Grrl Power #1094 – Exodon’t
I’ve lived in Texas for 40 years and to this day if someone says “Texas” my first thought is of desert and cactus. Granted, I’m old enough that when I was a kid, there were still cowboy shows on TV. They were mostly syndicated reruns, but you if you were flipping through the 4-6 available channels at the right time, you could watch the Lone Ranger in glorious black and white. I’m not sure where most westerns actually took place, but Texas was often mentioned. Man, I’m glad we’re past the cowboy obsession. I never was or will be a fan of westerns.
And sure, if you drive far enough west through Texas, there’s plenty of desert and cactus, but growing up in a suburb just north of Houston, it was evergreens all the way to the horizon. People joke about whatever place they live only having two seasons. In Houston, it was “Summer” and “two weeks of winter,” but it was an extra kick in the teeth that the leaves didn’t even turn.
Oh wait, I take that back. In addition to evergreens, there were gumball trees. Or technically they’re called Sweetgums, and each and every one of them dropped hundreds of trillions of these caltrop things all over the place. Walking through your yard barefoot was a hazardous prospect to say the least. But at least their leaves turned.
I’m sure a lot of places are just fixed in people’s mind thanks to media representation. If you say “LA” to me, I generally think of people roller skating near the beach, homeless people, and earthquakes. Oh, and also that concrete spillway where the T-1000 chased John Connor, and also the paved over LA River where the shuttle crash landed in The Core, which is one of my favorite dumb disaster movies.
I tried to do “air particles streaking past” to indicate motion in a few panels there, but looking at it now, it does kind of appear as though Sydney flew them through a swarm of locust at about 300 miles per hour, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll dial it in eventually.
The October Vote Incentive is actually up!
Why did it take so long? I couldn’t tell you. Well, I hand drew the lace on Lorlara’s body stocking, so that took about an hour by itself. Anyway, it’s likely the next one will be single character, and hopefully it won’t be so late. Usually with fewer characters I can do more outfit variants but we’ll see.
So I have enough “Blue Babes” to do a theme. Eventually I’ll be able to fill in the whole rainbow of my own characters. I did a rainbow lineup previously for those who hadn’t seen it. I’d love to revisit that one of these days.
Enjoy variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Wait. “Suburb north of Houston full of evergreens”… I may or may not have met DaveB and not even known it. That exactly describes where I live too. Small world
Maybe but not likely… The Houston/Fort Worth metropolitan area is… pretty fucking big after all… and after checking it seems that they’ve managed to eat Arlington officially now as well…
There is no Houston/Fort Worth metro. The two cities are 230 miles away from each other on opposite sides of the state.
You’re thinking of Dallas/Fort Worth. Houston can be grouped with Galveston in the same way, though. Houston and Dallas are not only really far from each other, they’re not even in related biomes, never mind climate. Houston is basically a giant swamp and Dallas is basically an arid plain.
I tell people to thing of the DFW metroplex as “The ENTIRE San Francisco Bay Area, but the bay is an airport.”
we have the technology to transform deserts into arable land yes, we have had the technology for half a century if not more, the problem is that not only it would be really fucking expensive (that is a reason yes) but also it would very likely wreck the environment
the sahara desert is a uge source of nutrients for the amazon rain forest at the other side of the planet between other stuff so just transforming it willy nilly into a tropical environment would have consequences that would be very dificult to predict, but at the very least it would likely turn the amazon into a savanah
there have been other mega projects like this ones that have been canned because of the unpredictable impact that they would have, like creating mountains in certain regions to increase tourism or to increase rains in a region between many others, all of this projects wherent cancelled because of its infeasibility but because of the unpredictable behaviour of the environment when you start to geoform the planet to such a degree (even diverting or creating rivers can have huge impacts in the sorrounding region)
It’s actually not that expensive. The main problem is that deserts climates are largely affected by the plants that grow in them. Like rainforest for example is perpetuated by rainforest plants that can only grow in rainforests. You need to he plants to have the climate that the plants can grow in. Lack one, lack both.
It’s a massive catch 22.
