Most of this is quoted and cited from other sites.
I am not even going to lie, me being in this humongous hurricane zone, so close to the ocean (SO CLOSE..)Makes me want to take the money we have been saving for Giana's private school and buy a boat to keep in the front yard. Just in case (crossing fingers, knocking on wood, all that superstitious shit) god-forbid - it shows up here. Flood, tsunami (not that a boat would do any good in that case) , hurricane, whatever! It scares me.
Much to my disbelief most that I can find online are skeptics. It saddens me and angers me - reason why? Thats how it got this way! One person even said "Maybe if I had bought a Prius Joplin would still be standing." WOW. Maybe if we all had it would be. I've said it for a while. These gas hogs out to be outlawed, melted down and made into new cars. The government should forbid people to drive them. There should be limits on plane travel, and how much travel one person can take per month. I can get all the backlash I can stand, or whosoever opinions on this will not change my mind. Mine, and my children's life being put a risk, so you can globe-trot with your millions of dollars and waste that money? Silly big spenders, that money could be used to HELP the earth and our dire situations, not harm it.
OMG! Comments like these are whats wrong with climate change now, and why it has gotten as bad as it is. Its easy for you to sit back and say that the article is BS, your not the ones whose homes have been flooded or ripped from its foundation. Yes we have freak weather all the time, but it is increasingly getting worse and worse, and you sit there and type away at your computer doubtful and you’ll be the next one it gets. Just saying. You kinda deserve it. Your little brain cannot even begin to comprehend how frightful and terrifying this shit is. Let your family members die and perish in it, lets see how YOU feel. SMH!
Some of what we’ve already seen includes:
The wettest April in the Midwest in 116 years
The driest month in Texas in a century
A thousand tornadoes in the U.S. in the last year, leaving more than 500 people dead and more than $15 billion in damage
Record heat in Russia last summer that killed 15,000 people
Record floods in Pakistan and Australia
Drought in China
And the hottest year on Earth since weather records began
Some of what’s on the way:
California so hot that much of today’s agriculture will be impossible
Many coastal cities flooded by rising sea levels
More intense hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and deluges
More tropical diseases reaching into once temperate zones
Chicago feeling more like Baton Rouge
Very interesting. 2010 Tornado Tracker on top,
2011 Tornado Tracker on the bottom.
For most of you who don't know. I am from Alabama. These pics, especially the 2011 pic on the bottom. You cant even SEE Alabama in these photos. I can only pray for the lives of my friends and family and hope this tornado season is over soon. Cross your fingers for us on the shore too, that no hurricanes happen to sweep ashore this year. :/
_________________________________________________________________________________
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/02/17/207552/nsidc-thawing-permafrost-will-turn-from-carbon-sink-to-source-in-mid-2020s-releasing-100-billion-tons-of-carbon-by-2100/
VERY SCARY ^ like something out of a weather movie. Some of these skeptics say, oh we've always had thousands of tornadoes, look at the numbers. Not as much damage and deaths though, is what they are failing to put into consideration.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/29/are-you-ready-for-more.html
"Are You Ready for More?
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future.
Valentina Abinanti / Polaris
Joplin, Missouri after the tornado that hit on May 22.
Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone. Across the U.S., it’s just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they’ll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
Tom Pennington / Getty Images (left); Sean Gardner /Reuters-Landov
Left: A wildfire rages in Strawn, Texas on April 19.; Right: Rescuers pass a partially submerged building in Vicksburg, Mississippi on May 11.
The rookies will struggle to comprehend the complex impacts of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 40 percent above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. The added heat in the atmosphere retains more moisture, ratchets up the energy in the system, and incites more violent and extreme weather. Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes, but there is wide consensus that the 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges. Even if the world went carbon-neutral tomorrow, we’d be in for more: because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we’re on track for another 5 degrees of warming. Batten down the hatches. “You can no longer say that the climate of the future is going to be like the climate of today, let alone yesterday,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In all of the plausible climate scenarios, we are going to have to change the way we do things in ways we can’t even predict.”
Changing temperatures will have a profound effect on the plants and animals among us. Crops that flourished in the old climate regime will have to adapt to the new one, as some pests are already doing. Tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever are reaching temperate regions, and ragweed and poison ivy thrive in the hothouse world. Yet most of us are naive about what climate-change adaptation will entail. At the benign extreme, “adapting” sounds as easy as home gardeners adjusting to their new climate zones—those colorful bands on the back of the package of zinnia seeds. It sounds as pleasant as cities planting more trees, as Chicago, New York, Boston, and scores of others are doing (with species native to the warmer climes: Chicago is subbing heat-loving sweet gum and swamp oak for the traditional white oak). And it sounds as architecturally interesting as changing roofs: New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.
But those steps don’t even hint at how disruptive and expensive climate-change adaptation will be. “Ten years ago, when we thought climate change would be slow and linear, you could get away with thinking that ‘adaptation’ meant putting in permeable pavement” so that storm water would be absorbed rather than cause floods, says Bill McKibben, author of the 2010 book Eaarth. “Now it’s clear that’s not going to be at all sufficient, as we see already with disruptions in our ability to grow food, an increase in storms, and the accelerated melting of Greenland that could raise sea levels six feet. Adaptation is going to have to be a lot more than changing which trees cities plant.”
This is the article that scared me. If you have much sense it should scare you too.
To read the rest of the article, use the hyper-link below.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/29/are-you-ready-for-more.html
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/02/235087/oxfam-climate-change-double-food-prices-by-2030-%E2%80%9Cwe-are-turning-abundance-into-scarcity%E2%80%9D/
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Bush administration ignored/denied it.. now we are in a hole we cannot possibly dig ourselves out of.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/04/235903/heidi-cullen-tornadoes-extreme-weather-c-word/#more-235903
I am not even going to lie, me being in this humongous hurricane zone, so close to the ocean (SO CLOSE..)Makes me want to take the money we have been saving for Giana's private school and buy a boat to keep in the front yard. Just in case (crossing fingers, knocking on wood, all that superstitious shit) god-forbid - it shows up here. Flood, tsunami (not that a boat would do any good in that case) , hurricane, whatever! It scares me.
Much to my disbelief most that I can find online are skeptics. It saddens me and angers me - reason why? Thats how it got this way! One person even said "Maybe if I had bought a Prius Joplin would still be standing." WOW. Maybe if we all had it would be. I've said it for a while. These gas hogs out to be outlawed, melted down and made into new cars. The government should forbid people to drive them. There should be limits on plane travel, and how much travel one person can take per month. I can get all the backlash I can stand, or whosoever opinions on this will not change my mind. Mine, and my children's life being put a risk, so you can globe-trot with your millions of dollars and waste that money? Silly big spenders, that money could be used to HELP the earth and our dire situations, not harm it.
OMG! Comments like these are whats wrong with climate change now, and why it has gotten as bad as it is. Its easy for you to sit back and say that the article is BS, your not the ones whose homes have been flooded or ripped from its foundation. Yes we have freak weather all the time, but it is increasingly getting worse and worse, and you sit there and type away at your computer doubtful and you’ll be the next one it gets. Just saying. You kinda deserve it. Your little brain cannot even begin to comprehend how frightful and terrifying this shit is. Let your family members die and perish in it, lets see how YOU feel. SMH!
Some of what we’ve already seen includes:
The wettest April in the Midwest in 116 years
The driest month in Texas in a century
A thousand tornadoes in the U.S. in the last year, leaving more than 500 people dead and more than $15 billion in damage
Record heat in Russia last summer that killed 15,000 people
Record floods in Pakistan and Australia
Drought in China
And the hottest year on Earth since weather records began
Some of what’s on the way:
California so hot that much of today’s agriculture will be impossible
Many coastal cities flooded by rising sea levels
More intense hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and deluges
More tropical diseases reaching into once temperate zones
Chicago feeling more like Baton Rouge
Very interesting. 2010 Tornado Tracker on top,
2011 Tornado Tracker on the bottom.
For most of you who don't know. I am from Alabama. These pics, especially the 2011 pic on the bottom. You cant even SEE Alabama in these photos. I can only pray for the lives of my friends and family and hope this tornado season is over soon. Cross your fingers for us on the shore too, that no hurricanes happen to sweep ashore this year. :/
_________________________________________________________________________________
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/02/17/207552/nsidc-thawing-permafrost-will-turn-from-carbon-sink-to-source-in-mid-2020s-releasing-100-billion-tons-of-carbon-by-2100/
VERY SCARY ^ like something out of a weather movie. Some of these skeptics say, oh we've always had thousands of tornadoes, look at the numbers. Not as much damage and deaths though, is what they are failing to put into consideration.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/29/are-you-ready-for-more.html
"Are You Ready for More?
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future.
Joplin, Missouri after the tornado that hit on May 22.
Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone. Across the U.S., it’s just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they’ll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
Tom Pennington / Getty Images (left); Sean Gardner /Reuters-Landov
Left: A wildfire rages in Strawn, Texas on April 19.; Right: Rescuers pass a partially submerged building in Vicksburg, Mississippi on May 11.
The rookies will struggle to comprehend the complex impacts of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 40 percent above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. The added heat in the atmosphere retains more moisture, ratchets up the energy in the system, and incites more violent and extreme weather. Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes, but there is wide consensus that the 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges. Even if the world went carbon-neutral tomorrow, we’d be in for more: because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we’re on track for another 5 degrees of warming. Batten down the hatches. “You can no longer say that the climate of the future is going to be like the climate of today, let alone yesterday,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In all of the plausible climate scenarios, we are going to have to change the way we do things in ways we can’t even predict.”
Changing temperatures will have a profound effect on the plants and animals among us. Crops that flourished in the old climate regime will have to adapt to the new one, as some pests are already doing. Tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever are reaching temperate regions, and ragweed and poison ivy thrive in the hothouse world. Yet most of us are naive about what climate-change adaptation will entail. At the benign extreme, “adapting” sounds as easy as home gardeners adjusting to their new climate zones—those colorful bands on the back of the package of zinnia seeds. It sounds as pleasant as cities planting more trees, as Chicago, New York, Boston, and scores of others are doing (with species native to the warmer climes: Chicago is subbing heat-loving sweet gum and swamp oak for the traditional white oak). And it sounds as architecturally interesting as changing roofs: New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.
But those steps don’t even hint at how disruptive and expensive climate-change adaptation will be. “Ten years ago, when we thought climate change would be slow and linear, you could get away with thinking that ‘adaptation’ meant putting in permeable pavement” so that storm water would be absorbed rather than cause floods, says Bill McKibben, author of the 2010 book Eaarth. “Now it’s clear that’s not going to be at all sufficient, as we see already with disruptions in our ability to grow food, an increase in storms, and the accelerated melting of Greenland that could raise sea levels six feet. Adaptation is going to have to be a lot more than changing which trees cities plant.”
This is the article that scared me. If you have much sense it should scare you too.
To read the rest of the article, use the hyper-link below.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/29/are-you-ready-for-more.html
_________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/02/235087/oxfam-climate-change-double-food-prices-by-2030-%E2%80%9Cwe-are-turning-abundance-into-scarcity%E2%80%9D/
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Bush administration ignored/denied it.. now we are in a hole we cannot possibly dig ourselves out of.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/04/235903/heidi-cullen-tornadoes-extreme-weather-c-word/#more-235903
http://beta.news.yahoo.com/2011-deadliest-us-tornado-season-75-years-074411931.html
ReplyDelete