Weather News

New El Nino And Increasing Droughts For Western States

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It rained all summer here and is still raining and raining in Upstate New York but the rest of the nation has to worry about droughts. Now we hear a new El Nino is gearing up in the Pacific Ocean. This will flip-flop some of the present weather systems which is why we have had several big hurricanes hitting Baja while Florida sits high and dry.

Scientists warn the West about a very serious long-term drought cycle that is just beginning.

By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
September 20, 2006

LONGMONT - Future Western droughts could last an average of 12 years, spanning half of the region and severely reducing Colorado River flows that supply millions of people, according to climate projections from a Boulder scientist.

Eighteen of the world's most powerful computer climate models were used in the study, presented Tuesday by Martin Hoerling, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hoerling said he was startled by his own findings. But he cautioned that his results are preliminary and have not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

"The numbers are pretty striking," he said Tuesday at a drought conference sponsored by the Geological Society of America. "Climate change is moving us in the direction of a perpetual state that is of the Dust Bowl type."

I remember the 5 year drought when I was a child in Arizona. The churches used to pray for rain and when it did rain, we ran around in happy hysteria. I remember when the drought ended we also got a November snowstorm. My littlest brother who was born during the drought began to cry with fear when he saw the stuff falling from the sky. The fact that we all ran outside, screaming, terrified him even more.

The population of Arizona during that time was less than half a million. Today, it is many millions and they all use much more water per capita than when I was a child.

The real killer for the west and the great fear of global warming for them is the lack of snow. If the winter isn't cold enough for snow, the water table will drop dramatically. As I know very well on my own eastern forested mountain, summer rains do not equal winter snow at all! When snow melts, it permeates the soil which is why we call spring herebouts 'Mud Season.'

And it is the Big Muddy! My tractor can easily sink up to the running board in this mud. This summer featured much more moisture than winter but we don't have so much as an inch of mud. Melting snow takes all the moisture of the entire winter and perculates it deep into the ground. There is no run-off, there are 'springs' which pop out of the spongey earth. Not only is this water penetrating deeper, it is much cleaner than summer rain. This is due to the perculation effect: the water runs green and pure after filtering through the clays and sands.

Summer run-off is very dirty. So the loss of winter snow has a much, much bigger effect on water quality and availability than quick, violent summer downpours. This is why looking at average rainfall is meaningless.

We had so little snow this year, for example, I was really afraid of a drought situation. The heavy summer rain prevented this but it is much better to have this as snow, not rain. The rains have interfered with harvesting hay, when it is too damp, the corn rots in the fields and the vegetables don't ripen in the warm sun, for example, my tomatoes are exploding and can't be stored easily and the cabbages have mold growing deep within the head.

Since we are going into el Nino, time to review the last one that passed through.

Last Updated Fri, 10 Jan 2003 09:54:57 EST
CBC News
Forecasters say the Prairies will be drier than usual until at least March.

The warm weather brought by El Nino meant that cattle could graze well into the fall, rather than eat expensive feed, but the lack of snow could spell trouble once the spring arrives.

"If we don't get rain in the early spring there's going to be a lot of trouble again," said cattle auctioneer Mark Danes.

The drought last summer led to a massive sell-off of livestock as farmers couldn't provide feed or water for their animals.

It already looks like the Midwest is cycling between bad droughts and terrible droughts. This is one of the world's greatest bread baskets and humanity can't afford to see it become a basket case. A great deal of our agriculture depends on sucking up the winter waters from the Rockies. Just as all of Africa has diverted disasterous amounts of water causing the lakes to shrink, for that matter, Eurasia has, too, all the world's lakes are shrinking and with a lack of winter water, this will accelerate.

Lo and behold, the Atlantic is like a pendulum with the Pacific.

COLLEGE STATION, TX, United States (UPI) -
El Nino events occur when the sea surface on the South American side of the tropical Pacific warms dramatically, altering the cycle of heat and moisture fluctuations throughout the ocean and atmosphere. Warm air from the Pacific drifts east, where it raises the temperature of tropical Atlantic waters.