Thankfully there is a new and inexpensive tech invented by china that they’re using to reverse the Gobi desert. You see, they found a way to turn sandy soil into something useable by the root systems of more temperate plants. Turns out the sandy soils have plenty of nutrients, but plants just have a hard time taking root. This new soil additive is cheap and allows for fairly expensive reversal of desertification.
We need to roll it out world wide. Who will lay for it? Tax payers… It means more usable land. Better availability of housing, etc.
Okay I need to ask this. For all I know you’re completely right but as a layman on this, what you said made very little sense to me, so maybe you’ll be able to explain it to me.
1) How would turning the Sahara desert, in Northern Africa, into arable land turn the Amazon, in Brazil, into a savannah?
2) How is the Sahara Desert a huge source of NUTRIENTS for the Amazon rainforest? It’s not even a huge source of nutrients for Africa as far as I know.
3) How would turning an overall barren environment into an environment teeming with life and growth be a negative thing?
4) Where have people been creating mountains to increase tourism? If anything, I think humans tend to break DOWN mountains for the ore and to make paths through them?
The only thing that you said that seemed to make sense to me (again, lawyer – not an environmental scientist) is that there are often unintentional consequences of well-meaning projects. But I can’t figure out how the Amazon rainforest’s destruction would be the consequence of the greening of the Sahara Dessert, separated by about 7250 miles of ocean.
Precisely, it’s the Bodélé Depression in northern Tchad which feed Amazonian forest.
millenia old dried fish littered the place with phosphate(nutrients) rich dust. Winds carry this dust to amazonian forest. there mushrooms fix phosphate in the soil and the forest can absorb it.
With a saharian forest, no dust, no phosphate, amazonia forest starves to savannah.
This is why brazilian farmers must always burn new acres of forest: The barren soil can’t keep phosphate and become sterile in a few years.
So what you’re saying is dust particles from Africa are able to remain airborne in very humid air all the way across the South Atlantic Ocean in such large amounts that it can supply nutrients for an entire rain forest? I hate to be a contrarian, but I honestly can say I am skeptical.
It’s very true though. I’ve had to fly around mega duststorm when going from sao paulo to Florida as a kid a few times. There are huge airstreams there. It a main reason hurricanes travel the way they do, and why there are doldrums off east Africa and nw Brazil.
In parts of Brazil the daily 1pm and 4pm showers start with mud rains. Also called blood rain where the dust clouds converge.
Bahia weather reports includes high level/altitude particle counts during their winter season (June July).
Some of the best fisheries in SA are also dependent on the yearly dust falls.
Btw we flew Varig or Braniff everytime. I miss the plane art they sported.
I understand and shared your skepticism, so I looked it up and the result is absolutely wild: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants
Have seen a couple nature shows lately that had good explanations and footage, including one that introduced me to the Tall Tower Observatory, Brazil’s giant tower to hold air-sampling equipment that monitors airborne particulate levels (and other things) from the prevailing Atlantic tradewinds.
It wouldn’t turn into a savannah, swamp maybe, but not savannah. Desert is determined by rainfall not flora. An ecosystem would still exist, and likely still rainforest, just with a few fish die offs to compensate for the change in the biosphere, which local humans are kind of doing anyway.
Problem is rain forests perpetuate their own rain. If you completely cleared the Amazon, it wouldn’t keep raining there.
Contrary to what so many people seem to misunderstand, climate do not exist independent of the environment in which it exists. This is why humans are so able to change the climate. Really we shouldn’t even call it “climate change”, we SHOULD call it “climate destruction” because it’s next to impossible return a climate back to its original state after it’s been changed due to human interference.
130 years ago, Roanoke Virginia was called “Big Lick” because another 40 years before that, it was a salt marsh and natural salt licks would occur and attract deer. These days it’s no longer a salt marsh. All they had to do was drain it. That happened some time in the 1850s. They simply drained it and it ceased being a salt marsh. The equipment for draining it no longer exists and there has not been any attempt at keeping it drained. In fact, the area is quite prone to flooding, but the salt marsh remains gone forever. Despite the area being flood prone, it’s no where near as wet as it used to be.
The places where the Amazon has been chopped down remain barren. Not wet, barren. Dry. The rain forest no longer exists there, and so it does not rain there.
