We must learn our limits.
We are all something, but none of us are everything.
Blaise PascalLARGEST QUAKES - This morning -
5.3 NEAR COAST OF CENTRAL PERU
Yesterday -
3/27/10 -
None 5.0 or higher.
3/26/10 -
6.2 ATACAMA, CHILE
5.7 BANDA SEA
5.2 TONGA
VOLCANOES - ICELAND - The search and rescue association has issued a warning that dangerous toxic fumes are in the air in the immediate surroundings of the volcanic crater on Fimmvörduháls, which can cause permanent damages to the lungs if inhaled. The chemicals being released into the atmosphere are sulfur, fluorine, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which is odorless and deadly. Plans to open the road into the valley of Thórsmörk where the lava flow is headed were aborted Friday morning because the flow in the river Hvanná suddenly increased.
TROPICAL STORMS - Cyclone TWENTYTWO was 582 nmi WNW of Cairns, Australia.
Tropical storm Twentytwo was forecast to strike Australia at about 18:00 GMT on 27 March.
Forecasters say weather patterns are conspiring to produce a busy hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean, with one meteorologist predicting more than a half-dozen storms coming ashore in 2010. This follows a quiet 2009 season, in which the U.S. mainland was not touched by any of the giant tropical storms. "This year has the chance to be an extreme season," says AccuWeather, which correctly predicted 2009's quiet season and the record-setting snowfall this winter along the East Coast. "It is certainly much more like 2008 than 2009, as far as the overall threat to the United States' East and Gulf coasts."
The reasons most commonly cited for the 2010 forecast:
• A weakening of El Nino, the weather pattern that creates warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. In El Nino years, such as 2009, a persistent west-to-east wind blows across the southern United States. That wind tends to disrupt the formation of tropical systems in the Atlantic and Caribbean.
• Water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic that are warmer than last summer. Tropical systems get their power from warm water.
• Weaker winds off the west coast of Africa. That, forecasters say, will lessen the chances of dust from the Sahara Desert blowing into the Atlantic and disrupting the formation of tropical storms and hurricanes. Such a condition was present last year.
The hurricane season officially begins June 1.
EXTREME HEAT / WILDFIRES / DROUGHT / CLIMATE CHANGE - The year New Zealand blew strangely hot and cold. - Heatwaves and sudden snow bombarded the country in 2009, a year of extreme heat and cold that left many wondering which season they were in. Last year may have been fairly average by historical standards - ranking just 0.2C below the long-term temperature average of 12.5C - but the annual average masked a topsy-turvy year of sudden temperature change. The year got off to a dry start in January, with less than half the normal rainfall over much of the country combined with unusually warm temperatures in many places. February kicked off with a heatwave from the 7th to the 12th, and many places topped 34C. But those who thought they were in for a toasty year were due for a shock. Chilly southerly winds plunged temperatures to their COLDEST IN MAY in many places, with an extra dose of rain on top. The early chill ended abruptly in August, which was THE HOTTEST SINCE RECORDS BEGAN 155 YEARS AGO. All regions broke records for average August heat as northwesterly winds delivered an early spring. Then THE COLDEST OCTOBER SINCE WWII brought heavy snow dumps to Hawkes Bay and the central North Island and trapped unwary motorists in their cars. "We typically say winter is the months of June, July and August [but in 2009 we said] there was an early onset to winter and spring. Unfortunately it got cool again in October, so spring didn't last very long." The temperature extremes could not be explained by moderate El Nino conditions. "Sometimes the weather just happens."
CHINA - Emergency wells were being drilled and cloud-seeding operations carried out in southern China, where THE WORST DROUGHT IN DECADES has left millions of people without water and caused more than 1,000 schools to close. "The situation here will get worse in the coming months before it gets any better, but hopefully with more wells and water being diverted to those in need, we can help ease the situation. The drought, which has left southwestern China suffering since last year, has affected about 61 million people and left more than 12 million acres (about 5 million hectares) barren in Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing and Guangxi. "Cloud seeding hasn't been very successful, so even though we are drilling for wells and diverting water from dams to people in need, new areas will begin to suffer as long as there is no rain." China has been experimenting with weather modification for decades.
For parts of Yunnan, it is the WORST DROUGHT IN A CENTURY. Since late 2009, mountainous Yunnan and its neighboring provinces have received little rainfall, causing crop and livestock losses worth 23.7 billion yuan ($3.47 billion). Neighboring Guizhou province has been hit with its WORST DROUGHT IN 80 YEARS, while in Guangxi it is THE WORST DROUGHT IN 50 YEARS. In Guangxi, where sugar cane crops have perished and white sugar production is expected to decline this year, 67 producers have been forced to shut down, nearly double the number during the same period last year. Further south, the severe drought has dropped the Mekong River to its LOWEST LEVEL IN 20 YEARS after an early end to the 2009 wet season and low rainfall during the monsoons. The Mekong, which originates in the Tibetan Plateau and flows to southeast Asia through Yunnan, is the lifeblood for 65 million people in six countries — Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam.
China's huge land mass means drought can occur in one region while others have record-breaking temperatures and severe storms that can cause floods.
Monarch butterflies normally find sanctuary in the mountains of Mexico, away from the cold winters of North America, but a harsh winter of torrential rain and mudslides has decimated the monarch butterfly population. A harsh winter has reduced butterflies' population by as much as 50 percent. Not even sticking close together under tall fir trees as they normally do could protect them from the downpours and freezing temperatures. "We saw a number of things happen in Mexico this winter that shouldn't be happening but are probably due to climate change in some way."
"One of the things that's predicted from climate change is you see a lot of moisture coming into central Mexico in the dry season and that moisture came in with a passion this winter, and it was just very destructive. We had 15 inches of rain over a three-day period, and it was just devastating. "It was pretty clear that in some locations 80 percent of the butterflies had been lost, in other locations it had been 20 to 30 percent, and in other places it was 50 percent or more loss."
It's THE LOWEST NUMBER OF MONARCHS EVER SEEN returning to the United States. Around this time each year, sightings of the butterflies are reported from Florida to Texas, but this year there has been about a quarter of the usual sightings in the south. While researchers suspect climate change and the destruction of their habitat in the U.S. and Mexico as the cause of the population's precipitous drop, it may also be a natural phenomenon. "What we're going to try to do is get people to plant regionally appropriate milkweed all over the country so that we can create the habitat or try to replace some of the habitat that's being lost due to development and other conditions in this country."
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PICK YOUR POISON, WHICH OF THESE ARTICLES IS CORRECT?
A team of scientists has determined that the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 4th assessment report UNDERestimates the potential dangerous impacts that man-made climate change will have on society. "Even if all man-made greenhouse gas emissions were stopped tomorrow and carbon-dioxide levels stabilized at today's concentration, by the end of this century, the global average temperature would increase by about 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 2.4 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, which is significantly above the level which scientists and policy makers agree is a threshold for dangerous climate change. Of course, greenhouse gas emissions will not stop tomorrow, so the actual temperature increase will likely be significantly larger, resulting in potentially catastrophic impacts to society unless other steps are taken to reduce the Earth's temperature. Furthermore, while the oceans have slowed the amount of warming we would otherwise have seen for the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean's thermal inertia will also slow the cooling we experience once we finally reduce our greenhouse gas emissions." This means that the temperature rise we see this century will be largely irreversible for the next thousand years. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone is unlikely to mitigate the risks of dangerous climate change. Society should significantly expand research into geoengineering solutions that remove and sequester greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Geoengineering solutions must be in addition to, not replace, dramatic emission reductions if society is to avoid the most dangerous impacts from climate change."
Climate not changing as quickly as projected. When the global temperature computer models were developed, several important factors were either omitted or put in at adjusted rates such as sea surface temperatures, black dust from Eurasia and solar influence of the sun. All of these factors have an effect on global temperature along with greenhouse gases like methane. When the correct values for these factors were fed into the computer model, the adjusted global temperate went down. Water vapor in the upper atmosphere is declining and because it is declining, the temperature is not rising at the rate it was projected to raise. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and it is decreasing. "EPA is wrong; most of the warming is not, most likely, the result of changes in greenhouse gases." Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas, and according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the level of methane in the atmosphere is going up. Bovine flatulence, rice paddy agriculture, and coal mining are three of the main sources of methane gas emissions. But methane gas in the atmosphere is not increasing according to computer model projections. Global temperature is rising at a constant rate, not at a wild exponential rate as suggested by some computer models. When all of the computer models are all saying something different, how do we decide which one is correct? "Look out the window. It is not rocket science. See which model matches what the weather is doing now."
The science doesn't lie on climate change - Big Oil wants us to remain addicted to oil, a major source of carbon pollution. So it and other special interests have conducted an aggressive disinformation campaign for more than a decade to convince Americans that there's a major disagreement among scientists on the dangers posed by carbon pollution, just as the tobacco industry disputed the science to keep smokers addicted. Yes, the 3,000-page review of the scientific literature by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 has a couple of "trivial mistakes" in it. But the British Royal Academy, the oldest scientific body in the world, and the Met Office, part of the United Kingdom's Defense Ministry, noted that "even since the 2007 IPCC Assessment, the evidence for dangerous, long-term, and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened."
The basic science is clear. Naturally occurring, heat-trapping gases keep the planet about 60 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be, giving us the livable climate we have today. Since the industrial revolution, humankind has spewed vast quantities of extra greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere, causing more and more heat to be trapped. And so the atmosphere is warming. "The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record." It may have seemed like a cool January in parts of this country, but globally it was the hottest January in the satellite record. And while it may be counterintuitive, we actually get more snowstorms in warm years."
There is no global warming consensus - Call it the global warming crackup, an unfolding process of contradictory claims about glaciers, weather, and scientists asserting a consensus when none exists. Global warming alarmists can't make up their minds because the entire basis for their energy rationing project has collapsed into a mess of errors, exaggerations, and deceit. The Obama administration said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the "gold standard" for climate science, yet now the Environmental Protection Agency administrator won't defend it. The IPCC and Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now the IPCC has retracted several false claims concerning, among other things, rain forests shrinking, crops dying, and sea levels rising. We've been told weather is not to be confused with climate, except when you have heat waves or blizzards. We've been told cap-and-trade would create thousands of green jobs, yet the Congressional Budget Office, Department of Energy, National Black Chamber of Commerce, and others say it would mean a net loss of jobs.
We are told that increasing levels of CO2 will increase temperature, yet the key scientist in the climategate scandal says there's been "no statistically significant warming" in the past 15 years - all while CO2 levels have increased. We've been told that there is an "indisputable consensus" that human-caused global warming is happening and pushing the planet to certain disaster. Yet that same scientist now says that the vast majority of climate scientists don't agree on what the data are telling us. There is no consensus - except agreement there are significant gaps in what scientists know about the climate system.
HEALTH THREATS - Pandemic activity may be increasing across Central America and in some parts of South America. Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and parts of Brazil have reported increasing pandemic flu detections. Mexico is seeing more respiratory illnesses, though it's not clear if flu is the cause. Flu activity hasn't peaked in West Africa, though it is subsiding in Thailand. European countries are increasingly reporting influenza B.