But sometimes El Nino is followed by cooling in the tropical Atlantic. Chang and his colleagues believe that`s because the equatorial Atlantic is not a passive recipient of the El Nino weather system, as many had thought, but interferes with the far-reaching effects of El Nino.

This is a classic yin/yang thing. A Hegelian pendulum. This is to be expected since the ecosystem tries to balance things out, one way or another. But overall, it is warming up so the pendulum begins to swing wilder and wilder. As I keep saying, the weather systems won't be like living in the Bahamas all the time, instead, it will swing wildling from Heaven to Hell.

I just read somewhere today that the Artic Ocean has opened up so much this summer, ships now can pass through to the other side. And polar bears have been spotted in the ocean, drowning, desperately trying to swim to somewhere solid. The Norwegian navy has seen many corpses or struggling beasts. This is a bad omen for us all.

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Humans Are Abusing Water In Dry Climates

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the earth heats up and we see more mega storms, floods and droughts, water problems accumulate. But then there are man-made problems due to overpopulation and misuse of natural water resources. Draining all the rivers for irrigation and play is common across many lands including America. Also, I refute a scientific article that claims falsely to rebut the theory that the Gulf Stream failing to flow north causes ice sheets in Europe and America.

The Dead Sea is dying because of this.

London Times: Robert Booth

LORD FOSTER, the British architect, has been enlisted by the King of Jordan for his most grandiose project yet — a canal carved through the Sinai desert to rescue the Dead Sea from environmental disaster.
He has already held talks with the governments of Israel and Jordan about a $3 billion (£1.57 billion) scheme to transfer water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.

*snip*

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, have recently signed letters expressing their commitment to the project, despite the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The study will be financed by France, America, the Netherlands and Japan.

*snip*

According to Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of Friends of the Earth in the Middle East, the reduction has been caused by the diversion of the River Jordan, which feeds the Dead Sea, for irrigation and drinking water — mostly by Israel, but also by Jordan and Syria. Today, less than 7% of the river’s original flow reaches the sea.

The Dead Sea like the Aral Sea and every lake in Africa, is being starved to death as water is diverted to other uses. Most of the water being misued in the Middle East is due to Israel. The water users live totally inappropriate lives in the Middle East. Since many of them are recent colonists from water-friendly places and since they went out of their way to extend this lifestyle by turning a land appropriate for growing olive trees, date palms and grazing small livestock into a densely populated city-state that grows water-thirsty crops requiring lots of irrigation. There is no Euphrates river or Mississippi running through this region, just very small rivers like the Jordan which has been reduced to a tiny trickle so two million transplanted people can flush toilets, swim in pools, play golf and grow tomatoes.

There are fish farms in Israel, for example, that export to America. We do the exact same thing, farms in the Northeast are dying because of Federal water programs in the Southwest. The Colorado River, one of the great rivers on earth, has about the same volume of water issuing into the Gulf of California as the Jordan is discharging into the Dead Sea.

Of course, the Americans will be the primary people to pay for a project fixing the Dead Sea. The King of Jordan has to keep his palaces and luxury lifestyle, so he isn't paying anything. The Israelis want us to pick up the bill for their recent war and also this mess they created by overusing desert resources. The Palestinians are joining in because they want legitimacy. They get virtually no water resouces. The article even notes they are forbidden to make wells on the pathetic remains of their own lands.

Across Africa, wars are beginning to rage over water. The population in and around the ever-expanding Sahara is causing mass murder and great distress. There is no solution to this problem since it is due mostly to humans impacting on the earth's ecosystems. Thus, Dafur, for example.

Droughts are causing increasing problems in rain forests in the north.

Reuters

OTTAWA - A well-known resort town in a Canadian Pacific rain forest must shutter its hotels and businesses this week because a prolonged drought has slashed water supplies, officials said on Wednesday.

