Global Warming!!!!

[Emmett]

Newsflash April 9, 2007

Freezing tempatures have blanketed the nation this morning covering almost the entire continent of North America. Snow is falling right now over a larger area than EVER IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND for April 9th since records were kept. The Easter Bunny's pecker is frozen into a permanent woody.

As of 5:00 am this morning more area has accumulated snow than EVER IN HISTORY for this date.

Farmers report the loss of more crops especially citrus products than in any year of record this past winter.

Frigid tempatures have covered the nation this morning and it is snowing everywhere. The midwest is covered. Wyoming interstates are closed and considered too trecherous to travel. New Mexico has as much as a foot of snow in some places and folks who NEVER see snow have it this morning.

Al Gore's residence has the thermostat set at 80 degrees in all 32 rooms this morning and I suspect his jet crew will have to take extreme precautions against icing to see that his private jet functions properly today for when he takes it around to warn everyone about global warming on Monday after he flies it to relatives houses for Easter. I understand he phoned John Edwards earlier this morning to inquire as to how he is warming his big phat palace as well.

One might note that Phoenix, Arizona (the nation's warmest metropolis) experienced it's lowest average high temps in 50 years last year. This was also true for many other cities in the US.

The 5 major hurricanes that were predicted to kill hundreds of Americans, well, didn't happen. As a matter of fact not one single hurricane made landfall in the US last year. Not ONE!!!!!! This doesn't lend much credibility to the scare tactics used by so called "experts" does it?

Poor Easter Bunny!

 

[red states rule]

Newsflash April 9, 2007

Freezing tempatures have blanketed the nation this morning covering almost the entire continent of North America. Snow is falling right now over a larger area than EVER IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND for April 9th since records were kept. The Easter Bunny's pecker is frozen into a permanent woody.

As of 5:00 am this morning more area has accumulated snow than EVER IN HISTORY for this date.

Farmers report the loss of more crops especially citrus products than in any year of record this past winter.

Frigid tempatures have covered the nation this morning and it is snowing everywhere. The midwest is covered. Wyoming interstates are closed and considered too trecherous to travel. New Mexico has as much as a foot of snow in some places and folks who NEVER see snow have it this morning.

Al Gore's residence has the thermostat set at 80 degrees in all 32 rooms this morning and I suspect his jet crew will have to take extreme precautions against icing to see that his private jet functions properly today for when he takes it around to warn everyone about global warming on Monday after he flies it to relatives houses for Easter. I understand he phoned John Edwards earlier this morning to inquire as to how he is warming his big phat palace as well.

One might note that Phoenix, Arizona (the nation's warmest metropolis) experienced it's lowest average high temps in 50 years last year. This was also true for many other cities in the US.

The 5 major hurricanes that were predicted to kill hundreds of Americans, well, didn't happen. As a matter of fact not one single hurricane made landfall in the US last year. Not ONE!!!!!! This doesn't lend much credibility to the scare tactics used by so called "experts" does it?

Poor Easter Bunny!

Someone please break the news to Al Gore - you will find him in his mansion. Look for the one with the electric meter spinning around at 60 miles per hour

 

[Superlative]

Someone please break the news to Al Gore - you will find him in his mansion. Look for the one with the electric meter spinning around at 60 miles per hour

You dont find this a glaring example of Climate Change?

 

[red states rule]

You dont find this a glaring example of Climate Change?

Agence France Presse: 50 Million People to Lose Homes to Global Warming
Posted by Warner Todd Huston on April 8, 2007 - 08:14.
Agence France Presse has published a whopper about Global Warming, titled "Climate refugees -- the growing army without a name", in which we get the claims of a UN Climate Committee that "50 million" will be homeless because of Global Warming "by 2010". But the report is so filled with could be's, might be's and the ever popular "some experts say" that it is hard to take the claims seriously. It is, in fact, downright impossible to believe a word in the report unless you suspend all faculties of disbelief and merely accept as a matter of faith that they "could be" right. Of course, that is the nub of the Globaloney debate in the first place; the willing suspension of disbelief.

The first paragraph of this report sets a dichotomy that the rest of the report tries hard to refute with their "expert" testimony.