So yes we absolutely can change a climate, and it’s really not that hard to do. Problem is we have no control over the new climate that takes its place. We could destroy that one too, but what we can’t do is control it.
“Climate destruction” would be a silly nomenclature. No “climate” has been destroyed, they have been, at most, altered. In some places, they have been altered for the better, in others, for the worse, in our current — biased, ignorant and rather incoherent — human opinion.
Fifty years ago, “greening” the Sahara would have been a full-stop positive endeavor. Now, on the other hand, we know that we haven’t got more than a bare clue how it all really functions.
We don’t actually know what effect any of our actions are having, or what the overall world change would be of any particular alteration of those actions. The same people are pushing the same policies they have for fifty years, and are on their fourth different rationale / pretext for arguing for their preferred policies.
(In 1975 it was “the Coming Ice Age”.)
Global Climate Change has exactly two alternatives: Global Climate Statis, and Global Climate Control. To achieve the former, you have to achieve the latter.
When the International groups stop talking about money transfers and other graft, and start talking about a Global Climate Control system, we will know they are serious.
If you are concerned about the “air particles” you can just figure them as snow at that altitude?
Personally, I think having to “stand up” for an entire intercontinental flight, especially on a spherical surface, would be incredibly painful.
They don’t have to stand up. They can sit down. Gwen, Pixel and Dabbler sat down previously while flying in the Shield.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-433-the-bubble-bus/
(panels 4 and 6)
given it is a sphere they really should be all huddled together at the lowest point like cuddling kittens.
Quite frankly, that didn’t look any more comfortable. ;)
Well, since they are muddling along at a piddly M8…it would only be 1.5 hours. Ironically, only a quarter hour longer than M10.
So – my question is – what could she have seen in the orb that would trigger tears? Are they even actually still on Earth? And why are they even flying there? Wouldn’t she have set a bookmark for home that she could wormhole to?
They are in Africa not an alien planet.
So no, they don’t need a wormhole, they are flying across the Atlantic.
Thinking this is a prelude to revealing brown ball’s powers.
It probably is the power core slash energy converter for the set.
Maybe it needs fed now.
Or it needs to poop. Something exotic and valuable- something advanced civilizations have fought wars over a few grams of in the past. That’d be a looper…
“So this…poop? It’s valuable?”
Later, ” I bought earth some extra systems and a beach world for myself…also we have a crapton of credits we can use to fix things…”
Or even worse her comball lights up with a message…
“We have been trying to reach you about your sphere’s warranty…”
I used to answer and tell them my car had 100,000 miles on it. At which point they would hang up.
That didn’t reduce the calls I received however.
I almost never get the calls anymore because my solution to them and to anyone else that calls me from an unknown number is to answer and hit mute. The robots are looking for a line that picks up and there is a noise on the other end. I don’t give them that and my number eventually gets scrubbed out of the databases geting sold around. Occasionally a new DB is generated but most companies would rather use the existing ones. A side benefit is never having to deal with bill collectors either because they use similar systems that wait to see if somebody is there before passing you through to an agent. That or if somebody badly mispronounces my name I know there’s somebody that I really don’t want to talk to.
When I joined the Air Force and went to basic training, when we got our uniforms and were headed back to the barracks, the skies opened up with rain. The drill instructor laughed and said, “I bet you all thought San Antonio was in the middle of the (cuss word) desert!”
I would say that the air particle streaks would do better (and less like bugs) with the speck at the other end of the trail, so it looks the dirt is flying *past* them instead of flying *faster than* them, but that’s just my two cents
Deserts are important ecosystems in their own right and full of very badass extremophile biodiversity!
Oh god no. The last thing we need right now is yet another reason to fight for the Sahara.
More insulting deserts.
Remember Dave, all of your characters aren’t you. I mean, yes Sydney is your self-insert and a Mary Sue, but you could at least look into what a desert is before you put so much published effort into insulting them.
Not really sure how I’m insulting deserts… Dabbler suggesting converting a desert to farmland is within our technical capability is a simple fact, not a value judgement. Note that Sydney had no comment on deserts nor a stated preference for potential future arability. Not sure why you’re mad at her.