The terror lurking over our pine forests is the weakening of the trees when they are starved for water, the thick bed of needles that, instead of acting like sponges and holding the water and then decaying into rich topsoil, are like a zillion matches waiting for either a careless human or a thunderstorm. All over the earth, we are busy beavers building hydrolic systems. One of the most important is building dams to generate electricity and control floods. The Seven Gorges dam in China is the biggest, latest example. Human abuse of water is still not ending because no one is taking this crisis all that seriously, yet. For example, there is no reason to have flush toilets except for bad habits started by the British of London 200 years ago. There are much better systems but they cost more to install. Yet installing them, we must! Collectively, it is far cheaper since it would then cut down the need to clean dirty water by a very significant degree.

One of the readers of this blog linked to this story about the oceans, the Gulf Stream and Europe.

Richard Seagar

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe's mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

This is not to say that there is no climatological mystery to be explained. The countries of northern Europe do indeed have curiously mild climates, a phenomenon I didn't really appreciate until I moved from Liverpool to New York. I arrived in the Big Apple just before a late-summer heat wave, at a time when the temperature soared to around 35 degrees Celsius. I had never endured such blistering temperatures. And just a few months later I was awestruck by the sensation of my nostrils freezing when I went outside. Nothing like that happens in England, where the average January is 15 to 20 degrees warmer than what prevails at the same latitude in eastern North America. So what keeps my former home so balmy in the winter? And why do so many people credit the Gulf Stream?

Above is a map from that article, showing the world's oceans and their average warmth in winter which I have heavily modified showing the difference between Ice Age flows and modern times. True, the ocean, by itself, whatever the flow, will always warm lands that lie to the west meaning the west coast of North America and Western Europe. But do note the warm bulge in the Atlantic lies much further north than the one in the Pacific. During all Ice Ages of the last 2 million years, the west coast of North America, all the way up and through Alaska, stayed warm and had no ice sheets while England and all of Northern Europe down to France, was one huge ice sheet.

So I would surmise from this obvious evidence that the ocean currents in the Pacific changed, moving warm water to the north and towards the American continent while the Gulf Stream died and moved much further south. The scientists in this article used all sorts of nifty computer programs to prove their point but they started off on the wrong foot. They should have tried to explain why England goes under solid ice every ice age! Another interesting notion is the probablility that the ice sheets follow the contours of the Jet Stream in winter. The only difference from today, as far as the Jet Stream is concerned, is that it moves further north in summer. During ice ages, it blows in the winter pattern non-stop.

All ice ages end suddenly with catastrophic floods. The Pacific Northwest, as we know it today, was totally remade by tremendous floods when gigantic glacial lakes suddenly burst their ice dams.

By WILLIAM KATES, Associated Press Writer Tue Aug 29, 5:45 PM ET
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - A 30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.

Although scientists have previously theorized that the Labyrinth region in southern Victoria Land was created by water released from lakes that had formed under glaciers, researchers at Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the time.

Astronomers believe the earth's tilt and the sun reactivating, burning warmer, ends all ice ages. Other people like to think it is caused by CO2 changes. It certainly is a rhythm that is pretty stubborn now and it started in ernest when North America joined South America right after South America's penninsula broke off from Antarctica's penninsula. So I would suggest, we got this particular ice age cycles when the ocean's previous flow patterns were broken in the north and re-established in the south. Ie: the warm waters of the Pacific no longer flow into the Caribbean and the cold waters in the south now girdle the planet and flows freely into the South Atlanic and South Pacific which probably dried up Australia.

I would suggest, if another ice age threatens us, we blow up the landmass connecting the North American and South American continents. This would mean eliminating Panama. I am predicting this will be done, if we don't nuke ourselves to oblivion, first.

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Spain's Drought Worsens Even As Tourists Throw Tomatoes For Fun

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As mega-typhoon Ioke aims for Tokyo, Spain burns in terrible drought. Little rain from the Atlantic this year! I discuss how humans refuse to face reality as Spain hosts tomato fights for tourists while tomato growers cause a water crisis in the same city.

The drought might shut down whole cities.

By Graham Keeley in Barcelona
Published: 31 August 2006

As Spain struggles to cope with the worst drought for 10 years, running water may soon be cut in some parts of the South-east.

