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Signs
Supplement: Climate and Earth Changes
November
2005
LEE COUNTY - While watching NBC2
coverage of Hurricane Wilma about two dozen residents
called the station reporting an unusual sighting.
While watching a Doppler loop of Hurricane Wilma coming
ashore, a number two appeared in the eye of the storm.
In going back through the recorded Doppler loop,
we found exactly what viewers were talking about.
The image below was not altered in any way -
it's a screen capture from the Doppler system. You
can click 'play'
... to watch the actual Doppler loop.
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ITHACA, N.Y. - With a month
of widespread flooding from Maine to Maryland, it
should come as no surprise that it was the wettest
October on record in 15 cities throughout the Northeast,
Cornell University meteorologists reported Monday.
Five of those cities - Allentown, Pa.; Concord, N.H.;
Islip, N.Y.; Newark, N.J.; and Providence, R.I. -
all recorded the wettest month ever, said Kathryn
Vreeland, a meteorologist at Cornell's Northeast Regional
Climate Center.
Portland, Maine, had 14.37 inches, but that fell
short of the record 16.86 inches in October 1996.
Still, it was the city's second-wettest October and
third-wettest month ever.
The hurricanes that rolled over
the Gulf Coast in late September and October weren't
necessarily to blame for the wetness.
"Blame the jet stream," said Ross Dickson
of the National Weather Service's National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
"There was a strong blocking mechanism in the
North Atlantic that allowed the tropical moisture
from the remnants of those storms to flow northward
in the upper atmosphere, where it got caught in a
pattern of weak troughs and cold fronts," Dickson
said. "That was the problem, it just sat there
and didn't go anywhere for a while." [...] |
If emissions of heat-trapping
gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at
the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming
and a near-total loss of Arctic tundra, according
to a new climate study.
Over all, the world would experience profound transformations,
some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and
all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the
authors of the study, being published today in The
Journal of Climate.
"The question is no longer
whether we will need to address this problem, but
when we will need to address the problem,"
said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and
a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department
of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University.
"We can either address it now, before we severely
and irreversibly damage our climate, or we can wait
until irreversible damage manifests itself strongly,"
Dr. Caldeira said. "If all we do is try to adapt,
things will get worse and worse." [...] |
SYDNEY - A lightning strike
killed 68 dairy cows waiting to be milked on an Australian
farm, local media reported Wednesday.
The cows were standing together in a paddock Monday
when an electrical storm hit near Dorrigo on Australia's
mid-east coast, radio reports said.
Sixty-eight cows were killed by lightning, but another
69 survived, it said. |
PARIS - Mediterranean countries
from Tunisia to Turkey face a bleak environmental
future with concrete coastlines, rising temperatures,
mountains of refuse and endless oil slicks, according
to a UN prognosis for the region in 2025.
Only a radical change in public policy and increased
cooperation between northern and southern states will
prevent the dismal forecast from coming true, according
to the UN Environment Programme's "Plan Bleu"
Mediterranean centre. [...]
The growth of built-up areas in northern countries
and illegal urbanisation in the south, increased car
use and soaring energy consumption will all exacerbate
environmental problems, while carbon dioxide emissions
are set to leap by 45 percent to 2.8 billion tonnes
from 2000 to 2025, the study warns.
Climate change, largely caused by carbon dioxide,
is likely to be "twice as fast" in the Mediterranean
basin than in northern Europe, threatening more droughts,
forest fires and parasitic infections. [...] |
BEIJING - Large parts of Sichuan,
a southwest Chinese province known as the country's
breadbasket, may be covered in sand in a few years'
time because of the rapidly expanding desert, state
media said Friday.
Under particular threat is the Chengdu plain, a source
of grain since ancient times, the China Daily reported,
citing the Sichuan forestry department.
The reason is spreading desertification of the Ruo'ergai
Grassland, located 300 kilometers (190 miles) away
at an altitude of between 3,500 and 4,000 meters (11,700
and 13,300 feet) above sea level, according to the
paper. [...] |
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Last Updated Thu, 10 Nov 2005
05:34:56 EST
CBC News
Environment Canada is trying
to determine whether a tornado was responsible for
ripping the roof off an elementary school in Hamilton,
Ont., on Wednesday, slightly injuring two students.
The children were among a group practising volleyball
in the gym of the Lawfield Public School at about
4 p.m. when a bout of severe weather hit.
"I just heard a big gust of wind and the roof just
collapsed," said Matt Theoret, one of the students
in the gym. "The windows blew in... We all ran."
Two students who were hit by falling debris were taken
to hospital for treatment.
"This emergency scene could have been much worse and
a lot more tragic just due to the fact that if it
had happened a half hour earlier, the elementary school
would have been filled with children or with children
leaving," said Bob Simpson of Hamilton's EMS.
A number of children still doing after-school activities
at Lawfield were evacuated to a nearby arena, but
then that building's roof began peeling off.
School officials have closed Lawfield until further
notice.
Eyewitnesses reported black skies and funnel-shaped
clouds just before the bout of severe weather hit,
downing trees and power lines.
Environment Canada has yet to confirm a tornado was
responsible for the damage, since an on-site assessment
must be done. That will happen Thursday, when weather
experts have a chance to examine the pattern of debris
and the extent of the damage.
However, Hamilton is in a part of southern Ontario
where tornadoes have hit in the past.
Houses damaged as well
A large tree fell in front of Steve Burkholder's house
and the wind flipped over his camper trailer, which
had been parked nearby.
Burkholder was inside with his daughter at the time.
"I just felt the windows kind of go whoosh," he said,
describing how he looked outside to see his trailer
sitting on its roof on his front lawn.
The winds took a toll on Hazel Clarke's house "We
were all just relaxing and then we heard thunder and
lightning and the door banged," she said. "Then we
heard it again and all of a sudden the roof caved
in. The whole of the roof of the house is gone."
About 5,000 homes were without power in the wake of
the storm, but electricity had been restored to most
of them by Thursday morning.
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AFP
Thu Nov 10, 2:04 AM ET
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - United
Nations officials have warned that widespread rain
in Pakistan's quake zone could be disastrous for their
struggle to contain an outbreak of acute diarrhoea
in squalid tent camps.
There have been at least 200 cases and possibly as
many as 750 at one camp for homeless quake survivors
in Pakistani Kashmir, amid fears that it could be
cholera, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF
said.
"Rain would be disastrous,"
WHO emergency coordinator Rachel Lavy told AFP at
the main camp on the sports ground of the devastated
university in the Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad,
where around 3,000 people are living.
"Diarrhoeal illness and rain water go hand in hand,"
she added.
Light rain -- the first for six days -- started in
quake-hit northern Pakistan and parts of Kashmir early
Thursday, while snow is expected at night, the Pakistani
meteorological department said.
"All earthquake-affected areas
will have intermittent rain today and Friday," a spokesman
for the department said. "The rainfall will be moderate
in the plains and heavy in mountainous areas."
