The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity.Â
ScienceDaily: Severe Weather News
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Posted: 07 Aug 2012 08:33 AM PDT Even temporary rises in local temperatures significantly damage long-term economic growth in the world’s developing nations, according to a new study.
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Monsoon rains in capital of Philippines worse than Typhoon Ketsana, which devastated region in 2009
Within the past 24 hours, torrential rains have caused massive flooding in Manila, bringing the sprawling capital of the Philippines to a standstill. Dr Mahar Lagmay, executive director of Project Noah, the country’s diasaster mitigation system, said rainfall in Metro Manila (the City of Manila and its surrounding areas) has surpassed the levels of Typhoon Ketsana, which devastated Manila in 2009 and resulted in hundreds of deaths.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated and 15 deaths have been reported so far. CNN claimed 500mm of rain have fallen in Manila over the past 48 hours, while according to an AFP report, a landslide buried four houses in a Manila slum area.
Schools, financial markets and government offices were closed on Tuesday as flooding on major roadways made travel impossible. Schools in affected areas will remain closed on Wednesday. Non-stop monsoon rains have left hundreds stranded on roads and the government has issued landslide warnings in provinces outside the capital. Roads have turned into rivers, and on some streets people could be seen floating on whatever they could find.
Jean Navarez of the state weather service said: “If we put it in a percentage, at least 50% of Metro Manila is flooded.” Benito Ramos, executive director of the national disaster risk reduction and management council said the continued floods were due to the fact that soil remains saturated after several days of continuous rain. He added that “the sea and the flood waters looked like one single body of water”.
Massive evacuation and relief efforts have been underway throughout Metro Manila and nearby provinces. According to Red Cross volunteer Benjo Ramos, whose team has rescued more than 92 people so far, water levels have reached nine to 15 feet in some areas. “Some are stranded on the second floor, some are losing their second floors [and] calling for help from the roofs of houses,” he said. “We are taking them from houses to shelters, and feeding them – all our teams are out.”
A local emergency response team led by Melvin Villaruz, a councillor for Pasig City, has already evacuated 300 families of “informal settlers” living along the Pasig river, a 27km waterway that winds through Metro Manila. These disadvantaged communities are living there illegally but have nowhere else to go. “It’s very bad,” he said. “Beside the river it’s flooded area. Half the Pasig [river] is almost near the neck.”
He added: “We take them to schools or gyms for safety. We also rescued 10 children who were living under a bridge on the river. We warned them what will happen if the river rises in a few hours.”
Flooded roads make it difficult to reach these areas. On the way to the river, Villaruz’s team rescued a family of eight (a grandmother, five children and two adults) who could not leave their homes because the water had reached shoulder level.
John Javellana, a photojournalist who has covered every major typhoon in the country in the past four years, is surprised at how victims are responding to the flood. He says they are more prepared, even though there was no official typhoon warning sent out by the weather service (the local news reported only an upgraded rainfall alert and a warning of flooding in low-lying parts and areas located near river channels ).
“It was a relief to see,” said Javellana. “Although not ideal yet, people co-operated more with rescue workers. During Typhoon Ondoy [Ketsana], many people were hesitant to leave until the last minute because they were afraid of losing belongings. Now if it’s only a forecast for heavy rains and the government says go, they do.”
Ramos also noticed a difference in today’s rescue efforts. “Everyone pitched in – military, local government, police, NGOs … This time, everything was more organised and obviously people had learned from past disasters.”
Evacuation centres were also very organised, with relief goods making it on time, said Ramos. “It’s by the book – we are prepared this time. But there is a lot more work to be done, more families to be saved; it’s not over yet.”
Here comes the sun: chilling verdict on a climate going to extremes
James Hansen August 07, 2012
When I testified before the US Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows it is no longer enough to say global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heatwave of 2003, the fiery Russian heatwave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data is gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the US is suffering.
The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
More below
Years ago, I introduced the concept of ”climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.
But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the dice would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the dice season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.
But loading the dice with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal.
Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate, the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.
When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.
The change is so dramatic, one face of the dice must represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot events.
More below
Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the past three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 per cent of the globe.
This is the world we have changed, and we have to live in it – the world that caused the 2003 heatwave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data shows, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 per cent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.
The future is now. And it is hot.
James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This article was first published in The Washington Post.
