Wild Weather a Taste of Things to Come
A MONSOON dropped 35 centimetres of rain in one day across many parts of South Asia this month. Germany had its wettest May on record, and April was the driest there in a century. Temperatures reached 45 degrees in Bulgaria last month and 32 degrees in Moscow in late May, shattering long-time records.
The year still has almost five months to go, but it has already experienced a range of weather extremes that the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation says is well outside the historical norm and is a precursor to much greater weather variability as global warming transforms the planet. 
The warming trend confirmed in February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - based on the finding that 11 of the past 12 years had higher average ground temperatures than any others since formal temperature recording began - appears to have continued with a vengeance into 2007. The meteorological organisation reported that January and April were the warmest worldwide ever recorded.
“Climate change projections indicate it to be very likely that hot extremes, heatwaves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent,” the organisation said.
The heavy rains in South Asia have resulted in more than 500 deaths and displaced 10 million people, while 13.5 million Chinese have been affected by floods, the report said. In England and Wales, the period from May to July was the wettest since record-keeping began in 1766, resulting in floods that killed nine and caused more than $US6billion ($7billion) in damage.
The World Meteorological Organisation, which is co-sponsoring a series of meetings and reports on global climate change, is putting together an early-warning system for climate extremes and establishing long-term monitoring systems, and plans to help countries most vulnerable to climate change.
“The average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely the highest during any 50-year period in the last 500 years, and likely the highest in the past 1300 years,” the report said.
Global warming is expected to result in more extreme weather because of changes in atmospheric wind patterns and the ability of warmer air to hold more moisture, said Martin Manning, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group on the physical science of climate change. He said that one year of heavier than normal rains and warmer than usual temperatures said nothing definitive about climate change, but they were consistent with the panel’s long-term predictions.
“What we have projected is an increase in extreme events as the global temperatures rise,” Dr Manning said. “Floods, droughts and heatwaves are certainly consistent with that.”
The World Meteorological Organisation reported the extreme weather occurred in many parts of the world. In May, a series of large waves (estimated at up to 3.6 metres) swamped almost 70 islands in 16 atolls in the Maldive Islands off south India, causing serious flooding and extensive damage. Halfway around the globe, Uruguay was hit during the same month by the worst flooding since 1959 - floods that affected more than 110,000 people and severely damaged crops and buildings. Two months later, an unusual winter brought high winds, blizzards and rare snowfall to parts of South America.
Meanwhile, two extreme heatwaves affected south-eastern Europe in June and July. Dozens of people died, and firefighters worked nonstop battling blazes that destroyed thousands of hectares. On July 23, temperatures hit the record 45 degrees in Bulgaria.
Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Obviously, food crops cannot survive massive floods and extreme drought. Nature is withholding her increase and billions of people will starve.
People will increasingly realize the necessity of forging new ties of mutuality, for thrift and self-sufficiency, bonding together to plan and work for autonomy and preparedness in terms of distribution of essential goods and services. One question is how soon and how well this will be done. Another question is what backlash will corporations and governments (and armies) create to continue the exploitation of people and Mother Earth. We are trying to grow, process (can/freeze) and distribute more food each year from urban gardens. Burn scavaged wood for heat. Ride bicycles instead of relying exclusively on internal combustion for transport, and conserving where possible when we do need to use a car. People will become the center of life, rather than material consumption by individualistic and psychologically isolated persons.
From the heat of fossil fuel burning, Nature will respond with Water in over abundance, seeking a balance.
International solidarity for the masses of marginalized persons made destitute through floods, cyclones will also be essential in building an alternative world of justice. Social justice will be vital in confronting global warming.
Eh! It’s just the normal cycle.
Your friendly oiligarchy.
“People will increasingly realize the necessity of forging new ties of mutuality, for thrift and self-sufficiency, bonding together to plan and work for autonomy and preparedness in terms of distribution of essential goods and services.” I love this idea. I would give anything for it to happen. But I am afraid it won’t. The effects of climate change are already beginning to become apparent. Mass migration is one of them - and how do our nations react? By being willing to share with displaced people with urgent needs who are facing the prospect of imminent death? Or by closing the frontiers and patrolling them with armed men ready to shoot without asking questions? The automatic reaction - it’s ours, not theirs, they are only coming here to get what they didn’t earn - is already in play and candidates in elections are playing to it. Then there’s the scramble for scarce resources - nations tooling up with obscenely huge armed forces and invading countries which control them. Do the folks back home object, or do they support they troops and hope they will bring home the petrol? Will we share anti pollution technology with nations like China, to whom we have exported our heavy industry, or will we just refuse to cut back our emissions because China now pollutes too? And what about the climate sceptics - eager to keep the fossil fuels pouring out because that’s how the people who fund them make their fortunes? If the climate changes and society collapses, they already live behind heavy security in gated estates. They’ll be all right, Jack. And as nature culls three quarters of the human race, they’ll sit back and tut and blame the victims for not being strong enough to take what they wanted - the way they did!
