One Last Post

I think I'm shutting down this Blog.

There is little else to report - the science just gets more and more solid, the Politicians lack the spine to do anything about it, the Deniers make less and less sense, and probable conditions just get worse.

My last map - the Earth as of 2060, unless Mankind gets its act together:

It's just getting too depressing.

My apologies to my children and grandchildren for any part I may have had in this outcome.

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90 Degree River Shuts Tennessee Nuclear Plant for Second Time

From Climate Progress:

As oblivious as the proverbial frogs in slowly boiling water, we are beginning to experience the seemingly benign first years of catastrophic climate change. With the temperature in the Tennessee River approaching that of a nice warm hot tub, for a second summer in a row, three Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power plants had to shut down this week.

As temperatures across the South have skyrocketed in record-breaking heatwaves, the water in the Tennessee River, where the plants discharge their cooling water, is already a staggering 90 degrees.
Because hot rivers are not good for fish, by law nuclear plants must not heat rivers above 86.9 degrees with their discharged water.
But that now quaint-seeming environmental protection was passed decades ago, well before global warming began to impact air and water temperatures. Summers like these make environmental niceties like not overheating rivers with nuclear cooling water a bit irrelevant, because the river in question is already as hot as a hot tub.

“When the river’s ambient temperature reaches 90 degrees, we can’t add any heat to it,” TVA’s nuclear spokesman Ray Golden told the Times Free Press.

The shutdown marks the second summer in a row that TVA has had to shut down nuclear power as local rivers have reached record temperatures.Last year’s shutdown cost the company $50 million in replacement power, a cost it passed along to its customers. To forestall the same problem reoccurring in future years, TVA invested $80 million in a seventh cooling tower at Browns Ferry, which began construction last October.

Why Didn't Anyone See This Coming?

Texas is facing its worst drought ever....

 

Those Stupid, Lying Climate Scientists - Why didn't they warn us about stuff like this?

Ohh, wait...

A Danger we "Warmists" Missed

I don't remember ever hearing about this from any Climate Scientist...

PARIS, July 24, 2011 (AFP) - "Dirty Dozen" chemicals, including the notoriously toxic DDT, are being freed from Arctic sea ice and snow through global warming, a study published on Sunday suggested.

The "Dirty Dozen" — formally known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) — were widely used as insecticides and pesticides before being outlawed in 2001. They are extremely tough molecules that take decades to break down in nature. They also bio-accumulate, meaning that as they pass up the food chain, concentrations rise, posing a fertility threat to higher species. In addition, they are insoluble in water and easily revolatilise, so can swiftly transit from soil and water to the atmosphere in response to higher temperatures.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, looked at atmospheric concentrations of three chemicals — DDT, HCH and cis-chlordane — monitored between 1993 and 2009 at a station in Norway's Svalbard Islands and at another in the Canadian Arctic. The scientists indeed found a long-term downward trend in primary emissions after the Stockholm Convention banned production and trade in the "Dirty Dozen."

But a more complex and disturbing picture emerged when the same data was crunched through a simulation of the effect of global warming on POP concentrations.

Arctic Sea Ice to Disappear by 2030

More evidence of just how serious the situation is:


"Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at a record pace this year, suggesting warming at the north pole is speeding up and a largely ice-free Arctic can be expected in summer months within 30 years.

The area of the Arctic ocean at least 15% covered in ice is this week about 8.5m sq kilometres – lower than the previous record low set in 2007 – according to satellite monitoring by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. In addition, new data from the University of Washington Polar Science Centre, shows that the thickness of Arctic ice this year is also the lowest on record.

In the past 10 days, the Arctic ocean has been losing as much as 150,000 square kilometres of sea a day, said Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC.

'The extent [of the ice cover] is going down, but it is also thinning. So a weather pattern that formerly would melt some ice, now gets rid of much more. There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.'"
The Entire Article

Are You Ready for More?

From Newsweek:

Joplin, Missouri after the tornado that hit on May 22

Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.

Northern Canada Glaciers Melting Faster than in Alaska

FAIRBANKS — The glaciers and ice fields of Canada’s far-north islands have lost enough water over the last few summers to fill three-quarters of Illiamna Lake, Alaska’s largest. This news comes just a few years after typical melting from the same region would have only filled one quarter of the same lake each year.

“It was a massive increase between these two periods (2004 to 2006 and the record warmth of 2007 to 2009),” said glaciologist Gabriel Wolken, coauthor of a new paper in which scientists claim that glacial ice of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago contributes more to sea-level rise than any regional group of ice outside Greenland or Antarctica.

Hell and High Water, Part II

From AccuWeather.com

TEXAS HELL

“This is a situation of historic proportions,” said Victoria Koenig, public information officer with the Texas Forest Service, in a phone interview with AccuWeather.com Tuesday. “The fuels are so dry. The winds are astronomical. The behavior of the winds is a perplexing situation. It’s never been like this before.”

