It’s not even November yet, but this El Niño season is already fucking us up but good out here on the West Coast!
You might be hearing about flooding going on in big coastal California cities right now, what with all sorts of cuh-razy high tides destroying beautiful beachfront properties and flooding out entire highways and basically all of Balboa Island, which is a fancy part of Newport Beach, getting taken back by the sea.
The Los Angeles Times has a rundown of the jaw-dropping tidal changes we’ve been seeing. Personally, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say I think we’re going to come out of this in a few months with an entirely new coastline.
San Pedro’s tide gauge in Los Angeles Harbor saw its record broken Tuesday, reaching 8.19 feet. It was the highest level since records were first kept in November 1923.
In Santa Barbara, high tide reached a record 8.04 feet Tuesday before receding slightly Wednesday, said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist for the NWS at Oxnard.
In La Jolla, the tide reached 7.98 feet Tuesday, breaking the record of 7.83 feet in November 2015.
At the San Diego tide gauge, Tuesday’s high tide was a record 8.52 feet, breaking the previous record of 8.26 feet from this past July.
And more high tides are still coming. It’s making for some really wacky photo ops and videos, mostly described as fun with king tides!
But while this is a full moon, it’s not a king tide, and the fact that it’s being described as one is a problem.
King tides are colloquial terms for astronomically influenced events — the most dramatic tides of the year. That’s when we get some good-ass waves crashing against barriers and all the photographers line up to get their perfect shots. Because king tides are astronomical, they can be predicted with some accuracy.
“King tides occur when the orbits and alignment of the Earth, moon, and sun combine to produce the greatest tidal effects of the year,” says a one-sheeter from the Environmental Protection Agency, and it’s from 2011, so it can be somewhat trusted to not have “and that’s why we will exterminate everyone with brown eyes” or similar embedded anywhere in the text!
And while it’s not a scientifically accepted term and thus I probably shouldn’t be complaining about it at all, it does refer to a specific event, not just a really high tide, or even a really, really, really high tide.
This is not a king tide. It is just a really really big full-moon tide, influenced by the Kelvin wave phenomenon and exacerbated by the meanest, angriest El Niño any of us have ever lived through.
Remember the Kelvin wave? I wrote about it!
It’s doing exactly what I thought it would do, too!
This is what sea level rise looks like, friends. This is climate change. Did you know that our sea levels are NINE INCHES HIGHER than they were in 1880? We’re literally soaking in it!
Our first 2026 king tide is actually a month from now, per the California King Tides Project. Which means that the flooding coming up might be as bad as what we are seeing now, plus whatever the additional gravitational dance brings.
Which brings me to my actual point here, besides the fact that we are now in a world that has been irrevocably changed by global warming, and yet Americans are still being lied to about it, still being told to doubt the evidence of our eyes and our ears, which are seeing and hearing our fucking cliffs and hillsides crumbling, and tornadoes in February, and fires burning in (rising) ocean waters, and so forth.
But that’s why you have me!
When I mentioned Global Warming in class in 1986, the Science Teacher - also the school nurse - laughed at me.
In the late 80s my family and I planted 750 trees. They were in rows, meant to grow into windbreaks as well. I mostly did the watering.
Today, those trees are visible on Google Earth.
About that Jonestown guy:
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https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2116522328247144693?a=5EhcQAmR4clehEIlS3Y&s=20
The guy who compared a Trump rally to Jonestown on live Fox News was invited by the Trump campaign. They called his work phone on Monday and asked him to come.
His name is Tom Hoyle. He's 57 and runs a small custom printing shop in Charlotte called MadPark Designs with his business partner. He's hated Trump since 1989, back when he was a sophomore in college. And he really, really doesn't like getting sales calls on the shop line, from anybody.
So when the rally people called, he said yes. He even signed up with his real name and contact info, because he wanted it on the record that they invited him.
Then he had to get through the door. A private security guy asked him straight up if he was a Trump supporter. Tom told him he supports the Constitution, then started talking about his shirt, which was for an old death metal band called Death. He kept going about the history of Florida death metal until the guard gave up and let him in.
His plan going in was honestly pretty juvenile. He and a buddy he grew up with figured he'd wait a few minutes into the speech and yell something filthy.
Then a Fox News reporter, Lucas Tomlinson, found him standing off by himself and asked if he could interview him live. Tom thinks a white guy with a big beard and a ball cap was pretty much exactly what they were looking for.
He told himself he wasn't going to cuss on national TV, so he made it up on the spot. He says the first line and then just waits. The reporter goes "Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?" and that's when he finishes it.
He told The Handbasket he picked that up from Billy Crystal, who said on Letterman back in the '80s that you always let the other guy set up your punchline. Tomlinson set it up for him perfectly.
A few minutes later some men who said they were Secret Service pulled him aside. He asked if this was about the concession stand, because it closed early and he was starving. They didn't love that and walked him out. On his way out he passed the guard from the front door and told him, hey man, you didn't vet me too well.
Think about how many people had a shot at stopping this. The campaign's call list found him. The signup form had his name. A guard questioned him to his face. A Fox crew put him on live TV. Every one of them took one look at the beard and the hat and filled in the rest.
That's how almost all of this screening works. Asking somebody what they actually believe takes time, and looking at them takes a second, so everybody just looks.
The one check that actually caught him came after he'd already said it on national TV.