Saturday 18 July 2015

The Dying Earth - 07/17/2015

Dozens flee homes as wildfires rage in Greece, PM urges calm
Forest fires fanned by strong winds and high temperatures broke out around Athens and in other parts of southern Greece on Friday, sending residents fleeing from flames threatening their homes.



17 July, 2015


Summer wildfires, though common for the season, heaped additional misery on the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which is struggling to obtain a new bailout from foreign credдtors.



The police said 52 separate fires had broken out on four main fronts in a region stretching from the island of Evia, northeast of Athens, to the southern Peloponnese.

A 58-year-old died after inhaling fumes and suffering respiratory problems but there were no other reports of casualties.

Tsipras urged calm as more than 140 firefighters with 80 fire engines and 11 aircraft battled the flames near Athens that crept close to homes.

A neighborhood playground was razed and flames surrounded the local church. Dozens of people, including elderly women covering their faces with headscarves, tried to put out the flames with buckets of water.

"We all need to stay calm," Tsipras told reporters.

He said he had asked the air force and armed forces for help and had also appealed to other European countries for assistance with extra fire-fighting aircraft.

Forest fires are common during the summer months in Greece but memories remain vivid of the huge damage and heavy loss of life in 2007, during the most serious outbreak in decades.

The fires started on several fronts was and Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said arson was possible.

"Armed forces have been ordered to start patrols throughout Greece, and particularly in mountainous regions," he said.

Television footage showed huge plumes of smoke billowing over the town of Neapolis, with a wall of fire racing down a mountain fanned by very strong winds. 

Authorities said three communities in the region were evacuated.

"Things are very bad," Peloponnese Governor Petros Tatoulis told state television. "The situation is critical. We are working to prevent casualties."



Snow falls on Mauna Kea summit in July, road closure in effect
While most of Hawaii experiences sweltering conditions this July, part of the Big Island might seem like winter after Mauna Kea got some snow overnight.


17 July, 2015


Officials have closed the road to the summit of Mauna Kea Friday after snow fell and caused icy road conditions. A ranger reported mixed rain and snow, fog and 1.5 inches of frozen snow on the summit.

It is not known when the road will reopen to the public.

No winter weather advisories have been posted at this time.


Mauna Kea weather varies widely. A calm sunny day may quickly become treacherous with hurricane force winds and blizzard conditions. Summit winds above 120 mph are not uncommon. At 10:15 a.m. Friday the temperature was still a chilly 36 degrees with the wind-chill dipping to 27 degrees!


Cars Catch Fire After California Wildfire Jumps Freeway
According to the San Bernardino County Fire Department the fire was moving at a “rapid rate.”




NBC,
17 July, 2015


A fast, wind-whipped wildfire swept over a crowded California freeway Friday, sending drivers running for safety and setting more than a dozen vehicles ablaze, officials said.

Twenty vehicles were destroyed and 10 others were damaged after the wildfire, dubbed the North Fire, jumped Interstate 15 in Cajon Pass in San Bernardino, officials with San Bernardino National Forest said. There were no injuries. Fire officials earlier reported that several motorists suffered smoke inhalation and burns injuries.




The interstate was packed with weekend getaway traffic when the blaze broke out near the freeway at around 2:30 p.m. It quickly swelled to hundreds of acres and strong winds sent the flames sweeping over the interstate, officials said.

The fire burned some vehicles and the flames then spread to others, including a tractor-trailer and a towed boat, and explosions were seen as some of the vehicles burned.

Firefighters used helicopters and to try and douse the fires from above, as firefighters on the ground tried to put out burning vehicles on the interstate.

By 6 p.m. the fire grown to 3,500 acres, the forest service said. The blaze burned five homes and threatened 50 others, officials said.


Several cars were in flames after the rapidly-moving brush fire swept over Interstate 15. KNBC

California is in the fourth year of a historic drought, exacerbating wildfire conditions. Hot, dry winds that gusted up to 40 miles per hour swept the blaze over the interstate so fast officials couldn't stop traffic, said Liz Brown, spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

"It's so dry that its carrying that fire a lot faster, and put a little wind on it and this is what we have," she said.

Ambulances and medical helicopters were sent to the the interstate. San Bernardino County Fire prepared for a mass casualty event. Interstate 15 is a major thoroughfare from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

A cause of the fire is not yet known


SixTropical Cyclones At Once in the Pacific Ocean







Paris, Jul 16 (EFE) .- Scorching temperatures in France from June 29 to July 5, setting all-time highs in several parts of the country, caused 700 more deaths compared to records from years with milder summers.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine said on Thursday in a press conference that this staggering statistic represents a 7 percent increase in the number of deaths compared to the average during the same dates, minus the heat wave.

