Earth ChangesS


Question

Philippines: Virus kills 200 hogs in San Simon, rapidly spreading in Pampanga

City of San Fernando - More than 200 swine in San Simon town were found dead recently due to Porcine Reproductive Syndrome (PRRS) virus.

The Provincial Veterinary Office (PVO) said the rapid spread of PRRS among hogs and piglets in Apalit, Mexico, San Luis, Bacolor and in the City of San Fernando has reached an alarming proportion.

Mayor Rodrigo "Digos" Canlas said he accompanied the PVO officers in giving vaccines to afflicted pigs in some of the big and backyard piggeries in San Simon to avoid the mortality increase.

Augusto Baluyut, provincial veterinarian, said the PRRS first erupted in San Simon and it is continuously spreading in more towns in the province.

Baluyut recalled that two years ago, over 40 percent of the piggeries in the towns of Porac, Lubao, Santa Rita, Guagua were severely affected by PRRS, which caused financial setbacks to the owners of backyard farming.

Evil Rays

Will Anyone Notice Global Cooling

CO2 vs global temperature
© unknownThe graph above shows the temperature changes of the lower troposphere from the surface up to about 8 km as determined from the average of two analyses of satellite data. The best fit line from January 2002 to April 2009 indicates a decline of 0.25 Celsius/decade. The Sun's activity, which was increasing through most of the 20th century, has recently become quiet, causing a change of trend. The green line shows the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, as measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

It is inconceivable that even after a decade since global warming ended and seven years into a cooling trend with no end of cooling in sight, that world leaders are unaware of these facts and are still pursuing initiatives to stop global warming. Something is terribly wrong with the official international science bodies such as the IPCC who have not come forward and properly informed the world leaders of current global temperatures.

Something is terribly wrong with the individual government science bodies who did not come forward and inform their own leaders when it was certain that global warming had ended, or when there was sufficient data to claim that we are now in a cooling trend. It is not as though this is highly guarded secret data that can only be accessed by a limited group of people. The global temperature data is in fact readily available from several public sites and can be downloaded at no cost.

For the past year Friends of Science has been maintaining a graph of satellite temperature data and atmospheric CO2 concentration data on their website. This graph is updated every month as the new data becomes available. The cooling trend that started in 2002 is highlighted by a straight line best fit posted on this graph. The numerical value for this trend is 0.25C/decade of cooling!

Bizarro Earth

7.1 earthquake topples homes, kills 2 in Honduras

Image
© USGS; ESRI
Tegucigalpa - A powerful earthquake toppled more than two dozen homes in Honduras and Belize early Thursday, killing two children and injuring 40 people as terrified residents spilled from their homes across much of Central America.

The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 2:24 a.m. (4:24 a.m. EDT; 0824 GMT) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of the beach town of La Ceiba, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

"People were running for the door," Alfredo Cedeno said from the reception desk at the Gran Hotel Paris in La Ceiba. "You could really feel it and you could see it - the water came out of the pool."

Reynaldo Funez, 15, was buried in his house in Pineda de la Lima, 120 miles (200 kilometers) north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and 6-year-old Deily Yazmin Santos was killed when her house collapsed in the beach town of Morazan, national fire commander Col. Carlos Cordero said.

He said there were unconfirmed reports of two more deaths. In all, he said, at least 40 people were injured, most along the Caribbean coast.

Binoculars

US: Colorado dust storms speed snowmelt in the West

Colorado Peaks
© McKenzie Skiles / For the Los Angeles TimesSpring dust storms have left the snowcapped mountains of western Colorado tinged pink
Denver - A series of unusual spring dust storms has left the snowcapped mountains of western Colorado stained brown and red, even a bit pink. The dust is speeding up the runoff to rivers that supply millions of people with water and raising fears of an increasingly arid West.

Twelve dust storms barreled into the southern Rockies from the deserts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico so far this year. In contrast, four storms hit the mountains all year long in 2003. Eight occurred in each of the last three years.

"This year's been really, really strong," said Jason Neff, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "Something's been going on, and I don't think we're exactly sure what."

The storms leave a dark film on snow that melts it faster by hastening its absorption of the sun's energy. That, coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures, has sped up the runoff here, swelling rivers to near flood stage, threatening to make reservoirs overflow and fueling fears that there will not be enough water left for late-summer crops.

