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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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weather extremes  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ climate impacts  ~ contamination  ~ health impacts  ~ food crisis  ~ airborne pollutants  ~ heavy metals  ~ anthropogenic change  ~ holyshit  ~ technological innovation  



ApocaDocuments (10) matching "weather extremes" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "weather extremes"]
Sun, Aug 15, 2010
from New York Times:
In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming
The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma -- and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people. The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record. Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes. The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably. ...


And thus we are probably screwed.

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Sat, Aug 14, 2010
from BBC:
Rain triggers fresh China landslides
Torrential rain has brought landslides to more areas in China, as relief teams in devastated Zhouqu county battle against the bad weather. Teams are continuing to recover bodies in the remote region in Gansu province, in the wake of Saturday's landslides that left 1,700 people dead or missing. Elsewhere in Gansu 24 people were killed in landslides, and five people died in Sichuan province to the south. More rain is forecast for the area in the next few days. ...


Oh, mirror in the sky / what is love?

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Sat, Aug 14, 2010
from London Independent:
Children bear the brunt of Pakistan's nightmare
...Two weeks after unprecedented monsoon rains started causing chaos and devastation in the north-west of the country, in this region the effects are still being felt. Further south, in Sindh province, it is likely that the worst is yet to come.... Half the people being rescued by the troops and volunteers are children. Experts estimate that of the 14 million people affected by these floods, six million children are at risk. In every natural disaster, it is often children who suffer the most. When food is in short supply, they are often the last to eat, they are more vulnerable to contagious diseases and water-borne illnesses such as cholera, and under such hardship a child's needs may not always be a family's priority. In these floods, many children, inclined to swim and splash in the deep brown waters, have been attacked by snakes. ...


Whatever happened to the meek inheriting the earth?

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Fri, Aug 13, 2010
from Christian Science Monitor:
China mudslides were predicted 13 years ago
Monster monsoon rains may have loosened the mud and rock that buried and killed more than 1,000 people in the northwestern Chinese Province of Gansu over the weekend, but the mudslide in Zhouqu was more than a natural disaster. Official records show that government-run lumber companies cut 313,000 acres of forest from the slopes of Zhouqu county between 1952 and 1990, denuding the geologically vulnerable mountainsides and subjecting them to soil erosion. Thirteen years ago two Chinese scientists published a paper warning that following "the destruction of the eco-system" in the district, "a rainstorm will carry debris down the gully, destroying farmland, houses, roads, bridges, water facilities, and power systems and causing death and injury." ...


What were those scientists' names -- Nostra and Damus?

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Thu, Aug 12, 2010
from Associated Press:
Long hot summer of fire and floods fit predictions
Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way. The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says -- although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship. "There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott. ...


Can't I waste ... just one more day, please?

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Thu, Aug 12, 2010
from Guardian:
World feeling the heat as 17 countries experience record temperatures
2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries. Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine - the three nations at the centre of the present eastern European heatwave which has continued for more than three weeks - but also many African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. Temperatures in Moscow, which have been consistently 20C above normal, today fell to a more manageable 31C (86F). But the extreme heat experienced there would barely have registered in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Pakistan and Sudan, all of which have recorded temperatures of more than 47C (115F) since June. The number of record highs is itself a record - the previous record was for 14 new high temperatures in 2007. ...


The 99 degrees in Finland feels like the 125 in Iraq.

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Tue, Aug 10, 2010
from Cumberland Times-News:
Deep Creek fish kill toll at 1,000 -- and counting
The death toll of the June fish kill in Deep Creek Lake has reached approximately 1,000 and counting, but environmental investigators are hopeful the rate of fish deaths is slowing. Investigators are attributing the fish kill to unprecedented high water temperatures in the lake, combined with the speed at which the water temperature rose. The water heated up too quickly for the fish to become acclimated. "The vast majority of fish kills are really natural, as this one apparently is as well," said Maryland Department of the Environment Program Manager Charlie Poukish, who investigated the incident. "Our main interest, of course, is to get out quick enough to try to document if there is some sort of toxin -- the old canary in the coal mine." But instead of a toxin, Poukish said the Deep Creek Lake fish appear to be victims of a combination of stresses. Those stresses, including the higher water temperature, made them more susceptible to parasites. "We noticed a very heavy parasite load on the fish," Poukish said, adding, "The ultimate cause of death was really septicemia, which was brought on by a common bacteria found in nature which really doesn't affect fish until they're stressed." ...


Maybe it's time we genetically modified fish, so they could sweat.

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Mon, Aug 9, 2010
from CBC:
Record heat forces Northwest Territories folks to adapt
Landslides and low water levels in the Northwest Territories in the wake of record-breaking warmth have prompted calls for changes in infrastructure planning. "It's really important that community decision-makers and government decision-makers are prepared to spend a little bit more to make sure that the design [of structures such as buildings and roadways], in terms of preparation for permafrost degradation, is as strong as possible," said Doug Ritchie, a spokesman for the environmental group Ecology North, in the wake of temperature changes that Environment Canada called "unprecedented." In the Northwest Territories this year, spring temperatures were almost six degrees warmer than average, surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by half a degree. Climatologist Dave Phillips said in his 40 years with Environment Canada, he's never seen such a rapid change in temperature. "In my business, you break records by a tenth or a hundredth of a degree, not by a full half-degree or a degree," he said. "This is unprecedented, this kind of warming that we've seen in the last six months."... The Yukon government is already spending millions fixing roads affected by landslides, erosion, and washouts caused by extreme weather such as heavy rainstorms, Ritchie said. ...


You don't need even a high school degree, to understand six degrees. Centigrade!

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Mon, Aug 9, 2010
from PhysOrg:
Officials point to Russian drought and Asian deluge as consistent with climate change
Government officials are pointing to the drought and wildfires in Russia, and the floods across Central and East Asia as consistent with climate change predictions. While climatologists say that a single weather event cannot be linked directly to a warming planet, patterns of worsening storms, severer droughts, and disasters brought on by extreme weather are expected as the planet warms.... On Friday Medvedev continued his sudden frankness on climate change, warning that climate change could impact the Winter Olympics. "Frankly, what is going on with the world’s climate at the moment should incite us all (I mean world leaders and heads of public organizations) to make a more strenuous effort to fight global climate change," he said. Russia is one of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters: when emissions due to deforestation are not included, Russia is listed as among the top 4, after China and the US, and nearly equal to India.... At the same time as central Russia is experiencing record heat and debilitating fires, a number of Asian nations have been hit with catastrophic flooding and mud slides. Flashfloods in India have left 132 people dead and some 500 missing, while mudslides in China due to flooding has taken the lives of 127 people. Nearly 50,000 people have been evacuated in China. But to date no nation appears worst hit than Pakistan, where flooding has killed 1,600 people and affected 14 million. Landslides have followed the flooding killing dozens more. ...


Nattering nabobs of the negative "new normal."

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Mon, Aug 9, 2010
from PhysOrg:
Moscow's toxic smog fails to shift as anger, heat grows
The toxic smog smothering Moscow showed little sign of abating Monday as media accused officials of covering up the scale of the disaster and the authorities raced to put out a fire near a nuclear site. Amid Russia's worst heatwave in decades, the raging wildfires and burning peat bogs in central Russia have choked Moscow for several days and even sent plumes of smoke as far as neighbouring Finland.... "Authorities do not release statistics in order to conceal their incompetence," the Kommersant daily quoted an unidentified head of an enterprise in the funerals industry as saying. "Morgues and crematoria are overcrowded."... "We have been strictly forbidden to hospitalize people barring the most extreme cases," he said, complaining of hazardous working conditions.... "Air conditioners work only on the floor of the administration, temperatures reach 30 degrees C (86 degrees F) in the operating room," he told Kommersant on conditions of anonymity. "It's hard to work in these conditions."... The heatwave created a national catastrophe which has affected all areas of life, with 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of agricultural land destroyed and the government ordering a controversial ban on grain exports. ...


But the vodka vendors are doing a bang-up business!

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