water vapor is a far more efficacious greenhouse gas that CO2 could ever hope to be. Also, all that extra water has to go somewhere…like falling back to the surface of the earth as…umm…rain…hail…snow…and sleet, just to name a few forms of precipitation. It doesn’t happen overnight. It will take a few years to wring out all that water from the atmosphere.
Monsoon season in the desert.
Over 50 years ago I helped clean up a little Nevada town hit with some flash flooding. We simply had to squeegee mud out of various buildings. Two weeks later they were hit again and half a dozen cars ended up in the river and some people drowned. Of course, since climate change hadn’t been invented, it was marked up to weather.