[ExI] storms again

Sat Sep 5 20:11:48 UTC 2026

From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] storms again

>…Think about it Spike. Do you really want the tracking location in the path of storms that could cause it to go dark?

Sure I get that, but hurricanes usually don’t do that.  Miami’s biggest blackouts, one in 2008 and one in 1985, were not caused by storms.  There are storm-caused blackouts, but critical infrastructure, such as communications networks and storm tracking pages, can be kept up with storm-shielded power generation.  The town where I grew up had a recent hurricane-caused blackout, but the phones and radio stations kept working.  Anyone with battery-powered TV, kept working.  Laptop computers are battery powered, kept working.  My brother sat in the dark and posted ongoing real time reports.  Their power went down but their phones and internet didn’t.  That was encouraging.  

>…El Niño keeps Atlantic storms from forming. It also makes the weather hotter. Between people dying of excess heat and the damage caused by crop failure, I think hurricanes would be better.   Keith

Ja, as we went over before, however we have the technology to deal with the heat.  Air conditioning isn’t that hard or expensive.  Well, OK in California it is, because our power is crazy expensive and I have gas heating.

I take particular interest in this as one who wishes to promote AI data centers.  The public is being led to think of them as a threat, but I see it as a solution to a threat.  The one you raised is a power failure during the summer in Phoenix.  Having done plenty of business travel to that fair city in the summertime, I completely get it.  But if data centers and their associated power infrastructure clustered in Nevada south of Las Vegas, taking advantage of Nevada’s open-minded environmental policy, it could serve as an emergency backup power source for Phoenix, one which could save jillions of lives in an emergency.

I will grant of course that AI itself damn well is a threat, but it is also our only plausible means of escaping this life alive.  We bio-intelligences are just not smart enough to figure out how to upload a frozen brain.  Face it my friends: we carbon-eaters are too stupid to upload a brain.  But sufficiently advanced AI might be smart enough to do that.

spike

On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 12:26 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

Aside on previous commentary regarding Atlantic storms, the season peak regarding historic average Atlantic storm activity is… today.

But we are flatlined in 2026, with nothing point zero out there, and nothing in the forecast for next week.

Colorado State U tracks this:

https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?loc=northatlantic

but… why?  Storms don’t reach Colorado.  This should be tracked by University of Florida Miami or somebody down there, ja?  John, wassup widdat?  

spike

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