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Government Report Confirms Global Warming

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Climatic instability means it was 73 degrees two weeks ago up here and tonight it will be -10 degrees! Tons of data pouring in points to real global warming effects. Some scientists are theorizing the winds blew the other direction in winter during the Ice Ages, from east to west. This is quite possible as I will explain based on my own experience, living in a tent for ten years.

&hearts Al Gore is right, as usual.

BEIJING, Jan. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A climate report to be released next month will say an "explosion of new data." It will reveal evidence that human-caused global warming is visible in the air, water and melting ice and is destined to get much worse in the future.

Refuting past denials of solid proof by the Bush administration, a top U.S. climate scientist says there is positive evidence.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

Too bad Bush can't read. According to the news, many American corporate entities skiing at Davos and yapping with fellow rulers at expensive dinners, they nearly all think that there is no global warming which is why they don't give a cr*p about the rest of humanity. Bush didn't even bother to mention New Orleans during his State of the Disunion speech. He just wants to tax the poor saps who have health insurance from work! (Drawing and quartering Bush would be too kindly).

That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said.

Solomon and others refused to be specific about what the report says. They said the 12-page summary for policymakers will be secretly edited word-by-word by government officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.

I can just picture the Bush gangsters secretly editing this explosive report. Word for word. 'Remove "Inconvenient" and "truth", OK, can't have it,' snarls Karl Rove. Yup. Arrest him. And all the others. Should be easy enough, we know where they all are except for Cheney.

Bush's tools in the EPA desperately want to get the first word out and to muddy the waters and strangle the messenger and all that, then the scientists will get their say many months later and the media will attack everyone just like they attack Obama/Osama Hussein, that other dangerous Democrat.

This latest news story didn't even bother mentioning that Al Gore was right. Figures.

&hearts Ice Ages and Interglacials flip between extremes just like the weather here has been flipping between hot and cold with no rhyme nor reason.

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Tue Jan 23, 5:35 PM ET

In one of the most stark illustrations of how a changing climate can have regional effects, scientists have learned that winds over North America have done a complete 180 since the time of the last Ice Age several thousand years ago.

This sounds, on the surface, crazy. But it is not. Aside from all the detailed data they have assembled to make their case, I know from life experience, the winds can flow steadily from any direction depending on many other factors. Certainly, if there is an ice sheet a mile thick here, and there was back then, it would definitely affect wind flow patterns in a huge way.

The uplifting of the Tibetan plateau, just for example, changed the weather flowing over all of Europe and most of Asia because the jet stream was displaced further south, over India.

The researchers examined cellulose from ancient wood samples recovered from the mid-latitudes of North America (40-50 degrees N). The changes in the compositions of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes across the continent gave the researchers a picture of the distribution of moisture during the glacial period. While modern samples show high levels of moisture on both coasts, the ancient samples surprisingly showed high levels on the East Coast that steadily decreased to the West Coast.

Feng hypothesizes that the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered a large area of North America during the Ice Age, intensified winds swirling around the North Pole. This intensification caused the jet stream, along which many storms tend to track, to dip further south than does today and the weak polar easterlies above it were pushed down over the mid-latitudes of North America.

When I lived in the tent complex, every gust of wind was obvious. So I could tell where it was coming from and how powerful it was. I noticed over the years, the wind would tend to come from various directions with greater intensity and frequency. Some years like the last six months here this year, the winds mostly come from the south. Nearly all our storms this winter have come stubbornly from the south up until this week.

Some years, all the storms come from the east. These are the really nasty ones. We can get four feet of snow from them. One winter, we had several dozen such storms. Some of them very huge and destructive. The valley I live in runs east to west and then the valley next to me runs north and south so they cross 1/2 mile from my house. This means winds moving due west or due north are channeled and become much stronger. So east winds are very noticable. They can be over 90 mph up at my elevation.

So what these scientists are saying is, all the moisture-bearing storms were from the east, coming off the Atlantic Ocean, rather than coming from the West Coast. This is probably why the glacier over my poor little mountain grew to be a mile thick! One snowstorm after another, year after year. All coming from the east.

&hearts Humans are making desertfication worse.

Almost all the villagers in this dusty arid region say they have lost homes and farms to the Sahara Desert which is expanding southwards.

"What we do is that when the sand moves and buries our homes and farms and even our wells, we simply keep retreating southwards," says Aminu Mahmud, another villager who says he has already lost two different houses to the sand.

All over the planet, people are cutting down trees and deserts are growing. Trees keep the land cool. This is why forests, even on hot summer days, are cool. The trees break up the wind on the ground, they weaken the wind, they absorb the sun's energy, the wind's energy and thus, they grow. The create storms, they release important gases into the atmosphere, not the least being oxygen! As desertfication spreads, we doom ourselves. Mars is a very uninhabitable planet. We don't want it here too.

&hearts The loss of glaciers even as we pump out the last of the underground water reserviors of Ice Age perculation, we doom more than one community to death if we have no glaciers!

Glaciers are quickly disappearing from the Alps and will be all but gone by 2050, a climate expert said Monday. That's 50 years earlier than a July 2006 study predicted.

The loss would change the supply of drinking and irrigation water, lead to more falling rocks, and cripple the European ski industry.

Just like here in New York: no snow means spring turns to summer in April. And then no verdant grass for my grazing livestock! Dry winters are bad springs. We literally have no springs which is when water comes gushing out of the ground all over the hillsides! This also means the small rivers might dry up in August. So we love snow here just like the farmers in Europe know to love the snow too.

Rain just doesn't cut it. The blanket of snow means as the sun shines, the water slowly percolates into the fine soil which worms and small burrowing animals have aerated. This cleans the water, too. The slower it flows into the ground, the more it is cleaned and retained by the water table. Surface rain runs off too fast. This is why some of the richest farmlands are where it also snows.

&hearts Like Texas last winter, Australia is burning down due to the long drought.

Bernard Lagan

SYDNEY Thousands of Australians who are voluntarily tackling enormous bushfires are furious that firefighters from the US and New Zealand are being paid A$600 (£230) a day to take the same risks.

Eventually, no one will put out these fires. Unless we get serious about global warming and try to do something about overgrazing, too much forest clearing and industrial pollution and energy/automobile pollution.

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Winter Hurricane Batters Europe

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Winter storms have been sweeping down across the USA and then shooting up to Europe. The conflict between the warm/cold zones is spawning hurricane-force winds. Unusual cold destroys California's crops while the spring-like weather over the eastern USA and Europe switches to stormy, cold weather. This is how global warming works: all systems become more powerful and more uncertain.

&hearts The storm that rolled over my own mountain a few days ago grew into an absolute monster as it crossed the Atlantic:

Meteorologists said the winds reached "severe gale force" in Britain and were the strongest since January 1990.

They hit hurricane force in Germany, the worst in at least five years.

In the Netherlands, an 11-year-old boy was killed in the town of Riel when he was blown into a car, AFP reported.

As the storm moved east on Friday, a Polish crane operator in the southern town of Katowice was reported killed when his machinery collapsed, and another died in Zaborow, near Warsaw, when the roof of his house fell in.

In the Czech Republic a million people faced power cuts, Reuters reported, while strong winds damaged a terminal roof at Prague international airport and caused some flights to be delayed.

Reports said winds reached 216 km/h (133 mph) at Snezka, in the north of the Czech Republic.

Lows rolling along the jet stream pull in warm air that is pushed south by the jet stream which girdles the globe. This warm air moves in a counter-clockwise direction as it rises. Lows form as eddies behind the jet stream. The jet stream flows around slower moving, often stationary for long periods, high pressure ridges. The jet stream flows further south in winter and then races around the polar regions in summer.

Normally the pattern for winter is fairly stable. During the equinoxes in spring and fall, it shifts with increasing variations which is why these seasons in the northern hemiphere are so stormy and why tornadoes and hurricanes are most frequent during these times.

As the atmosphere changes and the oceans not only heat up but increase in volume as glaciers melt, the once stable system grows more dynamic. In this case, the jet stream has been snaking up and down the latitudes as if it were spring, not winter. Something I have discovered over the years is also how the weather balances itself: if is is snowy all winter in Siberia, it isn't snowy here on the other side and vice versa. And if it is cold here, it is warm in California and vice versa.

When it was 70 degrees F here in the Northeast last week, I knew it would go below freezing in California and sure enough, it did. The jet stream isn't just moving further south, it is looping down all the way to mid-Mexico and then snaking upwards swiftly to Labrador. Europe lies north of the USA and this means these storms racing along the jet stream pick up moisture from the Pacific below Baja, the over-heated Gulf of Mexico and then on over to Europe, dumping a heroic amount of water and releasing an explosive amount of energy.