Global warming could create tens of millions of climate refugees, although numbers are hard to predict with accuracy and the definition itself is open to debate, experts say.

"Experts say", do they? Yet, even as the claims that our mean 'ol Globaloney could create all these refugees the report admits it is "hard to predict with accuracy". Then how do we take them seriously? Could our "experts" be any more disingenuous?

Just about every paragraph is so filled with qualifiers that it is hard to know where facts begin and fantasy reigns. The next two paragraphs don't work to solidify real facts any better than the self-contradictory first one.

"According to some estimates, there are already almost as many environmentally displaced people on the planet as traditional refugees," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"As the impacts of climate change strike home, the numbers are likely to rise considerably, possibly as high as 50 million by 2010," de Boer said on Friday on the sidelines of a meeting in Brussels of the UN's top climate panel.

In our first three short paragraphs alone we find one "could", one "some" and one "likely", not to mention one "hard to predict with accuracy" and one "according to some estimates", qualifying the claims as not grounded in provable fact.

We are presented with not one salient fact in a piece that abounds with fearmongering and arm waving. Of course the UN wants ever more power and money to "solve" the problem that they cannot even quantify, naturally.

The most ridiculous part of the article uses Hurricane Katrina to justify their absurd refugee claims.

By some yardstick, it could also apply to the tens of thousands who fled New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, they say.

Some scientists, though, say there is no long-term evidence yet for declaring Katrina to have been a storm intensified by global warming, rather than a natural, extremely violent event.

"By some yardstick"... now that was a howler.

Another amusing quote was by one Thomas Downing, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute at Oxford, who said "Not all will be permanent refugees..." What, exactly is a "permanent refugee", anyway? At some point aren't they just called immigrants? How can you be a "permanent refugee"? When someone leaves their home as a refugee for what ever reason do they forever more just wander the Earth never to settle again?

What tosh.

Even our renowned "experts" cannot seem to agree what the term "environmental refugee" means. As the report nears its end a disagreement is extent.

...A major report on the impact of global warming released by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the Brussels meeting avoided the term "refugee" entirely, referring instead to "environmental migrants."

..."Estimates of the number of people who may become environmental migrants are at best guesswork," the report said, citing several uncertainties: migrations that are often temporary or seasonal, while motivations are complex and can include the desire to escape from poverty.

..."The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) doesn't want people to talk about climate refugees," UNFCCC spokesman John Hay said. "They would prefer that the term 'refugee' apply to politics only."

In other words, they got nuthin' but a political agenda. In this case, they don''t even have Al Gore's vaunted "consensus"!

What they do have, however, is what my neighborhood pals when I was a child used to call "shoulda', coulda' woulda's". Nothing but a bunch of claims, but not a single concrete fact is to be had.

But like all Globaloney zealots, fear is all they need to wring out of their flock of true believers more money for ever more "studies" and increasing support to legitimize the UN panels and committees that will result in ever more political power for the those who claim to be the "experts". Truly a self-perpetuating scheme they have there.

And, obviously, they can count on the AFP to lend them a hand.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11906

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - we's like a frog inna kettle - we all gonna die...

Record Heat Recorded Worldwide
June 20, 2017 — The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports the planet Earth is experiencing another exceptionally warm year with record-breaking temperatures occurring in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.

At least 60 people have been killed in the devastating forest fires in central Portugal. The World Meteorological Organization says one of the factors contributing to these run-away wildfires are very high temperatures that have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius. Extremely high temperatures also have been recorded in Spain and in France, which issued an Amber alert, the second highest alert level on Tuesday. WMO reports near record heat is also being reported in California and in the Nevada deserts.

Meteorologists report North Africa and the Middle East are experiencing extremely hot weather with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius. But WMO spokeswoman Claire Nullis says the hottest place on Earth appears to be the town of Turbat in southwestern Pakistan, which reported a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius in May. “It seems like this is a new temperature record for Asia. If it is verified, it will equal a record ... which was set in Kuwait last July. So, we will now set up an investigation committee to see if that indeed is a new temperature record for the region,” Nullis said.

