Living Car Free - Natural disasters

I've read that climate change could cause an increase in severe weather patterns, ie, hurricanes, floods, droughts and so on. Where I live, we lately tend to see 500-year flood cycles every 10-12 years. In California, their dry weather has spawned many forest fires this year... many more than they have ever seen at this time of the year.

For my part, the on-going monsoons here have pretty much wrecked all the bike trails we use. Yesterday I was on my way home on one riverside trail to discover that the river had -- once again -- jumped its bank. :mad: I'm getting tired of it.


Below is a picture of an park that was submerged along with the adjacent bike trail and main road. The river is normally way over on the right behind the trees.

http://bikes.javazoid.com/images/washedoutroad.jpg

I'm wondering if you have had to deal with any of this... hurricanes? fires? droughts? floods?

Weather is cyclic.

Ouch,

After some of our spring weather the Arkansas River was over its banks, and a number of events planned for the Rivertrail had to be cancelled, postponed or rerouted. I can feel for you, though Iowa is getting hit far worse than Arkansas.

The planners often intentionally put the bike paths in the flood zones so that they get use of otherwise unbuildable land, and this is the price we pay for having a bike trail that we might not otherwise have.

I was in Mobile, AL in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, using a bicycle allowed me to move around freely through barricaded roads and to avoid the gas lines at the gas stations.:thumb:

Aaron:)

Well 2007 was the coldest year on record erasing any increase in tmeperature for the last 100 years. And I felt it. It was cold. Winter was longer, colder and more irratating than ever. I had to buy snow tires.

This summer has been much more windy than last summer.

I've read that climate change could cause an increase in severe weather patterns, ie, hurricanes, floods, droughts and so on. Where I live, we lately tend to see 500-year flood cycles every 10-12 years.

If this actually true.... Your statisticians are way behind.

Here, lots more rain this Spring than usual, I have been checking my feet for webbing lately...

Mostly, I'm with Wahoonc, bicycling is usually less affected by this stuff. You have to service bearings and stuff, but thats not hard.

Weather is cyclic.

Sure... and one of the cycles is the CO2 cycle, which we've f'd up royally.


Well 2007 was the coldest year on record

Cite please, before spewing dreck.

Well 2007 was the coldest year on record erasing any increase in tmeperature for the last 100 years. And I felt it. It was cold. Winter was longer, colder and more irratating than ever. I had to buy snow tires.

According to this article, last Winter was about average in the US. But globally... the warmest on record, according to NOAA.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2819.htm

Well 2007 was the coldest year on record erasing any increase in tmeperature for the last 100 years. And I felt it. It was cold. Winter was longer, colder and more irratating than ever. I had to buy snow tires.

2007 was far from the coldest year on record. In fact, it was one of the warmest:

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Temp/2008.htm

I have always found it odd that anytime the weather spikes above 85 degrees here, some wilderness area catches on fire. Having ash rain down on you and being able to feel the smoke in your lungs is not fun.

I've had to deal with the flooding scenario because the best bike trails in my community were also in a flood zone. The solution is to ride the streets until the water goes down. I have pedaled through about a foot of water before (got to watch the kids in the community riding boogieboards in it), but it's difficult.

I've ridden around New Orleans during a few tropical storms and/or hurricanes. We frequently have street flooding. Generally speaking, it's really not too bad if you're not out during the height of the storm. And in the aftermath, it makes for interesting riding. (Note: I was on vacation during Katrina, a disaster that was mostly manmade anyway.)

Living on the Gulf Coast, my hurricane evacuation plan includes leaving with my bike just in case the roads are blocked (like after Katrina). Could be the only way in or out in some areas.

We had a very dry, dry season in our part of the country this year due to El Niño. This is cyclic. It was less severe than about 9 years ago when it was so dry for so long that there was a serious die back of cattle - and this is in an area that is a low land tropical rain forest (before the trees were cut down of course)

The Pacific coast just got hit with a tropical storm, pretty bad one, about a month ago. Florida won't have even noticed it, but we normally don't get much in the way of wind here.

Living on the Gulf Coast, my hurricane evacuation plan includes leaving with my bike just in case the roads are blocked (like after Katrina). Could be the only way in or out in some areas.

I have to travel for work, most of the time I am driving my beast of a truck. I ALWAYS have a bicycle with me, sometimes more than one. If the excrement impacts the rotary oscillator I WILL GET HOME! Most of my jobs are in the southeast and in hurricane zones. I always keep at least one of the truck tanks full at all times, during hurricane season I keep them both full and have spares full too.

People always ask why I have a bicycle with me in the truck...it is my lifeboat or dingy...your choice:lol: When visiting the historic downtown areas of many old southern towns, parking a dually crew cab is a major PITA. I park the truck and take the bike.

Aaron:)

I was watching a segment on the flooding in the midwest just the other day. They flashed by a video clip of an evacuation--both sides of the road were going the same direction, out of town, and traffic was at a dead stop as everyone was being evacuated...

...except for the bicyclist zooming up between the two lines of cars, with an avenue of escape that would leave him miles away from the cars whenever they started moving again. It wasn't specifically called out in the actual reportage, but was great to see included in the story even if accidentally.

^^^^ My point exactly. When they say go, I am usually already gone. I will get as far as I can by truck. Then take off on the bike. FWIW I also keep my GPS handy so I can make end runs around the traffic if at all possible.

Aaron:)

I've read that climate change could cause an increase in severe weather patterns, ie, hurricanes, floods, droughts and so on. Where I live, we lately tend to see 500-year flood cycles every 10-12 years. In California, their dry weather has spawned many forest fires this year... many more than they have ever seen at this time of the year.

For my part, the on-going monsoons here have pretty much wrecked all the bike trails we use. Yesterday I was on my way home on one riverside trail to discover that the river had -- once again -- jumped its bank. :mad: I'm getting tired of it.

I rode to work through a supposed 1 in 1,000 year downpour a few years ago. I'm not sure how they measured that, given that weather measurements in this part of the world only date back 100 years or so. Basically we copped 20 inches of rain in 12 hours in the middle of our dry season. Work that out. I rode to work, I dealt with it, I didn't complain. Actually I kind of enjoyed having all the roads to myself for a day because just about everybody else was afraid to go outside. As far as bike trails are concerned, there are none on my commute, and even if there were, I'd avoid them like the plague regardless.

I rode to work through a supposed 1 in 1,000 year downpour a few years ago. I'm not sure how they measured that, given that weather measurements in this part of the world only date back 100 years or so.

This is interesting to me. Experts mislead people with statements containing probabilistic terminology. Especially in court and the popular news shows. If you have a sample of values from a distribution with no mean or variance- like a Cauchy distribution- you can still fit a bell curve to the sample. In that case the expert can make meaningless statements about the likelihood of events based on the fitted bell curve. If the you continue to draw samples from the actual distribution like rainfall then extreme events will show up with higher than expected frequency. Continually updating the erroneous fit won't help the situation. Not only that, but it is difficult to accurately fit data to some distributions. Check out an actuarial book on loss distributions to see some of the issues.