&hearts Click here to see the BBC pictures

&hearts The toll on farms due to this increasingly unstable weather is great.

FRESNO, California (AP) -- From Valentine's Day bouquets to Superbowl spreads, shoppers soon will be feeling the sting of higher prices from a wave of icy weather that has hit California farms.

As much as three-quarters of the state's citrus crop withered in the field during the cold snap, but nearly every winter crop, from avocados to fresh-cut flowers, has suffered severely.

It is interesting to me, the business of the loss of the cut-flowers. Here in my own town of Berlin, NY, Seagroatt closed down nearly all of their gigantic greenhouse complex due to cheap labor/cheap transportation killing the local market for hot house flowers. The environment inside the greenhouses is stable so there is no 'disaster' every time the weather asserts itself. This has been thrown away.

Just as farmers who build barns and protect their livestock from the weather have been driven out of business by reckless ranchers who gamble on good weather. These disasters are due to trying to be as cheap as possible.

&hearts Click here to today's weather map for the earth as seen from the North Pole.

&hearts Australia's epic drought continues even as many storms pound the Northern Hemisphere.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) revealed that winter grain crop production fell 62 percent compared to last year 15.5 million metric tons. The severe drop in the grain harvest was blamed on a continuing drought across the country.

ABARE reported that the driest August to October period since 1900 across many cropping regions of Australia, coupled with some of the highest mean maximum temperatures on record, resulted in the significant decline in winter crop production.

Malaysia and Indonesia as well as Southern China have been having floods while Australia languishes. One thing about the weather is how it likes to develop a pattern and then sticks to it for a long time. Sometimes this pattern not only shifts but stays in the new rut for many, many centuries. We now know the Sahara was a fruitful plain with grassy fields and woodlands and lakes which are now called 'oasis'.

Then, over a 300 year span, it completely dried up and has become a persistent desert. This occured when the amount of moisture in the atmosphere increased as glaciers melted. One might suggest that this was global warming at work. As things heat up, more parts of the planet are drying up as we see with the Amazon, for example. Eventually it will be like the Sahara with the Amazon river functioning like the Nile, a narrow belt of farmland lining a long river.

This suggests the remaining moisture will be even greater as glaciers melt and will generate fiercer storms with higher winds as the northern jet stream screams overhead at 20,000 feet.

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El Nino And Wild Weather This January

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I planned for a winter with lots of ice storms only most of them have been hammering the South and Midwest. We have even today in January, rain up here! Dangerous weather, big storms hit Europe, too. It is icing outside right now, note the chickadee in the pear tree, shivering in the cold icy rain.

&hearts Last night, there was a tragic accident on one of the very high bridges that cross the Hudson River.

State Police said freezing rain caused a pileup in the eastbound lanes of the bridge around 2:15 a.m. Sunday. Peter Deangelis, 22, a passenger in a car involved in one of the first fender-benders, got out to make sure nobody was injured and was standing on the bridge when another car slid on the ice-covered roadway and headed toward him.

The young man tried to hoist himself on the bridge's safety rail to avoid being hit but slipped and fell about 90 feet, landing on the railroad bed below, State Police said. Deangelis, of Nassau, was pronounced dead while being taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital.

I have studs on my tires. This is because I live in the mountains. Most of the people out here don't put on studded snow tires in winter for various reasons. But I do because I hate sliding all over the place. My first driving experience with ice on roads happened when I drove into Pittsburgh in February, 1969. Driving only in the desert, I had zero experience with ice. I came out of a tunnel and crossed onto a bridge when I spun all the way around.

Needless to say, this was very disconcerting! I then tried to drive to the commune next to Mellon University only the steep hills made my truck go backwards, not forwards. This was very disturbing.

Today, I not only drive a lot in ice and snow, I snow plow! With a very big truck. I know how to put on chains, how to tow people out of snow drifts, etc. A tricky business. One thing people forget is the dynamics of cold rain on bridges: it freezed before the main roadbed freezes. So bridges should be avoided or one should get studded snow tires or if crossing, one must do it very cautiously.

