Green Planet

Here’s something to find out more about:

What was the Carrington event of 1859? Do the research and draw your own conclusions. Don’t you wonder why you haven’t heard about it before?

Now lets have a discussion…

The deep freeze of 2010.  Proof that there is no global warming.  I mean, how can there be global warming when everything’s freezing across the entire European continent?

That’s the conventional wisdom driving many people to conclude that the “scientific evidence” being evangelized by many is some sort of fabrication designed to cast uncertainty and doubt at best, or a carefully contrived lie whose entire purpose is to enrich personal wealth at worst.  In either case, how can these supposed “scientists” continue to spout this drivel in the face of  such overwhelming evidence?

How indeed.

Perhaps we should consider this:  Europe is North.  Way North.  But thanks to the great Atlantic conveyor, enough warm water pours past to allow Palm trees to exist in Ireland.  This fact is unbelievable in itself when one considers the latitude of Belfast, a city in the middle of Ireland, is 54 degrees, 37 minutes North.  That’s less than 300 miles south of Juneau Alaska.  Heck, Minneapolis Minnesota, at 46 degrees, 55 minutes North latitude is itself about 450 miles south of Belfast.

Now to the scary part.  Here are some pictures of the great Atlantic conveyor showing heat disbursement.  First, one from October of 2008:

Now here’s that same picture, taken in October 2010:

Ok, so what’s going on?  Notice the yellow band.  About the same location in both shots.  But why is the region around England so much more blue in 2010 than it is in 2008.  For the answer, look to the left at the large dark blue plume coming from Newfoundland that simply wasn’t there in 2008.  It’s pretty easy to see its effect on warm currents traveling Northward.  (As an aside, check out the increased equatorial heat zone too.  I wonder what effect that is having?)

Here’s the scary part:  Do you know what the blue plume is?  It is cold, fresh water coming from the accelerated ice melt that’s occurring up there.  Pretty much proof of what scientists are warning us about.   It’s effect on the conveyor is quite easy to see.  Without the Atlantic conveyor, Europe reverts to the kind of climate it should have.

Feel free to check out the current data yourself from the NOAA site.  Here’s the link: ROTFS (Atlantic).  Be sure to switch to salinity view to see what I’m talking about.

What’s the lesson here?  Simply, it is this: “global warming” is about increased energy in the system.  It doesn’t mean that every place on Earth will get hotter; rather it means that everything on Earth will change.  Storm systems will intensify, climatic regions will shift and with it, people will suddenly find that the infrastructure they’ve built based on their local climate will have suddenly become very, very inadequate.  Heck, I remember that the house I lived at in Rochdale, Lancashire England when I was 10 had external plumbing because nothing ever froze there.  That plumbing was painted bright green too!

The next effect of climate change, if drastic enough, could lead to mass migration as people try to escape from conditions that have suddenly become hostile.  At very least, economic problems must multiply as people try to adjust to the change.  Consider my childhood home in England as a case in point:  The plumbing was external because the walls were solid.  No major insulation was needed because of the mild climate.  Heck, it didn’t even have central heating.  Now those pipes have frozen.  The bathrooms don’t work any more.  There’s no running water.  What can poor Graham Litchfield (the man who bought the house) do now?  How much will it cost him?  Now multiply that problem by the rest of the reigon.  External plumbing is common in England.

The major effects of global warming are beginning.  If you haven’t seen the Palm trees of Ireland yet, it’s quite possible that you never will.

Our Fragile Planet has faced 5 great extinctions during it’s 4.5 billion year history.