Winter weather poses the biggest threat to survivors
of the October 8 quake, which killed 74,000 in Pakistan
and 1,300 in India. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
has warned there could be a massive second wave of
deaths.
The disaster left around three million people homeless.
The numbers in the camps that have sprung up in almost
every town and village are swelling as people come
down from the freezing Himalayan mountains.
Aid workers said they had succesfully treated existing
diarrhoea cases at the main camp in Muzaffarabad and
were now focusing on prevention, by teaching people
how to keep clean and setting up an isolation tent
for the sick.
Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors
Without Borders, had also dug new latrines at the
site. [...]
"If there is rain it will escalate the situation,"
she told AFP. "The hygiene situation is terrible in
the camp, there is open defecation, kids are playing
around -- it is quite a mess."
She added that there were more than 30 camps throughout
Muzaffarabad, all of which could be affected and most
of which lack adequate sanitation and water supplies.
UN officials say the symptoms closely fit the definition
of cholera but add that there are other waterborne
microbes that could cause the condition.
"We are taking it as seriously as if it were cholera,"
Jan Vandemoortele, the United Nations Emergency Coordinator
in Pakistan, told AFP.
"We are still awaiting confirmation but this is in
line with what we have been saying, that sanitation
is a potential timebomb."
The WHO's Lavy said that "in a way it does not matter
what it is because acute watery diarrhoea is serious.
The main thing is that we have to prevent the spread
of disease."
Lavy also appealed for more
international donations to help survivors. A 550-million-dollar
emergency UN appeal remains underfunded.
"The task is enormous, we don't have all the aid agencies
here because they don't have money to come here. That's
why we are constantly making urgent appeals to the
international community to provide funds," she said.
US President George W. Bush called on Americans late
Wednesday to open their wallets for the victims of
the quake.
"I ask all of our citizens and businesses to contribute
generously to this cause," the president said.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf,
a key Bush ally in the "war on terror", last week
accused the West of double standards for giving more
money after the Indian Ocean tsunami because foreign
tourists were involved.
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By Justin Huggler in Bagh, Kashmir
Published: 13 November 2005
UK Independent
Thousands have no shelter with
the first snows of winter only days away
At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still
have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just
days away, international relief agencies have warned.
Aid workers are scrambling to get tents to survivors
in high mountain areas where snow may arrive any day,
but the international relief effort is failing.
The problem is a severe lack of funds. Relief agencies
warn that if they do not get adequate shelters to survivors
before snow falls, thousands will die.
A desperate plea made to The Independent on Sunday,
from a village in the mountains above the Karakoram
Highway in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province,
illustrated the scale of the crisis.
"Please tell the British government to help us. Please
tell anyone," Mohammed Idris said by telephone. "We
have no tents and it is so cold at night. If we do not
have tents soon the children will die."
Mr Idris said he was one of 4,000 villagers in Rajmerra
with only 20 tents between them. On some nights, he
added, temperatures already dip below freezing and water
turns to ice. On other nights survivors are pelted with
torrential rain, havenothing to sleep under and sit
awake all night, shivering.
"We can see the snow on the hills and it will be here
any day now," Mr Idris added. "I went to the Pakistan
army today to ask for tents but they say they cannot
help, as they don't have any. Please tell people we
need tents, food and blankets." Rajmerra lies in Battamori
district, near Battagaram. Time for them is running
out fast.
Much the same situation can be seen throughout northern
Pakistan. In the village of Maira, in the hills above
Bagh, we found a two-month-old baby named Ariba, sleeping
with her mother under a thin sheet of tarpaulin that
did not even cover the rope-bed, which jutted out into
the rain. At 4,500ft above sea level, temperatures plunge
once darkness falls and the snow will be here soon,
too.
"If it starts to snow we'll have to try to build a new
house," Ariba's father, Abdul Rauf, said. But the family
has no money and no building materials.
In the same village we found Mohammed Haleem salvaging
wood from his ruined home to use as winter fuel, including
beams, doors and even the roof thatch. He was dismembering
the house to keep his family alive. "It burns my heart
to do this but I have no choice," he said.
Of an estimated three million people made homeless by
the earthquake, only 10,000 are in official relief camps.
Most remain in their often remote mountain villages,
where aid is still struggling to get through. The charity
World Vision last week said around 250,000 survivors
had received no aid at all.
Aid agencies say they are doing what they can but governments
have not put up enough money. The United Nations has
received only $133m (£76m) towards an emergency appeal
for $550m. It urgently needs $42m just to keep the current
aid effort going.
Pakistan says that out of the $2bn pledged by foreign
governments, it has received only $9.5m. The charity
Oxfam says Britain has contributed only 24 per cent
of what it says would be its "fair share", based on
the size of its economy.
Even when survivors do have tents, they are often inadequate
for the needs of a fierce Himalayan winter. In Maira,
where the Pakistan army finally dropped some tents -
though not enough to go around - they were lightweight
summer tents that are not even waterproof.
All over the quake-affected area, there is the smell
of rotting bodies. No one has had time to dig out the
corpses, such is the struggle to stay alive.
Even in a city that enjoys easy access, such as Muzaffarabad,
the state of the relief camps is terrible. In one camp,
we found 3,000 people sharing 12 toilets. These camps
have already suffered outbreaks of diarrhoea and doctors
fear cholera may follow.
Pakistani troops evicted quake survivors from one informal
relief camp in the city as the sanitation and overcrowding
were so poor that they feared for people's lives.
Some survivors said the Pakistan authorities had inadvertently
added to their woes. In Maira, they said the authorities
thwarted their attempts to draw on their savings to
rebuild their homes by freezing their accounts for three
months.
The move was apparently made to prevent villagers who
drew out all their money from being robbed, but it left
them defenceless against the elements.
With such a dire shortage of tents, many men are giving
up their spaces to the women and children and sleeping
outside. Among those who have to sleep outside are boys
as young as 10.
Another problem is that villagers are reluctant to move
down to the valleys. The Pakistani government has called
on homeless quake survivors in villages where snow is
imminent to go down. But often they don't want to go.
"Where will we put our farm animals?" Raja Moidnaiz,
of Maira, asked. "Even if we go down there, there are
no tents for us."
He added: "The government is talking about villages
where the snow is 10ft deep. Here, the snowfall is light
- it's only 4ft deep."
That, however, is still deep enough to kill anyone without
a proper shelter.
According to official figures, about 73,000 people died
in the quake itself. Without urgent action in the coming
weeks, that figure will grow by several thousand - victims
of an additional disaster that was entirely avoidable.
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November 14, 2005
Peter Weekes
theage.com.au
As chairman of a British company,
the former US vice-president still has global warming
and long-term consequences on his mind, writes Peter
Weekes.
"What changed in the US with hurricane Katrina was a
feeling that we have entered a period of consequences
and that bitter cup will be offered to us again and
again until we exert our moral authority and respond
appropriately," he says. "I don't want to diminish the
threat of terrorism at all, it is extremely serious,
but on a long-term global basis, global warming is the
most serious problem we are facing."