The minister also noted that 3,580 people had to be treated in emergency medical centers, representing a three-fold increase from a 'normal period.'


Touraine nevertheless noted that the mortality jump could be understood from a macro perspective as "limited."


NZ gets 'a battering' from storms
Two storm systems are forecast to batter the country over the next two days.



Here comes the rain! Radar loop upto 7.40am. Wind gusts of 100km/h in exposed areas, too. ^RKpic.twitter.com/Xi4dtW3DTk
MetService (@MetService) July 17, 2015
The first is expected to bring cold winds and snow to low levels in Fiordland, Southland, Canterbury and Marlborough, with very heavy snow possible to 300 metres in Otago.
Polar outbreak brings snow to low from Fiordland to S Marlborough, esp above 300m on Sat. ^RKhttp://t.co/NQBonCMXTZ pic.twitter.com/m00ayelpFb
MetService (@MetService) July 16, 2015
The second is expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds to most North Island regions and the top of the South tomorrow, with gale warnings for Wellington and eastern Marlborough from tonight.

A heavy rain warning is in place for the Bay of Plenty.
Low = gales and heavy rain to N and Cntrl NZ Sat, then ferocious S'ly to Welly late Sat.http://t.co/NQBonCMXTZ ^RK pic.twitter.com/upHqiJoRBv
MetService (@MetService) July 16, 2015
They follow bad weather throughout the week, with torrential downpours causing flooding in Auckland and heavy snow in the eastern North Island around Gisborne.
Pet Calves at Tahora Station, Wharekopae (inland Gisborne).Heavy snow was experienced around Gisborne earlier this week. Photo: SUPPLIED / Nicholas Barclay

MetService said big seas were likely to batter Wellington's south coast for the fourth time this year.

It said the wild weather could cause flooding, bring down trees, disrupt power and make driving hazardous.

MetService forecaster Karl Loots said people should be prepared.

He said heavy rain was also expected in Northland and Auckland, which will then make its way to central New Zealand.

In Auckland, strong winds have blown off scaffolding from a construction site in Ponsonby.
Crummer Street, off Ponsonby Road.Crummer Street, off Ponsonby Road.   Photo: RNZ / Sharon Brettkelly

Police have blocked off Crummer Street at the top of Ponsonby Road.







A DEEP freeze not seen in NSW for at least 20 years has caused havoc on the roads, closed schools and services, and put Sydney commuters through one of their coldest mornings on record.

The apparent temperature in Sydney’s CBD dropped to -1C at 7am today, believed to be the coldest for the city since hourly wind chill readings began in the 1990s, with rain exacerbating the discomfort.

Further west it was snow causing most of the trouble.

More than 40 schools in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands had to be closed because of snow.


An estimated 9500 homes in those regions were without electricity on Friday morning after snow-laden tree branches hit power lines.




Every day they update the numbers. And every day, the number of acres burned in Alaska seems to leap higher yet again.

As of Monday, it is at 4,447,182.2 acres, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center — a total that puts the 2015 wildfire season in sixth place overall among worst seasons on record. It’s very likely to move into fifth place by Tuesday — and it’s still just mid-July. There is a long way to go.

According to the Center, 2015 is now well ahead of the rate of burn seen in the worst year ever, 2004, when 6,590,140 acres burned in 701 fires. “Fire acreage totals are more than 14 days ahead of 2004,” the agency notes. In other words, and although the situation could still change, we may be watching the unfolding of the worst year ever recorded.

But it isn’t just Alaska — even more acres have burned this year across Canada. As of Sunday, 2,924,503.01 hectares had burned in 4,921 fires — and a hectare is much bigger than an acre. In fact, it’s about 2.47 of them. Thus, some 7,223,522 acres had burned in Canada as of Sunday. In Canada, too, wildfire activity this year is well above average levels.

Overall, the 2015 Canadian and Alaskan fire seasons have seen 11,670,704 acres burned so far, based on these numbers. (Which are always growing large.)




One reason that’s so worrisome: Alaska is 80 percent underlain by permafrost, and Canada is 50 percent underlain by it. These frozen soils now have a large number of fires burning atop them, and when permafrost thaws, it can begin to release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. (Fires also worsen global warming in another way — by releasing huge amounts of carbon into the air due to the combustion of organic material.