Once, I was driving on an icy bridge when a driver in front of me lost control and spun around and hit the railing. I told her to not get out of the car, she was safer inside (as we see in today's news) while I would fetch the State Troopers. I was a witness to this accident so the police told me to wait at a bank parking lot to talk to them after they rescued the lady. Well, we had a fun chat, and when he and I drove out the parking lot, a careless driver rear ended me!

The State trooper laughed.

When I moved to the Northeast, I wondered why everyone's cars were so dented up. After just one winter, it ceased to puzzle me.

&hearts Here is a useful site for weather maps that show the highs and lows along with doppler radar.

Here is today's weather map. The jet stream is making some pretty serious loops, it looks an awful lot like a spring map, not a winter one! As per this entire winter, the cold air is swooping down to the Gulf of Mexico and then shooting up towards my own mountain in NY. One thing I have noticed all my life is how weather gets into stubborn patterns. If one hurricane is going to hit, a half a dozen more follow right on the heels of it! Patterns that persist seems a common situation.

&hearts These ice storms are very dangerous.

Ice storms that have killed at least 21 people in the United States are continuing to batter the country.
A state of emergency has been declared and the National Guard called out in Missouri after the storms knocked out power to 200,000 homes.

One really hard winter, the jet stream seemed to be pinned right on my mountain. It would snake up and down the hemisphere but always it was passing over me. I was living in the tent complex back then and the ferocious winds were terrifying. We literally held our tents down with logging chains! Several times, we had to flee and go to a more secure place. We got so much snow, all our firewood was buried in ice and snow to such a degree, we couldn't pry it apart. A winter to remember and fear.

&hearts

Click here for Jet Stream maps

Today's jet stream is not only hooking down into the Gulf of Mexico but is shooting across the planet into Europe bearing some very ferocious storms. &hearts It is worth clicking on this BBC story just to see the huge fir trees toppling in the 90 mph winds or the lighthouse nearly disappearing under the wild waves.

Severe storms have battered southern Sweden, killing at least three people, disrupting transport and leaving about 270,000 homes without electricity.
The victims - who included a nine-year-old boy - were all struck by falling trees.

By Friday, the jet stream will be split in two and snaking across the globe, totally out of whack with normal winter patterns. One loop is going to drop over the center of the Atlantic while the upper channel of this wind stream will hug the northwest coast before dipping down into Arizona! Temperatures here in the NE will drop to near zero tomorrow, a significant change, only to rise back into balmy weather soon afterwards.

&hearts According to NOAA, the El Nino will continue to March.

There is an increased probability of observing El Niño-related effects over North America during January-March 2007, including warmer-than-average temperatures over western and central Canada, and over the northern United States, wetter-than-average conditions over portions of the U.S. Gulf Coast and Florida, and drier-than-average conditions in the Ohio Valley and in portions of the Pacific Northwest. Global effects that can be expected during January-March include drier-than-average conditions over portions of Malaysia, Indonesia, northern and eastern Australia, some of the U.S.-affiliated islands in the tropical North Pacific, northern South America and southeastern Africa, and wetter-than-average conditions over central South America (Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, southeastern Paraguay and southern Brazil) and possibly along the coasts of Ecuador and northern Peru.

They think it might go two ways: strengthen or weaken. It depends on how many storms this El Nino generates, this changes how much sun shines on the ocean and how strong the winds are. This El Nino isn't as powerful as the one in the mid 1990's, the one we lived through in a tent, but on the other hand, the earth is somewhat hotter than last time. Certainly, the Jet Stream is very dynamic and restless.

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2006 Warmest Year Ever But This Year is Much Warmer

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is January up here in the mountains of New York and it is springtime. Grass is green, the bees are humming about the hive, the cherry trees in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are blooming and the sun has a bunch of active sunspots pouring energy upon our earth and the weather patterns are totally crazy.

&hearts The warm weather affects the markets, of course.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Unseasonably balmy weather in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest this winter is roiling energy markets and consumer shopping patterns, resulting in gluts of heating oil and winter scarves as temperatures rise to springtime levels.
The warmest December in at least 10 years resulted in tepid same-store-sales results among the country's largest retailers last month, with apparel chains like Ann Taylor

'We don't look for the unseasonably warm weather necessarily to continue, but we're not looking for a really sharp flip to really cold from really warm.'— Bryce Anderson, DTN Meteorlogix

Meanwhile, the energy markets have found themselves with a surfeit of heating oil, coal and natural gas as households have turned down their thermostats.