Taps could run dry in Murcia and Alicante. Reservoirs which supply that part of the country are down to 10 per cent of their capacity after months of severe drought. Up to two million people who are served by those depleted reservoirs could be left having to depend on bottled water.

Spain's Environment Minister Cristina Narbona accused politicians in Alicante and Murcia of being more concerned with building thousands of villas, hotels and golf courses, than managing the water supply. Spain's booming agricultural sector, growing fruit and vegetables in plastic tunnels, is another huge drain on the water supply.

*snip*

Meanwhile, with the holiday season still in full swing, tourists in hundreds of hotels across this part of Spain, are consuming dwindling supplies. And many Britons, who have flown to Murcia or Alicante to enjoy the sunshine and improve their golf handicap, may be unaware how the courses are also eating up the country's scarcest resource. Ecologists have estimated that one golf course alone consumes the same amount of water each year as a small town of 5,000 people. Ms Narbona approved drought emergency aid of €600m (£400m), part of which will be used to try to reduce the amount of water that is being wasted on farms. Tomato farms, which require a large amount of water, are typical of Alicante and Murcia. Last year, as Spain experienced the worst drought for nearly 60 years, farmers were reduced to using waste water on their crops.

Spain had a terrible drought last year, too. As I point out before, droughts can last for years and years, even thousands of years. Despite them not being as dramatic as hurricanes, they are far more deadly and dangerous. The 'desert' belt is growing thanks to global warming. The ocean currents are being altered by the fresh water pouring out of Greenland. Antactica is surrounded by ocean so it diffuses much more than the ice waters of Greenland which have only one direction to go: into the Gulf Stream. And this is the conveyor belt of all the weather of Europe and America.

According to the news, the resevoirs of southeastern Spain are running dry. Several cities and resort will be waterless. I remember the droughts in NY in the 1960's. You couldn't get a glass of water when dining. I was astonished by this, coming from the Arizona deserts, when I came through in 1968. Spain depends on tourists coming from 'wet' England, for example. They have golf courses which are the curse of the desert, these things soak up precious water. Gah.

Lots of this water is pumped for growing tomatoes so they can be thrown at other tourists.

ABC News: Some 40,000 people have gathered in the town of Bunol, in eastern Spain, to pelt each other with 100,000 kilograms of tomatoes in the annual Tomatina festival.

Participants, including thousands of tourists, turned themselves into a human gazpacho at one of the world's messiest festivals.

Most donned waterproof capes to stave off the onslaught of juice and pulp in a manic free-for-all.

The festival is believed to have begun life as an argument between two carnival participants in 1945.

This is the definition of decadence. Destroying the environment, risking the death of whole cities so tomatoes can be raised using artifical irrigation just so people can throw them at each other and wade in a river of wasted tomatoes infuriates me.

This mindless stupidity to entertain brainless dolts is killing us. And endangering everyone.

It makes a lot of money because people are collectively, quite stupid. But the government should outlaw this sort of neo-decline of Rome sport.

Roman Emperor, Vitellius: Now, when he was in a position of so great authority, his wantonness only increased, and he was squandering money most of the day and night alike. He was insatiate in gorging himself, and was constantly vomiting up what he ate, being nourished by the mere passage of the food. Yet this practice was all that enabled him to hold out; for his fellow-banqueters fared very badly. 3For he was always inviting many of the foremost men to his table and he was frequently entertained at their houses.

A long session of starvation and privation followed all this. For about a thousand years. The population crashed. And barbarians invaded. Causing whole ecosystems to collapse is worse. Easter Island showed us what could happen next.

The Israelis liked to boast about how they could turn the desert into greenery via technology and know-how. Growing utterly inappropriate plants in the desert using water taken from rivers or pumped from the ground was their key to this Garden of Eden. In America, we did exactly the same and did many exchange programs. I remember some of them from the University of Arizona. I, myself, was part of a group study showing how one could grow a fair crop on a quarter acre in Tucson. Of course, all the water was pumped in from the Rio Grande.

The rivers in Arizona are now all sucked up and used by the massive population. All attempts at agriculture have collapsed except fo the many golf courses for tourists and retirees.

Americans are getting fat and fatter and this biomass is killing Nature.

