2006 : Hottest Year Ever

Florida gonna have more water than it knows what to do with...

Arctic ice cap melting 30 years early
May 02, 2007 - THE Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a US ice expert said overnight.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050. No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Centre in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Mr Scambos said. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster." That is because the ice reflects light and heat; when it is gone, the much darker land or sea will absorb more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said.

Mr Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture from that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel. "The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Mr Scambos said.

More Arctic ice cap melting 30 years early | NEWS.com.au

[Martin]

I truly believe in global warming.. but im sure another researcher will release a report today saying the complete opposite.

I've given up believing any of these reports because of all the political crossfire.

Severe storms seem to be more intense and tornadoes more frequent.

Even the BBC is reporting this one in their Sunday news...

Tornado flattens town in Kansas
Sunday, 6 May 2007, At least nine people are killed and a small town is nearly wiped out after a tornado hits southern Kansas.

A massive tornado killed at least nine people and flattened almost all of a small town in Kansas on Friday. More than 60 people were injured when the tornado - said to be up to a mile wide - hit the town of Greensburg. More than 95% of the 1,500-population town was destroyed, including the hospital and schools as well as homes, local officials said.

A new wave of tornadoes hit southwest Kansas on Saturday evening, affecting at least six counties. The National Weather Service forecast the development of strong tornadoes in central Kansas and Nebraska during Saturday night. Earlier, a tornado in central Nebraska damaged buildings and power lines, officials said.

Direct hit

Greensburg, around 120 miles (200km) west of Wichita in southern Kansas, received a direct hit by the tornado late on Friday. The tornado was described as a "wedge", a particularly wide formation carrying winds of up to 250mph (400km/h). "You could hear the top half of our house start tearing up" - Greensburg resident

More BBC NEWS | Americas | Tornado flattens town in Kansas

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New Flurry of Twisters Strikes Kansas
May 6, 2007 -- A fresh wave of tornadoes ripped through the Plains late Saturday, a day after a tornado all but destroyed this town, killing at least eight and injuring dozens more.

The Kansas Adjutant General's Department said it had confirmed reports of eight tornadoes touching down, including one that injured 11 people when it struck a pair of restaurants in the central Kansas town of Osborne. Vienna Janis, spokeswoman for Osborne County Emergency Management, said the twister hit around 6 p.m., ripping the roof off the Circle N restaurant and smashing windows in a Pizza Hut.

"It touched down and would then go back up and then touch down and go back up," Janis said. The National Weather Service said it had received reports "well into the double digits" of twisters touching down in six southwest Kansas counties. Numerous tornadoes were reported from South Dakota south into Oklahoma as forecasters scrambled to keep issuing warnings.

The new storms forced rescuers to abandon search efforts Saturday in southwest Kansas, where crews had spent the day hurrying through the wreckage from Friday night's giant tornado. That twister left little standing in Greensburg beyond the local pub. Friday's weather was blamed for nine deaths in Kansas, a figure authorities feared could rise even before the latest twisters.

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Warmer ocean water kills off coral...

Cayman coral dies off as waters warm
Cayman Islands hard up over its hard coral; Die-offs around the world are tied to warming seas
May 7, 2007

To coral reef-driven tourism industries like those of the Cayman Islands, there could be a greater cost in ignoring climate change than fighting it. Ranked among the top 10 scuba diving destinations in the world, the reef system of the western Caribbean territory has lost 50 percent of its hard corals in the last 10 years in spite of strong environmental laws, scientists say.

“We are at a very critical time in the history of coral reefs,” said Carrie Manfrino, president of the Central Caribbean Marine Institute on Little Cayman island. “It is like working with a sick patient. How well we treat that patient will determine if that patient survives. We could potentially see the end of hard coral reefs in our lifetime.”

The Caymans tourism industry, which represents about 50 percent of the colony’s gross domestic product, was kick-started in 1957 when dive industry pioneer Bob Soto opened the first scuba diving operation in the Caribbean. Fifty years later, about 2 million visitors arrive every year, with most either diving or snorkeling on famous sites like the North Wall or Stingray City.

More Cayman coral dies off as waters warm - Climate Change - MSNBC.com

2007 may end up being hotter...

Deadly Heat Wave Strikes Europe
June 27, 2007 -- A deadly heat wave that has already claimed at least 42 lives continues raging in southeastern Europe. Weather forecasters predict that the first significant drop in temperatures won't take place until this weekend.

Most of the deaths have taken place in Italy and the Balkans, including 23 deaths in Romania. The death toll climbed to eight in Greece today, where approximately 95 fires were reported around the country. Dozens of homes had to be evacuated due to a fire on the Greek island of Porosthens as a wildfire approached a densely populated area.

Parts of Athens also suffered power outages for up to 20 hours due to excessive use of air conditioners as residents battled the stifling heat.

While temperatures in Greece reached 111.2°F today, cooler temperatures were recorded in other parts of the Balkans. The heat wave has prompted smog alerts, emergency water delivery and warnings to stay out of the sun.

AHN | Deadly Heat Wave Strikes Europe | June 27, 2007

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Eastern China lightning strikes kill 40
June 27, 2007 -- A series of lightning strikes associated with devastating rainstorms across portions of eastern China have killed 40 people since last weekend.

While the death toll in the Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces reached 40, local meteorological stations predicted the deadly storms would stick around for another day, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

The China Meteorological Administration said Wednesday 193 people have been killed by lightning strikes between January and last Monday. That total represents 78 more deaths than occurred during the same time period last year, the forecasting office said.

Regional officials told Xinhua that most of this year's deaths have involved local farmers who were unaware of the storms' potential danger. Those officials also cited a lack of available shelter throughout the region as a significant cause for the increased number of lightning-based deaths.

Source

Granny says we all gonna be sweatin' like a hog in heat!

Global warning predictions coming true
Friday 29th June, 2007 - This year will probably be an indication of what is in store from global warming.

Experts believe the floods in England, heatwave in Europe and storms and floods in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India may herald worse disruptions. Phil Jones, whose organisation provides data to the UN International Meteorological Organisation says 2007 looks like being the second hottest year on record.

He says, since records began in the 1860's, only one other year has had as many climatic changes. Mr Jones had predicted late last year that 2007 could surpass 1998 as the warmest year on record, due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels, and an El Nino warming of the Pacific Ocean.

The ten warmest years in the past one hundred and fifty have all been since 1990.Almost all climate experts say the trend is towards more droughts, floods, heatwaves and more powerful storms.

Global warning predictions coming true

SoCal feelin' the heat...

Parched California has driest 'rainy season' on record
Jul 1, 2007 - Los Angeles suffered through the driest rainy season on record in 2007, marking the least amount of precipitation here in the 130 years rainfall has been measured, weather officials said Sunday.

There were just 8.15 centimeters (3.2 inches) of rain in Los Angeles between January 1 and June 30 -- barely a fifth of the annual average rainfall of 38.3 centimeters (15 inches).

"This was the driest rain season ever in downtown Los Angeles and at many other locations in southwestern California," the National Weather Service said in a statement.

Most California rains fall in the first half of the year, particularly between January and March. The National Weather Service began compiling precipitation statistics in 1877.

Los Angeles residents saw very heavy rains from late 2005 into early 2006, but officials warned that water rationing is possible by next winter if drought conditions persist.

Source

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Heat-wave warning issued for S California
Monday,Jul.2,2007 - The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a heat-wave warning for Southern California on Sunday, signifying high wildfire danger as the region heads into its first heat wave of the summer.

Temperatures in some mountain areas will reach some 100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 37.7 degrees Centigrade), while the relative humidity will dip to about 10 percent at times, according to the NWS. High pressure building over the region is expected to drive temperatures to near record levels by the Fourth of July. That means valley and inland temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat wave is arriving as the region ends its driest year on record. Since July 1, 2006, only 2.31 inches of rain has fallen at the downtown-area, making it the driest winter since record keeping started in the late 1870s. The norm is about 15 inches per year. According to a county fire department study, the moisture level in the chaparral covering the hillsides is at its lowest level in 26 years, making it ripe for explosive fire growth.

Humidities will be lowest in the high country, generally above 4,000 feet, where there will be the potential for strong winds. Potentially damaging gusts could hit 50 mph, making driving dicey for tractor-trailers and other high-profile vehicles along the Interstate 5 corridor. Because of the extended hot spell and the coming holiday typically celebrated with pyrotechnics, the NWS may well extend the "Red Flag Warning" beyond tonight and through the mid-week Independence Day holiday. Last year, a record-breaking heat wave hit the region, causing the deaths of about 150 people.

Source

Global warming affecting Tibet...

Global warming threatens Roof of the World
Sunday 8th July, 2007 Shrinking glaciers, frozen earth melting, grasslands turning yellow, rivers drying up... scientists studying the effects of global warming on Tibet are deeply worried.

A group of scientists, organised by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), has just explored the source of the Yangtze river on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and reported alarming findings. And on July 2, the Tibet weather authority recorded the highest July temperature in 30 years in Lhasa, the regional capital.

'The glaciers at the source of the Yangtze river are shrinking much faster than we had anticipated,' said Li Yajie, a scientist with the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who visited the area in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. The breathtaking view of Mount Yuzhu and 14 other snowy peaks stuns passengers travelling along the Qinghai-Tibet railway.

But those who enter a typical glacier valley west of Mount Yuzhu will no longer find any trace of a glacier at the snow line altitude of about 5,000 meters. In its place, a sliver of spring water bubbles its way down the flank of the mountain. Scientists found the remnants of the glacier on the far side of the mountain. 'There are four stages in the disappearance of a glacier. Sadly, this glacier is already in the last stage,' Li said.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau used to boast 36,000 glaciers with an area of 50,000 square kilometres that fed several of the major rivers in China and Southeast Asia. In the past 100 years, the area of these glaciers has shrunk by 30 percent. Scientists say that if the temperature at the end of this century is 2.1 to 4 degrees Celsius higher than now - a reasonable hypothesis given global warming trends - this figure will increase to almost half.

More Global warming threatens Roof of the World

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Expert says rising sea levels pose threat to rice
09 July 2007 : Rising sea levels triggered by climate change pose an "ominous" threat to some of the world's most productive rice-growing areas, the International Rice Research Institute has warned.

The Philippines-based institution is devoting fresh efforts to mitigating the coming threat, but senior climate scientist Reiner Wassman said adequate funding had yet to materialise. "Some of Asia's most important rice-growing areas are located in low-lying deltas, which play a vital role in regional food security and supplying export markets," Wassman told the IRRI magazine Rice Today.

"With Vietnam so dependent on rice grown in and around low-lying river deltas, the implications of a sea-level rise are ominous indeed." Rice is the staple cereal of nearly half the world's 6.6 billion people. Wassman said the impact of global warming on the key cereal would depend on the patterns of change in rice-growing regions.

But he warned a threatened rise of between 10 and 85 centimetres (four to 34 inches) in sea levels over the next century could have "enormous" impacts on some countries, including key rice exporter Vietnam. IRRI is cooperating with Hanoi to assess the impact of sea-level rise scenarios in the Mekong delta, he said. The organisation this year launched a project to assess the possible impact of climate change on rice output and find ways of adapting rice-growing to the new realities of global warming.

More Channelnewsasia.com

Sun's output not connected to global warming...

'No sun link' to climate change
Tuesday, 10 July 2007, Scientists have been measuring the frequency of solar flares

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen. It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present. "This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain's Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis. "All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that," he told the BBC News website. "You can't just ignore bits of data that you don't like," he said.

Warming trend

Takes a long time for fishes in the sea to recover from overfishing...

Coral Reef Fish Need Decades Or Longer To Recover
July 13, 2007 — In the longest running study on how fish populations in coral reef systems recover from heavy exploitation, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and others have found that the fish can recover, but they need lots of time -- decades in some cases.

With nearly continuous data spanning some 37 years from four national marine parks off the coast of Kenya which were closed to fishing at different times, the study found that commercially important species such as parrotfish, wrasses, and surgeonfish can take a quarter of a century to recover fully. More importantly, the ecological equilibrium needed for a healthy reef system, which relies on the interplay of many fish, invertebrate, and plant species, take even longer to achieve, and certainly longer than the length of the study. Most fish recovery studies are conducted with small data sets in short durations of time.

"There's a pressing need for long-term studies on how fish communities in reef ecosystems rebuild when fishing is banned," said WCS researcher Dr. Tim McClanahan, the lead author of the study. "This study gives us some important insights in how the different fish species recover and how these communities affect the health of the reef as a whole."

Specifically, the study examined the recovery rates of eight dominant fish families in Kenya's marine national parks between 1987 and 2005 using counts that measured fish diversity, size, and density. What the researchers found is that species diversity peaked and stabilized 10 years after a marine park was closed to fishing. The recovery rates of different families and species, however, occurred at different rates, partly as a result of competition for resources among different species. For instance, most parrotfish took some 10-20 years to recover, but then declined, perhaps as a result of competition from a variety of surgeonfish.

More ScienceDaily: Coral Reef Fish Need Decades Or Longer To Recover