California’s towering redwood trees are dying of thirst.

They require enormous amounts of water,” said Anthony Ambrose, a tree biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying redwoods and giant sequoias for nearly two decades. “For the big, old trees, they can use more than 2,000 liters of water per day during the summer.”

Water, however, is in increasingly short supply in the Golden State. All around drought-stricken California, coast redwoods appear to be suffering. They’re shedding leaves, turning brown, and dropping undersized cones. Some of the state’s younger trees, situated in parks and residential areas hundreds of miles away from their native forests, are even dying.


What does that mean for the state’s ancient redwood forests, where the trees are often centuries old and climb hundreds of feet into the air?




(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Models of past eras show that oxygen can influence global temperature and humidity as its concentration changes

Earth has a surprising new player in the climate game: oxygen. Even though oxygen is not a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, its concentration in our atmosphere can affect how much sunlight reaches the ground, and new models suggest that effect has altered climate in the past.

Oxygen currently makes up about 21 percent of the gases in the planet’s atmosphere, but that level hasn’t been steady over Earth’s history. For the first couple of billion years, there was little oxygen in the atmosphere. Then, about 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen started getting added to the atmosphere by photosynthetic cyanobacteria. “Oxygen is produced as a waste product of photosynthesis. It is consumed through respiration,” explains University of Michigan climate scientist Chris Poulsen, lead author of the study published today in Science



Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth's declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years," said the study's lead author, John Schramski, an associate professor in UGA's College of Engineering. "The sun's energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished."




A shift in a decadal-scale cycle of Pacific Ocean temperatures could lead to a spike in global warming the next few years, climate researchers said after tracking a subsurface layer of unusually warm water in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

The layer, between 300 and 1,000 feet below the surface, has been accumulating more heat than previously recognized, according to climate researchers from UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who published their finding in the journal Science




Earlier this week, I wrote about the global coal renaissance — arguably the most important climate-change story in the world right now. Since 2000, developing countries like China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia have been building coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace.

On the upside, this boom has helped these countries lift themselves out of poverty. But the growth in coal has also meant a surge in global carbon-dioxide emissions — and if coal continues to be the world's energy source of choice, we'll have little hope avoiding drastic global warming.


So that brings us to the next question: How long will this global coal boom continue?



NASA reported Wednesday that this was the hottest June on record (tied with 1998). And it’s now all but certain 2015 will be the hottest year on record, probably by a wide margin — as what increasingly appears to be one of the strongest El Niños in 50 years boosts the underlying global warming trend.

Climate expert Dr. John Abraham amended this NASA chart to show how the first six months of 2015 compares to the annual temperatures of previous years:




Over many years, glaciers helped form Greenland’s fjords, those narrow and deep inlets in the sea that are often surrounded by steep cliffs and serve as exit routes for the vast ice sheet’s sea-terminating outlet glaciers.

And, according to new research, fjords in West Greenland are much deeper than previously thought. That means the world’s sea levels could rise faster than anticipated, because those outlet glaciers are more exposed to warm water. The findings have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

The shape and depth of fjords have big implications for the ice sheet, which has been melting both from the top and the bottom and contains 20 feet of potential sea level rise in total. Warm air erodes ice above the water, but warmer waters — which reside at deep levels in some parts of the polar regions — undercut glaciers and melt ice from below. “As they melt faster, they can slide out to sea,” said Eric Rignot, leader researcher and a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine.




It’s the season when wildfires rage, and this year they’re raging particularly hard: In June alone, Alaska saw 1.1 million acres go up in flames. In California, firefighters had responded to 3,381 wildfires by July 11, “1,000 more than the average over the previous five years,” The New York Times reports in a big feature on wildfires in the state.

And that’s likely not a coincidence. A study published this week in Nature Communications connects worsening wildfire seasons to climate change, and suggests the trend will continue in the years ahead as climate change rolls forward. “Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources,” the study’s authors write. Of those factors, “weather is the most variable.”

The study also suggests that wildfires will themselves play a role in driving climate change, creating a nasty feedback loop.

From THE most unlikely source!


