They Weren't Ready For Hilary

I haven't written about climate disasters for awhile, even though there have been many of them and more are to come for certain (just as long as folks keep buying those gas-guzzling Ford F-150s and Expeditions), because what can I say about them other than that . . . well, they're bad?  But Hurricane Hilary is certainly something to take notice of, even in the face of the Maui wildfires, mainly because while there have been wildfires in Hawaii before, there hadn't been a hurricane or tropical storm to his southern California since 1939.

Hilary - which became a tropical storm by the time it entered the United States - was a storm from the Pacific basin.  Normally, such such storms steer well clear of the American West Coast.  But this one was diverted to the northeast from off the coast of Baja California in Mexico, apparently by an errant steering wind, and it brought flash flooding to a regularly dry part of the continent.  Not only was California affected, but so was Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and even Idaho.

To respond to the inevitable attempt to look for a bright side to Hilary and say that it least dropped some badly needed water into Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam, curb your enthusiasm, Sparky.  The water Lake Mead did receive was almost literally a drop in the bucket, as it were, toward erasing the lake's deficit, and it might not have made much of a difference even if had been a Category 1 hurricane at the time, as it had been when it made landfall in Mexico.  The truth of the matter is that there is no bright side to climate change - a large tropical rainstorm will not alleviate a drought and warmer temperatures will not mean more comfortable winters in Canada's Northwest Territories, which are burnt to a crisp.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.