Koenig added, “When you put all the ingredients together, you’re getting close to having the ‘perfect fire storm‘.”

That’s Accuweather meteorologist Heather Buchman writing about “a never-before-seen wildfire situation in Texas has led to the scorching of nearly 1 million acres and destruction of hundreds of homes and buildings.

Texas is in the midst of one of the worst droughts, in terms of the depth and expanse of drought conditions, since the early 1900s.

Oil Shortages and Environmental Decline Could Create "Global Quagmire" - Cdn Military

KINGSTON, Ont. — The planet is running out of oil and heading toward a future that could trap Canada in a violent spiral of decline in the economy and the environment, a special research unit within the Canadian military is predicting.

This "global quagmire" is one of four possible future scenarios advanced by the six members of the team who are developing a plan for the army of tomorrow based on existing scientific research and analysis.

In a best-case scenario, they predict that Canada could be at the forefront of a prosperous green economy, in which clean energy and environmental protection are priorities and living standards improve around the world.

Two other scenarios fall in between, but all four alternatives conclude that energy security and global environmental change are the most serious and unpredictable factors that could radically alter society as well as the role of Canada's army.

"It all depends on what kind of steps are taken today that could lead to various futures," Peter Gizewski, a strategic analyst on the team, told Postmedia News.

Members of the team said that climate change in particular could have a wide range of consequences, as well as oil shortages in a world with no alternative sources of energy.

The team has also noted that the world is now consuming oil faster than it's being discovered. "Globally, we find more (oil) all the time, but we haven't actually found as much as we've used in a given year since 1985," said Maj. John Sheahan, another member of the research team.

From the long (term) view, it's guaranteed that something else will take over (as an energy source), we just don't know what or when. . . . Nobody has yet come up with the solution (so) that we can (continue to) do the things we do now and have done for decades. So it is possible that the time line is against us."

The global quagmire scenario predicts a world ravaged by climate change and environmental degradation in which "markets are highly unstable" and there are high risks of widespread conflicts involving ownership and access to oil, water, food and other resources.

Warming Helps Drive Food Prices to Record Highs

FAO expects a tightening of the global cereal supply and demand balance in 2010/11. In the face of a growing demand and a decline in world cereal production in 2010, global cereal stocks this year are expected to fall sharply because of a decline in inventories of wheat and coarse grains. International cereal prices have increased sharply with export prices of major grains up at least 70 percent from February last year.


“Unexpected oil price spikes could further exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets,” said David Hallam, Director of FAO’s Trade and Market Division.

“This adds even more uncertainty concerning the price outlook just as plantings for crops in some of the major growing regions are about to start,” he added.

Unless oil prices come down sharply and soon, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
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Extinction and Climate

February 17, 2011 by Kate, "climatesight"

Life on Earth does not enjoy change, and climate change is something it likes least of all. Every aspect of an organism’s life depends on climate, so if that variable changes, everything else changes too – the availability of food and water, the timing of migration or hibernation, even the ability of bodily systems to keep running.

Species can adapt to gradual changes in their environment through evolution, but climate change often moves too quickly for them to do so. It’s not the absolute temperature, then, but the rate of change that matters. Woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers thrived during the Ice Ages, but if the world were to shift back to that climate overnight, we would be in trouble.

Put simply, if climate change is large enough, quick enough, and on a global scale, it can be the perfect ingredient for a mass extinction. This is worrying, as we are currently at the crux of a potentially devastating period of global warming, one that we are causing. Will our actions cause a mass extinction a few centuries down the line? We can’t tell the future of evolution, but we can look at the past for reference points.

A Vision of the Future, Happening Now

The article below is a good indication of what many areas are in for over the next few decades.

I think initially the worsening storms mentioned in the article will be the worst part, but in the long run rising sea levels will destroy Billions, perhaps even Trillions of dollars worth of of valuable coastal land...

Ventura Shorelines Washing Away

I keep hearing how much it will cost to prevent Warming, but very few people realize how much it will cost to NOT do anything.
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2010's World Gone Wild: Quakes, Floods, Blizzards

Associated Press Seth Borenstein And Julie Reed Bell, Associated Press – Sun Dec 19, 5:31 pm ET

This was the year the Earth struck back.

Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 — the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.

"It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves," said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010. "The term `100-year event' really lost its meaning this year."

And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.

Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes.

NASA Claims The Hottest November on Record

Also the warmest Meteorological Year (Dec to Nov) on record. All in all, not a surprise.

I expect 2011 to be cooler (Which will cause the Deniers to claim Warming is over, of course) then 2012 will be a SCORCHER!

For those of you wondering why so few updates recently, I'm just back fom a small vacation in my home town of Winnipeg, which is cooler and recieving more snow than it has in years, (although nowhere near what it did when I was growing up)  and is expecting its 4th "Flood of the Century" in the last 18 years, and quite probably their second "500 year flood" in the last 8 years. All floodway bits are being upgraded.