Warning: Mass Loss from both poles to boost sea level


Warning: Mass Loss from both poles to boost sea level. 55776.jpeg
- See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/15-07-2015/131344-sea_level-0/#sthash.BNEmbHEN.dpuf
2015
Warning: Mass Loss from both poles to boost sea level. 55776.jpeg
- See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/15-07-2015/131344-sea_level-0/#sthash.BNEmbHEN.dpuf
15 July, 2015


An article in the July 10 edition of Science Magazine on the global mean sea level has concluded that there is one major factor which is predicted to outstrip all other reasons for the rise, namely the melting of both Polar ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. The research also points out that in the past warmer polar temperatures were experienced.

The article in the recent edition of Science Magazine (July 10) entitled "Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods" brings two conclusions: firstly that among the various reasons for Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) rise - expansion of seawater caused by rising temperatures and the melting of mountain glaciers, the run-off flowing down into the sea from rivers - the main one which "is expected to exceed other contributions to GMSL" is mass loss from the polar ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica.

A cyclical pattern

The research team, led by Andrea Dutton, of the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, USA, used evidence from interglacial periods when polar temperatures were greater than today and correspondingly, the sea level was also higher. The records of sea levels studied by the team reveal that there was a variation in the levels due to the influence of various factors.

The study indicates that today, the academia have mastered new techniques in deciphering indicators of sea-level variation, referring to "advances in our understanding of polar ice-sheet response to warmer climates" and adds that records indicate several incidences of warmer periods which have occurred during the last hundreds of thousands of years.

"This enables us to infer that during recent interglacial periods, small increases in global mean temperature and just a few degrees of polar warming relative to the preindustrial period resulted in ≥6 m of GMSL rise".

Three-meter, twenty-foot rise

In other words, if the climate change is to be what experts predict, namely a variation in a few degrees Celsius, the sea level will rise by up to six meters, or eighteen feet. The impact on coastal areas around the world will be devastating with entire cities, many of them capital cities, submerged.
The report underlines this fact: "Our present climate is warming to a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past".

While further study is needed to make precise calculations, and while it is now apparent that climate change and temperature variation are cyclical and follow patterns over time, it also seems apparent that the faster the temperature rises, the more probable it will be to see sharks swimming along the main arteries of our cities. And crabs crawling along the sidewalks twenty feet below them, with no sign of Humankind.

Article: Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods, sciencemag.org edition of July 10 2015 by A. Dutton, A.E. Carlson, A.J Long, G.A. Milne, P.U. Clark, R. DeConto, B.P. Horton, S. Rahmstorf and M.E.Raymo

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey




Consider the albatross.

A bird that mates for life and flies over 6,000 miles for food, the albatross has seen profound population declines over the past several decades. It appears now as though a harbinger for its own demise.

Or take the Fiji petrel, a black, tube-nosed bird that spends almost its entire life skimming the oceans. The petrel, the albatross and other birds suffer when the oceans are polluted and overfished and a new study in PLOS One suggests they are paying a heavy price. Since the 1950s, the study concludes that seabird numbers have dropped by nearly 70 percent.

"Seabirds are particularly good indicators of the health of marine ecosystems," said University of British Columbia's Michelle Paleczny, a co-author of the study and a researcher with the Sea Around Us project. "When we see this magnitude of seabird decline, we can see there is something wrong with marine ecosystems. It gives us an idea of the overall impact we're having."



Summer is upon us, and that means one frightening truth for those living around the Great Lakes; soon, their water will start turning disturbing greens, browns, and reds. Soon, signs will start appearing at your favorite watering holes that advise against swimming. And for Lake Erie, the worst harmful algae bloom (HAB) ever measured might be right around the corner.



They Make Water Out of Sludge in Sao Paulo Now

With El Nino settling into a strong-to-monstrous mode and with the world now baking under 1 C of global temperature increases since the 1880s, a large swath from South American through to the Caribbean is suffering from extreme drought.

Drought South America


Brazil: Fighting dengue fever in Sao Paulo


One-hundred-and-thirty people have died in an outbreak of dengue fever in Sao Paulo.

More than 460,000 cases have been reported so far this year.

The disease is spread by mosquitoes and the epidemic is blamed on wet weather, and on storing contaminated water - at a time of water shortages across the country.




Video: Forest fire at Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan, 13 July 2015


1 comment:

  1. Everything on expected line - We are in for huge destruction by peaking and falling of energy in accelerated manner - Earth is struggling to sustain her equilibrium at all cost – it is time to Awaken https://www.scribd.com/doc/270257614/What-is-Happening-to-Earth-Its-climate-and-Biosphere-Are-we-Approaching-Sixth-Mass-Extinction

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