• First major extinction (c. 440 million years ago): Climate change (relatively severe and sudden global cooling) seems to have been at work at the first of these-the end-Ordovician mass extinction that caused such pronounced change in marine life (little or no life existed on land at that time). 25% of families lost (a family may consist of a few to thousands of species).
• Second major extinction (c. 370 million years ago): The next such event, near the end of the Devonian Period, may or may not have been the result of global climate change. 19% of families lost.
• Third major Extinction (c. 245 million years ago): Scenarios explaining what happened at the greatest mass extinction event of them all at the end of the Permian Period have been complex amalgams of climate change perhaps rooted in plate tectonics movements. Very recently, however, evidence suggests that a bolide impact similar to the end-Cretaceous event may have been the cause. 54% of families lost.
• Fourth major extinction (c. 210 million years ago): The event at the end of the Triassic Period, shortly after dinosaurs and mammals had first evolved, also remains difficult to pin down in terms of precise causes. 23% of families lost.
• Fifth major extinction (c. 65 million years ago): Most famous, perhaps, was the most recent of these events at the end-Cretaceous. It wiped out the remaining terrestrial dinosaurs and marine ammonites, as well as many other species across the phylogenetic spectrum, in all habitats sampled from the fossil record. Consensus has emerged in the past decade that this event was caused by one (possibly multiple) collisions between Earth and an extraterrestrial bolide (probably cometary). Some geologists, however, point to the great volcanic event that produced the Deccan traps of India as part of the chain of physical events that disrupted ecosystems so severely that many species on land and sea rapidly succumbed to extinction. 17% of families lost.

What was it like during these great events, I wonder?  I imagine as I’m sure most of us do, that these were horrific events, filled with terror and trauma.  Dead and dying beasts lay everywhere while those species that were to be their successors cowered, hidden, waiting for the sun to come out once more so that they, like some phoenix risen, could claim the world as their own.

Reality is far from that I fear.  Yesterday I read a chilling report:  A fifth of the world’s vertebrate species (i.e. mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish) are now threatened with extinction, according to a massive new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN); and the situation is worsening for the world’s wildlife: on average 52 species of mammals, birds, and amphibians move one category closer to extinction every year.

These are vertibrates; 3% of all lifeforms.  The situation isn’t much better for the other 97% either.  The study also reported on a number of non-vertebrate species types—not included in the overall analysis—finding, for example, that 14% of seagrasses, 32% of freshwater crayfish, and 33% of coral reef species are threatened with extinction. An earlier study, looking at a representative sample of plants, found that 22% of the world’s plant species are threatened with extinction.

One of the most threatened groups of species on Earth is the cycads, an ancient group of plants: 63% percent of cycads face extinction.

We are in the Sixth Great Extinction now and it looks like nothing is changing at all to us.  There is no fire, no rotting bodies littering the land, no massive die outs.  Just a few disgruntled fishermen who say they wish for the “good old days” when their catches were plentiful.  Just a couple of stories about the beetles that are killing all the ash trees.  Does anybody remember what the tree that the christmas carol “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” refers to looks like?

Great events that shatter our fragile planet look like this.  The fact that we don’t have a direct sense of a timespan that covers more than one generation is the reason why we don’t see the catastrophic change that’s occurring all around us.

I wonder what the cowering new species waiting to inherit the planet looks like…

Take a look at this:

No, not a hurricane in the traditional sense, but an intense, record setting  low pressure system that quickly formed over the Midwest United States.   In Wisconsin, on Tuesday morning October 26th at 11:35 AM, the recorded atmospheric pressure at its center was 28.22″ or 956 mb.  That’s the lowest pressure ever recorded for a non-tropical storm in the US.  Interestingly, pressure readings such as this are also typical for category 3 hurricanes.

As a hurricane, this storm didn’t disappoint much either.  With wind gusts of 81 mph, the low spawned 21 Tornadoes, knocked out power at hundreds of thousands of homes, and at one time stretched a staggering 1,200 miles from north to south.  Off Point Betsie on lake Michigan, surge heights were recorded at 18-23 ft.

My wife was a meteorologist about a decade ago and she was amazed when she brought up the weather maps yesterday.  “I’ve never seen anything like this here before” she remarked in a low voice, almost to herself as she showed me what was on the screen.  What I saw was a huge, almost perfectly circular pattern with tight, closely spaced isobars just west of us.  “It’s occluded too” she added.

Over the winter of 2009/2o10 we also noted increased energy in the overall weather.  Everything looked bigger, more intense, and carried more moisture.  This came as no surprise to us however.  In fact it was predicted by climate models for our region; a direct result of global warming which is adding energy to our entire planet’s weather patterns.  Of course, a climate model and its associated political rhetoric is one thing, but roofs getting torn off buildings by something never before recorded is something all together different.

As I write this, the low is intensifying over Canada as it heads North East with a pressure reading that is now 955 mb.  That’s approaching the reading for a Category 4 Hurricane…

How’s the weather been where you live?