Earth Changes
It was a normal Sunday in Vail for Geradine Vargas. Normal, until she and her husband stumbled upon something kind of weird."We were taking photos around the area and we just.... I mean, how could you miss this?" Geradine said. "It was just like glittering in the sun."Thousands of tiny, purple-hued spheres piled in the middle of nowhere.
"It's just one of those things that you've never seen before."They were watery, some where translucent, and the pile was completely isolated. Gerardine was amazed, and she wanted answers."We did email a friend of ours who's a zoologist, but she didn't know. I mean, she didn't seem to recognize what it was."
A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake.
On Jan. 30 at 1825 UTC (1:25 p.m. EST), NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of clouds associated with the strong cold front. The visible GOES-13 image shows a line of clouds that stretch from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast and contain powerful thunderstorms with the potential to be severe. The front is moving east to the Atlantic Ocean.
NOAA's GOES-13 satellite continually provides real-time visible and infrared imagery of weather over the eastern United States. The NASA GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., created the image from GOES data. The colorized image uses GOES-13 satellite visible data of clouds, and is overlaid on a U.S. map created by imagery from the Moderate Resolution Spectroradiometer instrument (MODIS), an instrument that flies aboard both the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites.
On Jan. 30 at 1825 UTC (1:25 p.m. EST), NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of clouds associated with the strong cold front. The visible GOES-13 image shows a line of clouds that stretch from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast and contain powerful thunderstorms with the potential to be severe. The front is moving east to the Atlantic Ocean.
© NOAA/NASA/GOES Project
© Al Jazeera
A state of emergency has been declared in three districts of Mahe, the largest island in the Seychelles
A state of emergency has been declared in three districts of Mahe, the largest island in the Seychelles
Parts of the Seychelles have been declared a state of emergency after severe weather hit the country.
Fortunately no casualties have been reported, but flooding, landslides and rock falls have hit the main island of Mahe. Over 150 houses have been damaged by the extreme conditions.
Pointe Au Sel in the southeast of the island reported 184mm of rain in a 24 hour period. This is nearly half the amount of rain which is expected in the entire month of January, which is the wettest month of the year.
Many other parts of the island also received well over 100mm, easily enough to generate flooding. With the ground fully saturated, landslides were inevitable.
© Joint Typhoon Warning Center
Category-4 equivalent Tropical Cyclone Felleng as of 1130 UTC Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013. To the west lies Madagascar; Reunion and Mauritius to the southeast (lower right).
Category-4 equivalent Tropical Cyclone Felleng as of 1130 UTC Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013. To the west lies Madagascar; Reunion and Mauritius to the southeast (lower right).
Highest sustained winds rose to an estimated 115 knots, or about 215 km/h, as of 1200 UTC Wednesday, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) said.
The dangerous storm, equivalent to a Category-4 hurricane, was centered less than 400 miles northwest of Reunion and within 360 miles east-northeast of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Storm movement was towards the south-southwest 13 knots, or 24 km/h.
Official forecasts tracking Felleng have been consistent since the first of the week, inasmuch as they have shown the southward-veering cyclone tracking "safely" between Madagascar and Reunion before racing southward over open water.
Last week, a much discussed new paper in the journal Nature seemed to suggest to some that we needn't worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth's history - the Eemian period, some 126,000 years ago - without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).
Comment: Indeed, the Earth naturally heats and cools and the desire to blame such natural occurrences on humans is unfounded and shifts the attention away from the truth, that our planet, and our whole solar system, could be in a natural heating up stage and that "human caused global warming" is just a distraction away from that.
But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn't buying it.
At Monday's Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we've already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What's more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher - both with no signs of stopping. "There is no analogue for that in the ice record," said Box.
And that's not all. The present mass scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren't happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland's icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.
Comment: Indeed, the Earth naturally heats and cools and the desire to blame such natural occurrences on humans is unfounded and shifts the attention away from the truth, that our planet, and our whole solar system, could be in a natural heating up stage and that "human caused global warming" is just a distraction away from that.
But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn't buying it.
At Monday's Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we've already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What's more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher - both with no signs of stopping. "There is no analogue for that in the ice record," said Box.
And that's not all. The present mass scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren't happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland's icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.
