Weather News

Experts Fear Fire Season Will Be Year Round

Elaine Meinel Supkis

After a winter of deadly fires, experts suggest we will see even worse this summer. Some belated spring rains/tornadoes swept the plains so the fire hazard has relented somewhat but this only will make things worse if it all dries up in the summer. Winter has been summer down in the south. Summer is going to be hell when it comes.

National Geographic:

Wildfires have been raging intermittently since the beginning of the year in parts of the western United States, where the term "fire season" has lost all meaning.

In what is already by far the worst year for wildfires in Texas history, a million acres (405,000 hectares) burned in the Texas panhandle during one week in March, and 19 lives have been lost since January 1.

"We have never seen a year like this," said Marilyn Grossman, spokesperson for the Texas Forest Service.

"It has people really shaken, and unfortunately we are not out of the woods yet."

It may have shaken people but just like the heroic hurricane season last year, it hasn't motivated anyone important to do something sane such as severely cut down on production of greenhouse gasses. Indeed, Americans are on fire over high fuel prices because filling the cavernous tanks of their tank like cars is scaring the GOP and Bush into all sorts of insane schemes to enable further gas guzzling. It is with some small pleasure for me to see more and more sanely sized vehicles on the road. I have always driven gas miser-small cars except when hauling stuff with the truck which is strictly used for business only. It has terrified me over the last five years, trying to drive around all these screamingly huge vehicles driven by people who think they are in sports cars.

Instead of feeling bad when I see a wreck, whenever I saw a SUV upside down on a dry, open, often straight road, I would wish the driver ill. Many Americans absolutely refuse to make the connection between the Kyoto Accord refusal and our present agonies. Tearfully, we stagger around, wondering why we can't suspend the laws of Nature. Why can't we do whatever we want, all the time, we wail.

The combined forces of persistent drought and high heat are teaming up to create what could be one of the worst fire seasons on record.

NIFC has listed much of the country at above-average risk for wildfires, with the greatest danger zones in the West and South, stretching from Alaska to Florida.

Even here in the Northeast! This spring has been one long fire alert. We got 2" of rain so that has been alleviated but I am very wary about the summer. This is why I have been frantically building terraces to catch the rain water, I no longer have a flock of sheep as well as the horse but if it is too dry, a pasturage that feed 30 animals might not feed even one!

This is one of many reasons why I am baffled about the joy expressed for burning plants to drive cars. If we continue to aggravate global warming, if we must grow plants that can be turned into alcohol, we might just lose even that to out of control fires! And growing water-loving plants in an increasingly drought-wracked world won't work, either.

And as Australia discovered, if one's acres of sugar cane or other, similar plants, are swept by violent hurricanes, tornadoes and hail storms, there isn't much to harvest, is there? Bush just announced he is going to raise CAFE standards on vehicles but last time this was attempted, the auto unions and American drivers all united to howl that one down just like no one was interested in signing the Kyoto Accords.

Even now, we won't sign them. We boasted that we were cutting down greenhouse gas emissions without signing the accords but this proved to be totally false. We have been increasing our output, dramatically.

Culture of Life News Main Page

200+mph Wind Cyclone Hitting Australia

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Another great cyclone hitting Australia! Even over restricted waters, the minute these cyclones hit the ocean, they shoot up from a catagory 1 to a 5 in less than three days! This is what the new weather systems mean, global warming is no joke. Simultaneously, there is record cold in the opposite end of Australia in New South Wales!

Courtesy of Rense.com:
Weather news:

Cyclone Monica threatens the NT
By David Grant
April 23, 2006 17:26 EST

Tropical Cyclone Monica, moving in a west/northwest direction for the most of Sunday, is threatening communities of northeast Arnhem land. As of 1pm Sunday, Severe Cyclone Monica was generating winds of up to 320 km/hr, with winds gusting up to 120km/hr in the northeast of the Top End. As of Sunday afternoon, the Tropical Cyclones eye was also a staggering 37km in diametre. In the 24 hours to 9am Sunday, the highest rainfalls in Arnhem land were recorded at Gove knocking up 64mm and Yirrkala Tropical Gardens with 56mm. Monica also continues to bring heavy rain to Cape York Peninsula with 215mm recorded at Lockhart River to 9am Sunday. Rainfall totals along the upper NT should increase on Monica approaching the coast. Presently it is too early to predict the position and timing of a coastal impact. However the category 5 cyclone is forecasted to track parallel to the upper NT coastline, prior to its expected crossing of the coastline late Monday.