Attention

Greenpeace study compares U.S. pollution to other nations

Maryland emits more greenhouse gases than 150 countries

Maryland emitted more cumulative global warming pollution between 1960-2005 than more than 150 other nations surveyed, according to a report released today from Greenpeace. And that makes the state one of the least polluting on a per person basis.

The United States has long been considered the chief emitter, but months ahead of a global forum on the subject, the environmental organization was seeking to underscore the level by compiling Department of Energy statistics for individual states and comparing them to World Resource Institute data from 184 other countries.

Evil Rays

Canada Has a Frigid May after a Cold Winter

May has been frigid slowing the planting and emergence of the summer crops in Canada. Late freezes and even snows are still occurring regularly and can be expected the rest of the month.
Canada May 2009 temperature anomaly
© NOAACanada May 2009 temperature anomaly

The chart above shows the May 2009 temperature anomaly through May 24th. Parts of central Canada (Churchill, Manitoba) are running 16 degrees F below normal for the month through the 26th (map ends 24th). Every day this month has seen lows below freezing in Churchill and only 6 out of the first 26 days days had highs edge above freezing. The forecast the rest of the month is for more cold with even some snow today in Churchill and again this weekend perhaps further south.

Hudson Bay remains mostly frozen though most of the seasonal melting occurs in June and July most years.

Ambulance

BSE, Climate Change and Science Journalism

Dear Benny,

It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated." It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.

After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time.

In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story.

Bizarro Earth

Rebuttal to UK Times Online global warming cholera link - researchers fed up with twisted media

Times Online

Climate change is the cholera of our era

In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era - fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution. And just as doctors led the Victorian campaign, so the medical profession should be in the vanguard of this new revolution in public health. The front page of The Lancet of May 16 says it all: "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." This prestigious journal, which usually gives no more than ten pages to vitally important clinical research, made space for a 39-page report.

Climate change will hit the poorest nations hardest, but it will affect us too. In the summer of 2003, la canicule, an unexpected heatwave, killed 14,000 elderly people in France. Rising temperatures will bring that type of problem to our shores. Our health services will be put under pressure by severe weather and floods. But it is the global effects that will hit us, and especially our children and grandchildren, because of the effect that climate change will have on world food and water supplies; millions of climate refugees will disrupt the borders of even an island nation.

Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate changes threat to health. That proposition will instantly provoke a hostile reaction from the diminishing band of climate-change sceptics. But as a doctor of 40 years' standing who has been involved in running public health services for 30 years, I know that the evidence is good enough to make action, not inaction, the sensible choice. An empirical view of the data shows that delay will not just increase the amount of preventable harm, it may take us past a point of no return.

Bell

The MIT Global Warming Gamble

MIT Researchers AGW
© unknown

Climate science took another step backward last week as a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was announced which claims global warming by 2100 will probably be twice as bad as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted.

The research team examined a range of possible climate scenarios which combined various estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system with a range of possible policy decisions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions which (presumably) cause global warming. Without policy action, the group's model runs "indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees".

Since that average rate of warming (about 0.5 deg. C per decade) is at least 2 times the observed rate of global-average surface temperature rise over the last 30 years, this would require our current spate of no warming to change into very dramatic and sustained warming in the near future.

And the longer Mother Nature waits to comply with the MIT group's demands, the more severe the warming will have to be to meet their projections.

Footprints

US: Oregon campers shut out over Memorial holiday as parks still buried in snow

Campers and picnickers this Memorial Day weekend may find a cold, wet blanket of snow over some of their favorite high-country picnicking and camping spots.

On the Deschutes National Forest, visitors are warned of 8-foot snow depths at campgrounds and picnic sites above 5,500 feet. The Cascade Lakes Highway, south and west of Bend, has been plowed open but offers barely enough room for two cars to pass between snowbanks.

On the Mount Hood National Forest, visitors are likely to encounter snow on any road or trail at 3,500 feet to 4,000 feet elevation, said Rick Acosta, another Forest Service spokesman.

"Some of our more popular spots are snowed-in still," he said. "It just depends on where you go. A lot of those campgrounds are normally open for Memorial Day, but this year, they are not."