Disastrous weather and other natural catastrophes

[Holly Stick]

...Here are some samples of pyrocumulus clouds Clouds, man clouds just don't get enuf play.

Amen to that; such photos, Toe!
 
lagatta, a friend of mine who is Mennonite did some historical research on Russia.  She had no reason to like Stalin, but she told me she just could not see what else he could have done about the famine.
 
And yes, the biggest problem with global warming is that it will affect crops.  Gwynne Dyer has a pretty pessimistic view, and notes that while we may not notice the effect of the rise in the wheat price, people in some parts of the world will starve because of it:
 

...What is happening in Russia now, and its impacts elsewhere, give us an early glimpse of what that world will be like. And although nobody can say for certain that the current disaster there is due to climate change, it certainly could be...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/06-7

[Antonia]

I read this book, Global Warring, by Montreal native Cleo Paskal. It's a real kick in the head.

It's not just food security that's going to be a problem. Water is number one. Energy security is another. You can't make food without water and energy.

But the book takes it beyond the obvious.

For example, changing sea levels will wipe out entire island nations, and reconfigure coastlines. This will affect borders and territorial waters. One possible scenario is, as sea levels rise, the US Gulf coast, which is low-lying, will be inundated while Cuba, which is mountainous, will remain relatively intact. This raises all sorts of issues vis-a-vis that 200 mile zone (although it's not quite respected now.) But Russia is now drilling for oil off Cuba. Uh-oh.

Now multiply that all over the world. The geopolitics are scary.

[lagatta]

Holly Stick, my Stalin reference was to brutal forced collectivisation, though it wasn't the only factor.
 
Yes, this is all very scary indeed. And so-called world leaders are doing sweet-f-all...

[Boom Boom]

I've been told by long time residents here that shoreline erosion has claimed a lot of land here, but the Municipality will not step in and do anything until a house is actually falling down into the sea, and then it will relocate the owners - not do anything about the cause of the problem. All the Municipality has to do, it seems to me, is relay the extent of the shoreline erosion here to the provincial government which in turn can ask for help from the feds. But the Municipality doesn't seem to be interested. However, the guy that runs the entire Municipality - appointed by the provincial gov't 25 years ago - got his own community - Chevery - protected from shoreline erosion with a huge project that placed big rocks he full length of the community on the beach. Nothing for us.

[Holly Stick]

Alison has a map showing where the fires are:
 
http://thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com/2010/08/russia-is-burning.html

[transplant]

The Russian Meteorological Center is saying that the current heat wave is the warmest in Russia in the last 1000 years:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/09/russia-heat-wave-one-thousand-years-global-warming/

[Toedancer]

And the non-leaders who have the power to make a difference still don't connect the dots. 

[Toedancer]

Celestial/Terestial/Global Warming - more complicated than ever.

It seems scientists/meteorologists are speculating about more than global warming to explain extreme heat in eastern N.A., Russia while our mirror in S. America are experiencing extreme cold, killing flora/fauna and tropical fish They also broke records for snow/cold/temps.

Blocked Jet Stream

Climate change has been cited as one possibility, but the scientist   Gerald Meehl, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in   Colorado, told New Scientist magazine there was no way to test   the theory, as the resolution in climate change models was too low to   replicate weather patterns such as blocking events.
Another cause could be low solar activity, Mr Fisher said.

April article re:   [/b]
More recently Cosmic Rays have been taken into consideration. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2173295.stm

  But Yu's study suggests   that cosmic rays, tiny charged particles which bombard all planets with   varying frequency depending on solar wind intensity, could be the   missing link. 
  Earlier research suggested   a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, but without positing the   altitude dependence Yu believes exists. 
           

Atmospheric measurements found the temperature gap                                                          He said: "A systematic change in global cloud cover will change the atmospheric heating profile.    "In other words, the   cosmic ray-induced global cloud changes could be the long-sought   mechanism connecting solar and climate variability."[/t][/t][/t]

Nat.Geo is telling us there is a connection between Pakistan's floods and Russia's fires But I don't think S. America's extreme cold is mentioned??