With heating-oil inventories running high, the February futures contract has shed about 18% of its value since the start of December, to below $1.55 a gallon. The warmer winter has also weighed on the broader energy market, contributing to a two-session loss for crude-oil futures of over 9% Thursday.

Normally, my mountain is encased in snow and ice by now. Seldom do temperatures break freezing. We get a 'mid-January thaw' but there is nothing to thaw this year, it never really froze in the first place! We have never seen such a non-winter like this before, this is way off the scale.

I joke that this is happening because for the firt time, I have been able to chop up a winter's worth of firewood and everything is set to go, all my supplies are in great working order for once. The bizarre weather patterns can be seen from space, here are some weather maps that show clearly how storms in the Northwest curve across the Midwest dumping tons of snow on the hapless people there and then sliding down to New Orleans, picking up warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and then flowing north to here.

We will be getting rain yet again tomorrow!

Here are my bees, leaving their hive, looking for flowers. They cannot believe it is winter. I have never, ever seen bees flying about in January. Not even during the famous 'Mid-January Thaws'.

Here is today's weather map that shows clearly how the storms move south and then north after warming up again.

Click on images to enlarge

&hearts Everyone is amazed by this turn of events.

CHICAGO — Crocuses are pushing out of the ground in New Jersey. Ice fishing tournaments in Minnesota are being canceled for lack of ice. And golfers are hitting the links in Chicago in January.

Much of the Midwest and the East Coast are going through a remarkably warm winter, with temperatures running 10 and 20 degrees higher than normal in many places.

Several things are happening at once: green house gasses have changed the way the atmosphere holds heat, the sun is very active even though it is not the top of the solar sun spot cycle, we have seen sun spot #930 last month spit X-ray at us in an event that was one of the largest X-ray events in recorded history. This caused beautiful auroras as well as poured an amazing amount of energy into our system.

I spent today outside building a new roof on the side structure where the tractor resides. It was so warm, I was dressed in spring clothes and sweated like crazy while moving steel roof panels. A flock of fat wild turkeys strolled along the tree line. Birds flew all over as the bees buzzed about me as I worked near their hive. One of the cats caught a mouse that wasn't hibernating. The sun was very warm for winter. The glare from it was surprising.

&hearts Last year wasn't nearly so warm for us yet it was abnormal, too.

GENEVA, Switzerland, January 3, 2007 (ENS) - Globally, the year 2006 is estimated to be the sixth warmest year since recordkeeping began in 1880, according to records maintained by member governments of the World Meteorological Organization, WMO. Final figures will not be released until March 2007.

Following established practice, WMO’s global temperature analyses are based on two different datasets. One is the combined dataset maintained by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK.

Japan and Siberia were hammered with snowstorms just like Colorado today. This odd circumstance where certain localities get many feet of snow while most others get nothing is not normal. In November, a freak snow/ice storm hit the NY Great Lakes region and destroyed many trees. Then it got really warm. This sort of violent swinging of the weather pendulum is exactly what happens during global warming due to both the sun and the atmosphere over energizing the system.

&hearts Bush is suddenly finding it is time to conveniently talk about global warming.

WASHINGTON - President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged closer cooperation on combatting global warming and in trying to prod a Middle East peace on Thursday, brushing aside lingering differences between the two countries.

Bush said at a joint White House news conference that he was open to new ideas to confront climate change, although he stopped short of some of the tight environmental standards favored by Germany and other European nations.

"We talked about climate change, and I assured the chancellor I'm committed to promoting new technologies that will promote energy efficiency and do a better job protecting the environment," Bush said. "I believe there is a chance now to put behind us the old stale debates of the past."

Al Gore, our real President, gets the last laugh here. The 'stale debates of the past' were Bush and his gang yammering about how evil the Kyoto Accords were and how to gag NOAA scientists so they wouldn't be able to talk about it and destroying NASA satellites that were supposed to observe this, etc.

This stupid proto-sea slug President acts as if everyone was thwarting him as he struggled to do something. This disgusting attitude is what in particular rubs me the wrong way. Listening to this sort of crap day after day has been quite a chore.

Not on the level of people dying in Iraq, it is just very irritating. Steams me up. Maybe this is the major reason we are seeing global warming.

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