Freaky Weather
UPDATED BELOW
The Netherlands currently suffers from a big storm. Windspeed measured up to 120 Km/h (130 Km/h is expected later today). It’s truly quite amazing, I haven’t witnessed this kind of storm for quite some years. For the first time ever, the government has issued a weather alarm and a traffic alarm. This means that people should stay inside, unless they have to travel.
Obviously, the wind causes quite some problems: in Utrecht a crane fell down on a University building. 3 people wounded. Rescue workers are trying to find victims below the rubble.
Several trucks have been blown off the road.
Schiphol Airport has closed every airway except for one or two.
If you follow this link you can see photos (show loads and plays automatically).
More photos here. One of them:
Another one:
Meanwhile, the U.S. seems to have its own freaky weather. CNN reports that 65 people have died due to the terrible weather.
bone-rattling blast of sleet and snow kept Texas and Oklahoma residents shivering in its icy grip, while a blizzard north of Los Angeles, California, caused 18-wheelers to jackknife.
At least 65 storm-related deaths have been reported in nine states since Friday, including 10 in Texas and 23 in Oklahoma.
The Alamo was closed Wednesday, as was a 300-mile stretch of Interstate 10 in Texas from Fort Stockton to San Antonio. (Watch how the storms have left thousands in the dark Video)
Much of the brunt of the latest Southern storms was to move east Thursday — but the reprieve may be short-lived. Another barrage was expected to bring up to 8 inches of snow to the Plains by late Friday.
A Houston city employee was killed Wednesday when he was hit by a car and knocked over a guardrail as he and a co-worker tried to help an accident victim, said Frank Michel, spokesman for Houston Mayor Bill White.
Hundreds of flights have been canceled.
More:
In addition to the fatalities in Oklahoma and Texas, the wave of storms was blamed for 11 deaths in Missouri, eight in Iowa, four each in New York and Michigan, three in Arkansas and one each in Maine and Indiana.
Elsewhere in the country, frigid conditions tested even those used to snow and ice. The entire state of Maine was no warmer than the single digits, and several communities saw dangerous wind chills. It was 16 below zero in Caribou.
O, and NOS journaal also reported that scientists believe that the impact of global warming might be much more severe than anticipated…
UPDATE
Amsterdam’s main railway station has been closed and evacuated.
Because the storm will get even worse, schools have sent the students home.
Busses between Amsterdam-Utrecht-Woerden-Uithoorn have been called back to the bus station. Safety first.
Rotterdam: a containership that broke loose damaged an oilpipe. Raw oil is streaming into the water. The oil can be smelled… even in The Hague.
A few highways have been closed.
Lastly, they are constantly checking our dikes to make sure that the water will not cause, well, a flood.
UPDATE II
Sad news: at least two people have died due to the storm. The wind knocked down a tree, which fell on their car.
UPDATE III
There is a fierce debate going on about global warming in the comment section of this post. If you’re interested in that subject, please join the debate!
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31 Responses to “Freaky Weather”
One of the surest ways to recognize an invalid attempt at scientific theorizing is when its advocates can twist the theory to explain contradictory outcomes.
Heat wave? Must be global warming. (2005)
Deep freeze? Global warming again. (2007)
More hurricanes than predicted? Global warming. (2005)
Fewer hurricanes than predicted? Global warming did that too. (2006)
Alien invasion? Probably be caused by global warming too…
Those scientists don’t point to the storm in the Netherlands, nor to the cold in America, but it is… quite a coincidence, isn’t it?
The thing with ‘global warming’ is that the weather will become erratic, with wild swings in conditions. Or at least that’s my understanding. In Iowa, the weather has finally gotten relatively ‘normal’ for this time of year. 45F high temp in early January is *not* normal. We should be at around 20F, which is where we’re at today. My sump pump was running in December….that should not be, as that means the ground hasn’t frozen yet and it should be frozen 5 feet down by then.
Jason, to say that your post displays a complete lack of knowledge on the subject is an understatement. Christine has it right. It’s been pretty cold around here for the last six days and there’s ice on the ground, but no snow. But the entire month before that had both daily highs and overnight lows that were above average. There’s been very little cold weather this season. In reality the lower number of hurricanes in 2006 had at least two components. El Nino and a drought in Africa that caused winds to carry more dust into the atmosphere in the part of the Atlantic where hurricane formation starts.
Of course another problem with the people who pretend to be reasonable skeptics is when they complain about climate modeling they claim that the models could be off and things could be much better than the alarmists are predicting. If they were real skeptics speaking of the limits of models they’d also consider that the models could be optimistic. Ask the folks in Greenland. Virtually all of the real world observations that are being made in spite of Jason’s snark have been of effects already being seen that many scientists didn’t think we’d see this early.
Global warming quite simply will cause the warm currents that flow northward up near the eastern seaboard of the USA and England to change and move farther south. This will result in a drastic change in weather that most certainly will result in Canada and the northern half of the USA as well as England, Greenland, Iceland, and Northern Europe to experience Arctic conditions such as is common for Northern Canada.
The resulting BIG freeze will force these 2 billion people to flee south as these areas will become uninhabitable. 2 billion people fleeing into the warmer mid latitudes will create “CHAOS, Anarchy, and most likely Genocide on a humongous scale.”
Global warming is happening. It will be subtle. Anti Global Warming experts can deny it and under most scenarios I would agree but with the Immense polution now being pumped into the air by China, India and the Former USSR with zero environmental restrictions in place…….its enevitable. And remember too that the Amazon RAIN FOREST which has long been considered the LUNGS of the earth is being DESTROYED at the rate of 100 square miles per year.
Its just not America that is destroying this planet, but this planet is facing its demise and it will happen in the next 30 to 50 years.
Jim S,
Since you are pretty tuned in to the scientific models, and since Upinsmoke brought up something I’ve been curious about, I will ask you (or anyone else who might know) a sincere question (in other words, don’t try to figure out if I have an ulterior motive- I’m just genuinely trying to find out the answer to this).
The question is: do the models that predict severe climate change due to CO2 take into account deforestation as a contributing factor, along with burning of fossil fuels? If so, how much is the deforestation contributing, and could REforestation be at least a partial solution? I’m wondering, for example, if deforestation has caused an additive effect in the CO2 buildup, is it possible to reverse this or is the CO2 in the upper atmosphere or somehow unable to be converted via photosynthesis.
CS, Reforestation will help, maybe. The problem is the time it takes for trees to mature to a size that will actually help. A black walnut tree takes 25 years to fully mature (and ready for harvest). My family has a 140 acre tree farm 80 miles south of where I’m currently located. On 40 acres we planted black walnut, white oak, cedar, and ash. The other 100 acres already had a varity of trees on it. We’ve made the land a forest preserve.
Deforestation is also removing natural habitats for the world’s creatures. I would hazard to say that not only plant life but animal life works hand in hand to balance things in most cases.
I was unclear and thus made my position easy to misinterpret.
I think global warming is probably a real problem. I think the preponderance of scientific evidence is in favor of the global warming hypothesis.
That said, it does not explain every single unusual weather occurrence and attempts to use it in that way actually work to delegitimize the theory. Attempts to rescue this by claiming that every unusual event is merely a sign of “erratic” weather frankly make the serious global warming argument look like the bad movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, a political project ignorant of basic laws of physics.
So what I’m saying here is that I think it is best to resist the temptation to wild flights of fancy about what global warming is all about. When you get apocalyptic about it, you just made it easier for the skeptics.
Whenever “scientists” start proclaiming certainties from complex dynamic system models, I keep my hand on my wallet. As an academic I designed and monitored many such, and they were all subject to major SDIC error, among other things. Even the simplest models produce results widely at variance with observations–with complex dynamic modeling the error factors increase enormously. And when issue advocates start trying to silence critics like this, I go past suspicious. Science is supposed to be about free inquiry, standards of evidence, and replicability, not the forcible stifling of dissent.
For a simplified take of one angle on WHY a whole lot of real scientists are skeptical of the claims of massive anthropogenic forcing there’s this article. But the agendized don’t want to hear it. They want to worship the dogma as a given and ignore any problems with their own hypothesis. They know the result they want, and somehow they only see what fits the desired conclusion.
Do please note that the phrase “global warming” is used as a conflational one to muddy the issues. The issue is anthropogenic forcing, or human-caused global warming. Global warming (and cooling) occurs naturally without any help from us and has for billions of years, the real question is the impact of human agency on that natural and periodic process. The anthropogenic forcing acolytes still haven’t explained the observed “global warming” affecting the other bodies in the solar system, for instance.
Science is not (or at least should not) run by emotional concensus and the dogmatic browbeating and purging of dissidents. It runs on evidence. To lift a line from Lewis, scientists are always wrong–they’re just less wrong now than they were before.
At least, if they’re doing it right.
Actually the reforestation has a major drawback. Let me explain.
There are two sources of greenhouse gases. MAN and decaying dead plant life.
What scientists are finding is that plant life that dies now decays at a certain rate. However that plant life is now decaying at a far slower rate because the plantlife is filled with excessive amounts of co2.
Decaying plant life releases co2 into the atmosphere and because they are being forced to absorb more and more Co2 as a result of more and more green house gases in the air, they have more co2 to release when they die and decay.
Its a vicious cycle and the simple planting of more trees will not solve the problem, but the deforestation of the planet will certainly hasten the effects of global warming.
Tully, I think most of us, or myself at least, are very aware that there is controversy over the definition of ‘global warming’ and the cause of it. Most of us realize that there are natural cycles in climate, but we also know that man can interfer with nature quite a bit. True, we do not know for a fact exactly how much human action has contributed to the changes, but man has contributed. Since man can contribute to the cause, they certianly can contribute to the cure. Since human history is extremely short on this planet, wouldn’t it be better to error on the side of caution and affect what we can than to let it all hang out and wait to see what happens??
And actually I find that most people dont even understand global warming. They think warming..oh were all gonna set around and sweat.
The reality as I posted earlier is global warming will change the tidal currents, moving the warm tides farther south causing what I described above. So in essence Global warming will in effect be this planets FIX.
MAN will suffer and survive and be along for the ride while the planet fixes itself. Ie it will kill off those evil green house producing plants and bury them under vast amounts of snow preventing them from releasing their gases into the atmosphere.
It will also bring to a screeching halt the vast offenders of the the biosphere……the USA, Europe, China and the former USSR. So while mankind is forced to readapt the world will be cleaning itself and going thru what I predict will be a several hundred year cleansing and rebalancing act.
Man is no match for mother nature. The Global warming going on today is Mother Natures alarm clock going off. She is sending us Emails but we arent opening them.
Upinsmoke,
Do you have a source that explains the plant decay and release of CO2? What you are saying seems counterintuitive. I admit that as a student of animal physiology, I’m much more familiar with animal respiration than with plant processes, but my understanding is that CO2 is utilized in photosynthesis which has byproducts including O2. Is CO2 really absorbed and stored in plant cells when it’s present at higher levels in the atmosphere?
I should clarify: I do understand that the burning of vegetation would put more CO2 back into the atmosphere because the organic carbon compounds would then be recombined with O2 in the air. That would reverse the process whereby the plant took CO2 out of the air and broke it down. But what I’m getting at is that natural decay of dead plants, because it occurs slowly, should help modulate the amount of CO2 and some of the carbon should remain behind, so that would have a net effect of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere–but what I think Upinsmoke is saying is that excess CO2 in the atmosphere is somehow stored in that form in the plants when it is in higher concentration in the atmosphere, so that it is then directly released back from the dead vegetation. That part is something I haven’t heard before and I’d like to learn if there is something to that.
C Stanley–
Rapid deforestation means a lot more dead vegetation to decompose its carbon dioxide off into the atmosphere. Also, in places that are cold enough–like Siberia–dead plants freeze and do not decompose. If Siberia were to thaw, there’d be a sudden release hundreds(?) of years worth of sequestered carbon.
Efforts to find new ways to sequester carbon are ongoing.
The Wikipedia page on the carbon cycle is HERE. And the Wikpedia page on carbon sequestration is HERE.
I hope that helps.
BYG and C,
Methane release is also very important. Check this article and post out (I’ll use the same claim Jack at peakoil.com did when he posted the article):
http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic26163.html
Thanks BYG and CP. I’ll read more from the links when I get a chance. At first glance, I’m starting to have more questions than I did before, but that’s part of the learning process I guess.
Storage in living plants
Green plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow. They combine carbon from CO2 with hydrogen to make simple sugars, which they store in their tissues. After plants die, their bodies decay and release CO2. Ecosystems with abundant plant life, such as forests and even cropland, could tie up much carbon. However, future generations of people would have to keep the ecosystems intact. Otherwise, the sequestered carbon would re-enter the atmosphere as CO2.
quoted here from:
still havent figured out this link thing other then to just post the http:
but anyway I quoted from an article written by NASA.
The article can be found here:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook_prt.htm
Upinsmoke, click on link, fill in the URL, click on ok… Then, after the bracket write something like ‘look here!’ and click on the link button again…
you get this: look here!
OK, Upinsmoke, but what I was asking is whether reforestation could partially ameliorate the excess greenhouse gas situation to any practical degree and it seems to me that your argument is that it wouldn’t help because if we replant forest then eventually someone will deforest again. Knowing human nature, I guess that is one concern but still, I’m just asking theoretically how much effect we could get by replanting. I see some info about that in the Wiki link you included above (says that to get the 7% reduction that Kyoto would have required of the US we’d have to replant enough forest to cover the state of Texas every 30 years- so that gives me some idea of the scope involved).
The actual scientific problem is not the deforestation of Northern hemispheres. Most if not all companies in the USA reforest saplings once they are done cutting.
The problem arises in that once you have cleared out a forest you have in addition to cutting down X number of trees you have also defoilated all the underlying brush and vegetation as well which also burns co2 and reoxengenates the planet.
Simply planting new trees is like putting a bandaid on a severed artery. It might slow the bleeding but in the end the patient is still gonna bleed to death and die.
No the actual solution to this problem is not for the USA to make more and more sacrifices while the rest of the world smogs us out of existence. (Im all for the USA to continue to try and prevent more green house gases from entering the atmosphere) I know some would have us believe the USA is the lone culprit in this scenario but in actual fact its China, India, The former USSR and the cutting of the rainforest in south America that will be the ultimate demise of this planet.
And as I posted in another article here on this blog addressed to those who are content with Blaming ONLY the USA for all the worlds environmental woes.
The world of pollution has changed drastically but your arguments have not.
Yeah, I realize that the deforestation in Central/South America is a major issue (witnessed it myself.) But I wouldn’t be opposed to efforts globally to counteract that. I agree with your sentiment in part (certainly the rest of the world is quick to blame the US and certainly it’s a problem if even our most extreme efforts won’t solve it without the rest of the world taking steps as well) but if the boat is sinking, I’m interested in at least trying to plug the whole even if we have to be the ones to do it.
Tully,
A claim of certainty implies a claim of exactitude. I’m not aware of anyone who claims that for any climate model. Secondly, you claim a whole lot of scientists disagree on the existence of AGW. Really? How many is a lot and who are they? How many do they number compared to those who do agree that AGW is taking place? Someone who posts with a nom de plume and makes bad arguments on a hyper-conservative web site like American Thinker just isn’t that persuasive. His entire post is nothing but generalized BS. The basic physics that he made fun of is in fact basic physics that then feeds into a complex system. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It helps the Earth retain heat. We are pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Measurements show that CO2 levels are increasing. Measurements also show a warming trend. Heat is energy. It will affect the climate while it continues to increase due to what we are doing to the planet. Not only are we adding CO2 to the system but are affecting the ecosystem in multiple other ways. What do you think all those miles of nice dark roads do to the planet’s albedo? Building roofs made of dark material? Deforestation? Producing dead zones in the ocean?
It’s also amazing how poor the skeptics’ reading skills are. The key sentence in the article that Tully links to is completely ignored by both the blogger and Tully. It is “This growth signals a temperature increase in that region, she said.”. The examples they cite as proof of global warming on other planets are in fact regional changes, not global ones. Big difference.
can we just call it “climate change” like most learned people on the subject do? which sort of (rightfully) removes the semantic argument about “warming” and “cooling”?
dan,
I’m with you on the idea of leaving the semantic battles behind. I’m not sure that “warming” is so controversial, but there are differences of opinion about whether the warming is global rather than regional, and about how critical the situation is, and about how significant human activities are as compared to natural phenomena.
The accepted term is Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence shows an overall warming on Earth. I should have been clearer in pointing out that the quote I used concerning regional warming was the claim that Tully and others are making concerning other planets showing “global warming”. They say that the poles of Mars are melting when in fact it is the Southern Pole, one region of the planet. Same thing on Jupiter and the other planets that the skeptics try to use as evidence of some Solar System wide phenomenon that they can’t explain but know must exist because they must discredit the idea of AGW. Frankly, CS, warming isn’t that controversial in the scientific community. You want to know what the “controversy” is really like look at this.
Yeah, Jim, cause if Garry Trudeau says that is how it is, then it must be so.
CS,
Like it or not that’s what your hero Bush treats science like, along with a significant portion of the Republican party.