Posts Tagged ‘global warming’
Standing Corrected
I stand corrected. My neighbor finally got my message and stopped by yesterday to discuss the soil eroding from his corn field. In my angst over the mess, I had jumped to the conclusion that he had neglected to leave a patch of un-tilled grass waterway.
In fact, he did, and it has a wonderful patch of grass, below which are some weeds taller than his corn. I had not walked far enough up into the field to notice the full scope of what was going on. Had I looked just beside my focus of the current source of sandy top soil, I might have noticed.
I think it was the willow tree that obscured a full view.
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The sad truth is that the heavy flow of downpour runoff has simply migrated to either side of his grass waterway.
There isn’t really anything he can do about it right now, but just the fact he is now acutely aware of the current situation helps my mind. When he cuts at the end of the growing season, he will better be able to see the whole picture of what is happening, allowing him to consider options going forward.
It may simply be that he tries making the grass water way wider. I got the impression that he believed it was just an unlucky timing of heavy rain in the spring, before the planted corn had sprouted, that created this situation, so the fix will rely on a hope we get lucky and it doesn’t rain like that next year.
I am more of a mind that the likelihood of heavy downpours will only increase until the global temperatures somehow reverse the current trend and drop a degree or two.
Either way, the solution appears to involve a wider portion of un-tilled soil, but that won’t take effect immediately. For now, I am facing the challenge of dealing with the filled silt fence and finding a way to stretch its effectiveness through the rest of this summer and fall.
I’m trying to decide where I can put the sandy soil if I dig out the front of my silt fence. I’d like it to go somewhere that doesn’t end up just washing away the next time it rains, and that’s a daunting feat. I love the hilliness of our terrain, but the runoff erosion tends to be a constant result.
I’m back to that challenge of striving to work with the natural order and not against it. I want to figure out a solution that involves allowing water to take the easy path it seeks, but without it causing such extreme erosion. It’s hard to convince water to flow gently when the land is not so flat.
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Nature Wins
This round goes to Mother Nature.
I’ve heard tell that our warmer climate allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture. With a pattern of increasing frequency, our anecdotal evidence of the years we have lived here is that downpours are increasingly bringing multi-inch totals that overwhelm the old drainage paths.
Overnight Wednesday we received over 2 inches, bringing the 24-hour total to more than 5.5 inches.
When I combine our experience and the recorded data of measurable climbing global temperatures, I get the impression we are seeing the beginning of downpour trend that will, at best, keep happening at this level, or worse, continue to grow more extreme.
This presents a daunting challenge for devising a plan to improve our drainage paths to a point they will be able to handle ever-increasing volumes of massive flow in a manner that avoids major washouts, if that is even possible.
Our attempt to stem the tide of topsoil flowing from the neighbor’s cornfield came up short of successful after not very many storms. I don’t know if there is a more industrial version of a silt fence or we just need to pull out and re-install the one we have, above the new ground level.
Ideally, we would like to enlist the assistance of the neighbor-farmer to get him to not plow the portions of that field where the runoff flows and instead, create a grassed-waterway.
Recent efforts to contact him have thus far failed. I have a sense that his not having already maintained a protective waterway reveals a certain lack of interest in having one, so I’m imagining I may need to be prepared to offer a convincing sales pitch.
I suppose I could pull out the corn plants that washed down from his field and are now growing on our property, and bring them over to his house to see if he wants them back.
If it wasn’t so much work, I’d love to also bring him a load of the mud that poured out of his field and now covers the grass of our walking trail.
Since the rain will likely keep dumping on us, maybe his field will just empty out and that problem will go away. I can switch my attention to marketing the sale of a large amount of sifted soil that magically became ours when it crossed the property line.
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Adding Siding
Record warmth yesterday, and we spent almost all of it chipping away at the somewhat tedious task of siding the chicken coop with salvaged lumber. It feels a little like I’ve made this project more complicated than it deserves, but I justify it in my mind as a good exercise in teaching myself carpentry skills.
I’ve never tried to make cabinets and had no clue about mounting a hinged door. We started small and did the narrow opening for accessing the poop board. It turned out a little too tight, but filing edges has been enough to make it work.
Next, we hung the three-hinge people door. I’m still unsure of the essential details that need to be considered, but somehow I seem to have faked my way through it and ended up with a door the appears to work perfectly.
Working in the hot sun was almost too uncomfortable, but since it is November, it seemed a little inconsiderate to frame that hardship as a complaint.
The warming of our planet does come with some short-term perks in the interim before whatever large-scale calamity will eventually doom civilization as we know it.
Using the boards we salvaged from pallets, we are now slowly but surely working our way up the walls with a piecemeal patchwork of siding. It is creative fun for a while, and then gets a little too tricky around openings and edges that require excessive amounts of measuring and cutting to fit.
Whose idea was it to make this thing so complicated, anyway?
Good things come to those who wait, and with that, I expect to be happy with this mansion of a chicken coop when it is finally completed.
More importantly, it is my hope that some chickens will be very, very happy with it, too.
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Then Smoke
The newest invader is smoke in the air from Canadian forest fires. Well, not just forests. I’ve been fixated lately on what it is like up at Fort McMurray, where fire is raging through the population center and destroying so many homes.
This morning, our sky is a milky gray and the sun rose as a deep orange orb over the horizon. I suppose the impression of smoke might be intensified by the fact we sat around a fire last night at George’s. When stepping in the house after being outside, it quickly becomes apparent how much our clothes absorbed the smoky aroma.
I love the smell, to a point. This is definitely one of the situations where a little is good, but more is not necessarily better. I know it is bad for our air quality, but I love the distant smell of burning wood. However, when it blows directly in my face, it becomes a bitter irritant.
I shudder to contemplate the ramifications of not just one house burning in a fire, but every house around. Yesterday in the news feeds, I came across James O’Reilly’s security camera video of the moment their house was consumed by the blaze. They had gotten out just 20 minutes earlier.
A woman named Jennifer Knuth is trying to maintain a sense of humor amid the devastation and posted the crazy things that made it into her suitcase in the last-minute desperate packing to flee.
In this time of crisis when we have lost almost our entire city and packed our whole lives into a car or a suitcase we need laughter. I urge each and every one of you, as you unpack wherever you are, to post a picture of the funniest thing you packed while fleeing for your lives. I shall go first … Cheese slices and snow pants!!!!! God bless Fort McMurray.
There are descriptions of the ways people are evacuating, including, by horse. That certainly caught my eye. It doesn’t look like the populated area was one where there were many horses being kept, but if this kind of fire happens here, we won’t be able to do anything but open the gates and let our horses flee on their own, if it is a matter of minutes to get away.
I wonder where I would go if everything is burning. I guess up to Cyndie’s family lake place, but that is just for the water. If it is extremely hot, dry, windy, and burning, there is every likelihood that the forests up there will be blazing, too.
The planet is going to become increasingly challenging to live on with the climate shifting the way it is. My preference would have been to live during a period when it is getting colder, instead.
One way to divert my attention from the heat and flames is to read up on the latest prognostications about the San Andreas fault. Seems like the kind of thing Hollywood makes movies about, and movies are all about distraction for entertainment, aren’t they?
I’m hoping for some rain here soon, before we get too dry.
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Relative Something 