AL GORE, the man who five years ago won the popular
vote but lost the US presidential elections by a few
hanging chads, has a stark warning for all investors.
"Capitalism is at a critical juncture," he says, arguing
that the focus on short-term results is undermining
issues such as the long-term sustainability of profits,
how a company relates to the community and its employees,
and the environment.
Australia's politicians might prefer to quietly retire
after securing lucrative business consultancy deals,
but Gore is out to make a noise as co-founder and chairman
of British-based sustainable investing company Generation
Investment.
"If in the process of proving our business case that
it is just good common sense to take these matters into
consideration when making investment decisions, we can
encourage other investors to do the same and have an
impact on the behaviour of the market, then that's all
for the good," he says.
Generation was formed when Gore met former Goldman Sachs
chief executive David Blood and they began mulling over
how to combine conventional equity market analysis with
longer-term judgements about sustainability.
In an interview with The Age on the eve of the Association
of Superannuation Funds of Australia conference, which
he addressed in Melbourne last week, Gore says the payment
structure for asset managers must reflect shareholders'
long-term interest.
Generation is only paid after three years of returns,
and then only if it beats the benchmark.
Retail investors are clamouring for a change to long-term
sustainable goals, he says, with consumers pushing for
lower carbon emissions as global warming awareness grows.
The refusal of the US and Australia to sign the Kyoto
pact that Gore helped draft clearly annoys the former
US vice-president. He draws parallels between those
who dispute global warming, and its investment implications,
with Neville Chamberlain and others who wanted to appease
the Nazis before World War II.
Winston Churchill warned in the 1930s that a storm was
gathering and democratic nations would be forced to
"sip from the bitter cup" until they reasserted their
moral authority.
"The time of half-measure has passed. We are entering
a period of consequences," says Gore, quoting Churchill.
"What changed in the US with hurricane Katrina was a
feeling that we have entered a period of consequences
and that bitter cup will be offered to us again and
again until we exert our moral authority and respond
appropriately," he says. "I don't want to diminish the
threat of terrorism at all, it is extremely serious,
but on a long-term global basis, global warming is the
most serious problem we are facing."
To be sure, holding a "feel-good" investment may appeal
to the heart, but it's of no real use if it doesn't
produce a healthy financial return.
Gore's partner David Blood (their other partners ruled
out calling the company Blood and Gore for obvious reasons)
says Generation doesn't ban entire sectors from its
portfolio for purely ethical reasons. "Sustainable investing
isn't something that's separate from traditional fundamental
stock picking. It's an integral part. There are long-term
issues that affect a company's ability to generate revenues
and protect its competitive advantage," Blood says.
Industries such as tobacco, aren't excluded purely because
the product slowly kills, but due to the litigation
risk and what that means for future profit.
Gore says investing in uranium mining also comes down
to sustainability. Although concerned about nuclear
waste and the possibility of spent fuel rods falling
into the wrong hands, he says he is not "reflexively
against" nuclear energy. While only investing in about
40 stocks, Generation is willing to own up to 70 per
cent of companies on the Morgan Stanley Capital International
world index "based on hard economics", Blood says.
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November 14, 2005
AFP
"It certainly sends a message that's
consistent with what we've seen in the last few years
-- that climate over Australia and indeed over the world
as a whole is getting warmer..."
Australia is having its hottest year on record and experts
blame global warming for the trend, the government weather
bureau reported.
The Bureau of Meteorology said average temperatures
for the first 10 months of the year were 1.03 degrees
centigrade above the 30-year mean and the warmest since
monthly records began in 1950.
With forecasts for continued warmer-than-average temperatures
in November and December, Australia is on its way to
recording its hottest year since annual records began
in 1910, it said.
The head of the bureau's National Climate Center, Michael
Coughlan, said the rising temperatures were linked to
global warming.
"It certainly sends a message that's consistent with
what we've seen in the last few years -- that climate
over Australia and indeed over the world as a whole
is getting warmer," Coughlan said on ABC radio.
"Given that most of the world has been showing this
increase, Australia has been going up with most of the
rest of the world and there's certainly evidence that
human activities are causing part of that warming, so
there probably is some component of human activities
in this warming that we're seeing," he said.
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AP
Mon Nov 14,10:16 AM ET
MIAMI - A tropical depression was developing Monday in the southeast Caribbean Sea and was expected to strengthen into Tropical Storm Gamma, the National Hurricane Center said.
By the end of the week the storm is expected to be south of Jamaica, where the Caribbean is still warm enough to feed a major hurricane, said hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart. However, the storm, which formed Sunday, is not expected to threaten the United States.
At 10 a.m. EST, the storm was centered about 175 miles west of St. Lucia, the hurricane center said. Its maximum sustained wind speed was about 35 mph and it was moving west-northwest at about 7 mph.
Dangerous rip currents and up to 12 inches of rain were possible across the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Stewart said.
If the system becomes a tropical storm — which would happen if its maximum sustained wind reaches 39 mph — it would become the 24th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, extending this year's record. The previous record of 21 named storms had stood since 1933.
Letters from the Greek alphabet are being used to name storms because the list of 21 storm names was exhausted. |
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AFP
Nov 14, 2005
A construction worker was killed Monday in a landslide in Norway as strong winds and heavy rain pummeled northern Europe, cutting power supplies and disrupting traffic and train services. The man was killed while working on house struck by a landslide near the western city of Bergen. Six other workers caught in the avalanche escaped with no serious injuries.
Residents were evacuated as landslides destroyed several other homes near the city and hundreds of students were forced to abandon schools threatened by flooding.
All train services were halted between Bergen and the capital, Oslo, due to the risk of boulders falling onto the tracks.
On the west coast, authorities advised residents to leave their cars at home due to dangerously strong winds and to use public transport.
Mudslides halted traffic on several roads and trapped about 50 cars inside a tunnel, while about 2,000 households in the country's southeast lost power.
In southwestern Sweden, electricity supply was cut to 25,000 households and the telephone services of thousands more were disrupted.
The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute warned sea levels in the country's southwest overnight Monday could rise by as much as 120 centimeters (47 inches), with winds gusting up to 90 kilometers per hourmiles per hour).
The Finnish Meteorology Institute issued a storm warning for the Baltic Sea, with winds in the country's southwest expected to reach 83 kilometers per hour.
Heavy snow, rain and ice in central Finland was expected to cause major traffic disruptions. |
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Sara Goudarzi
Special to LiveScience
Tue Nov 15, 3:00 PM ET
In 2003, a summer heat wave killed between 22,000 and 35,000 people in five European countries. Temperatures soared to 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Paris, and London recorded its first triple-digit Fahrenheit temperature in history.
If a similar heat wave struck the United States, the results would be disastrous, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at what would happen if a comparable extreme-heat event settled on five major U.S. cities, learning that not only would the country experience massive blackouts, but thousands of people could die. In New York alone, the number of deaths would increase to nearly 3,000 in a single summer.
"That would literally double the number of excess deaths over the next hottest summer in the last 40 years in New York," said study leader Laurence Kalkstein, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware's Center for Climatic Research.
Already deadly
History shows that heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes or tornadoes. And studies have indicated that extreme weather events will become more common with global warming.
The warming is underway. With temperatures up to 30 percent higher than the seasonal average over the past few decades in most of Europe, the summer of 2003 was one of the hottest in centuries. Scientists expect 2005 to set a modern record for the warmest average global temperature. Leading computer models show continued warming for at least several decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, with only wild schemes proposed to put the brakes on.
Urban areas are particularly vulnerable, because dark asphalt and rooftops absorb more solar radiation than natural landscapes, raising nighttime temperatures by as much as five degrees, according to NASA studies.
In order to see the effects of extreme heat events on the United States, the researchers developed models to simulate scenarios analogous to that of Europe's for heat-sensitive urban areas.
"We tried to take the Paris heat wave in 2003 and transpose it onto the climate of five different cities," Kalkstein said. The cities: Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.
The results were not cool.
In the nation's capital, there were 11 days with temperatures at or above 105 degrees in the virtual scenario. St. Louis reached an all-time maximum of 116. New York and Philadelphia each broke all-time highs for four days. In Detroit the mercury set all-time records twice.
The total simulated excess deaths were more than five times the historical summer average, with New York and St. Louis showing the highest numbers. This the researchers attribute to size and city structures.
"New York is much bigger and clearly will have more deaths than cities like Washington and Detroit," Kalkstein said. "The second thing is that [a place such as] New York is a very sensitive city with a lot of high-rises and buildings that are sensitive to extreme heat." [...] |
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Nov. 16, 2005. 10:00 AM
The Toronto Star
MADISONVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Nearly three dozen tornadoes ripped through the U.S. Midwest, part of a huge line of thunderstorms that destroyed homes and killed at least two people. "We heard a weird sound coming through, kind of a whistle," said Penny Leonard, 37, who sought shelter in the basement of a hospital Tuesday in the western Kentucky town of Madisonville. "I thank God I'm safe."
Meteorologists said a cold front moving rapidly east collided with warm, unstable air from the south on Tuesday to produce the thunderstorms that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, spawning funnel clouds and tornadoes in parts of Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee.
There were preliminary reports of at least 35 tornadoes, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center said on its website.
It was the third outbreak of twisters this month. One tornado on Nov. 6 killed 23 people in southern Indiana, and nine tornadoes struck Iowa on Saturday, killing one woman.
Roofs of homes were caved in and entire buildings were blown off foundations in parts of Madisonville on Tuesday.
One storm-related death was reported in Madisonville, but details weren't available, said Lori King, public information officer for the Marshall County Emergency Management Services. Twenty-two people were treated for injuries, said Jayne Barton, a spokeswoman for the Regional Medical Center in Madisonville.
Along with tornadoes, thunderstorms in Indiana produced wind of more than 160 kilometres an hour and as much as five centimetres of rain, causing scattered flooding, said meteorologist Jason Puma at the weather service in Indianapolis.
A teenager was killed when her car went out of control on a flooded road and overturned east of Indianapolis.
In Tennessee, Henry County's emergency officials had to scramble for shelter when their office was struck by a tornado.
The Henry County Medical Center treated 13 people and admitted two with non-life-threatening injuries.
In Tennessee's Montgomery County, four mobile homes, a camper and two houses were destroyed at Cunningham, just south of Clarksville.
"It looks like a war zone," said Ted Denny, spokesman for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department.
At the colder northern end of the storm system, snow fell across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday. homes, a camper and two houses were destroyed at Cunningham, just south of Clarksville.
"It looks like a war zone," said Ted Denny, spokesman for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department.
At the colder northern end of the storm system, snow fell across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday. At least three people were killed in crashes on slippery Minnesota roads on Tuesday, police said. |
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By RYAN LENZ
Associated Press Writer
November 16, 2005
EVANSVILLE, Ind. - Just eight days after a deadly tornado struck southwestern Indiana, another strong storm system rolled across the nation's midsection Tuesday, producing funnel clouds in at least three states. The National Weather Service issued tornado watches and warnings for the Evansville area, as well as parts of Tennessee, Missouri, eastern Arkansas, southern Illinois and western sections of Kentucky.
A funnel cloud was sighted in Clay City in central Indiana but apparently remained aloft. Two funnel clouds were also reported in southern Illinois, but there were no immediate reports of damage.
In western Tennessee, a funnel cloud reportedly touched down, damaging an undetermined number of buildings in Henry and Weakley counties.
"Numerous homes there were damaged, some completely destroyed," said Faye Scott, spokeswoman for the Henry County Sheriff's Department. "It's major destruction."
Tom Cooper, police chief in Paris, Tenn., told Nashville television station WSMV that 15 to 20 people suffered minor injuries from flying debris in the community about 85 miles west of Nashville.
The National Weather Service could not immediately confirm the tornado.
Flood warnings also were posted as more than 6 inches of rain fell in parts of the Ohio River Valley.
Meteorologists said a cold front moving east and colliding with warm, unstable air was producing severe thunderstorms across the central Mississippi and lower Ohio valleys.
Dan Spaeth, a weather service forecaster, said Tuesday's conditions were similar to those that produced the tornado on Nov. 6 that caused 41 miles of damage from Kentucky into the Evansville area and killed 23 people.
The most severe damage on Nov. 6 was in a mobile home park on the eastern edge of Evansville where 19 of the victims were killed. Four other people were killed in neighboring Warrick County.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, nine tornadoes swept across central Iowa on Saturday, killing one woman.
Though severe thunderstorms and tornados are not uncommon in the fall, Spaeth said the strength of storm systems that have produced recent tornadoes suggests severe weather ahead.
"It's not usually as widespread or frequent," he said. "But if it happens once, it can happen again." |
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By JEFF WILSON
Associated Press
November 19, 2005
VENTURA, Calif. - Calming wind
early Saturday helped firefighters battle a 3,700-acre
wildfire that prompted a voluntary evacuation of about
200 ridge-top homes.
Fierce Santa Ana wind fanned the late-season blaze that
started early Friday in School Canyon — a hilly, rocky
area between Ventura and Ojai, about 60 miles northwest
of Los Angeles.
The blaze was 30 percent contained early Saturday. After
mapping, fire officials reduced the size of the blaze
from 4,000 to 3,700 acres.
"We still have a few hot spots, but the fire is mostly
lying down," Inspector Ron Haralson of the Los Angeles
County Fire Department said.
The origin point and cause of the fire were under investigation.
At midmorning Friday, a wall of flames as high as 30
feet snaked along hillsides, and by early afternoon
a huge plume of whiskey-brown smoke carried ash to the
nearby Pacific Ocean.
In just a few hours, the wind-driven fire tripled in
size. But the fire calmed down in the early evening
as a cooler onshore breeze helped lower the wind and
the temperature.
The National Weather Service canceled a wind advisory,
but forecasters cautioned the wind would continue in
the area through early Sunday at 15 to 25 mph with isolated
gusts near 35 mph. [...]