It seems they don't make centuries like they used to. - There's even a few radicals who are linking it all to AGW.

New Record Low Arctic Sea Ice for Late October

The Records due to warming keep on keeping on...

This won't get much play elsewhere since it's not an absolute record, but I think it's significant. The winter ice is just not forming very fast!

U.S. Southwest's Dry Spell May Intensify with Climate Change

From Scientific American :

By Mike Orcutt  October 29, 2010

A new analysis using a standard drought index augurs that by the end of the century devastating drought conditions will take hold over much of the populated areas of the world


Lake Mead, the massive reservoir created in the late 1930s by Hoover Dam on the Arizona–Nevada border, has dropped to its lowest level ever, it was reported earlier this month. The lake has been steadily growing shallower since drought began reducing the flow of its source, the Colorado River, starting in 2000 due to below-average snowfall in the Rockies.

It is still too early to know whether the situation at Lake Mead and recent droughts throughout the U.S. Southwest are due to anthropogenic global warming, says Aiguo Dai, an atmospheric scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. There is not enough data to rule out natural variability as the fundamental cause. But the decade long dry spell is consistent with the predictions of models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007, which projected that warming of the planet would lead to long-term drying over the subtropics—the climatic regions adjacent to the tropics, ranging between about 20 and 40 degrees north and south latitude, which includes the Southwest.

It's also consistent with a new analysis, authored by Dai, which forecasts that increasing dryness over the next several decades will eventually become devastatingly severe, with long-lasting drought predicted for most of Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

The Entire Article

And so it goes - one more disaster after another...

Searching for Crumbs in Syria's Breadbasket

From the New York Times:

AR RAQQAH, Syria — The farmlands spreading north and east of this Euphrates River town were once the breadbasket of the region, a vast expanse of golden wheat fields and bucolic sheep herds.


Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the Fertile Crescent — including much of neighboring Iraq — appears to be turning barren, climate scientists say. Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off. Sandstorms have become far more common, and vast tent cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and cities of Syria and Iraq.

“I had 400 acres of wheat, and now it’s all desert,” said Ahmed Abdullah, 48, a farmer who is living in a ragged burlap and plastic tent here with his wife and 12 children alongside many other migrants. “We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero — no money, no job, no hope.”

Satellite Records Set: Hottest September Ever Recorded

The NOAA final report doesn't come out until the 15th, but the basic Satellite record looks very conclusive.

New records established everywhere.

And for the Deniers who claim that their particular little corner of the world was cooler, therefore there was no warming , take a look at the number of record highs vs the number of record lows:

Coastal North Carolina's Second 500-Year Rainfall in 11 Years

These extreme events are getting more and more common.

As Climate Progress said, they don't make 500 year storms like they used to.

Original post from Capital Climate:

Excessive rainfall in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina from a tropical conveyor belt including the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole has broken the total rainfall record from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The Floyd rainfall has been described by the National Weather Service as a once-in-500-year event.

The NWS reported this morning that the 19.66" at Wilmington in the 3 days ending yesterday is the highest 3-day total precipitation in records that began in 1871. The 10.33" on Monday is also the second highest all-time single day amount following Floyd's 13.38" on Sept. 15, 1999. The September total so far of 20.84" through this morning is the second highest for the month behind 1999. Heavy rain is continuing at Wilmington, and an additional 0.45" has fallen in the 6 hours ending at 2 pm EDT.

3 PM Update:

An additional 0.30" has fallen in the last hour with visibility reduced to 1.5 miles in continuing heavy rain.

4 PM Update:

Heavy rain continues, 0.39" more in the last hour.

5 PM Update:

The 0.42" in the latest hour brings the 3-hour total to 1.11". As of 4 pm, today's total was 1.74" and September to date was 22.17".

6 PM Update:

Wilmington has received 0.14" more in the last hour as the rainfall has diminished to moderate.

Elizabeth City's total so far today of 4.09" is still short of the record 4.52" for the date.

The 2.53" at Richmond VA is below the record of 2.85".

Today's 5.62" at Norfolk VA through 5 pm is a new record for the date. It's the third highest daily record for all of September. An additional 0.19" has fallen in the last hour.

And So It Goes...

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Melting Sea Ice Forces Walruses Ashore in Alaska

From AP:

Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted.

U.S. government scientists say this massive move to shore by walruses is unusual in the United States. But it has happened at least twice before, in 2007 and 2009. In those years Arctic sea ice also was at or near record low levels.

Loss of sea ice in the Chukchi this summer has surprised scientists because last winter lots of old established sea ice floated into the region, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. But that has disappeared.

Although last year was a slight improvement over previous years, Serreze says there has been a long-term decline that he blames on global warming.

“We’ll likely see more summers like this,” he said. “There is no sign of Arctic recovery.”
We all know about Polar Bears, which are photogenic and so make nice ads, but even the ugly Arctic creatures are affected.