There’s a story about a guy who asked five thousand hungry people to bring up whatever they had amongst them so it could be shared around the whole. And so five loaves and five fishes got divided amongst the five thousand and every one had enough - because those who had, shared. Will we?
OLD BADGER: I like that “story” about the fish and the loaves. Here’s another. In mythology, when Demeter’s precious daughter Persephone went missing, the great Mother had a sense her child had been abducted by Pluto. According to ancient mythology, our world was created and left to the respective powers of 3 brothers. Jupiter-Zeus ruled over the surface kingdom of earth, his brother Neptune-Poseidon ruled the sea kingdoms, and Pluto-Hades the underworld. Demeter asked for Zeus’ help, but being a bubba, he could care less. (Zeus even today, like earth CEO mainly focuses on stock and sports scores and leaves the general estate of women to “whatever.”) Demeter did happen to have one supreme power, that of running nature and its harvest cycles. She went on strike. That’s right. Every natural process came to a halt. Soon the people of earth had nothing to eat. Zeus, like most male gods, requires due homage and began to resent the people of earth withholding their various rituals in and to his name. He was forced into a compromise. As per the myth, he elected to send Persephone back to her mother for half the year, at which time (as the story goes) nature comes into full bloom/spring and harvest/summer. But the daughter must return to Pluto for the other half of the year, and hence the trees drop their leaves and nature enters the mock death of winter. I love this story and I think it has contemporary lessons to teach us.
Nature is an equal power to man made war, technology, machinery and all the wealth essentially derived from HER storehouses (Natural Capitalism, style). She can and will only take so much. The sad part is that people who reside in low-lying areas tend to get hit hardest, poor people who would not seem to deserve this fate. The U.S. will not be exempt. I can just picture all the fund raising to help the nations getting hit hardest, rather than correct the behaviors that cause these calamities! It’s always cost-effective to DO the right thing, but capitalism without conscience would come to a halt, and the devotees of mammon cannot countenance such a thing, so they will NOT encourage conservation, not let the masses know for certain why these things are happening (yesterday’s article on the $ spent to muddy the field with respect to the science of climate change) and send religious zealots out to remind the flock that God loves them most when they can fulfill their every desire through the paper currency of false wealth.
Very nice, Siouxrose.
Welcome to the Easy-Bake Oven World.
Let’s just pretend this isn’t happening.
Even where people want change they encounter inertia in changing both our economic systems (getting off oil for example)and in the me first mentality which avoids acknowledging that anything needs be done, if that means they are the ones that will have to do it. An insensate attitude akin to “If the libs want to save the planet then let them, I’m busy.” So we wait for it to get bad enough for even them to believe it’s real and something needs be done. Of course by then it may be too late to avoid the trigger effect. After something is too late, everyone can always see clearly then that something should have been done. I guess now we just waiting for it to be too late so that we can finally start doing something about it. And so we went.
EZEFLYER: Thank you. By the way, I applaud the fact that you DID cry in watching a documentary about our nation’s dark martial recent past history. I have a grandson now, too, and he’s half the reason I am directing much of my writing at children; although if KEM PATRICK is correct about the pervasiveness of DU dust, then the concept of posterity as taken for granted, may not support our dreams for our descendants. How tragic, that… and so in this forum, in parallel to the actions of our lives of conscience, we fight the good fight on behalf of the LIGHT and all that is good and worth sustaining in human beings and this fabulous planet bequeathed to us for the privilege of living…
What we need is mass demonstrations and marching in the streets!!!!OH….wait a sec………it is way too hot outside for that!
Bugs:
“After something is too late, everyone can always see clearly then that something should have been done. I guess now we just waiting for it to be too late so that we can finally start doing something about it.”
You hit the nail on the head.
There was an old margarine ad that had a tag line “don’t fool with Mother Nature”. That applies here as well. If you do not know what you are doing then don’t just do more of it faster!
I’m still boggled that we all knew about this at least by the early eighties. In elementary school, around 1985, we were all being trained as good conservationists. Don’t waste water when brushing your teeth, turns lights off, turn TVs off. The world knew! I heard Carter put solar panels on the White House. But then, where was it for the following twenty years? If I live to be 110, I’ll always wonder. Dolphins extinct, storms and floods and pressures. So much more to come.
I’d like to add here some words I found in “Mining the Oort” by Frederick Pohl, sci-fi writer.
You do what you can today, and then tomorrow, if you’re lucky, maybe you can do a little more. We don’t learn fast, but maybe we will learn, sooner or later. At least we can hope, and what else do we need?
I hope the virus can cure itself before the earth does.
Bush is just making sure the upper class still has first class accomidations on the Titanic.
Fortunately (?) for the rest they’re just too unconnected with reality to know or care.
The greatest threats to the human race 1. overpopulation 2. predatory capitalism 3. war 4. corrupt manipulative leaders 5. religion 5. human denial, irrationality, and inability to act to sustain a future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4329. terrorists (?)
As the resources needed for survival become increasingly scarce the aristocracy will become more and more concentrated in several mega cities. Most of the remaining population will be conscripted to various labor populations outside the cities. Controlled and maintained by Blackwater type “security agencies” they will be forced to produce the goods required by the ruling class. A smaller number of “lucky” peasants will be kept within the cities to function as servants.
It will be an era of global slavery with the great mass of humanity in thrall to a relatively small group of the ultra rich and powerful.
But, because of their insatiable lust for dominance, they will ignore, as they do today, the simple reality of a finite ecosystem with limited resources. They will continue to consume at obscenely wasteful levels and the global climate disaster will continue.
Before too long it will become impossible to provide the level of luxury to which the elite have become addicted.
The cities will begin to squabble over dwindling necessities. In time these minor skirmishes will escalate into intercity wars. These conflicts combined with the disastrous affects of addictive consumption will lead to something akin to the fall of the Mayan Empire but on a global scale.
Perhaps, at some time in the very distant future, the next intelligent life form to inhabit the Earth will stumble upon the ruins of once opulent cities hidden in dense jungle growth and wonder how such an “advanced civilization” suddenly disappeared.
People are the center of life but refuse to acknowledge the freedom and responsibility that this truth includes and that is indeed because of psychological isolatation and a consumption/media/message that serves well to affirm our fears and feed a deluded state of self.
What if we we learned the ways of peace; we see in a collaborative model that this is the true nature of human beings, compassionate and wise.
We can accomplish what we want to accomplish esp. working together for shared betterment. Find community, build community and be at peace; the storms come and go but the sky is still the sky.
The thing is, the megalotheocrats are running the world. They have and maintain and thrust upon the rest of us their apocalyptic world view. They believe, either because they actually do believe in their hideous mythology, or because it conveniently supports their dominance and greed, that Jesus ain’t comin’ back till everything goes to hell first so all this bad sh*t going down is just what has to happen before their big day
can arrive. and they are doing everything in their power to see that things get as bad as possible as quickly as possible.
i wish i knew the cure for THAT virus.
Whilst this is sorely disastrous for those in the affected areas - is it not a wonderful thing that the planet is demonstrating her self-healing mechanism? Perhaps there is sage advise in the term “head for the hills”.
Any solution that fails to reduce the human population is a failed solution. Our choices are: family planning clinics Worldwide, 100% recycling, or Worldwide starvation, disease and extinction.
Lets create the Global Foundation for Extreme Weather. The aim is to support Gaia’s process of self healing. Since we are part of the problem, we cannot be part of the solution.
Climate Deniers = Climate Dodos
“The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless bird that lived on the islands of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall (three feet), lived on fruit and nested on the ground.
“The dodo has been extinct since the mid-to-late 17th century. It is commonly used as the archetype of an extinct species because its extinction occurred during recorded human history, and was directly attributable to human activity. The phrase “as dead as a dodo” means undoubtedly and unquestionably dead.” — Wikepedia
It appears to me, though I am reluctant to admit it even to myself, that humanity has already made its choice to go right on growing, expanding and destroying regardless of consequences. If not, why haven’t the coal-fired power plants installed pollution control equipment, and why hasn’t anyone invented pollution control equipment for jet planes? Instead, every year more millions of people are flying and using electricity and creating more millions of tons of garbage. The human race must be insane.
E=MC2 -From Albert Einstein to George Carlin. We as a species shall evolve into radioactive breathing, fire loving water birds that will have mono-sex fledglings who will fly directly towards the sun, failing until they learn to breath in space upon which they nevertheless burn helplessly in a vacuum of their own heat produced by their rapid flight and that of the star that calls them to their inevitable death. Or maybe not…
All those rightwing and business sceptics of global warming should be frogmarched to the nearest flood and then waterboarded.
Jian-
You said?:
“People are the center of life but refuse to acknowledge the freedom and responsibility that this truth includes …”
Whoa.
Do I really even have to say it?
Please. Enough already! Ya basta! (couldn’t get the upside down one)
“People are the center of life…”?
Really now.
“this truth…”?
Maybe this belief is the problem?
Nightwatch: what do you plan to do with those skeptics who are neither rightwing nor pro business? Send them to the nearest drought area to be left to die without water?
Anyone who think this is all BS should have spent the past week here in Pittsburgh. Talk about wild weather. We had two wicked thunderstorms today and I think some tornados touched down also.
We never had weather like that here 20-25 years ago.
If a series of “large waves” up to 3.6 meters (12 feet) can swamp 70 islands in the Maldives it is time for those people to find a better place to live! Twelve foot waves on the ocean are not at all rare.
32 in Moscow? why thats not so bad is it? Oh, but it’s in Celsius? oh, ok.
and I while all this climate change is going on the right wing nuts like Limbaugh try to deny it and say everything is ok and we can continue to pollute, to hell with the Earth!
Siouxrose, maybe Demeter is angry again?
Or perhaps Thor, because we arent worshipping him?
I love mythology too. Sometimes I wish the Gods were real, but I’d pick the Marvel Comics versions. Lee and Kirby’s Thor wouldn’t let people drown or be washed away.
Hi, I WARRIOR: There’s a male scientist (his name escapes me, if anyone in the thread reads this they can perhaps fill in the blank) who wrote a book entitled “THE REVENGE OF GAIA.” IS she angry? Well, IF you were the great mother and watched children lose limbs to land mines, watched DU get scattered like fairy dust, a dis-investment in time’s own genetic banks… the legacy of the great mother Nature that over millennia has ensured through trial and error in her most elegant of laboratories that the BEST would survive, adapt and hopefully thrive… all this being undermined by that substance let out of Mars’ Pandora’s Box (and by that I mead radioactive substances that UNDERMINE the integrity of these same genetic codes, a/k/a the most precious BANKS of time); if you watched your forests felled, your precious animals dying for lack of homes, food or access; watched the oceans become toxic dumping grounds, and the skies fill with toxic chemicals all compromising not only the atmosphere, but heading into the stratosphere to weaken those protective bands that once kept the earth’s temperature fairly stable while blocking the more dangerous rays of the sun (leading to rising skin cancer rates in many). Would you not feel outrage for the bees treated like slaves and the other systems of nature being similarly forced into equivalent labor camps? EVERY THING mammon and Mars touch turns to shit, waste or death. They attack life and The Mother at every turn. Pissed? You’re damned right. I know you’ve read my prior postings about the balance of life, the DANCE of chi, of Yin and Yang, the input of BOTH sides of the force to make life (DNA double helix) and similarly expressed as a balance of opposing electrical charges in each atom. THIS interplay of the twin forces is what gives life the great dance, and if only one side (Mars/Mammon) takes over such overt and utter contemptuous dominion, WOE to all. THAT is what mankind is now experiencing… and it’s in its initial stages because we have not yet come to the CLIMAX related to what the dismantling of nature’s systems means for the web of life and ALL its species, including US.
Mother Nature is coming and boy is she pissed!
I posted the following on another article, but I think it is appropriate here, also.
———————–
As my wife has often said, “Man is the most endangered species.”
Everything on the planet lives on checks and balances. For instance, deer overpopulate, they start to starve after overgrazing. Predators increase, reduce the deer population. Fewer deer, graze increases, predators diminish until balance is restored. (oversimplified, I know, but that’s the idea)
Man seems just intelligent enough to overcome or put off the challenges to population overgrowth by natural means. Ever more virulent strains of diseases are warded off by new medicines and vaccines. Starvation by agribusiness’ chemical fertilizers (gradually salinating the soil, but great short term results) and GM foods and animals.
Nature keeps upping the ante, but we are just smart enough to offset her efforts, but not smart enough to limit our population to what the earth can sustain. Eventually, it will crash, but sadly it will likely take the rest of the beauty and diversity of the world with it.
Years ago I read the “Gaia Hypothesis.” Earth as a living, self-regulating presence. As I meditated upon the book, I tried to assign Man’s place in the scheme of things. My final conclusion. If Gaia, the Earth, is a living organism, Man can only be brain cancer. Cancer cells continue to multiply, feeding on and destroying their host’s vital organs until the host finally dies. That seems an apt description of Man on Earth.
Since the book was published, I have seen very little in the activities of the human race that challenges that opinion.
You Know Bush and the world’s powers that be now have themselves a new protection.
It seems any Environmentalist that speaks out now can be treated as a Terrorist.
And you can bet Big Brother is tuning in right here friends.
We are now part of real life Sci-Fi book which at its end we all die for real.