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By FREDDY CUEVAS
Associated Press
Sun Nov 20, 7:13 PM ET
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Tropical Storm Gamma weakened into a tropical depression Sunday and drifted off Honduras after torrential downpours lashed the Central American coast, killing 14 people — including a young family of four. Gamma, the 24th named storm of an already record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, was expected to dissipate over the next day and was likely to miss Florida altogether. But the storm was expected to bring steady rain to northern Honduras and central Cuba as it becomes less organized, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Gamma's maximum sustained winds decreased to 35 mph — below the 39 mph to be considered a tropical storm, the hurricane center said. Its center was located about 85 miles north of the Honduran city of Limon and it was meandering north.
Forecasters said Gamma's projected path would carry it south of Jamaica by Wednesday, but forecasters said it might not even be a tropical cyclone by then.
Gamma had 45 mph winds and torrential downpours when it deluged Honduras on Saturday. Its remnants killed a 48-year-old man and an 8-year-old boy Sunday in Batalla, 250 miles northeast of the capital, Tegucigalpa, bringing the death toll in that country to 11, authorities said. There were no details on how the man and boy died. Authorities were searching for 15 people reported missing.
The government said the storm destroyed 48 homes, damaged 264 and forced more than 11,000 people to evacuate. [...] |
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Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
Global warming hits Himalayas
Nawa Jigtar was working in the village of Ghat, in Nepal, when the sound of crashing sent him rushing out of his home. He emerged to see his herd of cattle being swept away by a wall of water.
Jigtar and his fellow villagers were able to scramble to safety. They were lucky: 'If it had come at night, none of us would have survived.'
Ghat was destroyed when a lake, high in the Himalayas, burst its banks. Swollen with glacier meltwaters, its walls of rock and ice had suddenly disintegrated. Several million cubic metres of water crashed down the mountain.
When Ghat was destroyed, in 1985, such incidents were rare - but not any more. Last week, scientists revealed that there has been a tenfold jump in such catastrophes in the past two decades, the result of global warming. Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and 24 of them are now poised to burst their banks in Bhutan, with a similar number at risk in Nepal.
But that is just the beginning, a report in Nature said last week. Future disasters around the Himalayas will include 'floods, droughts, land erosion, biodiversity loss and changes in rainfall and the monsoon'. [...]
'A glacier lake catastrophe happened once in a decade 50 years ago,' said UK geologist John Reynolds, whose company advises Nepal. 'Five years ago, they were happening every three years. By 2010, a glacial lake catastrophe will happen every year.' |
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11-14-05
By Mark Floyd, 541-737-0788
SOURCE: Rob Harris, 541-737-4370
Oregon State University
CORVALLIS, Ore. - A temperature analysis of more than 600 boreholes from throughout the Northern Hemisphere suggests that the Earth's climate may be warming at a higher rate than tree-ring analysis and other methods had led scientists to believe. " If we're right, these boreholes are showing that the Earth is more sensitive to whatever is forcing the climatic change," said Robert N. Harris, an associate professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and a principal investigator in the study.
Results of the research by Harris and colleague David S. Chapman of the University of Utah were just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The researchers also will present their data in December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Borehole temperatures have been measured since the 1920s, but only recently has this temperature analysis been applied to global warming studies. Unlike most "proxy" methods to reconstruct climate models, which depend entirely on statistical analysis, borehole temperature research is based on the physics of heat diffusion.
Harris offers an analogy to describe how it works.
"On a smaller scale, it's similar to underground pipes freezing in the spring instead of during the coldest part of winter," he said. "It takes time for the cold winter temperatures to propagate through the ground. Similarly, if you put one end of a steel poker into a fire, and hold the other end, the heat propagates toward your hand.
"If at some later time you take a series of temperature measurements along the length of the rod, you would be able to estimate the temperature of the fire and how long the poker had been in the fire. The distance the poker had warmed is related to time, and the amount of warming is related to the temperature of the fire."
In the ground, rocks are such poor conductors of heat that the effect of a changing surface temperature 500 years ago is felt at a depth of about 200 meters, Harris says. The scientists make careful temperature measurements in boreholes that are as deep as 500 meters. These temperatures reflect the adjacent rock and tell the researchers how temperatures have changed over long periods of time.
What the research cannot tell scientists is what the temperature may have been for a particular year, Harris said.
"Heat diffusion causes the signal to get smeared out, so the deeper you look, the smaller the signal," he pointed out. "Eventually, the signal is lost in background noise. This process also means that you only get multi-year averages."
Harris and Chapman examined temperature data from boreholes throughout the Northern Hemisphere, which helps eliminate regional anomalies in their findings. They estimate that the Earth has warmed 1.1 degrees C. over the past 500 years - more than double the 0.4- to 0.5-degree estimates suggested by most tree-ring analysis.
In their article, they say the difference may be that tree-ring analysis primarily reflects temperatures when trees are actively growing during the warm season, but doesn't reflect changes in winter temperatures. Much of the annual warming recorded by instruments over the past 100 years has occurred during the winter season, they add.
The boreholes used in the research were generated from a variety of sources, including mineral exploration, dry water wells and those done specifically for the temperature research. The best environment for drilling, Harris says, is where the rock is solid and impermeable, limiting advection.
A typical borehole may be six inches in diameter and 200 meters deep. Much deeper and the temperature differences become too minute to pick up, Harris said. However, that depth allows them to take measurements that go back about 500 years - or roughly the time Columbus was first approaching the New World.
"We know by comparative data that borehole analysis, as remarkable as it may seem, really works," Harris said. "For the periods of overlap when we can compare with recorded temperature data, the correlation is excellent. Beyond that, it is simply a matter of applying the physics of heat diffusion. "And those measurements tell us the Earth is warming faster than we previously thought." |
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Last Updated Wed, 23 Nov 2005 07:35:31 EST
CBC News
Thousands of people in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were without electricity Wednesday morning as winds of up to 100 km/h swept through through Atlantic Canada. Nova Scotia Power said electricity was restored to about 100,000 customers overnight, but roughly 25,000 were still without service.
As many as 11,000 P.E.I. residents also lost power, Maritime Electric reported. Another 8,500 homes and businesses were in the dark in southeastern New Brunswick, but only 650 remained without power by late Wednesday morning.
High winds and up to 70 mm of rain knocked out power across mainland Nova Scotia overnight. Winds were still gusting at 77 km/h in parts of Cape Breton Wednesday morning.
Margaret Murphy, a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Power, said the winds were especially severe in the Windsor and Bridgewater areas.
The power outages and high winds had an impact at Halifax International Airport. Several flights into and out of the province were delayed or cancelled. Travellers were being told to check with their airlines before heading to the airport.
The high wind was also keeping Marine Atlantic ferries in port. The Caribou was docked in North Sydney, with passengers on board and ready to go as soon as the winds abated.
High-sided vehicles such as trucks were still being barred from the Confederation Bridge linking New Brunswick to P.E.I. early Wednesday morning. Wind speeds at the bridge peaked overnight at 99 km/h, with gusts up to 121 km/h.