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Updated
Photo: Mount Tongariro, pictured prior to an eruption, has erupted, closing roads and disrupting flights in the North Island of New Zealand (www.geonet.org.nz)Scientists in New Zealand are monitoring Mount Tongariro carefully after the volcano erupted last night for the first time in 115 years.
Police and conservation rangers have been checking huts on the mountain, and have confirmed that no hikers have been trapped by the eruption.
Police say there are no reports of death or injury.
People near the volcano in the central North Island have reported hearing loud explosions and seeing flames, bright flashes, and red-hot rocks flying from the mountain’s north side.
Ash has fallen as far away as Napier, 100km to the south-east, with up to five centimetres of ash reported in some areas.
Meteorologists said the ash cloud is being blown eastwards towards the Pacific Ocean.
Truck driver Bryn Rodda was driving near the mountain when it erupted and has told Radio New Zealand it was a spectacular sight.
“I could see this big cloud, it looked like a fist basically, at an angle a across the sky, and at about the wrist section of the fist, there was a sudden, orange ball of flash,” he said.
“And there were a few startled comments over the CB from various odd truckies that I could hear, along the lines of, what the hell was that?”
Flights to various regional centres have been cancelled and residents in the area are being urged to stay indoors with windows closed.
GNS New Zealand volcanologist Michael Rosenberg has told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat the eruptions have stopped for the moment.
“The initial ash eruption probably lasted a couple of hours, at the moment things are fairly quiet,” he said.
“What that means we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Scientists say the eruption – the mountain’s first since 1897 – may be the start of more volcanic activity.
The spew of rocks, fine particles and steam from the snow-capped, 1,978m peak, was caused by a pressure buildup of volcanic gases, volcanologists said
Mr Rosenberg says despite recent rumblings from Mt Tongariro, the eruption has come as a surprise.
“Over the last three or four weeks we’ve been recording very small volcanic earthquakes underneath the mountain, but in the last week or so there’ve been far fewer of those earthquakes, and much much smaller,” he said.
“And from that very low level, suddenly we’re into an eruption – so it’s certainly unexpected.”
New Zealand’s Civil Defence has warned that volcanic activity could pose a threat to Waikato, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Manawatu-Whanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki.
The ministry’s David Coetzee told Radio Australia they don’t know if or when it will erupt again.
“You know we just don’t know,” he said.
“We may have a similar occurrence without warning and if people are there they could be in harm’s way. So we advise that they reconsider over the next few days if they intended to go there.”
The Desert Road section of State Highway 1, north-east of the mountain, and State Highway 46, to the north, have also been closed.
Air New Zealand has cancelled flights to and from airports east of the volcano, including Gisborne, Rotorua and Taupu.
“We will not fly through ash and are constantly taking guidance from the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) and the MetService to ensure we can continue to carry passengers where safe routes and altitudes are available,” the airline said in a statement.
Flights from Auckland to Wellington have not been affected, as they fly at a higher altitude than the ash.
Topics:volcanic-eruption, new-zealand, pacific
First posted
Columbia University
web page maintained by Makiko Sato (mhs119@columbia.edu)
Our aim is to help people understand global climate change — and how the factors that drive climate are changing.
We start with climate diagnostics — people are usually most interested in climate change itself. But cause-and-effect analysis requires also data on climate forcings (which drive climate change) and feedbacks (which amplify or diminish climate change).
We update graphs of “Storms of My Grandchildren.” Yet the greatest insight about processes discussed in “Storms” is often provided by other quantities, for example, the rate of ice sheet disintegration. We include some data from other scientists or their web sites, as indicated.
Continual updating of data curves, whether global temperature, the Greenland ice sheet mass, the sun’s brightness, Keeling’s carbon dioxide record, or other more obscure quantities, is a most interesting aspect of science. Sometimes data curves follow an expected path, sometimes not, but we usually learn something. As Richard Feynman said, there is a pleasure of finding things out.
That pleasure is now mixed with concern. Humans are altering the measured curves. But whether climate change will be moderate — something humans and most species can adjust to — or whether climate change accelerates and spins out of control, with devastating consequences for future generations — that depends.
Future climate depends on how climate forcings change — human-made greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, and forcings that are not yet well measured, especially aerosols. The speed and degree of climate change also will depend upon how fast amplifying feedbacks, such as Arctic sea ice, the large ice sheets, and methane hydrates come into play.
Construction of this web site is just beginning. But already there are interesting new data.
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