Florida’s citrus faces mounting threat from real estate developers | Fast Company

March 17, 2025March 16, 2025 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

As Trevor Murphy pulls up to his dad’s 20-acre (8-hectare) grove in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, he points to the cookie-cutter, one-story homes encroaching on the orange trees from all sides.

“At some point, this isn’t going to be an orange grove anymore,” Murphy, a third-generation grower, says as he gazes at the rows of trees in Lake Wales, Florida. “You look around here, and it’s all houses, and that’s going to happen here.”

Polk County, which includes Lake Wales, contains more acres of citrus than any other county in Florida. And in 2023, more people moved to Polk County than any other county in the country.

Your Weather Tweets Are Showing Your Climate Amnesia | WIRED

February 26, 2019February 25, 2019 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

EVERY TIME SOMEONE in a position of power (for example) says that a cold snap in winter proves that climate change is not a thing, a dutiful chorus responds with a familiar refrain: Weather is not climate. Weather happens on the scale of days or weeks, over a distance relevant to cities or states. Climate happens over decades, centuries even, to an entire planet.

The problem is, guess what timescale and space-scale people live on?

The question of what can make human beings understand climate change is literally an existential one. It’s complicated by humans’ pathetically short lifespan and their attention-span, roughly akin to that of a cat in a laser-pointer QA lab. How can anyone expect people to grasp the planetary, millennium-encompassing implications of their half-remembered actions? There’s bad news on that front, and as is customary with bad news, it comes from Twitter.

Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved? Scientists Think They’ve Figured It Out | Huffington Post

August 2, 2018 ~ jtweetcustombpscom ~ Leave a comment

bermuda

Scientists believe they’ve solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triange―and it’s not UFOs or sea monsters.

It’s another kind of monster: monster waves.

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is a region in the North Atlantic that is generally bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Over time, a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared there under mysterious circumstances.

Don’t Blame All These Rains and Floods on El Niño | WIRED

January 5, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

HEY, 2016: PACE yourself, huh? It’s raining in Los Angeles, freezing in Florida, tornado-ing in Texas. And then there’s the floods: houses in Illinois and Missouri up to their roofs in muddy Missouri River water. El Niño is finally here.

Or is it? Or wasn’t it already? No and yes, and yes and no. Scientists have had a pretty good idea since September that El Niño was going to be a monster (they even nicknamed it “Godzilla”). They knew what that meant in general—wet Southwest, warm Northeast. But picking out El Niño’s effect on any particular event is tricky.

The Planet Is Going To Have Its Hottest Year on Record | Live Science

September 21, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

This year is in the pole position to take the title for hottest year on record and it shows no signs of slowing down.

August is the sixth month of the year to set a heat record, according to new data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) released on Thursday. Five of those months also happen to be among the 10 most freakishly warm months that NCEI has ever recorded.

According to calculations NCEI performed using temperatures through July, this year had a 97 percent chance of being the hottest year on record, taking over the dubious title from 2014. That percentage will have to be revised upward with August’s new record.