Northumberland Ferries, which transports vehicles between Nova Scotia and P.E.I., was able to resume its regular schedule Wednesday morning.
Hundreds of basements were flooded and many roads had to be closed as 70 mm of rain fell on the New Brunswick cities of Fredericton and Saint John.
Meanwhile, gusts of wind up to 150 km/h were hitting parts of southwestern Newfoundland, with power outages reported in the Corner Brook area.
A Coast Guard ship and a number of fishing boats had to stop their search for a small boat off the province's south coast due to stormy weather Wednesday.
A search and rescue plane and a helicopter are still searching for the 7.5-metre fishing boat, which did not return to Belleoram as expected Tuesday. A man in his 40s and two teenage boys are onboard. |
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David Fickling and agencies
Wednesday November 23, 2005
Panic was today spreading in Harbin, with officials preparing to cut off water supplies as heavily polluted river water flowed towards the Chinese city.
Stockpiling began afresh at midnight when the local government switched taps on again for 12 hours after having cut off supplies to almost four million people yesterday. The temporary switch-on came after revised calculations showed the pollution would not reach Harbin until early tomorrow morning.
"As the exact time of the pollutants flowing to the city's drinking water intake spot has been confirmed, we hoped that citizens could take time to hoard as much water as possible ahead of the water cut-off," an executive from the Harbin water company said.
Article continues
Residents were storing water supplies in bathtubs and buckets ahead of the expected three-day drought. Supermarkets reported panic buying of water, milk and soft drinks, while Harbin's airport and railway station were jammed with people fleeing the area.
The provincial government was also trucking in water from neighbouring areas, testing little-used local wells and demanding 1,400 tonnes of activated charcoal to purify the water intake after the pollution had passed through the city.
Harbin's authorities warned residents not to even approach the Songhua river because of the risk of pollutants escaping into the atmosphere when the polluted water hits the city around 5am tomorrow. The 50 mile-long stretch of pollution is not expected to flow out of the city until Saturday.
Rumours of terrorist attacks and an impending earthquake increased public alarm, although seismologists said there was no reason to expect a tremor.
The city, in China's icy north-eastern Heilongjiang province, has a population of 3.8 million and draws most of its water from the Songhua. The river has been contaminated with more than 30 times the usual levels of benzene after an explosion at a chemical plant on its banks.
The blast, in the neighbouring Jilin province, happened on November 13, killing five people and causing 10,000 to be evacuated from the area, officials said.
Benzene, a component of petrol, is highly flammable and toxic. Short-term exposure to the chemical in drinking water can cause long-term damage to the nervous system, while long-term exposure can result in cancer and leukaemia.
The state Xinhua news agency said nobody had yet been taken ill, but 15 hospitals were on standby to deal with pollution victims. "There is sufficient water.
Residents have all stored a lot and we have been rushing in water from other places. We also have safe underground water," a government spokesman told Reuters.
An official at the Heilongjiang United Petrochemical Corporation told the Interfax news agency that people were relying entirely on mineral water. "We are not going to take a bath these days. Fortunately, it's not summer," he said.
Water supplies were also reported to have been cut in at least one district of Songyuan city, around 90 miles southwest of Harbin, although local officials denied the reports.
A doctor from the Ningjiang District Central Hospital and a teacher from Ningjiang No. 1 Middle School said water had already been cut off for between five and seven days already. Both refused to give their names.
Russia's environmental protection agency today said it feared the pollution could reach the border city of Khabarovsk, 435 miles downstream from Harbin on the Songhua.
However, Chinese officials said the pollution would have become more diluted by the time it reached Russia because several major tributaries flowed into the river.
A government-sponsored conference in China's eastern Jiangxi province today heard that 70% of China's lakes and rivers are polluted, and the country loses 20 lakes a year due to human activity. |
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Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2005, 13:59 GMT
BBC
The UK is unlikely to meet its 2010 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 20%, the government's chief scientific adviser has admitted. Sir David King told the BBC the target was perhaps a "bit optimistic" but said the government had not given up and long-term plans were in place.
The "green light" should be given for more nuclear reactors, he added.
Environmental groups accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of backtracking on the issue of setting targets.
Longer term
Sir David told the BBC's Sunday AM programme that the 2010 target on reducing emissions was a "very tough target to hit at the moment".
He admitted the UK could miss it but said one reason was that long-term plans took time to pay off.
"The longer term targets are actually the critical ones. These things like building a new power station take many, many years to come through.
"I think perhaps we were being a bit optimistic, but the government has not given up on its target for 2010."
Sir David said Mr Blair should "give the green light" to a new generation of nuclear reactors.
Nuclear power met almost a quarter of Britain's electricity needs in recent years but that will fall to just 4% by 2020 if reactors were not replaced.
Stiff opposition
"All of that is coming from a CO2-free source. I think we need every tool in the bag to tackle this problem," he said.
Mr Blair faces stiff opposition from green groups and some in his Labour Party if he sanctions new reactors.
Environment minister Margaret Beckett said there was "nothing extra" nuclear power could do to help meet the Government's target to reduce CO2 by 2010.
Speaking on the BBC's Politics Show, she said: "There's just no way you could get new nuclear power stations in time to contribute to that."
She denied she was anti-nuclear but said there were "lots of concerns" about its use.
'Tricky'
Earlier this month, the prime minister caused fury by suggesting that a "child-of-Kyoto" agreement, with firm targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, could be tricky.
"People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you which is going to restrict your economic growth," he said.
"I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."
Greenpeace director Stephen Tindale, a former environment adviser to Labour, told Sunday AM that Mr Blair realised he could not persuade United States President George Bush over the issue.
'Disaster'
President Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty when 141 countries signed up to it this year.
"I think Tony Blair has realised that he is not going to shift George Bush and he is therefore trying to move the rest of the world to George Bush's position, which is a disaster," Mr Tindale said.
He insisted that it would be impossible to "get a handle" on the future without emissions targets.
Sir David said he believed Mr Blair's comments on targets had been misunderstood and that Mr Blair had been talking about involving China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa in discussions.
"I believe what he was discussing was... how do we extend that to include these five countries? Of course we're also concerned about the United States' position.
"The US emits 25% of the world's carbon dioxide. How do we bring them on board?"
World leaders are due to discuss the issue at a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Montreal, Canada, from 28 November. |
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Michael Perry
Reuters
The Carteret Islands are almost invisible on a map of the South Pacific, but the horseshoe scattering of atolls is on the front-line of climate change, as rising sea levels and storm surges eat away at their existence. For 20 years, the 2,000 islanders have fought a losing battle against the ocean, building sea walls and trying to plant mangroves.
Each year, the waves surge in, destroying vegetable gardens, washing away homes and poisoning freshwater supplies. Papua New Guinea's Carteret islanders are destined to become some of the world's first climate change refugees. Their islands are becoming uninhabitable, and may disappear below the waves. A decision has been made to move the islanders to the larger nearby Bougainville island, four hours' boat ride to the southwest. Ten families at a time will be moved, over one to two years, once funds are allocated for the resettlement program.
