Global Warming

[Palehorse]

We don't even count the 90 degree days anymore. Now we count the 100 degree days. 

Yup. And Central Indiana is flirting with yet another couple of those today and tomorrow. With more "possible" derecho storms over the weekend. . .

[Henry Hawk]

Ten years from now we won't talk about droughts either...any more than people in the Sahara do.

bookmarked....

[Palehorse]

bookmarked....

You must like crow. . . 

[The Troll]

You must like crow. . . 

  I talked to a old Kentuckian that live in Republican Herbert Hoover's depression.  He said that young crow wasn't to bad to eat.  But, by the end of Herbert Hoovers Republican depression.  There was nothing to hunt or eat in the woods of Kentucky.  The damn government came in with some food.  Today the Republican would say, get off your ass hillbilly and get a job.   

  Roosevelt and the Democrats came in with the TVA, creating jobs, building the dams and the installations of electric line, poles, transformers and wiring homes for the people who had never had electricity.   

  Now today that would be uncalled for government spending and charity for the dumb and poor hillbilly's.

  I wish we could get hold of a time machine and send Henry back to Kentucky in 1932 and give a 22 rifle with 3 bullets and let him go out a shot some crows to eat and that is all that he has to eat but some grass.    I can just hear the crying of   Bird Boy. 

[Palehorse]

NASA scientist links climate change, extreme weather

(CNN) -- What do the 2010 heat wave in Russia, last year's Texas drought, and the 2003 heat wave in Europe have in common?
All are examples of extreme weather caused by climate change, according to a new study from NASA scientist James Hansen.

"This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened," he wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece meant to accompany the study.

"Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change."

The study, which was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at the past six decades of global temperatures and finds what Hansen described as a "stunning" rise in the frequency of extremely hot summers.

It compared what is happening now to what was happening between 1951-1980. In those years, extremely hot temperatures covered less than 0.2% of the planet. Now, those temperatures cover about 10% of the land area, the study said.

It dismissed the idea that specific weather patterns are by themselves sufficient to explain today's extreme anomalies. Phenomena like La Nina have always been around, but large areas of extreme warming have only come about with climate change, the study said.

"The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills," wrote Hansen.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/05/us/climate-change/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

[The Troll]

  Naaa, naaaaa, naaaa, it can't be global warming.  If you don't believe me, talk to Rush Limbaugh.  It's just got to be the cycle of the sun like we have had in the past.  Worry Warts.   

[libby]

Here's an interesting story about a local effect of climate change, global warming, whatever you want to call it (or deny it's happening). From the front page of today's Washington Post:

Alaskan Arctic Villages Hit Hard By Climate Change

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: August 5, 2012

POINT HOPE, Alaska — Fermented whale's tail doesn't taste the same when the ice cellars flood.

Whaling crews in this Arctic coast village store six feet of tail — skin, blubber and bone — underground from spring until fall. The tail freezes slowly while fermenting and taking on the flavor of the earth.

Paying homage to their connection to the frozen sea, villagers eat the delicacy to celebrate the moment when the Arctic's ice touches shore.

But climate change, with its more intense storms, melting permafrost and soil erosion, is causing the ice cellars to disintegrate. Many have washed out to sea in recent decades. The remaining ones regularly flood in the spring, which can spoil the meat and blubber, and release scents that attract polar bears.

"They're thawing and filling up with water," Point Hope Mayor Steve Oomittuk said as he lifted a small wooden door to a cellar, surrounded by plastic sheets shielding the remaining snow cover from the sun. This spring, residents had to take some meat and blubber out and make room for it in their freezers at home.

"When you store it in a freezer, it tastes different," Oomittuk said.

More quickly than any other place in the United States, the Alaskan Arctic is being transformed by global warming. The impacts of climate change are threatening a way of life.

The dilemma for the federal government — and state and local officials — is whether to try to preserve, if it is even possible, the heritage of the Inuit villages, their ice cellars, sod ancestral homes and cemeteries ringed with spires of whalebones. Or spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to move even one village.

Point Hope, with a 4,500-year history, has much to lose.
"So much of our culture is being washed away in the ocean," said Oomittuk, 50, who was born in a sod house, common here until the 1970s. "We live this cycle of life, which we know because it's been passed from generation to generation. We see that cycle breaking."

It's not just a matter of culture and history but of survival. Households in Alaskan Arctic villages rely on hunting and fishing for most of their food consumption, and those activities depend on sea ice.

The importance of catching their own food is evident in the aisles of the Alaska Commercial Co., a supermarket on Bison Street in Kotzebue. Milk costs $9.99 a gallon, and a jumbo pack of drumsticks is $21.77. "You get a sense of our dependence on subsistence hunting," John Chase said, pointing out the prices. He handles land use permitting for the the state's northernmost borough and oversees climate change issues.

The Arctic sea ice, which shrinks over the summer and grows in the winter, decreased by a total of 21.1 million square miles in June, the largest loss on record for the month since satellite records began, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Over­all, summer sea ice has declined 40 percent since the 1970s, when mapping of the ice with satellite imagery began.

The hunters in Kotzebue, 180 miles south of Point Hope, struggled during this year's bearded seal hunt. The slushy ice made it hard to find a firm place to stand, and many of the seals were submerged in water and harder to shoot and retrieve.

"This year's ice was really bad. It makes it harder to see them. Some of the ice was brown and dark," explained Karmen Monigold, 36, who has been hunting since she was 20. "Our food security is being threatened, not just by climate change, but by offshore development.

"When I think of my boys, they may not be able to hunt like I do."

In the town of Barrow, the northernmost community in the United States and 330 miles north of Point Hope, the men and women who build trails on the ice so they can harpoon whales and pull them onto a solid surface now complain of mugaliq, a combination of slush, ice and snow that is harder to work on.

Tied to the water

Point Hope, population 850, ends in a slender stretch of land jutting into the Chukchi Sea. The community's heritage is clustered in this part of the sparse landscape for a reason: The sea's bounty once sustained a local population of more than 5,000. But that proximity to the ocean is also why it is losing ground.

The North Slope Borough that encompasses Point Hope and Barrow has spent roughly $2 million building a 275-foot rock revetment near Point Hope's runway to guard against erosion, and the Army Corps of Engineers spent $433,000 to restore an evacuation road that was damaged by storms and is the main alternative to the airstrip. The community also makes a line of defense out of gravel each summer.

"We pile up this gravel and try to stop the erosion," Oomittuk said, looking out at the steep piles of brown gravel as the waves lapped against them.

"We see the things that are changing with the climate change, the offshore development, the ice moving out there, the destructive fall storms," he said.

This summer, the town of Kotzebue put the finishing touches on a $34 million sea wall — primarily funded by the federal government — to protect its beach from powerful fall storms and erosion. Northwest Arctic Borough Mayor Siikauraq Whiting, who is headquartered in Kotzebue, said she and other residents are committed to defending their community and way of life.

"The last thing I'm going to say is we're a people of the past," she said. "We still exist.

A dozen villages, however, are declaring defeat and trying to relocate.

Every year, the river encroaches farther and farther into Newtok, a village of 354 people that rests on melting permafrost on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Over the past 16 years, its trash dump and main barge landing have eroded into the water.

Newtok officials have identified a relocation site nine miles away on higher ground on Nelson Island, but they have not received federal funding for the move.

The village's tribal administrator, Stanley Tom, has started training villagers to build homes on the new site, but he said they are still waiting for federal permits and funding.

"Our village is sinking very fast, and we are now flood-prone," Tom said. "The government is so slow, they're taking their leisure time. . . . Where is the money?"

The funds that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) sees as essential to remote communities' survival are considered "bad earmarks" by many in Washington, she said. Nonetheless, she was able to direct $2 million to her state's coastal erosion program in fiscal 2010, on top of the $500,000 she secured for the town of Shishmaref in fiscal 2005.

Meanwhile, the federal government is studying what can be done.

Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes announced July 30 that a federal interagency group on Alaska will work with the Arctic Research Commission to create a central hub of scientific information to inform public decision-making. It also will launch an effort to evaluate the environmental, social and economic impact of Arctic infrastructure development, given the changing climate.

"When it comes to permafrost loss, what can we do about that? What we can do is better understand it," Hayes said. "What's most important now is scoping out the extent of the issue."

Studying the changes

Interior's Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperatives program is using computer models to project everything from where polar bear mothers will den this winter to how a changed landscape will shift species' distribution in Alaska by mid-century.

"We're trying to figure out what's happening to the land, and what will happen to the land," said Greg Balogh, the program's coordinator.

But there is a history of mistrust between Alaskan native villagers and the federal government. People in Point Hope remember Project Chariot, an aborted federal plan in the 1960s to create a new harbor by detonating six nuclear bombs nearby.

"A lot of this stuff is trust-building," Martin Robards, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Arctic Beringia Program, said of current efforts.

Aggie Henry, a housing security official in Point Hope, smiled when asked about possible federal assistance. "The federal government is not here. The Coast Guard is miles and miles away," she said, looking out onto the Chukchi Sea. "Our heritage and our culture and tradition is very important to us. We will have to adapt to it."

She said she is worried about the bowhead whales, bearded seals and walruses stored in the dark holds of her community's remaining ice cellars, each one about 13 feet square and 10 feet deep.

Fortunately, the flooding this year did not harm the whale tails saved from the spring hunt — five in all. So this fall, Point Hope residents will carry them to city hall, clean off the blubber they are wrapped in and cut them up. Whaling captains will be served first. Residents will bring buckets to take some home.

"It's green and slimy and nice, with a good taste," Oomittuk said. "It has a strong smell. You have to be born to it.

"To us, this is what we grew up with. When food was scarce, you had to ferment everything you had left," he said. "It's all about survival."

© The Washington Post Company

[The Troll]

             Life really sucks when when you don't fermented whale meat to eat.             

[Anne]

Looks like a nice week shaping up, a little rain, maybe, and temps in the 80s.

[Exterminator]

Well, I guess that proves that this whole global warming thing is just a big hoax; now doesn't it? 

[The Troll]

Well, I guess that proves that this whole global warming thing is just a big hoax; now doesn't it? 

  Something is doing it.  All of the lakes here in Indiana are 7 to 10 feet below pool stage.   

[me]

  Something is doing it.  All of the lakes here in Indiana are 7 to 10 feet below pool stage.   

Uh, that is usually what happens when we don't have rain. 

[Anne]

Well, I guess that proves that this whole global warming thing is just a big hoax; now doesn't it? 

No, it was just stating that it looks like we will be having a nice week weatherwise. I guess that is bad news to you, can't you ever take good news for what it is?

[The Troll]

Uh, that is usually what happens when we don't have rain. 

  You should be happy since it isn't global warming.  Sunshine. 

[Palehorse]

"July was hottest month on record for contiguous U.S. since record keeping began in 1895". ~ NOAA