Record April cold snap in NSW
By David Grant
April 23, 2006 17:19 EST

Cold and dry southerly winds in the wake of a cold front in tandom with a clear overnight sky, were again the primary forces in dropping temperatures to record April lows around NSW. Temperatures were up to 12 degrees below average across the state on Sunday morning , with 38 locations measuring monthly record lows. Around Sydney these included, Badgerys Creek and Richmond experiencing minimums of 0 degrees, 11 and 12 below average respectively. For Sydney in general there were no records broken, however it was the coldest overnight minimum since October last year. On Monday and Tuesday, NSW will continue to experience below average minimums. These below average temperatures, will not be as widespread as previous nights as the southerly winds weaken. By Wednesday, winds will tend a more northerly direction delivering warmer overnight minimums, closer to average.

Here is doppler radar showing a perfect eye and perfect circle and it is partially over land. The cyclone is so powerful, the fact that one quarter of the storm is over land is meaningless.

Storm Track:

Monica is now over Australia's Wessel Islands, making Monica a far worse hurricane than anything seen in the Atlantic last summer. At 892 mb, Monica is stronger than the dreaded hurricanes Katrina and Rita ever were, never mind at landfall. The symmetry seen is Monica is flawless and it is rare to every see a tropical system look so well-defined.

If it weren't so deadly, it is a thing of wonder. In the Gulf of Mexico which is like a huge bathtub, hurricanes can look just as pretty but this is over land! The places being hit are not heavily populated but important industries lie in this destructive monster's path.

Shanghai Daily:

Kevin Bell
2006-04-24
ALCAN Inc, the world's second-largest aluminum producer, halted production at its alumina refining site in Gove, northern Australia over the weekend, because Tropical Cyclone Monica threatened the safety of workers and equipment.

Production at the refinery was shut down as Monica gained strength to become a category 5 storm, Montreal-based Alcan said on Saturday. Production will resume as soon as it's "safe to do so," Alcan said.

Alcan moved to a "stage 3" alert, which involves shutting down the plant, after putting the plant on "stage 2" alert on Friday. Monica was in the Gulf of Carpentaria and was moving northwest toward the Arnhem Land coast, where Gove is, the Australian meteorology bureau said on Saturday.

World oil prices were affected by the previous two cyclones because they struck at oil fields. This one can wander whither she will and it will take a while to expend her tremendous energy. The Alcan factory closing may be a tad longer than merely during the cyclone's passage. If the winds at the center hit, the entire complex might have to be rebuilt. This will raise the cost of many things starting with soft drinks. Alcan makes many of the containers, just for example.

Sustained winds of over 200 mph are astonishing. This is like one big, fat tornado. If a wind of 200 mph hits for one or two minutes, it can be very destructive, one or two HOURS means scouring most structures to the ground. If something this ferocious hits any major city, it just might not be habitable afterwards and not just like New Orleans, due to flooding from a nearby lake.

Hurricane Andrew pretty much wiped out the section of Florida it hit and the winds were less than 200 mph.

The Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are superhot this last winter and into summer. We are sitting ducks.

Culture of Life News Main Page

USA Greenhouse Gases Rise Rapidly, Set Record

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the world's greatest polluter of green house gases exceeds itself as the USA sets new records. Americans refused to sign the Kyoto Accords because we wanted lessor polluters like China and India to put in high technology while we run on old, nasty systems. Well, no one is cutting pollution anymore, off we go, to the Permian extinction.

Independent UK:

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 19 April 2006
The United States emitted more greenhouse gases in 2004 than at any time in history, confirming its status as the world's biggest polluter. Latest figures on the US contribution to global warming show that its carbon emissions have risen sharply despite international concerns over climate change.