A family cools off in a stream during a heat wave, in Islamabad, Pakistan, May 30, 2017. The town of Turbat in southwestern Pakistan reported a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius in May.​

WMO Senior Scientist Omar Baddour says the world heat record of 56 degrees Celsius was recorded in Death Valley in the United States in 1913. “It is very difficult to break a world record because it is not easy to have all the conditions in terms of pressure, invasion of air together at one place. So, the concern now is we are close to cross that record. We are now 54. We are not that far.”

The WMO says it expects global heat waves will likely trigger more deadly wildfires. If necessary precautions are not taken, it warns many people will die from the heat, as happened in 2003, when heat waves across Europe killed 70,000 people. Scientists predict climate change will cause heat waves to become more intense, more frequent and longer.

Record Heat Recorded Worldwide

See also:

Too Hot to Handle: Study Shows Earth's Killer Heat Worsens
June 19, 2017 | WASHINGTON — Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.

Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them. A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated. “The United States is going to be an oven,” said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground. Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn't part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so. “This is already bad. We already know it,” Mora said. “The empirical data suggest it's getting much worse.”

Children cooling off at a water fountain during a heat wave in Santiago, Chile.​

Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia. Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It's more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe. If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.

A hotter world doesn't necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That's because he found over time the same blistering conditions _ heat and humidity _ killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can't afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future. “This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades - hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn't part of the study. Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn't have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change. Just one heat wave - in Europe in 2003 - killed more than 70,000 people.

Too Hot to Handle: Study Shows Earth's Killer Heat Worsens

 

[waltky]

Things about to cool off...

Solar Minimum is Coming
High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.

But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares—magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity. Until it’s not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm. “This is called solar minimum,” says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. “And it’s a regular part of the sunspot cycle.”

The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020. While intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares subside during solar minimum, that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form. For instance, says Pesnell, “during solar minimum we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.” Coronal holes are vast regions in the sun’s atmosphere where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles to escape the sun as the fast solar wind.

Pesnell says “We see these holes throughout the solar cycle, but during solar minimum, they can last for a long time - six months or more.” Streams of solar wind flowing from coronal holes can cause space weather effects near Earth when they hit Earth’s magnetic field. These effects can include temporary disturbances of the Earth’s magnetosphere, called geomagnetic storms, auroras, and disruptions to communications and navigation systems. During solar minimum, the effects of Earth’s upper atmosphere on satellites in low Earth orbit changes too.

Normally Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated and puffed up by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience friction as they skim through the outskirts of our atmosphere. This friction creates drag, causing satellites to lose speed over time and eventually fall back to Earth. Drag is a good thing, for space junk; natural and man-made particles floating in orbit around Earth. Drag helps keep low Earth orbit clear of debris. But during solar minimum, this natural heating mechanism subsides. Earth’s upper atmosphere cools and, to some degree, can collapse. Without a normal amount of drag, space junk tends to hang around.

MORE

 

[Old Rocks]

We hope. A major Maunder Minimum might give us a bit of a breathing spell in which to reduce the GHG emissions. However, it will not stop the continued increase in temperatures, just slow it a bit.

 

[waltky]

An increase of 188%...

Global warming could drive 660,000 more people per year to Europe
Dec 22, 2017 - The number of asylum seekers fleeing their home countries to the European Union will increase 188 percent — to 660,000 applications per year — by 2100 if carbon emissions and global warming continue on their current path, according to new estimates published Thursday in Science Magazine.

Where did these numbers come from? Environmental economists Wolfram Schlenker and Anouch Missirian arrived at these figures by combining asylum-application data with NASA projections on future earth warming. The pair from Columbia University looked at applications to 103 EU nations, filed between 2000 and 2014, and temperature variations in the home countries of those who applied. They found when severe fluctuations in temperatures happened, throwing off the optimal conditions for agriculture, asylum applications increased as a result.

A migrant woman warms herself by the fire at a makeshift camp in the transit zone on the Serbian-Hungarian border near Horgos, Serbia​

Why it matters: “Our findings highlight the extent to which countries are interlinked, and Europe will see increasing numbers of desperate people fleeing,” Schlenker said. This comes at a time when “Europe is already conflicted about how many refugees to admit.” Greenhouse gases, by nature, cross geographic borders, and Schlenker told the NewsHour that developing countries will be impacted more severely by climate change, resulting in a human spillover into more resilient nations. While the future extent of global warming is hard to guess, Schlenker said the best case scenario for emissions would limit warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius. But based on their predictions, asylum applications to the EU would still increase 28 percent — 98,000 extra applications annually.

