Some of these folks are stepping up to actually help. Friends from her church, for instance. Considering that Dad and I are both Atheists, that's important. I don't think that a scientist can be objective if they're a fan of Middle Eastern Hokum. Just, no. Many careers are not damaged by superstitious beliefs, but science is. Look at the Global Warming nonsense. Its really just the latest Nihilism, a fad, with BS for numbers and a model widely admitted to be extremely inaccurate. People who know math discard that model as outright lies.
I actually like studying these events because Pleistocene Geology is all over the place, and has lots of stuff you can look at in person, including landscape morphology that's still around. You can find places people lived if you just look with a discerning eye. When I look at the Mohave Desert, I see it when it was lakes, streams, willows and cottonwoods, flamingos and antelope. Before the soil washed and blew away. When the grasslands and streams dried out, all that stuff gradually retreated and then died out (locally). This is what global warming does. And its temporary.
Sea levels rose 80 meters during this time, but the rise is just about done at this point. I sincerely doubt we'll see all of Greenland and Antarctica melt off. Why? Because the next ice age is at its tipping point. Free/Open Arctic Sea Water can evaporate at a far faster rate than ice does, meaning those strong arctic winds that blow cold and dry down through Canada and cause summer t-storms in the Midwest? Those are going to change. Now that there's WATER exposed as liquid on the Arctic Ocean, those winds are going to come down South WET, and drop snow everywhere they can. Bright windy summers in northern Canada? Think again. Sudden snow flurries in July. Maybe all the way to Texas sometimes. Sounds crazy right? And bad for crops. Currently, the Northern Rocky mountains are a desert, like the Atacama. The winds come across their 19,000 high plateaus and passes dry, so no snow falls. This is temporary. As Arctic ice melts, those dry winds become laden with snow and ice, and it will start falling there. This is believed to be where the last ice age began its ice sheets in North America. Another site was the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Thus all the glaciers and carved passes etc. It will begin there again. This is huge because once we start getting accumulations up there, that don't quite melt during the summer, the next Ice Age is ON. It might take the rest of your life to see it creep off those passes, but its coming. And Ice Ages grow till they stabilize.
The associated effects are unclear, exactly. We know that during the ice age, there was much heavier rainfall, 110+ inches/year here in California. The evidence is all over the place. Pasadena was slammed with hurricanes. Those canyons were roaring floods. The Mohave was grassland full of animals and fish and birds. The Southern San Joaquin Valley was shallow lakes and rushing rivers, and the Sacramento Delta handled so much water that most of it was Marsh, all the way to Davis and up to Marysville and down to Merced was flood plain, and often underwater. That's an area the size of Rhode Island. And it was Fresh water. There would have been fish, birds, mosquitoes, and malaria. Completely impossible to control. I expect that will come back, if only because the Levee system is falling apart and inherently flawed. When you make rivers stay in a channel, they go faster and erode more. The math is simple, beautiful, and relentless. Only Geologists and Civil Engineers really care about it though. I think all the people in Stockton will, when the levees fail some Spring and the whole town is Disaster Area'd the way New Orleans was. As Stockton has a lot of problems, most will abandon it and take the Govt Check to relocate. I expect to see that in my lifetime, btw. California has big problems with doing maintenance of critical infrastructure. Everybody is chasing dreams on Credit. Nobody wants to sweep the road or clean the toilet.
Up here on the mountainside, Dad and I have vowed to continue caring for Mom's garden, improve it. She had planting ambitions that hadn't happened yet. I was going to help with those since I have a strong back. Holes that need digging. Plants put in. I WILL spread the fertilizer she complained was too expensive, and save the English Laurels, many of which are yellow from low nitrogen. And I'll put a lot more phosphorus on the fig trees, since fruit trees need that to both grow new wood and fruit. It's something new to learn. I'd like to put in Night Blooming Jasmine outside my window, since that window will be open every night in the summer and the scent will drift in. Yes, I have a diffuser, which has stopped working (bad remote or dead battery. Will buy a new battery to test this). I'm hopeful it will work again. If not, I'm planning to take apart the remote and look for any fault.
Dad and I keep looking for distractions, so we can deal with our grief in little bits and pieces, rather than all at once. When she passed, I was right there, and I felt a terrible flash of grief. Then it was gone. And I know for my own needs, distractions are critical so I can function. I got to spend months with Mom, talking over various subjects because she needed the distraction herself. Once the snow melts on the trail, we'll take mom's ashes up there to her favorite picnic spot. Some of my relatives dislike that, but it's what she wanted. What they want is irrelevant. This is about Mom.
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