A United Nations panel of more than 2,000 scientists has predicted that average sea levels are likely to rise between 9 and 88 cm (3.5 to 35 inches) by 2100, mainly because of a build-up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. . . At the higher end of the forecast, the sea would overflow the heavily populated coasts of countries such as Bangladesh, and cause low-lying island states like the Indian Ocean's Maldives and South Pacific's Kiribati and Tuvalu to disappear. |
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Nov. 23 (UPI)
ST. LOUIS - A geologist from the stable heart of North America caused a stir in the Big Easy when he urged on national television that New Orleans be abandoned.
Timothy Kusky of St. Louis University has received hundreds of angry e-mails. "They're saying, 'Come down here and we'll kick your butt,' or 'You better watch where you walk.' A lot of vulgarity," Kusky told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Kusky predicted that in 90 years New Orleans will be 15 to 18 feet below sea level with enormous levees protecting it from the Gulf of Mexico. He described the future city as a "fish bowl."
Critics point out that Kusky, although he has written a book on geological disasters, is not a coastal geologist. Charles Groat, a former U.S. Geological Survey director quoted by Kusky on "60 Minutes" disagreed with his conclusions in a Times-Picayune article headlined "Not So Fast, '60 Minutes.'"
"No, no, no," Groat said. "You've got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they're not going away."
On the other hand, some geologists told "60 Minutes" that Kusky was, if anything, conservative in his dire prediction |
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AP
Fri Nov 25, 5:25 AM ET
DENVER - Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job. "If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses — because that goes straight to the bottom line — then I hope I can help the country in some way," Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.
Brown said officials need to "take inventory" of what's going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, critics complained about Brown's lack of formal emergency management experience and e-mails that later surfaced showed him as out of touch with the extent of the devastation.
The lawyer admits that while he was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency mistakes were made in the response to Katrina. He also said he had been planning to quit before the hurricane hit.
"Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is," he said.
Brown said companies already have expressed interested in his consulting business, Michael D. Brown LLC. He plans to run it from the Boulder area, where he lived before joining the Bush administration in 2001.
"I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients," Brown said. "My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me."
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Increase blamed on fossil fuel use since 19th century
Cut in greenhouse gases futile, researchers say
Ed Brook, a climate scientist at Oregon State University said the rise in greenhouse gases ... was a stark indication of the influence industry was having on the environment. Global warming is doubling the rate of sea level rise around the world, but attempts to stop it by cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be futile, leading researchers will warn today.
The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres, the researchers claim. Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by the surge in greenhouse gas emissions produced by the development of industry and introduction of fossil fuel burning.
Today's warning comes from US researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey who analysed cores drilled from different sites along the eastern seaboard. By drilling down 500 metres through layers of different sediments and using chemical dating techniques, the scientists were able to work out where beaches and dry land were over the past 100m years.
The analysis showed that during the past 5,000 years, sea levels rose at a rate of around 1mm each year, caused largely by the residual melting of icesheets from the previous ice age. But in the past 150 years, data from tide gauges and satellites show sea levels are rising at 2mm a year.
"The main thing that has happened since the 19th century and the beginning of the modern observation has been the widespread increase in fossil fuel use and more greenhouse gases," said Professor Kenneth Miller, who led the study. "We can say the increase we're seeing is much higher than we've seen in the immediate past and it is due to humans."
The rising tide is expected to make oceans 40cm higher by 2100. "This is going to cause more beach erosion. Beaches are going to move back and houses will be destroyed," he said. Rising sea levels will also add to the destructive power of storm surges triggered by hurricanes such as Katrina which battered New Orleans and surrounding areas this year.
The research, published in the US journal Science, comes a week before the countries that embraced the Kyoto protocol meet for the first time in Montreal to discuss future agreements for cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions further. While Britain has adopted the protocol, the government has suggested that voluntary targets rather than the mandatory cuts demanded by Kyoto could be a more practical way to trim greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Prof Miller, there is little chance of slowing the rising tide caused by global warming. "There's not much one can do about sea level rise. It's clear that even if we strictly obeyed the Kyoto accord, it's still going to continue to warm. Personally, I don't think we're going to affect CO2 emissions enough to make a difference, no matter what we do. The Bush administration should stop asking whether temperatures are globally rising and admit the scientific fact that they are, but then turn the question around politically and say: 'We can't really do anything about this on any kind of cost basis at all'," he said.
In two further studies, also published in Science, a team of German researchers put figures on the extent to which the climate is warming compared with any time during the past 650,000 years. They report that levels of the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, are rising 200 times faster than could be caused by any natural process. Carbon dioxide levels are now 380 parts per million, some 27% higher and methane levels 130% higher than at any time over the period they analysed.
The researchers measured levels of greenhouse gases locked into a core of ice drilled from Antarctica. At more than 3km long, the ice core holds pockets of air that were in the earth's atmosphere from nearly 1m years ago until the present day.
The cores are the best record left on the planet of the earth's environmental history. By analysing the gases locked up in 10cm chunks of ice, the researchers can reconstruct the gases that made up the atmosphere at any time from present day until before the four previous ice ages.
"If you really want to make a case for global warming, you just have to look at the past 1,000 years, because the current increase in carbon dioxide stands out dramatically," said lead author Dr Thomas Stocker at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Ed Brook, a climate scientist at Oregon State University said the rise in greenhouse gases ... was a stark indication of the influence industry was having on the environment. "The levels of primary greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are up dramatically since the industrial revolution, at a speed and magnitude that the earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years. There is now no question this is due to human influence." |
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By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer
A nearly two-mile-long core of ice -- the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica -- shows that levels of two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, have not been as high as they are today for 650,000 years.
A nearly two-mile-long core of ice -- the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica -- shows that levels of two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, have not been as high as they are today for 650,000 years. The new research, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the past 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European ice coring team that wrote two new papers based on the core.
The work provides more evidence that human activity since the industrial revolution has dramatically altered the planet's climate system, scientists said. "This is saying, 'Yeah, we had it right.' We can pound on the table harder and say, 'This is real,'" said Richard Alley, a Penn State University geophysicist and expert on ice cores who was not involved with the new analysis.
Previous records, from an ice core drilled at the Russian Antarctic station Vostok, extended back 440,000 years. Extracting and analyzing that core was a major achievement, but the core stopped short of a time period scientists are anxious to study because it was like today's.
Climate scientists called the analysis of the older records spectacular because they are so clear and said they would become "canonical" additions to the climate record.
"It's really important," Ed Brook, an ice core expert at Oregon State University said of the new research. "Those 200,000 years were a lot harder to get than the previous 400,000 -- and those were hard enough."