Deke Arndt, head of the Climate Monitoring Branch of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, agreed it's likely that the fires can be traced back to the monsoon.He   noted that the events may also be prolonged by an atmospheric "logjam"   that's common in the summer but which has been unusually "stubborn and   long-lasting" this year.
The blockage occurs when atmospheric   winds lock climate phenomena—such as large storms or heat waves—into   place for a long period of time. In the United States in the summer, for   example,  storms will "squat on a place and sit and spin for a week,"   Arndt said.
"These features, while they're strong, are also really   persistent," he said. They "show up [as] day after day of rainfall in   India and Pakistan ... and day after day of oppressive conditions in   western Russia."

Remember back in Jan. I posted a link to the Star telling us our North Pole was drifting at 40 miles per year towards Russia?

Magnetic N Pole affecting climate: Confirmed so says an unfinished article.
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=print&thread=1280

The arguing on that board is tiresome. But in one intriguing article (no longer avail. @ Canada.com) (2005, after the Big Tsunami)  it says : Curiously, the speed with which the pole moves could be related to   dramatic events like the massive earthquake that caused last December's   devastating tsunami. That quake was big enough to alter the shape of   Earth and jar the planet into a slightly different axis of rotation. It   also had enough power to jolt the molten iron that powers the magnetic   field, and could be partly responsible for magnetic "jerks" that are   propelling the magnetic North Pole, Newitt said.




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[Toedancer]

Perhaps this should be in our Global Warming thread, but I want to continue it here, because earth seems to be in some sort of transition right now, hence some extreme weather. Okay so I was checking out the Hook
when I saw the article re: Gordon Campbell going to Bilderberg on the public's dime...blah blah...but this last bit caught my eye.

The official website said the agenda included discussions on "financial   reform, security, cyber technology, energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, world   food problem, global cooling, social networking, medical science and   European Union/ United States relations.

So natch I googled Global Cooling and see another new theory from a physicist from the Waterloo Uni.

From the Financial Post  Long-term global cooling began in 2002, according to a just-released  study in the Journal  of Cosmology,   a peer-reviewed publication produced at  Harvard-Smithsonian’s Center   for Astrophysics. Man-made global warming  was real and dangerous, the   study finds, but the danger has passed.
The  study,   authored by Qing-Bin Lu, a rising star at the Department of  Physics   and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explains  why   climate models have been so spectacularly wrong in trying to tie the    global warming of the last half of the 20^th century to CO2 —    the climate modelers fingered the wrong culprit when they targeted CO2.    The true culprits, Dr. Lu explains, were CFCs, the now banned    substances that until the 1990s had been a refrigerant and propellant to    products as diverse as air conditioners and hair spray cans.
Fortunately for the globe,   environmentalists had CFCs banned because  of their role in depleting   the ozone layer, not realizing that the ban  was simultaneously solving   the global warming threat.
According to Dr. Lu, the phase-out of CFCs will be reversing the  global warming effect by ushering in a 50  to 70-year period of global cooling.
So if the earth is cooling why do we need a big expensive climate change bill? The answer is we don’t and Congress knows this.

  Not just Congress, Bilderbergers/Canada etc.
Interesting huh? We are in transition of something, that's fer sure.

[pogge]

From the Financial Post...

From Lawrence Solomon who will grab anything he can find that might remotely debunk climate change. Here's a short analysis of Qing-Bin Lu's paper which concludes that CFC's have only played a small part in global warming.

[Toedancer]

Here's a short analysis of Qing-Bin Lu's paper which concludes that CFC's have only played a small part in global warming.

Yes CFC's have played a small part, just as carbon dioxide has played a part. Mojib Latif author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said  "No climate specialist would ever say that 100 percent of the warming we have seen is down to greenhouse gas emissions."
His research also said that natural fluctuations in ocean temperature could have a   bigger impact on global temperature than expected. In particular, the   study concluded that cooling in the oceans could offset global warming,   with the average temperature over the decades 2000-2010 and 2005-2015   predicted to be no higher than the average for 1994-2004.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06921.html

 Natural processes and cycles are part of the warming trend we are now in and I just wish it wasn't all based on models. The truth is no one knows all the causes, many factors are working together all the time, the climate is affecting our weather, it's part of climatic evolution. Unfortunately, since the science is not unequivocally in, climate change talks between countries go nowhere.

[lagatta]

Over 20 million now affected by Pakistan flooding: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article18220

[Antonia]

Hey, I hear Lindsay Lohan is getting sprung from rehab!

[lagatta]

Hope she doesn't decide to go help out in Pakistan!

[Croghan27]

Hey, I hear Lindsay Lohan is getting sprung from rehab!

  well said ...