The figures, which were quietly released on Easter Monday, reveal that net greenhouse gas emissions during 2004 increased by 1.7 per cent on the previous year, equivalent to a rise of 110 million tons of carbon dioxide.

This is the biggest annual increase since 2000 and means that in 2004 - the latest year that full data is available - the US released the equivalent of nearly 6,300 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Scientists in Britain condemned the increase, saying that it showed how the US was failing to take a lead in the international attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions despite being the worst offender.

So, these figures were "quietly released." As the Arctic dies, as floods rage across Europe, as the pressure cooker in the Gulf of Mexico rises, as the Amazon dries up, as glaciers everywhere are melting at a mad rate, we in America up the ante. The President of China ought to take us to task for polluting the planet! Har. Right. We feel we should lecture the Chinese about torture and the right of workers to organize unions and aggressive military warmongering.

This is pretty hopeless. The more it heats up in America, the more greenhouse gasses we release for we depend on creating airconditioned bubbles for ourselves so we can die in luxury. We want to be comfortable so we will damn everything on earth to death so we can stay nice and cool while building inappropriate buildings for the climate we are creating. This is a noxious feedback system. All the world's major cities which already are hot spots have made it much worse by building structures that are all windows and no exterior walls. This increases the heating/cooling needs terrifically. And it feeds hot air back into the streets which have no countervaling tree canopy to recirculate the air. Our cities produce ozone and not oxygen. As we build bigger and bigger cities, we make the surrounding enviornment worse and worse.

BBC News:

The Danube flood wave has now reached the river's delta in Ukraine after hitting many Balkan communities.
Ukrainian emergency teams are shoring up dykes and building sandbag barriers in the Odessa region.

Several thousand people have been removed from their homes in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria after floods caused by melting snow and heavy rain.

Serb officials say they think the water level has peaked in Belgrade but many areas may be waterlogged for months.

The Danube has reached its highest level since 1895 in Romania, where some farmland and forest areas have been deliberately flooded to protect towns.

There was an avalanche in Mammoth Lake Park, California. Record snow there which will lead to record melting. Meanwhile, my rivers and streams up here in NY are at midsummer levels. This is bad. At this rate, they will be a slight trickle on most of the mountain streams. Normally, they have a robust flow in the spring.

ABC:

Billions of people will be at greater risk from storms, floods and droughts in the years ahead, partly as a result of global warming, an international water agency has warned.

"By 2025, half the world's population will be living in areas that are at risk from storms and other weather extremes," the World Water Council said, citing evidence gathered by U.N. and other experts. The economic cost will be huge, especially for poor countries that are likely to bear the brunt of these events, it said.

"Extreme weather records are [already] being broken every year and the resulting hydro-meteorological disasters claim thousands of lives and disrupt national economies," said William Cosgrove, vice president of the Marseille-based think tank made up of users and suppliers of water for social and economic development.

"The big problem is that most countries aren't ready to deal adequately with the severe natural disasters that we get now, a situation that will become much worse as storms and droughts become more pervasive," he said.

There is a lot of yelling going on about this. The people doing the majority of the pollution in the world, the USA's corporate infrastructure, wants us to think this is normal weather. There is a lot of articles and talking heads claiming the recent hurricane season has nothing to do with global warming. When hurricane Wilma shot from a catagory 1 to 4 in only 90 minutes, this incredible fact has been shoved to the side. Hurricane Andrew went from a catagory 2 to a catagory 5 in less than six hours.

So any storm can morph in minutes into a mega-cyclone event! This is what global warming is all about.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Tornadoes Rage Across Several States

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Terrible weather, many tornado warnings and some touched down already, this is proving to be as bad a tornado year as hurricane year. Europe has been having huge floods, the Danube is over its banks, Hawaii is flooding, too. Africa is having a drought and so is Texas. Global warming: xtreme weather.

USA Today:

The Storm Prediction Center has received 11 reports of tornado touchdowns or sightings Friday afternoon in Tennessee. Forecasters predict severe weather will continue to track over parts of northern Alabama, northern Mississippi and west and middle Tennessee.
Schools in North Mississippi shut down early Friday ahead of a storm that put much of central and northern areas under a tornado watch until 8 p.m.

