Windstorm!
I have to admit a part of me didn’t like all the talk of preparing for the so-called ’storm season’. Yes windstorms are a possibility, a distinct one to be sure, but the media’s been treating it like a foregone conclusion.
We had some pretty devastating storms over the last couple years but even global warming contains fluctuations. It’s not a straight line, which is why some right-wing idiots have been able to bury their heads in the rapidly-expanding desert sand and say foolish things like “all the science isn’t in” like it were election results. As if scientific inquiry into nature has an end point. Nature’s too unpredictable which, ironically, is why I refused to take windstorms as a given.
Whoops.
On my way to work yesterday I saw 2 incredible things. And remember this is coming from a guy who has now accepted removing pools from intersections as normal.
A sheet of siding ripped off the side of an apartment building and proceeded down the street. Oddly enough despite refusing to stay on the building it had been affixed to for years it obeyed all traffic rules. Stayed in it’s lane, stopped for red lights, etc.
And this was by far the more normal of the two incidents.
Waiting for a connection I saw an apartment on the corner of a building. It had one window facing east and one facing south. The occupant opened the south-facing window a crack (no more than an inch, no less than a centimeter) just as a gust of wind came by. It blew out the east-facing window which traveled laterally east about 8 feet dropping by half a meter and then hovered in mid-air for a couple seconds.
It then came crashing down hitting 2 cars. The only cars within a block. The window shattered on impact. The cars didn’t even slow down. I was about the only pedestrian who reacted in a physically observable way. Everyone else saw nothing odd about it.
So, windstorms are a given, global warming is linear without fluctuation, and the Matrix has us. Got it.
