We are only 14 days into the new year and already it is looking to be another depressing one. Hundreds killed by floods in Australia, Sri Lanka and Brazil and another crazy with a gun running amok in America.
The shooting can be explained by Americas gun culture/political rhetoric/anti-semitism (delete as applicable) and the Queensland floods are being pinned on La Nina, which is lower than normal temperatures on the South America side of the Pacific and higher than normal on the Australasia side which results in some wild weather.
As anybody who has bothered to listen to the climate scientists knows, warmer waters fuel bigger storms which leads to more rainfall so if the ocean temperature is raised, and then pushed up even further by something like La Nina, then we get to see scenes like we have in Australia.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration undertook a 10 year study from 1998 to 2008 and found that the temperature data gathered pointed to a 'robust warming' of the ocean and the results of a 40 year study of ocean temperatures discovered a raising of the sea temperature by 0.5C over the past four decades.
Based on figures from the The Water Encyclopedia, La Nina raises the sea temperature in the western Pacific Ocean by 1C which means in 40 years the ocean has almost warmed enough to be halfway towards La Nina conditions being the norm.
Worryingly, La Nina is not the biggest problem because every 5 years or so, the even more powerful El Nino reverses the process and the violent rains and floods hit South America instead and throws out the weather systems across the globe, the El Nino of 1997 caused floods as far away as Europe and killed an estimated 2,100 people and caused at least £33 billion in property damage.
We can argue about why the earth is warming, whether it is man made or natural, but devastating weather phenomenons are becoming more common and even more catastrophic and it is only going to get worse.
10 comments:
Lucy,
what the heck - how do you manage a sentence about guns in the middle of a weather report?
Lucy - LET IT GO
You better hope we don't sell guns to Mr. Nino and Ms. Nina! Then they could go on a shooting rampage.
q
Quick - ban weather!!! SAVE THE PEOPLE!!!
NO!!! Better than that, give everybody a gun and let's shoot the heck outta Nino and Nina!
OH OH OH - we can nuke 'em until the glow - yeah that's the ticket. Boom boom glow...
q
Strangely q, i did start to write the post in the form of a weather report but halfway through i deleted it and started again as it did read as if i was making light of it all.
I wasn't but you know how some people can ignore the message that it has been a bad start to the year and pick out a few words of a sentence and hit me over the head with them. Hence, i did one nobody can bash me about. Or so i thought.
lucy,
in my case it is all meant to make light of our differences and our various views (mine as well as yours).
frankly, just to be contrarian, i think we are off to a great start. the economy is actually getting a little better (tho it hasn't been bad in Texas), our pols are acting like they are going to raise their level of civility some (i don't mind them disagreeing on every topic as much as i dislike their methods), i'm one year closer to retirement, i've already had a fun fishing trip in colorado (hence my lack of comments last week), i had a good backpacking weekend in Texas, i didn't gain any weight over the holidays, and i named the innovator of the year at my company this week (kinda cool).
q
Congratulations on the award, not gaining any weight over Christmas and i'm glad that you have had a good start to the year and long may it continue.
My year seems to have begun with me breaking things so i hope that comes to an abrupt halt soon.
It's sad that the respondents to your excellent article, to date, have avoid the issues you raise, Lucy.
I see that B.P. is working with Russia to explore then open new petroleum platforms in the ocean. It seems the fiasco in Mexico wasn't enough.
What does nature have to do to stop human stupidity and greed?
Perhaps a drought that kills 3-4 billion might bring about a change in attitude.
Might!
I thought that there was some kind of Arctic agreement not to drill there but apparently that's only the Antarctic. How ironic that the global warming that the oil companies have done so much to bring about is what is allowing them to drill in the Arctic now.
David,
You might need to rethink your position. Reading between the lines, it seems you just identified somebody (Russia, the Dutch, Venezuela, and the Chinese (buyers of oil from Russia, Netherlands, and Venezuela)) other than America as being culprits in destroying the world.
Q
i was tempted to write "3 or 4 billion... i suppose i could live those numbers."
mind you, i thought about doing it just to torque David, get a reaction from David, and reinforce David's belief that all Americans (and especially ignerint, dumass, redneck, gun totin, beer gusslin, truck drivin texans) are nefarious.
But, all us americans have been told to turn down the vitrolistic rhetoric... and David has been pretty unoffensive recently (even though his examples are still to extreme to maintain credibility).
q
So we can be as vitrolistically rhetorical as we like and Americans still have to be polite to us? Bingo!!
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