The EU received 1.2 million applications from first-time asylum seekers in 2015, a record setting number and more than double the year prior. What’s more, about half of Europe’s asylum applicants from 2015 to 2016 still had decisions pending at the end of 2016. “These findings will be especially important to policymakers since they show that climate impacts can go beyond the borders of a single country by possibly driving higher migration flows,” said Juan-Carlos Ciscar, an economics and climate expert at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, who wasn’t involved in the study.

What’s next:

 

[waltky]

Heat Waves Affecting Oceans, Too...

Heat Waves Affecting Oceans, Too
August 15, 2018 | WASHINGTON — Even the oceans are breaking temperature records in this summer of heat waves.

Off the San Diego coast, scientists earlier this month recorded the highest seawater temperatures since daily measurements began in 1916. "Just like we have heat waves on land, we also have heat waves in the ocean,'' said Art Miller of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Between 1982 and 2016, the number of "marine heat waves'' roughly doubled, and most likely they will become more common and intense as the planet warms, a study released Wednesday found. Prolonged periods of extreme heat in the oceans can damage kelp forests and coral reefs, and harm fish and other marine life. "This trend will only further accelerate with global warming,'' said Thomas Frolicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who led the research.

Surfers leave the water next to Scripps Pier, Aug. 2, 2018, in San Diego. A recent measurement of seawater temperature off Scripps Pier broke a record — it reached 79.5 degrees Fahrenheit on Aug. 9.​

His team defined marine heat waves as extreme events in which sea-surface temperatures exceeded the 99th percentile of measurements for a given location. Because oceans both absorb and release heat more slowly than air, most marine heat waves last for at least several days — and some for several weeks, said Frolicher. "We knew that average temperatures were rising. What we haven't focused on before is that the rise in the average comes at you in clumps of very hot days — a shock of several days or weeks of very high temperatures,'' said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist who was not involved in the study.

A little is too much

Many sea critters have evolved to survive within a fairly narrow band of temperatures compared with creatures on land, and even incremental warming can be disruptive. Some free-swimming sea animals like bat rays or lobsters may shift their routines. But stationary organisms like coral reefs and kelp forests "are in real peril,'' said Michael Burrows, an ecologist at the Scottish Marine Institute, who was not part of the research. In 2016 and 2017, persistent high ocean temperatures off eastern Australia killed off as much as half of the shallow water corals of the Great Barrier Reef — with significant consequences for other creatures dependent upon the reef. "One in every four fish in the ocean lives in or around coral reefs,'' said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland. "So much of the ocean's biodiversity depends upon a fairly small amount of the ocean floor.'' The latest study in Nature relied on satellite data and other records of sea-surface temperatures, including from ships and buoys. It didn't include the recent record-breaking measurements off Scripps Pier in San Diego — which reached 79.5 degrees Fahrenheit on August 9 — but Frolicher and Miller said the event was an example of a marine heat wave.

​

A Guadalupe fur seal, foreground, passes by as SeaWorld animal rescue team member Heather Ruce feeds a California sea lion at a rescue facility in San Diego, Feb. 26, 2013, when rescue crews were seeing a higher than average amount of stranded sea lions. Marine biologists nicknamed a patch of persistent high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2016 “the Blob.” During that period, decreased phytoplankton production led to a “lack of food for many species."​

Miller said he knew something was odd when he spotted a school of bat rays — which typically only congregate in pockets of warm water — swimming just off the pier earlier this month. Changes in ocean circulation associated with warmer surface waters will most likely mean decreased production of phytoplankton — the tiny organisms that form the basis of the marine food web, he said. Marine biologists nicknamed a patch of persistent high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2016 "the Blob.'' During that period, decreased phytoplankton production led to a cascading lack of food for many species, causing thousands of California sea lion pups to starve, said Miller, who had no role in the Nature study. "We've repeatedly set new heat records. It's not surprising, but it is shocking,'' he said.

Heat Waves Affecting Oceans, Too