The end of Burning Man will have a future as well
The Los Angeles Times reported that a thunderstorm caused record-breaking temperatures in July, and a record in southern Nevada, setting temperatures record by 11 degrees F
They also have to recontour the playa because of the trash that they have to pick up. “They need to smooth some of the tracks so they can get on with their lives.”
It’s the Burning Man organizers who are still on site that he said will have to deal with the accumulating effects of the extreme weather over the landscape. The state required them to leave no trace of their activities on the land.
The recent flooding will actually bring to life a vibrant ecosystem of invertebrates that live as desiccated eggs under the surface of the desert, waiting to become hydrated so they can hatch.
Closer to home, the latest national climate assessment from the U.S. Global Change Research Program warns that although the arid Southwest is projected to get drier overall as the Earth warms, the precipitation that does fall is more likely to come in large bursts. When a lot of rain falls in a short period of time, it’s more likely to cause floods because the ground can’t absorb water quickly enough.
“There’s always been monsoonal activity and passing thunderstorms in the area,” Donnelly said, adding that the season typically runs from June to September. It’s normal for a storm to park overhead and pour a whole inch of rain in a very short period of time.
There were a series of extreme climate problems across the desert southwest in the summer. The Death Valley National Park had a heat record in July when the temperature reached 129 degrees F, but it was not the all-time record. The storm also made a rare foray into southern Nevada, setting records there as well. The mountains west of Las Vegas received up to 9 inches of rain.
You can’t directly attribute this event to climate change. But we are seeing impacts and extreme weather all over the place now … so folks can make their own decisions about how they’re observing the climate change in front of their very eyes,” he told NPR.
How Burning Man Becomes a Community-Promoted, Radically Resilient City: The Case Against Climate Crises and Extinction
The Center for Biological Diversity is an advocacy group that promotes conservativism and fights to stop the extinction and climate crises on public lands in Nevada, Utah and California.
The protesters’ efforts ahead of the festival was met with a lot of mockery and ire from their fellow partiers. And Patrick was one of them.
The second, in a twist of extreme I-told-you-so irony, was caused by attendees trying to escape the pop-up city after an unrelenting bout of intense rainfall that experts say is increasingly typical in warming climate.
More importantly, the playa’s devolving into a muddy, trash-filled trap for Burners has raised questions about whether there is such a thing as “radical self-reliance”—one of Burning Man’s most cited principles—on a boiling planet. Perhaps the other, less fetishized tenants of communal effort and civic responsibility could shine a light forward for the event.
The usual scramble to find tickets at Burning Man was absent this year. Instead, the opposite occurred: There was a mad scramble to sell them.
But it also might hit the reset button on the event. In the past five years, Burning Man has gained a reputation for being a playground for billionaires and influencers, filled with luxury RVs and private, air-conditioned domes with open bars. This latest wallop could pull it back from the brink of full Coachella-fication and into its radical, community-focused roots.
The annual Burning Man event takes place over three hours outside of Reno, Nevada, in the Black Rock Desert. It’s a place of extremes: extreme temperatures, extreme dust storms, and an extreme lack of water.
It was distasteful to use diesel during a climate crisis. People understandably wanted to take the $5,000-plus dollars they’d normally lay out for travel and supplies and spend it on a vacation to Europe instead of on Mad Max cosplay. There were people who wanted to take a year off after the extremely hot and very un- fun 2022, Burn because they were tired of the doubled RV prices.
A variety of reasons was given, the leading one being that the recent layoffs in the tech industry had gutted Burning Man’s target market. A satirical Medium article talks about a Sparkle Pony Recession, in which pretty females were unable to get wealthy sponsors to send them in and put them up in luxury RVs. Camps that usually aimed for 80 percent returning members had to take in around 70 percent newbies to fill their roster.
The Twist: Getting Tickets for Low-Tensor QCD at a Linear Collider (The Rise of the Crowd)
In years past, those who didn’t get tickets in the initial sale had to work all their connections to find a spare one. With regular-priced $575 tickets vanishingly rare, some threw down $2,750 to secure their spot. But this summer, a surprising number of tickets were being offered for below face value on social media.
