Mostly Quiet, Besides In The Great Lakes – National Weather Outlook For October 19, 2022

National Weather Forecast

The main story on Wednesday across the nation will be an area of low pressure near the eastern Great Lakes, producing an area of rain and snow showers in the Great Lakes and Northeast. An area of low pressure in New England will also continue to produce heavy rain across parts of Maine. Most of the rest of the nation will be fairly quiet.

The heaviest rain through Thursday evening will be in parts of Maine, where an additional 3”+ could cause flooding concerns.

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California’s 2020 Wildfires Negated Years of Emission Cuts

More from Scientific American: “Carbon pollution from California’s 2020 wildfires erased 16 years of the state’s greenhouse gas emission cuts, according to a new UCLA study. The fires were the state’s most destructive on record, burning 4.2 million acres, killing dozens of people and destroying thousands of homes. The study—published in Environmental Pollution—adds another statistic: the fires released roughly 127 million megatons of greenhouse gas emissions, or about twice California’s total emission cuts from 2003 to 2019. “What happened in 2020 was basically like a new sector; a new sector of emissions just came out of nowhere,” said study co-author Amir Jina, a University of Chicago professor. The wildfire emissions were “almost as big as their main emission sector, which is transport.””

Flooding Significantly Impacts Food Security, New Study Finds

More from New York University: “New research finds that flooding can affect food security for over 5.6 million people across several African nations. The work comes at a time when floods have also devastated Pakistan, India, and large parts of the European Union and the United States. “Our findings show that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event,” says Connor Reed, a former New York University Center for Data Science graduate student and lead author on the study, “The impact of flooding on food security across Africa,” which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In many flood events we assessed, there were substantial damages to infrastructure, croplands, and livestock, which compromised food production and access, as well as water resources and sanitation also critical to food security.””

Can Focusing On Climate Change Help Win Elections?

More from FiveThirtyEight: ““Our generation grew up watching as the climate crisis got worse and worse and politicians did nothing.” That might sound like a quote from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, but it’s actually the opening line for a new series of political ads appearing in multiple states in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms — ads that the advocacy groups Climate Power Action and the League of Conservation Voters are hoping will tip the scales towards climate-focused Democrats. Historically, however, climate change has not been much of a political kingmaker. Even when candidates trusted that their constituents did care deeply about the environment, it hasn’t been something that reliably changed votes. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, two-thirds of voters told exit pollster Edison Research that climate change was a “serious problem” — but 29 percent of that same group voted for then-President Donald Trump, a candidate whose position on climate change was … inconsistent … at best.”

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– D.J. Kayser