Figure 1. Changes in global grain yields and global temperatures 1961-2011
I keep reading these claims that we're all going to starve because of global warming. People say it's going to be the death of agriculture, that increasing temperatures will cause significant drops in crop yields. Here's a typical bit of alarmism (emphasis mine):
A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), indicates that climate change would hit developing countries the hardest, leading to massive decline in crop yields and production.Whoa, a massive decline in crop yields due to increasing temperatures, sounds scary. So I thought I'd review the facts. Here is the global situation, showing the global yields of rice, corn, and wheat, along with the change in global temperature.
© Lynne Terry/The Oregonian
A few berry-studded bushes sit near the intersection of Northeast Russell and Rodney, where more than 30 dead robins have been found in recent days. The question is: Did they die of berry binge drinking?
A few berry-studded bushes sit near the intersection of Northeast Russell and Rodney, where more than 30 dead robins have been found in recent days. The question is: Did they die of berry binge drinking?
More than 30 carcasses have been found on the ground in Northeast Portland in the past week. Wildlife experts don't know for sure what killed them but one possible cause is a berry binge -- just like in February 2008.
That month, the carcasses of more than 50 American robins were found around Mount Tabor in Southeast Portland. When scientists opened them up, they found their bellies full of holly berries.
"They had gorged themselves on fermenting berries," said Bob Sallinger, conservation director at the Audubon Society of Portland.
The robins had died of alcohol poisoning.
Kandi Cash trudged in rain through the splintered debris of her grandparents' home, hoping to salvage photos and other keepsakes after violent storms and tornadoes scoured the Southeast, leaving two people dead before the system advanced on the Northeast. The demolished home was one of many in the Georgia city of Adairsville splintered by a massive storm front as it punched across the Southeast on Wednesday and then headed across the densely populated Eastern seaboard on Thursday.
The vast storm front stretching on a slanting north-south arc for hundreds of miles shattered homes and businesses around the Midwest and South with tornadoes and high winds earlier in the week. By Thursday, it had spread power outages from the Carolinas to Connecticut, triggered flash floods and forced water rescues in areas outside Washington, D.C.
In the Northeast, utilities reported power outages affecting 74,000 users in Connecticut, nearly 25,000 others in Rhode Island and some 24,000 in upstate New York. Authorities in Rhode Island said gusting winds blew the roof off a building in Central Falls. A wind gust of 63 mph was recorded in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York as temperatures plunged with the cold air mass creeping up behind the front. Forecasters said snowfall was possible from the Great Lakes to the Northeast - some of it lake-effect snow.
© AP Photo/David Goldman
A vehicle lies on a road after a tornado moved through Adairsville, Ga. on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013. A fierce storm system that roared across northwest Georgia has left at least one person dead and a trail of damage that included demolished buildings in downtown Adairsville and vehicles overturned on Interstate 75 northwest of Atlanta.
A vehicle lies on a road after a tornado moved through Adairsville, Ga. on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013. A fierce storm system that roared across northwest Georgia has left at least one person dead and a trail of damage that included demolished buildings in downtown Adairsville and vehicles overturned on Interstate 75 northwest of Atlanta.
In the Northeast, utilities reported power outages affecting 74,000 users in Connecticut, nearly 25,000 others in Rhode Island and some 24,000 in upstate New York. Authorities in Rhode Island said gusting winds blew the roof off a building in Central Falls. A wind gust of 63 mph was recorded in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York as temperatures plunged with the cold air mass creeping up behind the front. Forecasters said snowfall was possible from the Great Lakes to the Northeast - some of it lake-effect snow.
"We could not observe the height of the eruption of dust because of the condition of the fog around the crater. At first eruption eruption dust altitude of about eight hundred yards," said Farid. He said the series of eruptions occurred after an increase in seismicity that occurred on Wednesday (30/1) at 22:54 pm. "Until now the status is still at alert level three," he said. - Inilah translated
"The Phlegraen Fields is a supervolcano. Yellowstone in the United States and Toba in Indonesia are also supervolcanoes capable of spewing more than 1,000 cubic km of magma. These are catastrophic eruptions. There was a huge volcanic eruption in the Phlegraen Fields some 30,000-40,000 years ago. Volcanic ash from that eruption is still found in the Mediterranean, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and even in Russia. We are now seeing the expansion of a magma pocket, which means that there might be an eruption at a certain time."
Comment: This article is obviously bent on spewing the 'human caused global-warming' schtick. The reader may enjoy more Climate Change Swindlers and the Political Agenda. And as far as worrying about 'sea rise flooding', read
Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!