Actually A Nice SUV Ad, Until They Drive The Vehicle Into The Water. It's Irresponsible.

In a new Kia Telluride ad, the SUV is driven into a creek, and
water cascades over the hood and windshield. Had this been
real life, the Telluride would have stalled. This is a
dangerous way to sell a car, because already, too many
people drive into flood waters. Some of them die. 

One of the better ads during the Super Bowl Sunday night was for an SUV called the Kia Telluride.

However, I'm afraid I'm going to rain on the parade for the small town of West Point, Georgia. You'll see how it has to do with the weather in a moment.

Until near the end, the Kia Telluride ad is quite good. It's pretty cinematic. It has no bells and whistles, and tells a story.  It's a nice departure from the usual TV ad fare.

Narrarated by a young boy, we learn that nobody has heard of West Point, Georgia. People live their lives quietly there, with dignity, but nobody gets the limelight, like the NFL players in the Super Bowl do.

"We're just a small Georgia town of complete unknowns," the boy drawls, amid images of hard working people, a quaint little downtown, an old, tight-knit public school and rural scenes

 "We hope to be known for what we do," the boy continues. It turns out the new Kia Telluride is manufactured there. Then the glaring problem with the ad arises.

Somebody drives the new Kia Telluride into a creek. It goes in so deep that water washes over the hood of the SUV and up onto the windshield. It's supposed to tell us how tough the Telluride is, and the imagery is supposed to impress us.

No! No! No! No!   Every time there's a flood, some morons drive their cars into water, and get stuck or worse. It doesn't take much water to float a vehicle away. Six inches will do it. Now we have this ad telling people it's OK to plunge into water.

A particularly galling aspect of the Kia Telluride ad comes when the SUV plunges into the water. For three seconds, barely visible on the bottom of the screen in small print you see a message if you're looking closely: "Do Not Attempt. Water stunt performed with aftermarket snorkel. Professional driver on closed course."

You'd never seen this message because you're focusing on the Telluride in the water. I didn't see this message until somebody pointed it out to me.

Had somebody driven this or any other vehicle into water that cascaded over the hood, the engine would have stalled. Whoever was in the car or truck would just float down the river, eventually sink, and possibly drown. Unless rescued by somebody. Of course, the rescuers' lives would be put in danger, too.

I know I'm being a bit of a scold here, but advertising, and pretty much anything we see in the media influences us, whether we acknowledge that or not.

Enough people drive into flood waters as it is, with often tragic results. According to the National Weather Service 79 people died in floods during 2018 and the vast majority - 54 - died in vehicles caught in the flood waters.

The NWS and other agencies have for several years now promoted the phrase "Turn Around, Don't Drown," to encourage people to not drive into floodwater. I worry that the Kia Telluride ad might partly undo some of the good work the public safety messages have done.

I get it. Car ads like to show vehicles doing things people normally wouldn't do to show how rugged and cool these things are. Most people are not stupid enough to try this at home. But a few are. Many who aren't that stupid might just feel a little more comfortable driving into a flood after seeing that Kia Telluride ad.

For what it's worth, he's the ad:

Nobody Is Quite Sure What Trump Is Trying To Accomplish With Climate Change Attack

Trump loves coal, and thinks climate change is hoax, but
the rest of the world is already moving away from
his line of thinking

As you probably heard on the news, President Trump signed an executive order a couple weeks back  intended to roll back his predecessor's actions on climate change

I suppose Trump's climate executive order is meant to be marketed as a pro-business, pro-job move, but it's hard to imagine how it will help businesses or job growth all that much.

A centerpiece of Trump's campaign last year was to promise people in coal producing zones in the United States that he would bring coal jobs back.

That was part of the motivation of Tuesday's executive order. To "keep" his campaign promise.

However, Trump knows that no matter what he does, he won't keep his promise to bring all those coal jobs back.

Basically, nobody wants to buy coal anymore.

As Vox points out:

"Even the most anti-Obama coal executive on the planet, Robert Murray of Murray Energy, knows this. He supports Trump's assault on climate policy and wants it to go further. (after all, he stands to benefit!), but he's under no illusion it will help coal miners. When he met with Trump, 'I suggested that he temper his expectations,' Murray told The Guardian."

It's true that the world went through a coal burning boom as the 21st century opened. China, India and some other developing countries went on a coal plant building binge, which of course is bad if you're worried about climate change.

Coal is pretty much the worst, most effective greenhouse gas you can get. Lots of countries are getting the message. They're increasingly afraid of climate change, which is a good thing to be afraid of.

With that in mind, it seems like the ardor for coal in these countries is starting to cool. For one thing, those big bursts of smog that China has endured in recent years, is partly due to coal plants and people are not happy about it.