Schools in Benton, Marshall and DeSoto counties were closing at midday or early afternoon.

Several counties in Tennessee and Kentucky are under a tornado warning, the weather service said. Latest Nashville radar image.

The weather service said Friday that the potential existed for powerful storms, possible strong tornadoes, very large hail, heavy rainfall and damaging winds.

This is the same system that came off of the Pacific Ocean and flooded California and left huge amounts of snow on the mountains even though it is spring. Some rangers died at Mammoth Lake. Associated Press:

By BRENDAN RILEY, Associated Press Writer 42 minutes ago
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - Three members of a ski patrol died after two plunged into a volcanic fissure at the Mammoth Mountain resort and the third fell trying to rescue them, a resort official said.

Four other would-be rescuers were hospitalized for exposure to carbon dioxide but were doing well, said Rusty Gregory, chief executive officer of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area.

The patrol team had been on the mountain after a snowstorms checking on a fence surrounding a fumarole, a natural vent that releases volcanic gas from deep within the Earth, Gregory said.

They slid into a depression which had toxic gasses. This is a depression in the Great Rift Complex of California. There was a big 6.2 earthquake off the shore in Mexico this last week, at the lower end of where the Great California Rift Complex ends, the end of the Gulf of California. At the top end, there was a smaller but significant earthquake today in the zone where the rash of 4+ events happened in quick succession last week. Mammoth Lake can suddenly turn into a volcanic event with little warning, it is hissing and outgassing right now.

Mother Nature is awake and busy. When she is fed energy, she expresses it in various ways and melting all the ice on either pole is setting into motion a massive amount of both geological energy and fluid mechanics as water changes it form and becomes a liquid rather than a solid and the weight distribution of all this water is shed from one place and running into another, ie, the oceans.

Community Dispach:

April 4, 2006 — A warm winter contributed to a busy and deadly start to the tornado season, according to NOAA meteorologists. A total of 68 tornado reports and 26 tornado fatalities in eight states on Sunday brought the totals for the year to 355 tornado reports and 38 deaths, said Dan McCarthy, warning coordination meteorologist with the NOAA Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. Sunday's storms also caused two wind-related deaths and approximately 196 injuries.

This is the highest total number of reports for the first three months of the year since 1999 and is a sharp contrast to last year when only 96 tornado reports and five deaths occurred by April 3. The number of deaths so far is the highest since 1998.

Indeed, even as we struggle to maintain our happy-go-lucky lifestyle, it is biting back viciously. Our love of fast, gas guzzling vehicles is turning our communities into splinters. We think, no one can stop us even as Mother Nature does exactly that with a flick of her fingernail.

If we evolved as a culture to accomodate tornadoes and hurricanes, we would live quite different lives. People who insist on living as if there isn't an evironment will be doomed to suffering and pain when the environment does what it must do. In Japan, for centuries, they built light houses that would be reassembled quickly after earthquakes, for example. But when they built the huge city of Tokyo, an earthquake started huge fires that consumed the city. This is why one has to change gears when the population operates differently.

I could imagine Hobbits evolving their house styles while living on the Great Plains. After all, domed houses facing southeast don't need to worry even slightly about tornadoes, they would simply spin past them or hop over them, maybe distrubing the chimney if it isn't well-pointed. But we want to build European houses that seldom see tornadoes.

Except they had a tornado in England this year and another in Hamburg, Germany, of all places, just this last week! Did considerable damage and both were only catagory 2 tornadoes. In America, we get the monster ones, the catagory 5's, even, which rip up asphalt roads and suck ponds dry.

But even those would pass over a Hobbit house with minimal harm. Of course, people want to have what they always had so no one is going to do the smart thing, as usual. Instead, we will open our wallets and build inappropriate, dangerous houses. Until the bitter end. Spitting in Nature's eye.

She doesn't care. She has an endless supply of tornadoes and hurricanes up Her sleeves.

Culture of Life News Main Page