If Georgia orders watering restrictions in metro Atlanta beyond the current outdoor ban, it will be taking drought-fighting steps that not even arid Southern California or Las Vegas has had to make.
As the state considers restrictions on commercial and industrial users, water experts around the nation say they don't recall any major U.S. metro area being forced into such dire drought measures in about two decades.
"Most large metropolitan areas have systems in place where they try to be better managers of the resource than that," said Don Wilhite, who founded the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has been involved in drought responses for at least three decades.
Earth Changes
Showers and thunderstorms flooded roads, damaged buildings and knocked out power Monday as a strong weather system swept across North Texas. The rainy weather was blamed for at least one death and caused numerous accidents and traffic delays in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
One of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.
Comment: He says, "As vapor, [water is] a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it." While it is the most important, it simply is untrue that models don't take into account water vapor as a radiative forcing feedback. He's misinformed about this. In terms of radiation feedback effects of water vapor in the atmosphere models take this into account along with precipitation, evaporation and snow and ice cover. However, he may be referring to the cloud feedback mechanism which models do have a hard time dealing with. Whether low clouds or high clouds develop in response to CO2 forcing plays a large role on the effects on climate. Low clouds tend to cool the planet by making a high albedo surface and thus reflecting sunlight whereas high clouds tend to cause a blanket-type warming by reflecting long wave radiation back to the surface. In this, the models may have got it wrong.
Eight tourists, including one Briton, have died after being swept away by flash floods in Thailand while exploring a cave.
The tour group were trekking through the Khao Sok national park in Surat Thani province when the cave flooded.
The tour group were trekking through the Khao Sok national park in Surat Thani province when the cave flooded.
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| Wild elephants play in the Deeparbil wetland, a wildlife sanctuary, in Deeparbil, India. |
GAUHATI, India - About 100 wild elephants have converged on a river island in northeast India, demolishing homes, feasting on sugarcane and panicking residents, officials said Saturday.
BEIJING - A type of tiger thought to be extinct in the wild for more than two decades has been photographed in a mountainous area in northwest China, state media reported Saturday.
The endangered subspecies known as the South China tiger was spotted by a farmer on Oct. 3, the China Daily said.
Experts confirmed that it was a young wild South China tiger, the newspaper quoted Shaanxi Forestry Administration Bureau Deputy Director Zhu Julong as saying.
The endangered subspecies known as the South China tiger was spotted by a farmer on Oct. 3, the China Daily said.
Experts confirmed that it was a young wild South China tiger, the newspaper quoted Shaanxi Forestry Administration Bureau Deputy Director Zhu Julong as saying.
PORT-AU-PRINCE - At least 45 people have died in the poverty-stricken island of Haiti as homes were swept away in floods triggered by heavy rain, the interior ministry said Friday.
Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime told AFP 23 bodies had been found Thursday in Cabaret, just north of the capital, and 12 were missing after floodwaters hit their hillside homes, sweeping them away in the current.
Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime told AFP 23 bodies had been found Thursday in Cabaret, just north of the capital, and 12 were missing after floodwaters hit their hillside homes, sweeping them away in the current.
Norway - Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.
"I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize," Gore said. "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.
Comment: With the political drive behind the climate change debate, this nomination was expected. Nevermind, that there is a growing body of scientists, who challenge the conclusions that Gore and the IPCC are drawing.
"I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize," Gore said. "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.
Comment: With the political drive behind the climate change debate, this nomination was expected. Nevermind, that there is a growing body of scientists, who challenge the conclusions that Gore and the IPCC are drawing.
Comment: There is broad agreement that the climate is warming at the moment, but there is much disagreement about the conclusions that are drawn from this change and to what degree human activity is responsible.
Read Climate Change Swindlers and the Political Agenda
The North Coast and in particular Lismore is busy cleaning up today after a super cell storm hit the region yesterday. Heavy rain, golf size hailstones and wind gusts of more than 80 km per hour had enough force to smash the windows of cars, houses and businesses.
Comment: For more information on what Dr. William Gray is talking about, read Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow.