Survival Instincts
By Barry Didcock
BBC’s post-apocalypse classic is back – and the timing is spot-on.
IF 1970S sitcom The Good Life had an evil twin it was Survivors, a post-apocalyptic tale from Dalek creator Terry Nation that ran for three series on BBC One between 1975 and 1977. Today, its cult status assures its place in the canon of British television's sci-fi greats, alongside Doctor Who and Blake's 7. If you're old enough to remember it, you will; if not, think yourself lucky. It was the stuff of nightmares.
The plot was simple: a plague has wiped out most of the world's population and the few survivors have to return to an agrarian way of life while avoiding the manifest perils of a now-lawless society. In this world, Felicity Kendal is toast and so is her goat.
The theme music was minimalist and menacing, the opening credits equally so, and the show's stencilled title gave it a brutal and immediate iconography. The first episode was called The Fourth Horseman, the second Genesis.
Moreover, in Terry Nation's writing and in the brittle performances of lead actors Carolyn Seymour (as the indomitable Abby Grant), Ian McCulloch (Greg Preston), Lucy Fleming (Jenny Richards) and Talfryn Thomas (Tom Price), there was a constant sense of panic and paranoia. This, after all, was the era of oil shortages, power cuts, strikes, inflation and nuclear stand-offs.
In fact, Nation didn't even accept that his show was science fiction. "Survivors has its roots in the future," he told the Radio Times in April 1975, "but it's not science fiction. It's not going into the realms of the impossible, it's skating very close to the possible."
How close to the possible it skated was illustrated in the same interview when Nation pointed to the headline on that week's Sunday Times. It was a story about the 200 people in London who had come into contact with a man killed by Lassa fever, a rare and lethal haemorrhagic virus.
Now, in the age of flu scares and jungle survival programmes like I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, the BBC has re-made the cult series. Or, as writer and executive producer Adrian Hodges prefers, "re-imagined" it for the iPod generation. And, he thinks, it's even more relevant and shocking today than it was in the 1970s.
"Look around the living room - we all live on-line, we all have mobiles. We're further away from being able to look after ourselves than at any point in human history," he says. "More importantly, I think the theme of fear of pandemic is bigger and stronger than ever. Look at bird flu, look at Sars. These kinds of medical health scares always seem to be with us, but since the end of the cold war we seem more inclined than ever to believe something like this could happen."
Hodges has kept only some of the main characters from the original series. Scottish actress Julie Graham takes the role of Abby Grant, Paterson Joseph plays Greg Preston and Max Beesley is Tom Price, here a charming sociopath who has broken out of prison by murdering a guard.
But the character of Jenny Richards has been split into two - Jenny Collins (Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman) and her friend Dr Anya Raczynski (Zoe Tapper) - and Hodges has introduced two Muslim characters in the form of Al Sadiq, a well-heeled champagne-drinking playboy (Nip/Tuck's Phillip Rhys), and Najid (Chahak Patel), a devout 11-year-old who sports a football top under his traditional linen clothing.
One other difference from the original is that Hodges and director John Alexander now have computer-generated imagery at their disposal. So Abby Grant and Greg Preston can meet on a motorway that is quiet and still as far as the eye can see - only it wasn't: it was a small portion of test track that was extended using CGI.
The day-to-day task, as the title suggests, is continued survival. But how, with no electricity, no mobiles, no petrol?
"If you were one of the lucky ones who survived, what would you do?" asks Hodges. "How would you survive once you'd cleaned out the supermarket? Could you hunt and kill an animal? That's quite a shocking thing to contemplate."
But though Survivors is a multi-racial 2008 remake trading on the name of an illustrious 1970s predecessor, its central theme of an apocalyptic event almost wiping out humanity has a long and proud tradition in British literature.
It's in the King James Bible for a start. The book of Genesis tells us that Noah was saved from the deluge by God's instruction to build an ark. The Earth was "corrupt" and "filled with violence" so God sent a hard rain. Temporal wickedness was washed away, Noah and the animals were not.
Two-and-a-half centuries after the King James Bible was published, Mary Shelley produced her own take on the post-apocalyptic tradition. British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss has made the case for Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein being the first true example of the genre. He could have more easily claimed The Last Man, which she published eight years later. Set in a late 21st-century world decimated by plague and written as a memoir, it tells the story of the last human, one Lionel Verney.
Although deeply autobiographical - its central characters are based on Lord Byron and Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley - its theme is a bleak one: personal isolation. The novel ends with Verney setting off in a boat from a deserted Rome in an attempt to find other survivors.
Other authors picked up this post-apocalyptic theme and moulded it to their own ends. In 1885 the nature writer Richard Jefferies published After London, set in a city devastated by an unspecified catastrophe. The survivors are essentially knocked back into mediaeval times, nature quickly gains the upper hand and - the important bit as far as Jefferies was concerned - the capital becomes a poisonous marshland. London, city of vice, is wiped away.
But while the post-apocalyptic vision is terrifying to some, it's strangely appealing to others. As well as co-opting Shelley to the side of sci-fi, Aldiss also coined the phrase "the cosy catastrophe", meaning the cataclysm which neatly activates a story of cleansing, of triumph over adversity.
Aldiss was referring to the work of John Wyndham, specifically his famous 1951 novel The Day Of The Triffids in which most of the Earth's population is blinded before being attacked by plant life. Again, London is a place which must be left at all costs and the novel ends in the unlikely environs of the Isle of Wight, where a few sighted survivors set up a colony and begin the reconquest. Wyndham, in the novel's closing passage, calls it "the great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped".
Aldiss's own works were not generally so optimistic. His catastrophes were not cosy, just ragged, brutal and open-ended. There was often no prospect of a fight back.
Bleakest of the lot, perhaps, is Nevil Shute's On The Beach, written in 1957 - at the height of the cold war - and set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Its survivors search in vain for proof that they are not alone, holding on to hope but finding that fate has tricked them cruelly. For them, suicide or death by radiation are the only ways out.
There's a Swiftian satire to be had in post-apocalyptic visions, too. Margaret Atwood's Booker-nominated 2003 novel Oryx And Crake takes the last man on Earth theme and uses it to examine everything from genetic engineering to child pornography. The idea for the book came to Atwood during a trip into Australia's tropical rainforests. It's sobering to learn, however, that as she sat in Toronto Airport in September 2001 mapping out her post-apocalyptic world, she learned her flight had been cancelled due to the attacks on the World Trade Centre. She stopped work immediately. "It's deeply unsettling when you're writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens," she later noted.
In Survivors, Hodges throws all this into the pot. Fear of disease and lawlessness drive his survivors out of London; there are hints of more sinister reasons for the outbreak of the virus; psychological journeys are undertaken and hard questions asked about morality, trust and co-operation. There is satire, up to a point.
But while his vision for Survivors is not utopian, neither is it dystopian. At one point in the first episode Abby Grant meets Callum Brown, an instructor on the outward-bound course her son Peter was attending when the virus struck. In a pivotal scene, Brown tells Abby he sees the virus as a chance for mankind to rediscover its humanity. It's what you might call the New Leaf school of post-apocalyptic thinking.
In that respect, Brown speaks for Hodges too. "There are many different views of the future after a situation like this," says the writer. "Mine is scary but affirmative and optimistic in the long run, though it may not seem that way at times. I don't take a fantastically pessimistic view of human nature. I don't think it would turn into Lord Of The Flies overnight."
THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER...
Tea and toast with your apocalypse? How British filmmakers viewed the morning after the end of the world
The Changes Loosely based on Peter Dickinson's trilogy of novels for young adults - The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children - this BBC children's series screened in 1975 and was a counterpart to Survivors. Machines begin to emit an ear-splitting noise causing humans to destroy them, returning the world to a pre-technological society. Electricity pylons become "the bad wires" and are avoided. Even bicycles are smashed. The action is viewed through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl who sets out to uncover the mystery behind the changes. Unavailable on DVD and repeated only once, in 1976, its cult status is now assured.Threads Written by Kes author Barry Hines, set in Sheffield and screened on BBC Two in September 1984, Threads imagined what life would be like in the years following a nuclear war. Like Peter Watkins's The War Game 20 years earlier - commissioned by the BBC but still banned when Threads screened - Hines's dystopian essay mixed documentary-style facts with live action. A decade on from the war, his survivors are speaking broken English mixed with dialect words, dying from radiation poisoning and giving birth to mutant babies. There is no prospect of redemption here. The programme was given a second airing on BBC One in August 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Japan.
28 Days Later In 2002, Trainspotting director Danny Boyle took the idea of a "rage" virus affecting the majority of the population and turned it into a post-apocalyptic British zombie flick. Cillian Murphy is the cycle courier who wakes up in a hospital bed only to find London deserted. Or is it? The script was written by Alex Garland, author of The Beach, and Boyle's original ending had Murphy's character dying. Test audiences thought it too bleak, however, and it was replaced with an ending in which Murphy survives, leaving the door open for the 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later.
Children Of Men Based on a 1992 novel by crime writer PD James, Children Of Men was filmed in 2006 and starred Clive Owen and Michael Caine. Set in 2027 and heavy on religious imagery, it shows a dystopian world whose inhabitants can no longer reproduce. The youngest person on the planet is 18 and mankind, apparently, is dying out. Theo, whose own son died in a flu pandemic, is given the job of escorting a young woman to the Human Project, a shadowy quasi-terrorist group. Her secret? She's pregnant. The message is one of hope and, ultimately, salvation.
Survivors starts tonight (BBC One, 9pm)
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Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
An Appeal to Reason
An Appeal To Reason
John Tamny, 11.17.08, 12:00 AM EST
Has Al Gore read Nigel Lawson's book?
Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and author of three books--including his essential account of the Thatcher years, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical--had trouble finding a publisher for his most recent book, An Appeal to Reason, which casts a skeptical eye on global warming.
As he notes in the foreword, one rejection letter suggested that "it would be very difficult to find a wide market" for a book that "flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy." So while Lawson acknowledges that his contribution to the discussion won't "shake the faith" of global warming's true believers, he's written what is a very informative book for those not yet convinced that Armageddon is our future, absent massive worldwide government action.
Lawson acknowledges up front that while he is not a scientist, neither "are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter" of global warming "with far greater certainty." And throughout, he deliberately uses the term "global warming" rather than the "attractively alliterative weasel words, 'climate change,'" and he does so "because the climate changes all the time."
In discussing global warming, Lawson happily takes the road less traveled in making the basic point about the science of global warming being "far from settled," not to mention that scientific truth "is not established by counting heads," as so many advocates of all manner of popular causes would likely prefer. So while Lawson doesn't hide from the fact that the 20th century ended slightly warmer than it began, he reminds readers that there has been no further evidence of global warming since the turn of the century.
Furthermore, news accounts would have us believe that calculating temperature is a foolproof process. But in reality, these calculations include data taken from the former Soviet Union, along with records from less-developed parts of the world. When Lawson checked U.S. temperature records, records thought to be most reliable, he found that only three of the last 12 years are among the warmest on record; 1934 being the warmest year of all. And though the level of carbon dioxide did increase 30% during the 20th century amid a slight warming trend, it's also boomed this century amid a slight cooling.
When we consider the slight warming that materialized during the 20th century, Lawson notes that it's not certain that the majority of it has to do with human activity. In truth, clouds/water vapor are the biggest contributors to the much vaunted "greenhouse effect," but the science of clouds is "one of the least understood aspects of climate science." Importantly, the earth's climate has always been subject to variations unrelated to human industrial activity, the "medieval warm period" of 1,000 years ago having occurred well before industrialization.
Regarding actions we might take, Lawson reminds readers that we need to avoid the kind of panic that could lead to disastrous policies. Indeed, he makes plain that there "is something inherently absurd about the conceit that we can have any useful idea of what the world will look like in a hundred years time," not to mention the other projected calamities expected to occur over 1,000 years from now. If this is doubted, ask yourself how many times weather forecasts meant to predict the next day have proven to be massively incorrect.
John Tamny, 11.17.08, 12:00 AM EST
Has Al Gore read Nigel Lawson's book?
Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and author of three books--including his essential account of the Thatcher years, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical--had trouble finding a publisher for his most recent book, An Appeal to Reason, which casts a skeptical eye on global warming.
As he notes in the foreword, one rejection letter suggested that "it would be very difficult to find a wide market" for a book that "flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy." So while Lawson acknowledges that his contribution to the discussion won't "shake the faith" of global warming's true believers, he's written what is a very informative book for those not yet convinced that Armageddon is our future, absent massive worldwide government action.
Lawson acknowledges up front that while he is not a scientist, neither "are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter" of global warming "with far greater certainty." And throughout, he deliberately uses the term "global warming" rather than the "attractively alliterative weasel words, 'climate change,'" and he does so "because the climate changes all the time."
In discussing global warming, Lawson happily takes the road less traveled in making the basic point about the science of global warming being "far from settled," not to mention that scientific truth "is not established by counting heads," as so many advocates of all manner of popular causes would likely prefer. So while Lawson doesn't hide from the fact that the 20th century ended slightly warmer than it began, he reminds readers that there has been no further evidence of global warming since the turn of the century.
Furthermore, news accounts would have us believe that calculating temperature is a foolproof process. But in reality, these calculations include data taken from the former Soviet Union, along with records from less-developed parts of the world. When Lawson checked U.S. temperature records, records thought to be most reliable, he found that only three of the last 12 years are among the warmest on record; 1934 being the warmest year of all. And though the level of carbon dioxide did increase 30% during the 20th century amid a slight warming trend, it's also boomed this century amid a slight cooling.
When we consider the slight warming that materialized during the 20th century, Lawson notes that it's not certain that the majority of it has to do with human activity. In truth, clouds/water vapor are the biggest contributors to the much vaunted "greenhouse effect," but the science of clouds is "one of the least understood aspects of climate science." Importantly, the earth's climate has always been subject to variations unrelated to human industrial activity, the "medieval warm period" of 1,000 years ago having occurred well before industrialization.
Regarding actions we might take, Lawson reminds readers that we need to avoid the kind of panic that could lead to disastrous policies. Indeed, he makes plain that there "is something inherently absurd about the conceit that we can have any useful idea of what the world will look like in a hundred years time," not to mention the other projected calamities expected to occur over 1,000 years from now. If this is doubted, ask yourself how many times weather forecasts meant to predict the next day have proven to be massively incorrect.
Brown Haze.......
Mysterious brown haze covering world
A massive mile-thick brown pollution haze has settled over vast areas of the planet, changing weather patterns and threatening health and crops, according to the UN.
Vast areas of Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, are affected by the smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds".
Video: Himalayas could soon disappear
Natural wonders to see before they disappear
The earth's seven biggest mysteries
When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Programme.
"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of the UNEP.
Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted in the report as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known.
Perhaps most widely recognised as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions.
"All these have led to negative effects on water resources and crop yields," the report says.
Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.
Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in 13 megacities: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.
Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25% in some places including Karachi, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario, because the brown clouds also help cool the earth's surface and mask the impact of global warming by an average of 40%, according to the report.
Further reading
Photos: animals now extinct
Video: Himalayas could soon disappear
The earth's seven biggest mysteries
Natural wonders to see before they disappear
Would you dare visit these wild places?
A massive mile-thick brown pollution haze has settled over vast areas of the planet, changing weather patterns and threatening health and crops, according to the UN.
Vast areas of Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, are affected by the smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds".
Video: Himalayas could soon disappear
Natural wonders to see before they disappear
The earth's seven biggest mysteries
When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Programme.
"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of the UNEP.
Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted in the report as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known.
Perhaps most widely recognised as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions.
"All these have led to negative effects on water resources and crop yields," the report says.
Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.
Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in 13 megacities: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.
Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25% in some places including Karachi, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario, because the brown clouds also help cool the earth's surface and mask the impact of global warming by an average of 40%, according to the report.
Further reading
Photos: animals now extinct
Video: Himalayas could soon disappear
The earth's seven biggest mysteries
Natural wonders to see before they disappear
Would you dare visit these wild places?
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Blimey ~ The Irish do weather!
Freak weather is becoming the norm
Ireland as a whole is likely to warm by 3-4 degrees by the end of this century, writes John Gibbons
FIRST, SOME good news: despite the atrocious weather of the last week or so, overall Ireland is in fact rated as one of the countries in the world least vulnerable in the medium term to the effects of climate change. That will probably be cold comfort for the motorists battling through flooded roads, farmers unable to harvest their crops or householders mopping out their ruined homes. Ireland has long enjoyed a Goldilocks climate - not too hot, not too cold. While poor summers are not unusual, we have largely been spared the weather extremes endured by many other countries.
Last Saturday's deluge, the most intense in nearly half a century, battered many parts of Dublin and Kildare.
What had been viewed as freak weather events are now rapidly becoming the new climate norms. Computer models for Ireland in the decades ahead show greater seasonal extremes, with autumns and winters becoming as much as 25 per cent wetter with drier, drought-prone summers. Where then do August deluges fit into this model? "Overall summer rainfall is declining; we're getting less rain, but it comes in severe bursts, and that seems to be consistent with what we're seeing here," says Peter Lynch, professor of meteorology at UCD.
These short, sharp episodes of intense rainfall are both difficult to predict and extremely destructive, as they quickly overwhelm drainage systems. "With so much recent building in flood plains, this is causing more instances of severe flooding," says Lynch. Adaptation through improvements in engineering and planning is now essential, he said.
Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth (who also does work for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) pointed out that much of the widescale house-building over the last decade had taken place in low-lying regions. Rivers' natural flood plains are being converted into housing estates and covered in concrete, leading to a loss of land into which flood waters can drain.
However, the Department of the Environment has still not moved to prevent local authorities from allowing houses and infrastructure to be built on flood plains.
The oceans act, in effect, like a giant sponge absorbing the bulk of the extra heating global warming has injected into our system. "The climate system has inertia," says Dr James Hansen of the Nasa Goddard Institute. "But that inertia is not our friend." The great bulk of this tightly coiled climatic spring now resides in elevated ocean temperatures.
It takes an immense amount of energy to warm an entire ocean. Surface temperatures of the Atlantic waters around Ireland are now increasing by around 0.4 degrees per decade, but the Irish Sea has undergone even more dramatic and unprecedented heating, of up to 0.7 degrees a decade.
As the water warms, its energy increases and the hydrological cycle intensifies. According to Prof Sweeney, ocean water temperatures in the region south of Newfoundland where our recent weather systems are forming have increased by an astonishing 5-6 degrees.
Wetter, wilder winters and summers of droughts and downpours are among the medium-term predictions for Ireland in a world of increasingly chaotic climate. Dublin city consumes 550 million litres of water a day. This is set to increase to 880 million litres by 2031 as the city continues to expand. At the same time, water levels in the river Liffey, which supplies 80 per cent of the capital's needs, could be halved by mid-century as a result of global warming.
The capital is facing a 20 per cent drop in its water supply within the next 12 years. The most likely solution will be to extract additional supplies from the Shannon at Lough Ree to make up the deficit.
Ireland as a whole is likely to warm by 3-4 degrees by the end of this century, with the most intense heating in the south and east. Extreme weather will be our constant companion in the decades ahead. Rising sea levels will exacerbate a process which may render many of Ireland's low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable this century.
"Let's just say I wouldn't be buying a seafront property any time soon," Prof Lynch said to me.
In this unfolding century of ever-deepening climate disruption, Ireland, one of the world's most globalised societies, can hardly expect to stand as an island apart, somehow insulated from the unfolding chaos lapping ever more urgently against our own shores.
• John Gibbons is founder of Climatechange.ie. info@climatechange.ie
© 2008 The Irish Times
Ireland as a whole is likely to warm by 3-4 degrees by the end of this century, writes John Gibbons
FIRST, SOME good news: despite the atrocious weather of the last week or so, overall Ireland is in fact rated as one of the countries in the world least vulnerable in the medium term to the effects of climate change. That will probably be cold comfort for the motorists battling through flooded roads, farmers unable to harvest their crops or householders mopping out their ruined homes. Ireland has long enjoyed a Goldilocks climate - not too hot, not too cold. While poor summers are not unusual, we have largely been spared the weather extremes endured by many other countries.
Last Saturday's deluge, the most intense in nearly half a century, battered many parts of Dublin and Kildare.
What had been viewed as freak weather events are now rapidly becoming the new climate norms. Computer models for Ireland in the decades ahead show greater seasonal extremes, with autumns and winters becoming as much as 25 per cent wetter with drier, drought-prone summers. Where then do August deluges fit into this model? "Overall summer rainfall is declining; we're getting less rain, but it comes in severe bursts, and that seems to be consistent with what we're seeing here," says Peter Lynch, professor of meteorology at UCD.
These short, sharp episodes of intense rainfall are both difficult to predict and extremely destructive, as they quickly overwhelm drainage systems. "With so much recent building in flood plains, this is causing more instances of severe flooding," says Lynch. Adaptation through improvements in engineering and planning is now essential, he said.
Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth (who also does work for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) pointed out that much of the widescale house-building over the last decade had taken place in low-lying regions. Rivers' natural flood plains are being converted into housing estates and covered in concrete, leading to a loss of land into which flood waters can drain.
However, the Department of the Environment has still not moved to prevent local authorities from allowing houses and infrastructure to be built on flood plains.
The oceans act, in effect, like a giant sponge absorbing the bulk of the extra heating global warming has injected into our system. "The climate system has inertia," says Dr James Hansen of the Nasa Goddard Institute. "But that inertia is not our friend." The great bulk of this tightly coiled climatic spring now resides in elevated ocean temperatures.
It takes an immense amount of energy to warm an entire ocean. Surface temperatures of the Atlantic waters around Ireland are now increasing by around 0.4 degrees per decade, but the Irish Sea has undergone even more dramatic and unprecedented heating, of up to 0.7 degrees a decade.
As the water warms, its energy increases and the hydrological cycle intensifies. According to Prof Sweeney, ocean water temperatures in the region south of Newfoundland where our recent weather systems are forming have increased by an astonishing 5-6 degrees.
Wetter, wilder winters and summers of droughts and downpours are among the medium-term predictions for Ireland in a world of increasingly chaotic climate. Dublin city consumes 550 million litres of water a day. This is set to increase to 880 million litres by 2031 as the city continues to expand. At the same time, water levels in the river Liffey, which supplies 80 per cent of the capital's needs, could be halved by mid-century as a result of global warming.
The capital is facing a 20 per cent drop in its water supply within the next 12 years. The most likely solution will be to extract additional supplies from the Shannon at Lough Ree to make up the deficit.
Ireland as a whole is likely to warm by 3-4 degrees by the end of this century, with the most intense heating in the south and east. Extreme weather will be our constant companion in the decades ahead. Rising sea levels will exacerbate a process which may render many of Ireland's low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable this century.
"Let's just say I wouldn't be buying a seafront property any time soon," Prof Lynch said to me.
In this unfolding century of ever-deepening climate disruption, Ireland, one of the world's most globalised societies, can hardly expect to stand as an island apart, somehow insulated from the unfolding chaos lapping ever more urgently against our own shores.
• John Gibbons is founder of Climatechange.ie. info@climatechange.ie
© 2008 The Irish Times
Monday, August 4, 2008
Oil & our survival
Reducing oil use 'our survival challenge'
Expert on oil supply tells receptive Sebastopol audience quick, decisive action needed
By MIKE McCOYTHE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 6:03 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 8:52 a.m.
It was easy to tell oil supply expert Richard Heinberg was preaching to the choir Saturday.
Parked around the Sebastopol Veterans Memorial building where 250 people crowded in to hear Heinberg foretell the gloomy future of oil and the global economy, one of every five cars was a gas-sipping hybrid.
But unfortunately, Heinberg said, enough of the rest of the world has not caught up yet with what it faces.
The ability of the world to wean itself from the ever-declining production of oil “is our survival challenge for the 21st century,” he said.
Heinberg, 57, a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute based in Sebastopol, is considered among the leading voices on the issue of peak oil supply, the time when the world’s supply of oil drops below the amount needed to fuel the worldwide economy.
The impact of that, particularly on individuals, can already be seen in the rising cost of food and the end of cheap travel, he noted.
Foodstuffs are trucked an average of 1,500 miles “from farm to plate” these days, Heinberg said, noting the need to conserve fuel demands that food be grown closer to home.
Airline travel is the same since the cost of fuel for large passenger planes will drive the industry into the red, he said.
Heinberg’s lecture, titled “Kiss Your Gas Goodbye,” was largely an update, a sort of “I told you so” of a lecture he gave at the same site three years ago that predicted a decline in global oil production and intensifying competition and chaos by nations to get it.
Heinberg said things have changed since then. “Most of what we talked about then is now history,” he told the audience.
Three years ago, when he made his prediction and warned that alternatives to oil had to be found, a gallon of gas in Sonoma County cost $2.19.
Today it hovers around $4.30 as the demand for oil increases worldwide while the available supply continues to slip.
Heinberg, who predicts oil exports throughout the world will drop by 50 percent over the next decade, urged that decisive action must be undertaken quickly.
“We’re talking about a civilization-ending crisis,” he said.
Fellow speaker Julian Darley, president of the Post Carbon Institute, however, presented the beginning of a 10-point plan he is developing to soften the blow of the doom-and-gloom Heinberg fears is coming.
“We must begin to live within the means of our planet,” he said.
To do that, he said, individuals must reduce their use of oil and the waste of raw materials; use car-pools; diversify into other sources of energy, including wind, solar and geothermal; and find high-tech ways to store energy.
You can reach Staff Writer Mike McCoy at 521-5276 or mike.mccoy@pressdemocrat.com.
Expert on oil supply tells receptive Sebastopol audience quick, decisive action needed
By MIKE McCOYTHE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 6:03 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 8:52 a.m.
It was easy to tell oil supply expert Richard Heinberg was preaching to the choir Saturday.
Parked around the Sebastopol Veterans Memorial building where 250 people crowded in to hear Heinberg foretell the gloomy future of oil and the global economy, one of every five cars was a gas-sipping hybrid.
But unfortunately, Heinberg said, enough of the rest of the world has not caught up yet with what it faces.
The ability of the world to wean itself from the ever-declining production of oil “is our survival challenge for the 21st century,” he said.
Heinberg, 57, a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute based in Sebastopol, is considered among the leading voices on the issue of peak oil supply, the time when the world’s supply of oil drops below the amount needed to fuel the worldwide economy.
The impact of that, particularly on individuals, can already be seen in the rising cost of food and the end of cheap travel, he noted.
Foodstuffs are trucked an average of 1,500 miles “from farm to plate” these days, Heinberg said, noting the need to conserve fuel demands that food be grown closer to home.
Airline travel is the same since the cost of fuel for large passenger planes will drive the industry into the red, he said.
Heinberg’s lecture, titled “Kiss Your Gas Goodbye,” was largely an update, a sort of “I told you so” of a lecture he gave at the same site three years ago that predicted a decline in global oil production and intensifying competition and chaos by nations to get it.
Heinberg said things have changed since then. “Most of what we talked about then is now history,” he told the audience.
Three years ago, when he made his prediction and warned that alternatives to oil had to be found, a gallon of gas in Sonoma County cost $2.19.
Today it hovers around $4.30 as the demand for oil increases worldwide while the available supply continues to slip.
Heinberg, who predicts oil exports throughout the world will drop by 50 percent over the next decade, urged that decisive action must be undertaken quickly.
“We’re talking about a civilization-ending crisis,” he said.
Fellow speaker Julian Darley, president of the Post Carbon Institute, however, presented the beginning of a 10-point plan he is developing to soften the blow of the doom-and-gloom Heinberg fears is coming.
“We must begin to live within the means of our planet,” he said.
To do that, he said, individuals must reduce their use of oil and the waste of raw materials; use car-pools; diversify into other sources of energy, including wind, solar and geothermal; and find high-tech ways to store energy.
You can reach Staff Writer Mike McCoy at 521-5276 or mike.mccoy@pressdemocrat.com.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Economic disasters with us NOW!!
The economic disaster will get worseBy Edmund Conway
It had to happen sooner or later. We have an economic disaster that cannot be blamed on Gordon Brown. No, not the collapse of Northern Rock, which the Prime Minister wrongly tried to attribute to problems in the American sub-prime market. Not the slump in house prices, rising unemployment or our stalling economic activity, which are all home-grown traumas.
We face longest era of turmoil in memory, says Bank boss
Read more from Edmund Conway
No, this is 21st-century stagflation: a toxic brew of soaring inflation and slumping growth. Technically, Mr Brown could have done more to prevent the latter, although I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the return of stagflation - or globeflation, or whatever peculiar name the wise men will give it - is an international phenomenon, with higher prices generated by China's rising economy and the fear that we may be running out of oil/metals/food/water.
Its consequences will be keenly felt here on our sensitive, import-dependent island. While we won't see inflation shoot up to 25 per cent as it did in the 1970s, the experience will be no less painful.
Experts, who had assumed that the Bank's next move with interest rates would be down rather than up, are scrabbling to change their forecasts. They are now betting on the apocalyptic prospect that the Monetary Policy Committee will raise borrowing costs as we head into a housing crash. They are also wagering that inflation will remain above four per cent for the next half-century.
This is terrible news for Mr Brown, who was quietly hoping the Bank would come to his rescue and slash rates to generate a bounce in time for the next election. While he may have looked across the Atlantic for his scapegoat last time, this time the culprit - or at least the catalyst - for the chaos is closer: in Frankfurt.
For it was there, last week, that the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, threw a massive spanner in the works by warning that inflation is such a concern that he is likely to raise euro rates next month.
Having weathered the financial markets crisis (give or take the nationalisation of a high street bank), we are now facing something quite different: a widespread economic crunch that will affect us all. And if this weren't enough doom and gloom, it is worth remembering that the behaviour by central banks in Europe and America is uncannily reminiscent of the spat in October 1987 that helped spark the worst-ever falls in the stock market (though, admittedly, share prices have fallen far enough to make a repeat of Black Monday a near-impossibility).
Either way, life is about to become even more painful - not just for homeowners, who are already having to contend with a fall in the value of their property, but for anyone with a job. Unemployment, already rising, will escalate, and companies will become increasingly reluctant to raise their wages. The standard of living for the average Briton will fall as the cost of living outpaces our earnings. The financial markets are starting to face up to this prospect. It will be some time before the full reality dawns on the wider public, but when it does it will be difficult to stomach.
Whether the Bank raises rates or not, the cost of borrowing for households and companies is already rising; this will accelerate over the next few weeks. With money market borrowing rates almost half a percentage point higher than last week, banks and building societies will soon pass this extra cost on to homeowners in the shape of higher fixed-rate mortgages and higher fees.
If the housing market were in good shape, this would be worrying enough, but coming as it does when prices are falling at the fastest rate since the last crash - by some measures even faster - it is a cause for concern. For all the damage done by higher taxes and regulations over the past decade, the economy is still a better-adjusted animal than it was in the early 1990s - albeit more debt-ridden.
But with mortgage rates spiralling just at the moment when consumers are at their least optimistic, there is no telling how severe the downturn could get. Mr Brown's personal poll ratings may have further depths to plumb as a result - even accounting for the traditional British affection for the underdog.
I used to believe that in economics and politics you make your own luck, and this dictum has applied pretty well for most of Brown's premiership. Having spent and borrowed too much when he should have been putting away cash for rainy days, he is now being punished for it. Unlike George Bush, he has nothing left in the can for major tax cuts, and would have to borrow in order to lower taxes.
This would be unwise. First of all, Alistair Darling has already cut taxes by £2.7 billion for those affected by the 10p tax fiasco; I doubt an extra few billion would make much meaningful difference.
Second, and most important, it would threaten to undermine the economy in more deep-seated ways than one can easily imagine. The two borrowing rules Brown laid down as Chancellor (that the Government must borrow only to invest; and that total government debt should not exceed 40 per cent of GDP) are among the few threads helping us avoid those double-digit inflation rates we saw in the 1970s. The minute anyone sensed that Labour really was preparing to borrow its way out of this, we would be punished by the international capital markets with an even weaker pound and far bigger price rises as a consequence.
The most sensible thing would be to batten down the hatches, keep cutting spending and to borrow as little extra as possible. We will have high inflation for the next year or so, but as the world economy slows, so will the price rises. Although the markets have become overexcited about high inflation, I still suspect the next move in Bank rates will be down - not up. Labour could put this at risk if it went for unfunded tax cuts.
Of course, an eventual upturn won't save Brown from what seems his inevitable fate - any more than it did John Major. However, it may prevent him from going down in history as the man who wrecked the British economy for the first quarter of the 21st century.
Have your say
It had to happen sooner or later. We have an economic disaster that cannot be blamed on Gordon Brown. No, not the collapse of Northern Rock, which the Prime Minister wrongly tried to attribute to problems in the American sub-prime market. Not the slump in house prices, rising unemployment or our stalling economic activity, which are all home-grown traumas.
We face longest era of turmoil in memory, says Bank boss
Read more from Edmund Conway
No, this is 21st-century stagflation: a toxic brew of soaring inflation and slumping growth. Technically, Mr Brown could have done more to prevent the latter, although I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the return of stagflation - or globeflation, or whatever peculiar name the wise men will give it - is an international phenomenon, with higher prices generated by China's rising economy and the fear that we may be running out of oil/metals/food/water.
Its consequences will be keenly felt here on our sensitive, import-dependent island. While we won't see inflation shoot up to 25 per cent as it did in the 1970s, the experience will be no less painful.
Experts, who had assumed that the Bank's next move with interest rates would be down rather than up, are scrabbling to change their forecasts. They are now betting on the apocalyptic prospect that the Monetary Policy Committee will raise borrowing costs as we head into a housing crash. They are also wagering that inflation will remain above four per cent for the next half-century.
This is terrible news for Mr Brown, who was quietly hoping the Bank would come to his rescue and slash rates to generate a bounce in time for the next election. While he may have looked across the Atlantic for his scapegoat last time, this time the culprit - or at least the catalyst - for the chaos is closer: in Frankfurt.
For it was there, last week, that the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, threw a massive spanner in the works by warning that inflation is such a concern that he is likely to raise euro rates next month.
Having weathered the financial markets crisis (give or take the nationalisation of a high street bank), we are now facing something quite different: a widespread economic crunch that will affect us all. And if this weren't enough doom and gloom, it is worth remembering that the behaviour by central banks in Europe and America is uncannily reminiscent of the spat in October 1987 that helped spark the worst-ever falls in the stock market (though, admittedly, share prices have fallen far enough to make a repeat of Black Monday a near-impossibility).
Either way, life is about to become even more painful - not just for homeowners, who are already having to contend with a fall in the value of their property, but for anyone with a job. Unemployment, already rising, will escalate, and companies will become increasingly reluctant to raise their wages. The standard of living for the average Briton will fall as the cost of living outpaces our earnings. The financial markets are starting to face up to this prospect. It will be some time before the full reality dawns on the wider public, but when it does it will be difficult to stomach.
Whether the Bank raises rates or not, the cost of borrowing for households and companies is already rising; this will accelerate over the next few weeks. With money market borrowing rates almost half a percentage point higher than last week, banks and building societies will soon pass this extra cost on to homeowners in the shape of higher fixed-rate mortgages and higher fees.
If the housing market were in good shape, this would be worrying enough, but coming as it does when prices are falling at the fastest rate since the last crash - by some measures even faster - it is a cause for concern. For all the damage done by higher taxes and regulations over the past decade, the economy is still a better-adjusted animal than it was in the early 1990s - albeit more debt-ridden.
But with mortgage rates spiralling just at the moment when consumers are at their least optimistic, there is no telling how severe the downturn could get. Mr Brown's personal poll ratings may have further depths to plumb as a result - even accounting for the traditional British affection for the underdog.
I used to believe that in economics and politics you make your own luck, and this dictum has applied pretty well for most of Brown's premiership. Having spent and borrowed too much when he should have been putting away cash for rainy days, he is now being punished for it. Unlike George Bush, he has nothing left in the can for major tax cuts, and would have to borrow in order to lower taxes.
This would be unwise. First of all, Alistair Darling has already cut taxes by £2.7 billion for those affected by the 10p tax fiasco; I doubt an extra few billion would make much meaningful difference.
Second, and most important, it would threaten to undermine the economy in more deep-seated ways than one can easily imagine. The two borrowing rules Brown laid down as Chancellor (that the Government must borrow only to invest; and that total government debt should not exceed 40 per cent of GDP) are among the few threads helping us avoid those double-digit inflation rates we saw in the 1970s. The minute anyone sensed that Labour really was preparing to borrow its way out of this, we would be punished by the international capital markets with an even weaker pound and far bigger price rises as a consequence.
The most sensible thing would be to batten down the hatches, keep cutting spending and to borrow as little extra as possible. We will have high inflation for the next year or so, but as the world economy slows, so will the price rises. Although the markets have become overexcited about high inflation, I still suspect the next move in Bank rates will be down - not up. Labour could put this at risk if it went for unfunded tax cuts.
Of course, an eventual upturn won't save Brown from what seems his inevitable fate - any more than it did John Major. However, it may prevent him from going down in history as the man who wrecked the British economy for the first quarter of the 21st century.
Have your say
Monday, June 2, 2008
Here comes the Sun.........
Sun Blamed for Warming of Earth and Other Worlds
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 March 2007 07:27 am ET
Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events.
Others argue that such claims are misleading and create the false impression that rapid global warming, as Earth is experiencing, is a natural phenomenon.
While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species.
Wobbly Mars
Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, recently linked the attenuation of ice caps on Mars to fluctuations in the sun's output. Abdussamatov also blamed solar fluctuations for Earth’s current global warming trend. His initial comments were published online by National Geographic News.
“Man-made greenhouse warming has [made a] small contribution [to] the warming on Earth in recent years, but [it] cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov told LiveScience in an email interview last week. “The considerable heating and cooling on the Earth and on Mars always will be practically parallel."
But Abdussamatov’s critics say the Red Planet’s recent thawing is more likely due to natural variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt. On Earth, these wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, are thought to contribute to the onset and disappearance ice ages.
“It’s believed that what drives climate change on Mars are orbital variations,” said Jeffrey Plaut, a project scientist for NASA’s Mars Odyssey mission. “The Earth also goes through orbital variations similar to that of Mars.”
As for Abdussamatov’s claim that solar fluctuations are causing Earth’s current global warming, Charles Long, a climate physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington, says the idea is nonsense.
“That’s nuts,” Long said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t make physical sense that that’s the case.”
In 2005, Long’s team published a study in the journal Science showing that Earth experienced a period of “solar global dimming” from 1960 to 1990, during which time solar radiation hitting our planet’s surface decreased. Then from the mid-1990’s onward, the trend reversed and Earth experienced a “solar brightening.”
These changes were not likely driven by fluctuations in the output of the Sun, Long explained, but rather increases in atmospheric clouds or aerosols that reflected solar radiation back into space.
Other warming worlds
Others have pointed out anomalous warming on other worlds in our solar system.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who monitors studies and news reports of asteroids, global warming and other potentially apocalyptic topics, recently quoted in his daily electronic newsletter the following from a blog called Strata-Sphere:
“Global warming on Neptune's moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets ... Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”
Peiser included quotes from recent news articles that take up other aspects of the idea.
“I think it is an intriguing coincidence that warming trends have been observed on a number of very diverse planetary bodies in our solar system,” Peiser said in an email interview. “Perhaps this is just a fluke.”
In fact, scientists have alternative explanations for the anomalous warming on each of these other planetary bodies.
The warming on Triton, for example, could be the result of an extreme southern summer on the moon, a season that occurs every few hundred years, as well as possible changes in the makeup of surface ice that caused it to absorb more of the Sun’s heat.
Researchers credited Pluto’s warming to possible eruptive activity and a delayed thawing from its last close approach to the Sun in 1989.
And the recent storm activity on Jupiter is being blamed on a recurring climatic cycle that churns up material from the gas giant’s interior and lofts it to the surface, where it is heated by the Sun.
Sun does vary
The radiation output of the Sun does fluctuate over the course of its 11-year solar cycle. But the change is only about one-tenth of 1 percent—not substantial enough to affect Earth’s climate in dramatic ways, and certainly not enough to be the sole culprit of our planet’s current warming trend, scientists say.
“The small measured changes in solar output and variations from one decade to the next are only on the order of a fraction of a percent, and if you do the calculations not even large enough to really provide a detectable signal in the surface temperature record,” said Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann.
The link between solar activity and global warming is just another scapegoat for human-caused warming, Mann told LiveScience.
“Solar activity continues to be one of the last bastions of contrarians,” Mann said. “People who don’t accept the existence of anthropogenic climate change still try to point to solar activity.”
The Maunder Minimum
This is not to say that solar fluctuations never influence Earth’s climate in substantial ways. During a 75-year period beginning in 1645, astronomers detected almost no sunspot activity on the Sun. Called the “Maunder Minimum,” this event coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a 350-year cold spell that gripped much of Europe and North America.
Recent studies have cast doubt on this relationship, however. New estimates of the total change in the brightness of the Sun during the Maunder Minimum suggest it was only fractions of a percent, and perhaps not enough to create the global cooling commonly attributed to it.
“The situation is pretty ambiguous,” said David Rind, a senior climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has modeled the Maunder Minimum.
Based on current estimates, even if another Maunder Minimum were to occur, it might result in an average temperature decrease of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, Rind said.
This would still not be enough to counteract warming of between 2 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit from greenhouse gases by 2100, as predicted by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
LiveScience staff writer Andrea Thompson contributed to this article.
More to Explore
10 Surprising Results of Global Warming
Emerging Environmental Technologies
Video: Goldilocks and the Greenhouse
How You Can Fight Global Warming
Global Warming Features
Earth Will Survive Global Warming, But Will We?
Strange Weather's Loose Link to Global Warming
Global Warming or Just Hot Air? A Dozen Different Views
Recent Climate Change News
Protecting Ozone Layer Also Slowed Global Warming
Surprising New Arctic Inhabitants: Trees
Earth's Polar Regions Target of Year-Long Study
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 March 2007 07:27 am ET
Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events.
Others argue that such claims are misleading and create the false impression that rapid global warming, as Earth is experiencing, is a natural phenomenon.
While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species.
Wobbly Mars
Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, recently linked the attenuation of ice caps on Mars to fluctuations in the sun's output. Abdussamatov also blamed solar fluctuations for Earth’s current global warming trend. His initial comments were published online by National Geographic News.
“Man-made greenhouse warming has [made a] small contribution [to] the warming on Earth in recent years, but [it] cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov told LiveScience in an email interview last week. “The considerable heating and cooling on the Earth and on Mars always will be practically parallel."
But Abdussamatov’s critics say the Red Planet’s recent thawing is more likely due to natural variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt. On Earth, these wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, are thought to contribute to the onset and disappearance ice ages.
“It’s believed that what drives climate change on Mars are orbital variations,” said Jeffrey Plaut, a project scientist for NASA’s Mars Odyssey mission. “The Earth also goes through orbital variations similar to that of Mars.”
As for Abdussamatov’s claim that solar fluctuations are causing Earth’s current global warming, Charles Long, a climate physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington, says the idea is nonsense.
“That’s nuts,” Long said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t make physical sense that that’s the case.”
In 2005, Long’s team published a study in the journal Science showing that Earth experienced a period of “solar global dimming” from 1960 to 1990, during which time solar radiation hitting our planet’s surface decreased. Then from the mid-1990’s onward, the trend reversed and Earth experienced a “solar brightening.”
These changes were not likely driven by fluctuations in the output of the Sun, Long explained, but rather increases in atmospheric clouds or aerosols that reflected solar radiation back into space.
Other warming worlds
Others have pointed out anomalous warming on other worlds in our solar system.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who monitors studies and news reports of asteroids, global warming and other potentially apocalyptic topics, recently quoted in his daily electronic newsletter the following from a blog called Strata-Sphere:
“Global warming on Neptune's moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets ... Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”
Peiser included quotes from recent news articles that take up other aspects of the idea.
“I think it is an intriguing coincidence that warming trends have been observed on a number of very diverse planetary bodies in our solar system,” Peiser said in an email interview. “Perhaps this is just a fluke.”
In fact, scientists have alternative explanations for the anomalous warming on each of these other planetary bodies.
The warming on Triton, for example, could be the result of an extreme southern summer on the moon, a season that occurs every few hundred years, as well as possible changes in the makeup of surface ice that caused it to absorb more of the Sun’s heat.
Researchers credited Pluto’s warming to possible eruptive activity and a delayed thawing from its last close approach to the Sun in 1989.
And the recent storm activity on Jupiter is being blamed on a recurring climatic cycle that churns up material from the gas giant’s interior and lofts it to the surface, where it is heated by the Sun.
Sun does vary
The radiation output of the Sun does fluctuate over the course of its 11-year solar cycle. But the change is only about one-tenth of 1 percent—not substantial enough to affect Earth’s climate in dramatic ways, and certainly not enough to be the sole culprit of our planet’s current warming trend, scientists say.
“The small measured changes in solar output and variations from one decade to the next are only on the order of a fraction of a percent, and if you do the calculations not even large enough to really provide a detectable signal in the surface temperature record,” said Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann.
The link between solar activity and global warming is just another scapegoat for human-caused warming, Mann told LiveScience.
“Solar activity continues to be one of the last bastions of contrarians,” Mann said. “People who don’t accept the existence of anthropogenic climate change still try to point to solar activity.”
The Maunder Minimum
This is not to say that solar fluctuations never influence Earth’s climate in substantial ways. During a 75-year period beginning in 1645, astronomers detected almost no sunspot activity on the Sun. Called the “Maunder Minimum,” this event coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a 350-year cold spell that gripped much of Europe and North America.
Recent studies have cast doubt on this relationship, however. New estimates of the total change in the brightness of the Sun during the Maunder Minimum suggest it was only fractions of a percent, and perhaps not enough to create the global cooling commonly attributed to it.
“The situation is pretty ambiguous,” said David Rind, a senior climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has modeled the Maunder Minimum.
Based on current estimates, even if another Maunder Minimum were to occur, it might result in an average temperature decrease of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, Rind said.
This would still not be enough to counteract warming of between 2 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit from greenhouse gases by 2100, as predicted by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
LiveScience staff writer Andrea Thompson contributed to this article.
More to Explore
10 Surprising Results of Global Warming
Emerging Environmental Technologies
Video: Goldilocks and the Greenhouse
How You Can Fight Global Warming
Global Warming Features
Earth Will Survive Global Warming, But Will We?
Strange Weather's Loose Link to Global Warming
Global Warming or Just Hot Air? A Dozen Different Views
Recent Climate Change News
Protecting Ozone Layer Also Slowed Global Warming
Surprising New Arctic Inhabitants: Trees
Earth's Polar Regions Target of Year-Long Study
Al Gore is " a gross alarmist"
A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore "a gross alarmist'' Friday for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming.
"He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about,'' Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech.
A spokeswoman said Gore was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Nashville Friday; he did not immediately respond to Gray's comments.
Gray, an emeritus professor at the atmospheric science department at Colorado State University, has long railed against the theory that heat-trapping gases generated by human activity are causing the world to warm.
Over the past 24 years, Gray, 77, has become known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster; recently, his mentee, Philip Klotzbach, has begun doing the bulk of the forecasting work.
Gray's statements came the same day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approved a report that concludes the world will face dire consequences to food and water supplies, along with increased flooding and other dramatic weather events, unless nations adapt to climate change.
Rather than global warming, Gray believes a recent uptick in strong hurricanes is part of a multi-decade trend of alternating busy and slow periods related to ocean circulation patterns. Contrary to mainstream thinking, Gray believes ocean temperatures are going to drop in the next five to 10 years.
Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth,'' has helped fuel media attention on global warming.
Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who had feuded with Gray over global warming, said Gray has wrongly "dug (his) heels in'' even though there is ample evidence that the world is getting hotter.
Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming
International Group Issues Global Warming Report
All About Global Warming
"He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about,'' Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech.
A spokeswoman said Gore was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Nashville Friday; he did not immediately respond to Gray's comments.
Gray, an emeritus professor at the atmospheric science department at Colorado State University, has long railed against the theory that heat-trapping gases generated by human activity are causing the world to warm.
Over the past 24 years, Gray, 77, has become known as America's most reliable hurricane forecaster; recently, his mentee, Philip Klotzbach, has begun doing the bulk of the forecasting work.
Gray's statements came the same day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approved a report that concludes the world will face dire consequences to food and water supplies, along with increased flooding and other dramatic weather events, unless nations adapt to climate change.
Rather than global warming, Gray believes a recent uptick in strong hurricanes is part of a multi-decade trend of alternating busy and slow periods related to ocean circulation patterns. Contrary to mainstream thinking, Gray believes ocean temperatures are going to drop in the next five to 10 years.
Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth,'' has helped fuel media attention on global warming.
Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who had feuded with Gray over global warming, said Gray has wrongly "dug (his) heels in'' even though there is ample evidence that the world is getting hotter.
Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming
International Group Issues Global Warming Report
All About Global Warming
Flooding in Italy......
Robin Pomeroy in Turin
June 1, 2008
ITALY has declared a state of emergency in the country's north after flooding and mudslides left at least four people, including an infant, dead in heavy rains that have also hit Belgium, Britain, France and Germany.
The state of emergency will enable aid to be speeded up to the affected regions of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta.
In Piedmont, four people were killed in landslides, including a three-year-old child whose body was found yesterday.
Schools were closed in the town of Saviglano because of mudslides and 30 people were evacuated from their homes in Demonte.
A mudslide at Villar Pelice, near Turin, swept away a house, killing an elderly man inside it. A second person was found dead in a car also caught up in the mudslide.
Fifty patients were evacuated from a hospital in Turin but Red Cross official Giuseppe Vernero said the worst seemed to be over.
Train lines between Turin and Lyon in south-eastern France were closed to avoid accidents after heavy rains.
Road tunnels linking France and Italy were closed to trucks for several hours after parts were affected by a mudslide. Several highways were blocked or closed for safety in the Alpine districts of Savoie and Isere. Mudslides and flooding also hit villages and cut secondary roads in eastern France, while other routes were blocked by fallen trees.
Streets were turned to rivers of mud in the eastern Belgian city of Liege after a violent storm. Belgian television showed cars swept along in the mud and flooded houses.
In Germany, heavy rain and hail caused extensive damage, while at Moenchengladbach, near Dusseldorf, a woman suffered a severe electric shock when she went into her flooded cellar in bare feet to cut the power.
A clean-up operation was under way in south-west England after torrential rain caused flash flooding.
In Somerset, cars were abandoned on water-logged roads, fire crews had to rescue a number of motorists and hundreds of homes and businesses were flooded.
Source: The Sun-Herald
June 1, 2008
ITALY has declared a state of emergency in the country's north after flooding and mudslides left at least four people, including an infant, dead in heavy rains that have also hit Belgium, Britain, France and Germany.
The state of emergency will enable aid to be speeded up to the affected regions of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta.
In Piedmont, four people were killed in landslides, including a three-year-old child whose body was found yesterday.
Schools were closed in the town of Saviglano because of mudslides and 30 people were evacuated from their homes in Demonte.
A mudslide at Villar Pelice, near Turin, swept away a house, killing an elderly man inside it. A second person was found dead in a car also caught up in the mudslide.
Fifty patients were evacuated from a hospital in Turin but Red Cross official Giuseppe Vernero said the worst seemed to be over.
Train lines between Turin and Lyon in south-eastern France were closed to avoid accidents after heavy rains.
Road tunnels linking France and Italy were closed to trucks for several hours after parts were affected by a mudslide. Several highways were blocked or closed for safety in the Alpine districts of Savoie and Isere. Mudslides and flooding also hit villages and cut secondary roads in eastern France, while other routes were blocked by fallen trees.
Streets were turned to rivers of mud in the eastern Belgian city of Liege after a violent storm. Belgian television showed cars swept along in the mud and flooded houses.
In Germany, heavy rain and hail caused extensive damage, while at Moenchengladbach, near Dusseldorf, a woman suffered a severe electric shock when she went into her flooded cellar in bare feet to cut the power.
A clean-up operation was under way in south-west England after torrential rain caused flash flooding.
In Somerset, cars were abandoned on water-logged roads, fire crews had to rescue a number of motorists and hundreds of homes and businesses were flooded.
Source: The Sun-Herald
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Darwin on Line
Darwin's first draft goes online
The first draft of a book which changed the world's attitude to evolution is available for the first time online.
Papers which led to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University's library.
The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime.
Dr John van Wyhe, a Darwin specialist at Cambridge University, said: "He changed our understanding of nature."
World-changing ideas
The online archive about Charles Darwin is so vast it would take someone two months to view it all if they downloaded one image per minute.
"His papers reveal how immensely detailed his researches were. The family has always wanted Darwin's papers and manuscripts to be available to anyone who wants to read them," said Dr van Wyhe.
"The fact that everyone around the world can now see them on the web is simply fantastic.
"Charles Darwin is one of the most influential scientists in history. The collection of his papers now online is extremely important and therefore very exciting.
"This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free."
Story from BBC NEWS:
The first draft of a book which changed the world's attitude to evolution is available for the first time online.
Papers which led to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University's library.
The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime.
Dr John van Wyhe, a Darwin specialist at Cambridge University, said: "He changed our understanding of nature."
World-changing ideas
The online archive about Charles Darwin is so vast it would take someone two months to view it all if they downloaded one image per minute.
"His papers reveal how immensely detailed his researches were. The family has always wanted Darwin's papers and manuscripts to be available to anyone who wants to read them," said Dr van Wyhe.
"The fact that everyone around the world can now see them on the web is simply fantastic.
"Charles Darwin is one of the most influential scientists in history. The collection of his papers now online is extremely important and therefore very exciting.
"This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free."
Story from BBC NEWS:
Thursday, April 3, 2008
California Housing Market Collapse....& Comments
L.A. Land: Peter Viles on the rapidly changing landscape of the real estate market in Los Angeles and beyond
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« More on McCain's housing speech Main Paulson: Let housing prices fall »
California freefall: Home prices down 26% in February
Signs of distress are piling up in the California housing market, where prices are falling at three times the national rate of decline.
--Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% from year-ago levels in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed's interest rate-cutting campaign "will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market."
--In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: "During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.""It's bad. It's really bad," market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
The California Association of Realtors reports median prices fell 27.2% from year-ago levels in the hard-hit Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, 30.9% in Sacramento, and 39.1% in Santa Barbara County.
On a percentage basis, the California price meltdown is more than three times as severe as the national decline of 8.2% in median prices reported this week by the National Association of Realtors. On an absolute basis, the California meltdown is even more severe: Nationally, prices fell over the past year at a rate of $338 per week; in California, prices fell at a rate of $2,788 per week.According to the CAR, "The median sales price of an existing, single-family detached home in California during February 2008 was $409,240, a 26.2 percent decrease from the revised $554,280 median for February 2007." The February 2008 median price fell 4.8 percent compared with January’s revised $429,790 median price."The Federal Reserve Bank’s recent action to reduce the federal funds rate will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market," said CAR Vice President and Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young. "However, Fed rate cuts should result in more favorable real estate finance rates as we move through the year."
Median home sales prices sometimes exaggerate swings in market activity. A year ago, median home sales prices in California continued to show price gains, even though the market downturn had begun. At the time, the collapse of sub-prime lending had the effect of freezing the lower end of the market. With fewer sales of less expensive homes, the market was dominated by sales at higher price points, and median sales prices showed gains.
The opposite appears to be happening now, as lower-priced foreclosed homes come onto the market, increasing sales at lower price points, while the market for more expensive homes has slowed dramatically. Thoughts? Comments? E-mail story tips to peter.viles@latimes.comPhoto Credit: Associated Press
Posted by Peter Viles on March 26, 2008 in Foreclosure Permalink
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Peter,
Thanks for the post. I just read a few articles about this in the last few days. Here in the Santa Barbara area we are seeing huge reductions in prices in certain areas while others are remaining fairly stable (having reached a bottom seemingly). The problem for us with a lot of these statistics is that they include Lompoc and Santa Maria for Santa Barbara and these markets are very different.
With that said, we are seeing a fair amount of activity in the last 7-8 weeks with a lot of pending sales. No price increases to speak of but a lot of activity. Condos though are still up in the air.
Posted by: Santa Barbara Real Estate Voice March 26, 2008 at 10:40 AM
I am ecstatic to see the collapse of home prices in California...I do feel sorry thought for middle class families that were duped into bad loans.....Yet, it is great to see this collapse in the real estate market happening....
Posted by: John March 26, 2008 at 10:51 AM
More hysterical nonsense.
The drop is related to foreclosures being dumped on the market........skewing the numbers.
Ignore this nonsense
Posted by: Joe smith March 26, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Let's see some more on the positives to come from the CA housing correction.
Greedy idiots will be punished.
What's left of the intelligent and rational middle class will have a higher likelihood of being able to afford a decent home without moving out of state. (A few months ago, you needed a 6-figure household income to afford a home in L.A.'s worst neighborhoods.)
Our politicians will actually have to show leadership and think and make difficult decisions, since they can't just ride along taking credit for the sunshine and ongoing prosperity. (Business punishing laws and taxes, combined with terrible public schools and a high cost of living IS NOT a recipe for sustainable community and economic development.)
Posted by: John March 26, 2008 at 10:54 AM
Median prices were half a million..hahha..What a joke. People don't have that kind of rea money. Living way above their means. I hope they are all homeless for years. They have cost people who do it the rigfht way much now in taxes and stoack market collapse.
Posted by: Mark March 26, 2008 at 10:55 AM
The California prices were inflated and overpriced to begin with. Who wants to live in a liberal state where you are taxed to death, gas prices are inflated due to everyone bowing to the extreme environmentalists?
Sell those houses to graduating students from Berkley....oh wait, you have to be productive human being with a job to get a house.
Posted by: Darrell March 26, 2008 at 10:56 AM
To say that median prices are down 26% does not necessarily mean that every million dollar home is now worth 740K. It could mean that million dollar homes are sitting on the market while 500K homes are selling at a brisk pace. It could mean that there are no more million dollar homes ON the market and all the 500K homes are selling slowly.
The headline alone does not really tell a complete story.
Posted by: Jim Roof March 26, 2008 at 10:58 AM
Who could be surprised by the California real estate price meltdown? Many parts of that market have been grossly over priced for years!
Posted by: Tony March 26, 2008 at 11:01 AM
"the median sales price of median price of an existing, single-family detached home in California during February 2008 was $409,240..."
That's still very high, something like three times the national average. CA prices are falling far because they had climbed to such ridiculous levels.
It's bad, but it was an inevitable correction.
Posted by: Dan March 26, 2008 at 11:02 AM
This isn't a big surprise. Home prices were 3 times higher in CA than the national average, it makes sense that they would fall at 3 times the rate. The CA median home price is still double the national average. I think it still has a ways to fall before normal people will be able to buy a house.
Posted by: Etosamoe March 26, 2008 at 11:02 AM
The first stage of a real estate recovery has to be price capitulation, which we are now entering. While painful for the people who bought at inflated prices, the price adjustment to more realistic levels will help people who are now able to buy or will soon. CA home prices got disconnected from reality. Reality is back in Vogue.
How long will it take for the excess unsold homes to get to "normal" levels in So. CA?
Posted by: George March 26, 2008 at 11:04 AM
Sales volume is up dramatically at the low end of the market. The banks are putting their inventory of foreclosures on the market at well below market prices and it has spurred sales. It's not uncommon to see 5 to 10 offers on properties.
All the action is on properties under $500,000 that are priced 25% to 40% lower that two years ago. While sales numbers will be up, the median price is going to plummet when it get's reported for March and April sales.
Posted by: We Help-U-Buy Guy March 26, 2008 at 11:07 AM
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Sharks to predict weather ~ A fishy story ~ Read on!!!
Sharks 'could predict weather'
Sharks could be used to predict the weather as research by a marine biology student claims, it has emerged.
Lauren Smith, 24, is close to completing her PhD studies into the pressure sensing abilities of sharks.
If her studies prove the theory, scientists in future could monitor the behaviour of sharks to anticipate severe weather fronts.
Her research took her to the Bahamas and was carried out in the wild on lemon sharks.
Miss Smith, originally from West Bromwich, used their near relations, the lesser spotted dogfish, for further research at Aberdeen University's altitude chamber at the National Hyperbaric Centre in Aberdeen.
It is thought her work is the first of its kind to attempt to test the pressure theory.
It was prompted by an earlier shark habitat study in Florida, which coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Gabrielle in 2001, when observations suggested that juvenile blacktip sharks moved into deeper water in association with the approaching storm.
Miss Smith said: "I've always been keen on travelling and diving and this led me to an interest in sharks.
"I was delighted to have been able to explore this area for my PhD, particularly as it's the first time it's really been explored fully.
"How many other students get the chance to put a shark in a chamber to study its behaviour?"
Sharks could be used to predict the weather as research by a marine biology student claims, it has emerged.
Lauren Smith, 24, is close to completing her PhD studies into the pressure sensing abilities of sharks.
If her studies prove the theory, scientists in future could monitor the behaviour of sharks to anticipate severe weather fronts.
Her research took her to the Bahamas and was carried out in the wild on lemon sharks.
Miss Smith, originally from West Bromwich, used their near relations, the lesser spotted dogfish, for further research at Aberdeen University's altitude chamber at the National Hyperbaric Centre in Aberdeen.
It is thought her work is the first of its kind to attempt to test the pressure theory.
It was prompted by an earlier shark habitat study in Florida, which coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Gabrielle in 2001, when observations suggested that juvenile blacktip sharks moved into deeper water in association with the approaching storm.
Miss Smith said: "I've always been keen on travelling and diving and this led me to an interest in sharks.
"I was delighted to have been able to explore this area for my PhD, particularly as it's the first time it's really been explored fully.
"How many other students get the chance to put a shark in a chamber to study its behaviour?"
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Harlequin Frogs ~ Leaping to the wrong conclusion......
In the scientific equivalent of the board game Clue, teams of biologists have been sifting spotty evidence and pointing to various culprits in the widespread vanishing of harlequin frogs.
Related
Frog Killer Is Linked to Global Warming (January 12, 2006)
Dot Earth: Frogs, Climate and the Front Page (March 24, 2008)
Web Link
Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines (PloS Biology)
Dot Earth
Andrew C. Revkin blogs about climate and sustainability. Join the discussion.
The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.
It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.
The “bullet,” the researchers said, appeared to be a chytrid fungus that has attacked amphibian populations in many parts of the world but thrives best in particular climate conditions.
The authors, led by J. Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, said, “Here we show that a recent mass extinction associated with pathogen outbreaks is tied to global warming.” The study was featured in reports last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Other researchers have been questioning that connection. Last year, two short responses in Nature questioned facets of the 2006 paper. In the journal, Dr. Pounds and his team said the new analyses in fact backed their view that “global warming contributes to the present amphibian crisis,” but avoided language saying it was “a key factor,” as they wrote in 2006.
Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. In interviews and e-mail exchanges, Dr. Pounds and the lead author of the new paper, Karen R. Lips of Southern Illinois University, disputed each other’s analysis. Experts who have researched the amphibian said neither group had enough evidence to nail down its case and warned that this normal tussle over scientific details should not distract from the reality that humans are clearly roiling biology in ways important and yet poorly understood.
“There is so much we still do not know!” David B. Wake, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail note after reading the new paper. The origin of the fungus and the way it kills amphibians remain unknown, he said, and there are ample mysteries about why it breaks out in certain places and times and not others.
Dr. Pounds and Dr. Lips have both done important work, Dr. Wake said, adding, “I hope this does not turn into a ‘spitting contest,’ because we all have a lot to learn about amphibian declines.”
Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, said such scientific tussles, while important, could be a distraction, particularly when considering the uncertain risks attending global warming.
“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”
Related
Frog Killer Is Linked to Global Warming (January 12, 2006)
Dot Earth: Frogs, Climate and the Front Page (March 24, 2008)
Web Link
Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines (PloS Biology)
Dot Earth
Andrew C. Revkin blogs about climate and sustainability. Join the discussion.
The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.
It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.
The “bullet,” the researchers said, appeared to be a chytrid fungus that has attacked amphibian populations in many parts of the world but thrives best in particular climate conditions.
The authors, led by J. Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, said, “Here we show that a recent mass extinction associated with pathogen outbreaks is tied to global warming.” The study was featured in reports last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Other researchers have been questioning that connection. Last year, two short responses in Nature questioned facets of the 2006 paper. In the journal, Dr. Pounds and his team said the new analyses in fact backed their view that “global warming contributes to the present amphibian crisis,” but avoided language saying it was “a key factor,” as they wrote in 2006.
Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. In interviews and e-mail exchanges, Dr. Pounds and the lead author of the new paper, Karen R. Lips of Southern Illinois University, disputed each other’s analysis. Experts who have researched the amphibian said neither group had enough evidence to nail down its case and warned that this normal tussle over scientific details should not distract from the reality that humans are clearly roiling biology in ways important and yet poorly understood.
“There is so much we still do not know!” David B. Wake, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail note after reading the new paper. The origin of the fungus and the way it kills amphibians remain unknown, he said, and there are ample mysteries about why it breaks out in certain places and times and not others.
Dr. Pounds and Dr. Lips have both done important work, Dr. Wake said, adding, “I hope this does not turn into a ‘spitting contest,’ because we all have a lot to learn about amphibian declines.”
Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, said such scientific tussles, while important, could be a distraction, particularly when considering the uncertain risks attending global warming.
“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Dramatic increases in Temperatures over Cardiff....
Temperatures dramatically rose over Cardiff on Saturday. Could it be Global Warming or just the Welsh team warming up?
Wales truimph in Grand Slam victory.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Earthquake in the UK
UK rocked by powerful earthquake
The biggest earthquake to hit the UK for almost 25 years has shaken homes across England and parts of Wales.
Lincolnshire was hit by the centre of the quake early on Wednesday, but the tremors woke people up as far away as Newcastle, London and Cardiff in Wales.
The main quake lasted about 10 seconds and measured 5.3 on the Richter Scale.
Lots of chimneys collapsed, roof tiles fell off and the emergency services received loads of calls, but luckily it seems no-one was seriously hurt.
Did YOU feel the earthquake? Tell us here...
The centre of the quake hit LincolnshireYou've been telling us what the quake felt like where you live.
In Lincolnshire, eight-year-old John said it felt like a rollercoaster ride, but Molly, nine, thought it was much scarier.
"It was really bad here and we thought it was a plane crash from our nearest airport," she said. "We were bouncing around. It was that strong and really scary."
The last big earthquake to hit the UK measured 5.4 on the Richter Scale when it struck north Wales in 1984, but a smaller quake hit Kent in April last year.
Really Cool!
Cooler temperatures, more snow, in cards for March
John Schudlo, Ottawa CitizenPublished: Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Don't think about putting away that shovel or scarf any time soon.
Ottawa's seemingly relentless onslaught of snow continued Tuesday, with 10 to 15 centimetres expected to fall by Wednesday morning. Then, says Environment Canada, temperatures will drop to as low as -22 on Thursday, a full 10 degrees below the average for this time of year.
And after that? More snow on Friday and Saturday. "We cry 'uncle' and we think that nature is humanitarian and it will be kind to us," says Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips.
"Well, that's not the case."
He says many people think that because Ottawa has already gotten so much snow this year - 302 cm in total, 64 per cent more than average for this time of year - the weather is bound to let up soon.
"The thing is, it's probably still another eight weeks," says Mr. Phillips. "We haven't stopped counting the flakes." He likes to remind people that Ottawa has never had a March on record without snow, and only three of the past 70 Aprils haven't produced snowfall in the area.
Still, he says, people can take solace in knowing that the days are getting longer and the sun is getting more intense. That, combined with the typical jump in rainfall that March brings, will help to wash some snow away.
Mr. Phillips says residents probably shouldn't expect this winter's snowfall to surpass the 450 cm the region experienced in the record-setting 1970-1971 winter.
But, Environment Canada is calling for a "normal to colder than normal" March, he adds.
John Schudlo, Ottawa CitizenPublished: Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Don't think about putting away that shovel or scarf any time soon.
Ottawa's seemingly relentless onslaught of snow continued Tuesday, with 10 to 15 centimetres expected to fall by Wednesday morning. Then, says Environment Canada, temperatures will drop to as low as -22 on Thursday, a full 10 degrees below the average for this time of year.
And after that? More snow on Friday and Saturday. "We cry 'uncle' and we think that nature is humanitarian and it will be kind to us," says Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips.
"Well, that's not the case."
He says many people think that because Ottawa has already gotten so much snow this year - 302 cm in total, 64 per cent more than average for this time of year - the weather is bound to let up soon.
"The thing is, it's probably still another eight weeks," says Mr. Phillips. "We haven't stopped counting the flakes." He likes to remind people that Ottawa has never had a March on record without snow, and only three of the past 70 Aprils haven't produced snowfall in the area.
Still, he says, people can take solace in knowing that the days are getting longer and the sun is getting more intense. That, combined with the typical jump in rainfall that March brings, will help to wash some snow away.
Mr. Phillips says residents probably shouldn't expect this winter's snowfall to surpass the 450 cm the region experienced in the record-setting 1970-1971 winter.
But, Environment Canada is calling for a "normal to colder than normal" March, he adds.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Want to get a different View?
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
Sponsored by The Heartland Institute
March 2 - March 4, 2008Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel1535 BroadwayNew York City, NY U.S.A.
James M. TaylorConference CoordinatorSenior Fellow, The Heartland InstituteManaging Editor, Environment & Climate News
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major international conference to focus on issues and questions not answered by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.
Hundreds of scientists, economists, and public policy experts from around the world will gather on March 2-4, 2008, at the Marriott New York Marquis Hotel on Manhattan’s Time Square, to call attention to widespread dissent in the scientific community to the alleged “consensus” that the modern warming is primarily man-made and is a crisis.
Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?
The debate over whether human activity is responsible for some or all of the modern warming, and then what to do if our presence on Earth is indeed affecting the global climate, has enormous consequences for everyone in virtually all parts of the globe. Proposals to drive down human greenhouse gas emissions by raising energy costs or imposing draconian caps could dramatically affect the quality of life of people in developed countries, and, due to globalization, the lives of people in less-developed countries too.
The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change promises to be an exciting event and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to present both sides of this important topic.
Conference Goals
The goals of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change are:
to bring together the world’s leading scientists, economists, and policy experts to explain the often-neglected “other side” of the climate change debate;
to sponsor presentations and papers that make genuine contributions to the global debate over climate change;
to share the results of the conference with policymakers, civic and business leaders, and the interested public as an antidote to the one-sided and alarmist bias that pervades much of the current public policy debate; and
to set the groundwork for future conferences and publications that can turn the debate toward sound science and economics, and away from hype and political manipulation.
Attendance
Attendance is limited to 500 people.
Registration will be closed when that total is reached. Approximately 100 scientists, economists, and policy experts will participate as speakers and panelists. Admission is open to the public, but the following people are specifically urged to attend:
scientists, economists, and policy experts whose work has focused on some dimension of climate change, particularly challenging popular misconceptions about the causes, extent, and consequences of the modern warming
elected officials from all countries and at all levels of government who are grappling with legislative proposals being put forward in the name of “stopping global warming”
civic and business leaders, including the leaders of Chambers of Commerce, manufacturers associations, trade associations, foundations, and charities that have a voice or seek a voice in the current debate over climate change policies
publishers, editors, journalists, and free-lance writers who set editorial policy or write regularly on the debate over climate change science, economics, or politics.
Discounts for registration are available for journalists and students to encourage their attendance. Free admission and travel and hotel scholarships are available to elected officials, scientists, economists, and policy experts who are recommended by sponsors and track chairmen.
Please direct inquiries to James M. Taylor at taylor@heartland.org. Elected officials interested in attending should contact Trevor Martin, director of government relations for The Heartland Institute, at tmartin@heartland.org.
After the Conference
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major international conference questioning global warming alarmism, but it will not be the last one. This event is intended to be a catalyst for future meetings, collaboration among scientists, economists, and policy experts, new research, and new publications.
The proceedings will be transcribed, edited, and published as a major contribution to the debate over global warming. Other possible follow-up activities now being discussed include:
an event in London in 2009;
launch of a new journal devoted to climate change;
launch of an association of philanthropists willing to support further research and public education opposing global warming alarmism;
support for an International Climate Science Coalition that will act as an alternative voice to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and
expanded cooperation among the scores of organizations currently sponsoring research, publications, and events on the dubious claims in support of the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming.
Other sections of this Web site provide information about the conference’s background, program, registration, and sponsorship opportunities. The primary contact: is James M. Taylor, senior fellow of The Heartland Institute, taylor@heartland.org.
Sponsored by The Heartland Institute
March 2 - March 4, 2008Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel1535 BroadwayNew York City, NY U.S.A.
James M. TaylorConference CoordinatorSenior Fellow, The Heartland InstituteManaging Editor, Environment & Climate News
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major international conference to focus on issues and questions not answered by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.
Hundreds of scientists, economists, and public policy experts from around the world will gather on March 2-4, 2008, at the Marriott New York Marquis Hotel on Manhattan’s Time Square, to call attention to widespread dissent in the scientific community to the alleged “consensus” that the modern warming is primarily man-made and is a crisis.
Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?
The debate over whether human activity is responsible for some or all of the modern warming, and then what to do if our presence on Earth is indeed affecting the global climate, has enormous consequences for everyone in virtually all parts of the globe. Proposals to drive down human greenhouse gas emissions by raising energy costs or imposing draconian caps could dramatically affect the quality of life of people in developed countries, and, due to globalization, the lives of people in less-developed countries too.
The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change promises to be an exciting event and the point of departure for future conferences, publications, and educational campaigns to present both sides of this important topic.
Conference Goals
The goals of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change are:
to bring together the world’s leading scientists, economists, and policy experts to explain the often-neglected “other side” of the climate change debate;
to sponsor presentations and papers that make genuine contributions to the global debate over climate change;
to share the results of the conference with policymakers, civic and business leaders, and the interested public as an antidote to the one-sided and alarmist bias that pervades much of the current public policy debate; and
to set the groundwork for future conferences and publications that can turn the debate toward sound science and economics, and away from hype and political manipulation.
Attendance
Attendance is limited to 500 people.
Registration will be closed when that total is reached. Approximately 100 scientists, economists, and policy experts will participate as speakers and panelists. Admission is open to the public, but the following people are specifically urged to attend:
scientists, economists, and policy experts whose work has focused on some dimension of climate change, particularly challenging popular misconceptions about the causes, extent, and consequences of the modern warming
elected officials from all countries and at all levels of government who are grappling with legislative proposals being put forward in the name of “stopping global warming”
civic and business leaders, including the leaders of Chambers of Commerce, manufacturers associations, trade associations, foundations, and charities that have a voice or seek a voice in the current debate over climate change policies
publishers, editors, journalists, and free-lance writers who set editorial policy or write regularly on the debate over climate change science, economics, or politics.
Discounts for registration are available for journalists and students to encourage their attendance. Free admission and travel and hotel scholarships are available to elected officials, scientists, economists, and policy experts who are recommended by sponsors and track chairmen.
Please direct inquiries to James M. Taylor at taylor@heartland.org. Elected officials interested in attending should contact Trevor Martin, director of government relations for The Heartland Institute, at tmartin@heartland.org.
After the Conference
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is the first major international conference questioning global warming alarmism, but it will not be the last one. This event is intended to be a catalyst for future meetings, collaboration among scientists, economists, and policy experts, new research, and new publications.
The proceedings will be transcribed, edited, and published as a major contribution to the debate over global warming. Other possible follow-up activities now being discussed include:
an event in London in 2009;
launch of a new journal devoted to climate change;
launch of an association of philanthropists willing to support further research and public education opposing global warming alarmism;
support for an International Climate Science Coalition that will act as an alternative voice to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and
expanded cooperation among the scores of organizations currently sponsoring research, publications, and events on the dubious claims in support of the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming.
Other sections of this Web site provide information about the conference’s background, program, registration, and sponsorship opportunities. The primary contact: is James M. Taylor, senior fellow of The Heartland Institute, taylor@heartland.org.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Flooding ~ A personal Story
Odd weather: Reality or myth?
Disasters prompt concerns, but experts say worry not
By CURT SLYDERcslyder@journalandcourier.comand DAVID SMITHdsmith@journalandcourier.com
Dennis Kellar of Carroll County moved back into his home along the Tippecanoe River this week after a very expensive winter.
January flooding, followed by more flooding this month, cost him about $25,000 in repairs.
"That's just the house," he said. "I've still got to do the garage."
He wasn't alone.
Because of high water, President Bush declared nine Indiana counties disaster areas. So far nearly 1,000 residents in nine counties, including Carroll, White and Tippecanoe, have applied for federal assistance.
Back-to-back floods, record-breaking heat, killer tornadoes -- these extremes and others are causing many people to wonder if the weird weather phenomena are related -- perhaps the result of global warming.
Kellar goes even farther, speculating that extreme weather may have something to do with the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that caused tsunamis, or tidal waves, that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
"Everything's been happening since that big tsunami," Kellar said. "Something is wrong. This is crazy."
Devdutta "Dev" Niyogi, Indiana state climatologist at Purdue University, tries to dispel such clouds of speculation with cold, hard facts. He said that while climate is undergoing long-term changes, other factors are likely causing the Midwest's weird weather.
The most likely culprit, he said, is La Niña -- a cooling of the Pacific Ocean that causes a shift in weather over North America every four to six years.
Higher than normal precipitation and temperature extremes "are the swings we expect with a La Niña type pattern," Niyogi said.
"And we're not out of the woods yet," he said. Niyogi said La Niña could bring additional high precipitation this winter, followed by potentially more violent thunderstorms in spring and summer.
"I'm not a climate change skeptic," he said. "I agree there is some degree of climate change occurring. We need to make cause and effect more clear."
Reality vs. perception
Niyogi said there is evidence that Indiana's growing season has lengthened in the past century. But that subtle shift, very real to farmers, doesn't get the same media attention as floods, tornadoes and other extremes.
"In a sense, we do see general increases in climate extremes. However, we also have a short-term memory. When we see something happen, we think it is the worse that's ever been."
Dave McDowell, director of the Carroll County Emergency Management Department, tends to agree.
"When I was in school, there was the Blizzard of '78," McDowell said. "All the headlines back then read 'Ice Age imminent.'
"There seems to be a shift in the weather every 20 years or so."
McDowell also believes people are making a bigger issue of extreme weather because communities are expanding into formerly undeveloped areas.
"As humanity expands, there are more things to damage," he said.
McDowell believes weather extremes are something that must be anticipated, whatever their cause. This is especially true in flood-prone areas.
Where was the warning?
When Kellar and others along the Tippecanoe River were flooded out Jan. 8, the high water came quickly. The flood occurred after warm temperatures the previous day melted snow and overnight thunderstorms dumped several inches of rain.
Oakdale Dam, a hydroelectric dam not designed for flood control, let the torrent pass through to the Tippecanoe River.
Downstream residents such as Kellar were caught by surprise, in part because the dam's owner, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., failed to trigger a phone alert system designed to warn residents of dangerously high flows.
"Many residents awoke to the sound of water rushing through their homes, after an early-warning system failed," noted Indiana's Jan. 28 application for federal relief, sent by Gov. Mitch Daniels to the White House.
Jim Fitzer, a public affairs manager for NIPSCO, said the dam operator on duty notified emergency and company personnel of the high flows but did not realize residents were not notified warned until the next day.
Fitzer said operating procedures have since been clarified, and the warning system worked properly when flooding returned on Feb. 5.
McDowell is pushing for a three-tiered warning system that would place warning sirens along the river and weather radios in every home along with the telephone warning system.
The cost of sirens could be substantial, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to pay for it," McDowell said.
With adequate warning, residents in the flood-prone areas could move themselves as well as furnishings, clothing and prized possessions out of harm's way.
Kellar agreed that a better warning system is needed.
"We need an early warning system from Buffalo, all the way down the Tippecanoe River," he said.
So far, the damage toll has run into the millions, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In the nine-county disaster declaration area, FEMA has processed 968 applications for disaster assistance from individuals and businesses.
The applications represent $3.1 million in assistance approved so far, an amount that could grow significantly in coming weeks, Sam Ventura, FEMA public information officer, predicted.
Those kinds of numbers tell McDowell that a warning system would be a worthwhile investment. He would like to see FEMA help pay for it, but he has been told such a request may have to go through Indiana's Homeland Security Department.
"If we get the money, I don't see why such a system couldn't be up this summer," McDowell said.
A brief history of Wabash flooding
A Journal & Courier analysis of Wabash River peak levels for the past 108 years suggests that significant flooding -- defined as a river level of 20 feet or more measured at Brown Street -- is no more common now than it was 50 to 100 years ago.Between 1901 and 1954 there were 30 floods in excess of 20 feet, the same number as from 1954 to present.And multiple significant floods in one year are not that uncommon either.The year 1927 saw three separate floods in excess of 20 feet, and during the 11 months between June 1958 and May 1959, three floods ranging in size from 22.4 feet to 26.4 feet occurred in Lafayette.The February 1959 flood, which prompted a national disaster declaration by President Eisenhower, was accompanied by an ice jam so big it threatened the bridges at Main and Brown streets.The Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans to break up the ice with dynamite, then raised the possibility of bombing it, according to Journal & Courier articles.While the discussion about what to do with the ice dragged on, the ice jam broke up on its own without serious consequence.
-- David Smith/dsmith@journalandcourier.com
Disasters prompt concerns, but experts say worry not
By CURT SLYDERcslyder@journalandcourier.comand DAVID SMITHdsmith@journalandcourier.com
Dennis Kellar of Carroll County moved back into his home along the Tippecanoe River this week after a very expensive winter.
January flooding, followed by more flooding this month, cost him about $25,000 in repairs.
"That's just the house," he said. "I've still got to do the garage."
He wasn't alone.
Because of high water, President Bush declared nine Indiana counties disaster areas. So far nearly 1,000 residents in nine counties, including Carroll, White and Tippecanoe, have applied for federal assistance.
Back-to-back floods, record-breaking heat, killer tornadoes -- these extremes and others are causing many people to wonder if the weird weather phenomena are related -- perhaps the result of global warming.
Kellar goes even farther, speculating that extreme weather may have something to do with the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that caused tsunamis, or tidal waves, that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
"Everything's been happening since that big tsunami," Kellar said. "Something is wrong. This is crazy."
Devdutta "Dev" Niyogi, Indiana state climatologist at Purdue University, tries to dispel such clouds of speculation with cold, hard facts. He said that while climate is undergoing long-term changes, other factors are likely causing the Midwest's weird weather.
The most likely culprit, he said, is La Niña -- a cooling of the Pacific Ocean that causes a shift in weather over North America every four to six years.
Higher than normal precipitation and temperature extremes "are the swings we expect with a La Niña type pattern," Niyogi said.
"And we're not out of the woods yet," he said. Niyogi said La Niña could bring additional high precipitation this winter, followed by potentially more violent thunderstorms in spring and summer.
"I'm not a climate change skeptic," he said. "I agree there is some degree of climate change occurring. We need to make cause and effect more clear."
Reality vs. perception
Niyogi said there is evidence that Indiana's growing season has lengthened in the past century. But that subtle shift, very real to farmers, doesn't get the same media attention as floods, tornadoes and other extremes.
"In a sense, we do see general increases in climate extremes. However, we also have a short-term memory. When we see something happen, we think it is the worse that's ever been."
Dave McDowell, director of the Carroll County Emergency Management Department, tends to agree.
"When I was in school, there was the Blizzard of '78," McDowell said. "All the headlines back then read 'Ice Age imminent.'
"There seems to be a shift in the weather every 20 years or so."
McDowell also believes people are making a bigger issue of extreme weather because communities are expanding into formerly undeveloped areas.
"As humanity expands, there are more things to damage," he said.
McDowell believes weather extremes are something that must be anticipated, whatever their cause. This is especially true in flood-prone areas.
Where was the warning?
When Kellar and others along the Tippecanoe River were flooded out Jan. 8, the high water came quickly. The flood occurred after warm temperatures the previous day melted snow and overnight thunderstorms dumped several inches of rain.
Oakdale Dam, a hydroelectric dam not designed for flood control, let the torrent pass through to the Tippecanoe River.
Downstream residents such as Kellar were caught by surprise, in part because the dam's owner, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., failed to trigger a phone alert system designed to warn residents of dangerously high flows.
"Many residents awoke to the sound of water rushing through their homes, after an early-warning system failed," noted Indiana's Jan. 28 application for federal relief, sent by Gov. Mitch Daniels to the White House.
Jim Fitzer, a public affairs manager for NIPSCO, said the dam operator on duty notified emergency and company personnel of the high flows but did not realize residents were not notified warned until the next day.
Fitzer said operating procedures have since been clarified, and the warning system worked properly when flooding returned on Feb. 5.
McDowell is pushing for a three-tiered warning system that would place warning sirens along the river and weather radios in every home along with the telephone warning system.
The cost of sirens could be substantial, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to pay for it," McDowell said.
With adequate warning, residents in the flood-prone areas could move themselves as well as furnishings, clothing and prized possessions out of harm's way.
Kellar agreed that a better warning system is needed.
"We need an early warning system from Buffalo, all the way down the Tippecanoe River," he said.
So far, the damage toll has run into the millions, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In the nine-county disaster declaration area, FEMA has processed 968 applications for disaster assistance from individuals and businesses.
The applications represent $3.1 million in assistance approved so far, an amount that could grow significantly in coming weeks, Sam Ventura, FEMA public information officer, predicted.
Those kinds of numbers tell McDowell that a warning system would be a worthwhile investment. He would like to see FEMA help pay for it, but he has been told such a request may have to go through Indiana's Homeland Security Department.
"If we get the money, I don't see why such a system couldn't be up this summer," McDowell said.
A brief history of Wabash flooding
A Journal & Courier analysis of Wabash River peak levels for the past 108 years suggests that significant flooding -- defined as a river level of 20 feet or more measured at Brown Street -- is no more common now than it was 50 to 100 years ago.Between 1901 and 1954 there were 30 floods in excess of 20 feet, the same number as from 1954 to present.And multiple significant floods in one year are not that uncommon either.The year 1927 saw three separate floods in excess of 20 feet, and during the 11 months between June 1958 and May 1959, three floods ranging in size from 22.4 feet to 26.4 feet occurred in Lafayette.The February 1959 flood, which prompted a national disaster declaration by President Eisenhower, was accompanied by an ice jam so big it threatened the bridges at Main and Brown streets.The Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans to break up the ice with dynamite, then raised the possibility of bombing it, according to Journal & Courier articles.While the discussion about what to do with the ice dragged on, the ice jam broke up on its own without serious consequence.
-- David Smith/dsmith@journalandcourier.com
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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