Americans have sipped and slurped their way to fatness by drinking far more soda and other sugary drinks over the last four decades, a new scientific review concludes.

An extra can of soda a day can pile on 15 pounds in a single year, and the "weight of evidence" strongly suggests that this sort of increased consumption is a key reason that more people have gained weight, the researchers say.

"We tried to look at the big picture rather than individual studies," and it clearly justifies public health efforts to limit sugar-sweetened beverages, said Dr. Frank Hu, who led the report published yesterday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

This is a water problem. Here in the hydro-rich northeast, many companies pump water from the earth and package it. In India, various states and farmers and cities are fighting Coca Cola and Pepsi over water rights. This out of control development, misuse of water and abuse of food is all part of a contemptuous attitude about this planet that is fostered by humans to keep on doing really bad things. I was watching ABC talk about the end of the earth and not once did they mention gas guzzling cars, soda pop guzzling populations or mega corporations.

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Super Typhoon Ioke Heads North

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Super Typhoon, Ioke, is now definitely heading north into cooler waters and might strike northern Japan rather than banging right into China or the Tokyo sector of Japan. Asia has been battered by a series of violent typhoons this last two years. One with 50 foot waves would have been a tremendous blow.

The Weather Underground has some good maps.

NASA has also been tracking this monstrous storm.

Typhoon Ioke started as all tropical cyclones do, as a depression—an area of low atmospheric pressure. After forming on August 19, 2006, the depression quickly developed into a tropical storm, the threshold for earning a name. Ioke is the Hawaiian word for the name Joyce. Storms and hurricanes in the central Pacific are unusual, but they occur often enough for there to be a naming convention, applied by the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu. The last named central Pacific storm was Huko in 2002. Ioke rose all the way to hurricane strength in less than 24 hours.Ioke also performed another unusual trick, crossing the International Date Line on August 27, which by convention means the tropical cyclone was then called a typhoon instead of a hurricane.

When hurricane Wilma went from a catagory one to a catagory four hurricane in 90 minutes, that was a world record. Going from a tropical storm to a catagory five in less than 24 hours is amazing, too. It seems, all the storms are vying for breaking such records. The swiftness of their growth is a warning to us all. Right now, most of these storms have not done this trick right on top of some shoreline. Except for Andrew.

I remember that storm. They thought it was going to be a fairly low level hurricane. Suddenly, just before landfall, in less than six hours, it shot up to a catagory five.

I have been watching this megastorm in the Pacific for a week. Usually, when a storm forms far away, it doesn't hold its shape for more than 10 or 14 days due to windshear and other factors. In this case, it is being shoved into cooler waters. Just south of it lies much warmer waters. One wonders what would have happened if it strayed there! Australia would really have problems, for example!

We can be relieved this storm isn't going to strike a hammer blow to Asia. The USA has evaded the worst Mother Nature can throw at us but She has many arrows in Her quiver and the fact that we are spared only means drought will now hammer the Midwest and South with increasing power. Hurricanes are bad but only for a few hours.

Droughts are hideous. They grind on and on and on, sometimes for years. Sometimes for hundreds of thousands of years. The Sahara was once a green savannah veldt. And humans evolved there.

CO2 is assisting megastorms---but there is yet another force we must contend with.

Elizabeth Svoboda
for National Geographic News
August 29, 2006
In the ongoing debate over global warming, climatologists usually peg carbon dioxide as the most dangerous of the atmosphere's heat- trapping gases.

But methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, might be even more problematic.

According to Tessa Hill, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, more methane is released into the atmosphere from ocean deposits during periods of warming than previously thought.

This expelled methane increases temperatures and releases more methane, creating a positive feedback loop.

The methane breathers on alien planets probably would love to see this planet's atmosphre become more pleasant for them. For us, this is another worry. The oceans hold an amazing amount of methane locked away in the lower depths. Some humans dream of tapping this and using it. It reminds me of the drilling in Indonesia for gas that ended up releasing a massive amount of very hot mud.

Unlocking Nature's box can release all sorts of unexpected Pandorian demons.

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