This next bit from Vox is pretty stat heavy, but really worth going through. Because it's very telling about how out of step Trump is:

"Here's what happened with coal plants around the world, year on uear, from 2016 to 2017:

"Pre-construction activity (planning, permitting, etc.) was down a whopping 48 percent. In January, 2016, there was 1,090 GW (gigawatts) worth of coal capacity in pre-construction planning; as of January, 2017, it had fallen to 579 GW.

Work in ongoing coal plant construction projects was down 19 percent. In China and India alone, scattered across more than 100 sites, some 68 GW worth of coal plant construction was frozen in place. In fact, across the world, 'more construction is now frozen than entered construction in the past year.

Construction starts - new coal plants entering construction - were down by 62 percent. Meanwhile, especially in the U.S. and Europe, coal plants are retiring, to the tun of about 64 GW worth in the past two years.

It's all slowing down."

(The report referred to in this excerpt is the annual "Boom or Bust" report on the global coal pipeline from Coalswarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace.)

Meanwhile, investments in energy production from wind and solar continue to climb worldwide The U.S. could be a worldwide leader in these industries, but Trump is too dumb to see that.

Trump said when he signed the executive order rolling back climate change initiatives that coal miners will get their jobs back. That "clean coal" whatever the hell that is, is the future of American energy independence.

Stephen Colbert reacted this way, which is perfect: "Clean coal sounds like an oxymoron but then so does President Trump."

I've always said that the most dangerous people in the world are very stupid ones who think they are smart. That description fits Donald Trump more than any other person I've ever heard of.

One thing Trump is good at is creating alternative realities for entertainment and business purposes. But when you create these fake realities, real reality always comes back to bite you.

Hard. 

Houston Flooded This Morning, And This Bus Shouldn't Have Drive Throught The Water

Cars stranded on a Houston freeway this
morning. Photo by Elizabeth Conly
Houston Chronicle 

Heavy rain, falling at a rate of one to two inches per hour, caused widespread flooding in the Houston metro area this morning.

A lot of roads were closed, and rescuers had to pluck people from stranded vehicles. Four to six inches of rain blasted down in just a short period of time.

It's been a stormy week around Houston, with a couple tornadoes reported on Monday. More wet and severe weather, and a flood threat, will continue in and around Houston, and the Gulf Coast states through the weekend

In one incident during Houston's flood this morning captured in the video below, a passenger inside a Houston Metro bus drove into floodwater and the water gushed into the bus, getting a lot of people wet.

You can hear one women in the bus saying of the driver. "I don't know why he didn't turn around."

I don't know, either.

Here's the video, via television station KHOU:

Not Sure Why This Scooter Rider Was Out In A Typhoon, But Bad Idea

A guy on a scooter should not have been
out riding during Typhoon Meranti in Taiwan. 

Typhoon Meranti, the strongest of the year so far, battered far southern Taiwan this week.

It then moved into China, where at last report it was causing high winds, destructive storm surges and torrential flooding rains.

There will be a lot of damage.

A video surfaced of a man on a scooter out in the typhoon in Taiwan.

I'm not sure why he thought it was a good idea to be out like that in such scary weather, but it didn't end well. Not sure of his condition now, but watch:

Stupid People Keep On Driving Into Floods, Keep Getting Stuck

Cars stranded in street flooding in the
Wichita, Kansas area Monday. Photo from KAKE.com 

This is the summer of flash flooding, apparently.

I've noted this already in previous posts, but yet again, a vast part of the nation is under threat of flash floods today, and many areas experienced such deluges Monday.

Today, the flash flood risk zones include a broad stripe from Texas through Oklahoma into Missouri; part of Nevada and the desert Southwest, as monsoon moisture will trigger local torrential thunderstorms; parts of Wyoming, and mountainous West Virginia, where gullywashers could easily sweep down steep slopes today.

This just adds to epic rainfall totals for the year in some parts of the nation, a contrast to the West Coast, where the drought just keeps on grinding on.

The flash floods this week add more to the usual phenonenon we see: So many people driving into flooded streets, and getting stuck.

I guess the National Weather Service's constant refrain, "Turn Around, Don't Drown," isn't working. I don't know why.  It seems pretty easy to understand, at least to my little brain.

I'm amazed at the videos, an example of which you see below, of people seeing that cars and trucks have died out as motorists tried to drive down flooded streets. But does everybody else turn around?

Of course not! Some people soldier on, thinking they have magical powers in which everybody else's car drowns in the water but theirs won't.

In the videos, you do see other people turning around instead of plunging into the water. You can almost see the thought bubble of the people in the cars that are turning around. They look at people with their stuck cars and say, "Loser."

The video below, from StormChasingVideo.com, shows cars struggling amid flash floods in Wichita, Kansas Monday.

Wichita isn't exactly a remote, boony one road town. A little under 400,000 people live there. It's a pretty sizeable town.  You'd think that if one street floods, you can turn around and find a nearby street that's not flooded and do a detour there.

