and I'm Back

Hockey, running, workouts, biking, car searching and now finally a new post.  It has been awhile so let's get caught back up.

Great timing to start keeping track of summer rainfall totals.  Great idea to pick Philadelphia as one of the cities to represent.  Since my summer project began on June 1st, Philadelphia has set a new June monthly rainfall record, a July monthly rainfall record and destroyed their daily rainfall record by more than a inch all within a few hours.  By this time tomorrow the total rainfall for two months could be near 25 inches.  Wow.  August will not be breaking any records.  I think the record is somewhere around 19 inches.

In keeping with local weather how about these temperatures?  For all the complaints of a week of 90 degree days everybody should be very pleased with the temperatures we've been seeing and will continue to see.  Even August is looking nice compared to what we could be seeing.

Off to the stories of the strange and different that I have skipped over this past month.  I'll try to do a few here and there while catching up to current events.


1.)  The National Trust for Historic Preservation came out with their top five landmarks to be threatened by gradual sea rise.  You'd be correct if you guessed that all five are located near an ocean.  Now nobody can be certain how high the rise will be and if or when it will occur but take some solace in knowing you might see places others in future generations will miss out on.  Maybe solace wasn't the right word.  Here are their top five in no order.

• Embarcadero - San Francisco:  This area along the water in northeast SF could be swallowed by a rise of 55 inches by the end of this century.
• Battery District - New York:  On the southern tip of Manhattan, this area already saw what a monster storm like Sandy can do.  Flooding will become a more common occurrence in the area as time goes on.
• Miami Beach - Florida:  This one can't be surprising.  The city is on an island between the ocean and Biscayne Bay.  A few direct hits from hurricanes and the place could be gone.  Sea level rise would add more fuel to a potential fire.
• Gay Head Lighthouse - Massachusetts:  The 1856 lighthouse sits on Martha's Vineyard and after taking a parade of beatings from storms over the years, erosion is destroying the cliff it sits on threatening to topple the structure.
• Annapolis - Maryland:  A historic city and home to the Naval Academy, Annapolis has two things working against the city.  They sit right on the bay and are also slowly sinking.  This town should go on my lists of places to at least spend a day in.

2.)  Melting glaciers are never a good sign but in many instances they prove to uncover mysteries of events long from the past.  It happened again two weeks ago, this time in Alaska as a National Guard unit flying training missions last year noticed the wreckage of a plane.  Now the wreckage is being pushed to the surface.  The Air Force cargo plane crashed in 1952.  Officials knew where it was but snow quickly buried it causing it to disappear.  Now officials are working to uncover items and remains that have been preserved in the ice.  Since the crash, the glacier moved the wreckage 12 miles as it continued to shift.

3.)  It was only a matter of time, although I can't say this isn't already being done, but the CIA is funding $630,000 for a scientific study to see if humans can control the weather.  I won't get into all the jargon and specifics but two ideas seem to be on the radar.  One method is to pump particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet in an attempt at a cooling trend.  Another study will investigate removing carbon dioxide from the air.  There have been attempts before at altering weather, whether it is trying to create clouds to trying to change hurricane behavior.  Nothing has worked.  And with funding like this I'm not sure how serious they are on it anyway.  

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