Ice cores are plugs drilled from glaciers and ice sheets. They are composed of tens of thousands of layers of fallen snow and air bubbles that become compressed over time. Ice cores are among the most powerful tools available to climate scientists. The chemistry of the ice reveals what temperatures were in the distant past, while bubbles within the ice are minuscule time capsules that capture samples of air and greenhouse gases just as they existed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The ice core was drilled by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica from a high plateau in East Antarctica called Dome C that rises more than two miles above sea level. It is one of driest, coldest parts of the icy southern continent, where summer temperatures can fall to 50 degrees below 0. Temperature records from the core were published in a paper in 2004, and scientists have been waiting for an analysis of the core's gases ever since.
The last time carbon dioxide levels were as high or higher than today was probably tens of millions of years ago, Alley said. Over millions of years, carbon dioxide levels shift because of slow geological processes, like weathering of rocks, swallowing of crust into subduction zones and the release of gases from volcanoes. But these processes are much slower and more gradual than the current rapid increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, Alley said.
Scientists are enthusiastic about the ice core because it includes nearly eight full glacial cycles and not just four, as Vostok had. Glacial cycles occur roughly every 100,000 years and include long periods of cold, when ice ages occur and brief, warm interglacial periods, such as the one we live in today. The cycles are controlled by shakes, wobbles and tilts in the Earth's orbit around the sun that determine the amount of sunlight falling on and warming the planet.
The Vostok core showed that warm interglacial periods lasted about 10,000 years. Since our current temperate interglacial period has lasted about 12,000 years, many scientists had speculated that the planet was overdue for the next ice age.
But the new core shows that the interglacial period of 440,000 years ago, when the Earth's position relative to the sun was very similar to what it is today, lasted nearly 30,000 years and was not ended by natural decreases in carbon dioxide, Stocker said. The work suggests that the next ice age is some 15,000 years away.
"Anyone counting on an ice age to head off global warming, or hoping to justify human greenhouse-gas emissions as a useful attempt to head off the next ice age, will find no comfort in the ice-core record," Alley said.
The latest findings also run counter to a theory presented two years ago by William Ruddiman, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, that humans who lived 5,000 or more years ago are responsible for delaying the next age because their activities -- forest clearing and rice growing -- started to raise greenhouse gas levels when they should have been naturally declining.
"This claim can no longer be upheld," said Stocker, because the ice core shows greenhouse gases do not naturally decline after 10,000 years in the longer interglacial periods like today's.
Scientists are eager to look even farther back into earth's climatic past. About a million years ago, the earth shifted from ice age cycles that were 40,000 years long into cycles that were 100,000 years long. This shift from a "40K world to a 100K world" is a major mystery, said Oregon State's Brook, and will require a core that reaches deeper into the ice and much farther back in time.
Brook is co-chairing a joint European and American group that hopes to start drilling in coming years a core that could produce ice and bubbles that are 1.2 to 1.5 million years old. |
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November 24, 2005
CNN
Scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometre iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.
"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing." BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Scientists monitoring earth movements in Antarctica believe they have found a singing iceberg.
Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of around 0.5 hertz, too low to be heard by humans, but by playing them at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up, the scientists said.
The German Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research will publish the results of its study, done in 2002, in Science magazine on Friday.
Between July and November 2002 researchers picked up acoustic signals of unprecedented clarity when recording seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.
Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometre iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.
"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing."
"The tune even goes up and down, just like a real song." |
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By COLLEEN SLEVIN
Associated Press
November 28, 2005
DENVER - Blizzard conditions wreaked havoc from Colorado to the Midwest, and tornadoes ripped through Arkansas and Kansas as a burst of treacherous weather damaged homes, turned roads into ice rinks and sent cars spinning off highways. A driver was killed Sunday near Little Rock, Ark., when a suspected tornado scattered wood from a lumberyard across a highway and overturned cars, police said.
A 150-mile stretch of Interstate 70, the major east-west corridor, was closed from Denver to the Kansas line, stranding travelers headed home after Thanksgiving. Officials shut the highway after up to 25 cars were involved in an accident as visibility in the blowing snow dropped to nearly zero.
"We'll just go when it's safe. We have a four-wheel drive vehicle but that doesn't make you any safer in this," said Julie Ward of Wichita, Kan., who got one of the last rooms available at the Tyme Square Inn in Limon, Colo.
A blizzard warning was in effect until Monday afternoon in three counties along the Nebraska border.
The biggest trouble spot for travelers stretched from Colorado through Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, where blizzard conditions and freezing rain turned roads into icy swaths.
Drivers were stuck for miles around Fargo, N.D.
"It is bumper to bumper," North Dakota Transportation Department district supervisor Bruce Nord said. "There's slush on the road. It's just unbelievable, the traffic. When one goes in the ditch, it takes three or four people along."
High wind or tornadoes destroyed at least eight homes in Arkansas. Officials would assess other reports of damage Monday.
In Fort Riley, Kan., more than 30 homes were damaged when a tornado swept through town. Fort spokesman Army Maj. Christian T. Kubik said 17 families were left homeless.
"We were fortunate nobody was hurt," he said. About 7,500 homes were without power in Arkansas late Sunday, Entergy spokesman James Thompson said.
In Texas, wind gusts of more than 50 mph toppled a 66-foot tall Christmas tree in Fort Worth and fed grass fires that destroyed at least six homes. No injuries were reported. [...]
As much as 3 inches fell near Amarillo in north Texas, the
National Weather Service reported.
Cpl. Pam Jetsel, a sheriff's department spokeswoman, said a fire that started west of Cleburne, Texas, spread north and burned 1,000 acres and six homes. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Grass fires also were reported in north Texas — some of them reportedly sparked by power lines downed by the strong winds.
"When the conditions are so dry and the wind is so high, any kind of spark can be dangerous," said Tom Reedy, a spokesman for the Denton County Sheriff's Department.
In the Northwest, nine people were hospitalized, though none seriously, after a series of accidents on Interstate 5 about five miles north of Arlington, Wash. The accidents happened when a wave of rain and sleet blew through the area.
Rain delayed flights out of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport up to an hour and a half Sunday morning, Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said. Some 210,000 passengers were expected to pass through its concourses Sunday.
Two cross-country skiers missing overnight near the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness about 25 miles north of Steamboat Springs, Colo., were found in good condition. Their names were not released.
Up to 18 inches of snow have fallen in that area, which is at about 7,500 feet in elevation. |
|
AP
Wed Nov 30, 4:37 AM ET
MIAMI - The Atlantic hurricane season ends Wednesday, but Tropical Storm Epsilon could still cause dangerous surf conditions in Bermuda, forecasters said.
Epsilon, the 26th named storm of the busiest hurricane season on record, formed Tuesday in the central Atlantic. It was not expected to hit Bermuda or any other land, according to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. At 4 a.m. EST, Epsilon had top sustained winds of near 50 mph. It could strengthen over warm ocean waters before hitting cooler waters that should cause it to weaken, forecasters said. Surf conditions in Bermuda could become dangerous during the next few days, they said.
It was centered about 725 miles east of Bermuda and about 1,520 miles west of the Azores Islands. It was moving west at about 7 mph.
The Atlantic hurricane season lasts for six months. |
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