So, if you encounter flooding today, no matter where you are, don't drive through it. The car and life you save might be your own.

Dumb Idea Chronicles: The Great Anti-Tornado Wall Of America

Tornado season is fast approaching in the United States, that potentially deadly time of year in the spring and early summer when large twisters level towns and cause general chaos across sections of the Great Plains, Midwest and South.

A tornado that was at an elevation of 11,900 feet
on Mt. Evans in Colorado in 2012. Mountains don't
necessarily stop tornadoes.  

It would be nice if we could prevent these destructive monsters, but we can't.

A guy named Rongjia Tao of Temple Univesity wants to try, though.

His thought: Erect three huge east to west walls across the central United States, one around North Dakota, the other near the Kansas-Oklahoma State line, and one around Texas and Louisiana.

He's going to present this idea to the American Physical Society in Denver this week, but pretty much everybody agrees this idea won't fly.

Tao's idea is that cold winds blast down from the north, and humid, warm winds come up from the south. The air masses collide, and that helps set off tornadoes.  He says his walls would block the winds, and thereby prevent the tornadoes from forming.

That's a oversimplication on my part, but Tao's got the basic idea about the winds right. But his proposed walls, each 1,000 feet all and 150 feet wide stretching across the Plains, though huge, won't disrupt the tornadoes. They're not nearly big enough. And even really HUGE walls might not make a difference.

Maybe these walls would briefly screw up a very weak tornado, maybe. But not a big one. And face it, who cares if a lame tornado rips one branch off a tree in the middle of nowhere?  But we do care very much when a powerful tornado levels a town and kills people. Tao's walls won't prevent that kind of tragedy.

Mountain range often don't stop or disrupt tornadoes, and mountain ranges are bigger than even Tao's proposal.

From USA Today:

"'It wouldn't work' tornado researcher Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, OK said in an email

Brooks said that China has deadly tornadoes despite the east-west mountain ranges there. In additon, he said, tornadoes still occur in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri despite the presense there of smaller east-west mountain ranges similar in size to Tao's proposed walls."

Brooks added: "This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in hsi sub discipine, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant."

Tornadoes often form more because of changes in temperature and wind direction as you go up vertically, rather than changes in temperature as you move from south to north.

Worse, some east-west mountain ranges could actually enhance the formation of tornadoes.

According to Wunderground:

"There are some east-west ridges in eastern Colorado, one is the Palmer Divide," (The Weather Channel's severe storm expert Dr. Greg) Forbes said. "Eddies to the north of the Palmer Divide when winds are from the southeast are a good breeding ground for tornadoes."

Here's a video (below) demonstrating how a hill can't really stop a tornado.  A strong tornado had just left Springfield, Mass in June, 2011. It scales a hill, and you can see it's not weakening. The person who shot the video ducked for cover once the tornado crested the hill and cut off the video.

Good thing: The tornado came down the hill at full strength and caused major damage to houses and other buildings in Monson, Mass. Watch, (but turn down the volume because the videographer added annoying music and sounds to the video):




Moreover, the cost of Tao's walls might far exceed the cost of the tornados the United States gets every year. It would cost maybe $60 billion for every 100 miles of wall built. And good luck getting the environmental and other permits, and obtaining the land to do this from the thousands of property owners that would be affected.

So for now, we're going to live with our current methods of dealing with tornadoes. That is, have the National Weather Service and other meteorologists issue warnings that a tornado is forming, and hope people get out of the way and into their basements and don't get killed.

For good measure, here's an even more dramatic tornado video than the one above. This one is a powerful twister having no trouble tearing up houses on a steep hill near West Liberty, Kentucky in March, 2012:

Very Dumb Boater Gives Us Awesome View Of Waterspout

I don't know if I'm rewarding good behavior here, but the video in this post is too good to pass up.

Boater about to go into waterspout
off  Florida Keys. Don't try this at home  

A boater who'd been fishing for lobster saw several waterspouts touch down in the waters near the Florida Keys.

Hey, why not drive the boat into one of the waterspouts, says the captain of the small boat.

Not a good idea. Waterspouts are tornadoes over water. True, waterspouts tend to be weaker than land-based tornadoes.

Most waterspouts have winds of about 70 mph or less. But that's still strong, and that whirling motion of the funnel can cause real havoc.

The boater admits it. In the notes below his YouTube video, he writes:

(The wind)...was strong enough to completely open my deck hatches and forcibly move the boat more than I expected. The approach was intended to go with the wind at high speeds to minimize the effect, yet provide the fullest, safest experience. Again, don't ever do this! If you do, you're gonna need a bigger boat!"

Florida Severe Weather Channel also weighed in. The storm causing the waterspouts could have easily produced lightning that would have zapped the two men, and the dog on the open boat. The fact the waterspouts looked relatively small could have been deceiving. They might have been much stronger than they looked.

Still, it's a fun video.  So with no further verbiage, here you go: