Elaine Meinel Supkis
Suddenly, there are absolutely no hurricanes in the Atlantic. There are many in the Pacific, some have already caused huge floods and loss of life. China, for example, is being hit with simultaneous floods and droughts. Fires rage across America and the persistant rainfall in the Northeast is long gone. Much of the nation is having a bad ozone pollution problem. Perhaps a drought is now developing in the Midwest and Southeast.
By CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Associated Press writer Wednesday, August 16, 2006BOISE, Idaho -- With all available equipment and crews fully engaged on more than 40 large wildfires across the West on Tuesday, federal fire managers were shifting more resources from suppression to protecting high-value targets in the path of approaching flames.
"When we get into this time of the year, when fires are primarily in the high country with a lot of fuel and timber to burn, it makes more sense to incorporate a strategy of point protection," said Rose Davis, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman at the national firefighting command center in Boise.
"We're focusing on protecting community infrastructure, historical resources and precious watersheds," she said. "We need to look at where we can be the most effective with what we have, knowing these fires could keep burning for another month or so."
Our use of energy is producing all sorts of side effects. I still laugh at the notion so many are running up the flagpole these days the we can use present biomass to produce gasoline so we can drive really fast. As we use more and more energy we need more and more energy to deal with the energy side effects and this is a feedback loop that is increasingly dangerous.
CHONGQING, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- Searing heat and the worst drought to hit parts of China in 50 years have left millions of people facing drinking water shortages and at least one person dead, and are challenging the country's power and water supply networks.A 30-year-old tourist died of heatstroke in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. In the southwestern municipality of Chongqing alone, more than 7.5 million people are suffering water shortages. In remote areas people are relying on water being transported from the towns and rationed on arrival.
China has been hammered with one typhoon after another. Of course, the USA ignores this pretty much, we want the world to baby us when we get hit but we think the Chinese should take care of themselves if they are hit, evidently, they are the world's adults. India is worse off than China vis a vis water, much of India depends on the monsoon rains or the snowmelt in the Himalayan and Hindu Kush mountain ranges, both of which are melting faster and faster due to global warming.
China suffers from what is going to make things hard for Brazil: deforestation. This is something our nation better worry about, too. Under the GOP, stripping away the forests in the west has been a dogma. Increased heat/longer droughts/bigger floods is weakening the forests in many ways that are not easily seen unless one knows forests really well. Insects are attacking all the forests with great gusto because weak trees are sirloin steaks for bugs. As the climate shifts, trees can't migrate. They die. Their seeds might colonize new areas but this is really slow since the parent trees can't walk a few hundred miles and then set up a new homestead.
So where are all those predicted hurricanes?
By Tsegaye TadesseADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Rescuers in helicopters tossed ropes to stranded Ethiopians on Thursday after many scrambled onto rooftops and trees to escape floods that have killed nearly 900 and marooned tens of thousands.
Rushing waters have devastated large areas throughout the Horn of Africa nation since early this month as emergency services struggle to cope with overwhelming numbers of evacuees.
It can't rain everywhere at once. So if it is flooding in Ethiopia then it is pretty unlikely to be stormy on the other side of Africa. The delivery system for moisture in the Atlantic doesn't just come from the ocean, it starts like a conveyor belt over Africa's vast deserts. South Africa just had a really big snowstorm. And intense cold! So there is definitely moisture down by Antarctica. But not up by the Caribbean Seas. One of the things I have noted happening increasingly over the last 50 years is this sense that all weather systems are like a faucet that randomly turns off or on. If May, June and July's floods here in the NE happened during the middle of winter, we would have been buried under a mountain of snow!
Now it is very dry. And will probably be mostly dry for the next three months. Which means around Christmas, the faucet will turn on again. Last fall, we got one flood after another with each hurricane. Then winter came and there was virtually no snow and only a little rain! It was so dry by March, not one of my springs ran and I feared my hay fields would fail. Then it poured and poured! So now I am betting we will get dumped with snow this winter.
What really disturbs me is the ozone map at the top of this story. Look at that nasty, awful mess! Look where it is! We Americans are producing an amazing amount of pollution. And we refuse to sign the Kyoto Accords. We will certainly choke to death before we sign, right?
Click here of NOAA's ozone maps.
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