More than a third of the contiguous United States has an above average flood risk currently. (NOAA) Click on the image for photos from the flood preparations in North Dakota and Minnesota.
With the Red River continuing to rise and expected to crest at more than 20 feet above flood stage, communities in North Dakota and Minnesota are preparing for widespread flooding. Weather forecasters are expecting that the river may approach the record levels seen just last year, potentially flooding hundreds of square miles.
The filling of sandbags and reinforcing dikes and levees has taken on a sense of urgency along the river.
In Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River was already nearly 13 feet above flood level Wednesday morning – major flood stage by National Weather Service standards. It is forecast to rise seven more feet by Sunday morning.
NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco warned in a statement that it flooding is likely to be extensive. “It’s a terrible case of déjà vu, but this time the flooding will likely be more widespread. As the spring thaw melts the snowpack, saturated and frozen ground in the Midwest will exacerbate the flooding of the flat terrain and feed rising rivers and streams.”
The early morning quiet on Tuesday in Southern California was broken by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake near Los Angeles. The temblor, centered near Pico Rivera, caused no major damage but rattled area residents and put first responders on alert.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake occurred at 4:04am and originated 11.7 miles below the surface of the earth. The epicenter was less than a half mile from Pico Rivera or 10 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
While the quake was relatively small, it was felt across a large swath of Southern California. Reports indicate it was felt as far north as Rosamond, as far east as Lucerne Valley and as far as Poway near San Diego to the south.
A British government ad campaign utilizing children nursery rhymes to warn about the dangers of climate change has been rebuked by a government watchdog. (DECC)
Scare tactic newspaper advertisements from Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have been banned by a government advertising watchdog agency. Two ads in a series which used child nursery rhymes to warn about the purported dangers of manmade climate change were found to have unsubstantiated claims in them.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) reviewed the ads after receiving more than 900 complaints from British citizens – the most complaints it received on any ad last year.
The two offending ads were based on the nursery rhymes of ‘Jack and Jill’ and ‘Rub a Dub Dub’ and warned of the effects of extreme weather, a claim which has long been disproven.
Without a background in climate science, the ASA relied on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) reports to determine the accuracy of the ads. In its conclusion, the ASA said the ads failed to meet code based on a lack of substantiation, truthfulness and their environmental claims.
It was the definitive statement that the severe weather events will happen that caused the ASA to take action as they are presented as if there is no doubt.
Radar image of the tornado in White County, Arkansas. Two other twisters were reported in the state Wednesday, one that claimed the life of an elderly man. (NWS)
Tornadoes tore through Arkansas late yesterday and claimed the first tornado victim of 2010. One person was reported dead and three injured as the series of storms moved across the state.
The first twister of the night struck at 6:28pm local time in Saline County. That tornado damaged nearly two dozen homes but no injuries were reported.
The National Weather Service reported a second tornado was spawned out of a storm cell near Center Hill in White County. Nine homes were damaged and one person was injured.
The deadly twister was the third of the night which struck near Pearson in Cleburne County just after 9:00pm. Renee Preslar, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said that twister killed an elderly man and injured two others.
Thus far there has been a distinct lack of tornadoes reported in 2010. There were 41 twisters reported in January, slightly above the three year average for January of 37. That was followed by only one twister in February, the fewest in the month since record-keeping began in 1950.
There have been seven tornadoes reported thus far in March, all of which occurred in the last 48 hours.
This screen capture from amateur video shows one of the massive waves crashing into the cruise ship Louis Majesty.
Massive rogue waves struck the cruise ship Louis Majesty in the Mediterranean on Wednesday killing two and injuring more than a dozen passengers. The waves, at least 25 feet in height, broke windows and flooded cabins on the ship carrying 2,000 people.
The Louis Majesty was traveling from Barcelona to Genoa on the last day of a 10-day cruise of the western Mediterranean when the waves struck. Reports indicate that three massive waves broke windshields on the front of the ship and sent water over the decks.
Two deaths were reported as a result of the waves and both died at the scene. The victims were a 52-year-old Italian man and a 69-year-old German man from North Rhine Westphalia.
Fourteen injuries were reported, most minor and none life-threatening. Two of those had serious injuries including a 62-year-old woman who broke both of her legs.
Passenger Claude Cremex of Marseille, France told the Associated Press, “It was spectacular. A lot of water came in. Many cabins were flooded.”
Exactly where the accident occurred was still unclear. Most reports said the ship was sailing near the French Mediterranean port of Marseille but others placed it off the coast of Cabo de San Sebastian, Spain near Palafrugell.
Reports are that there were high winds in the area the ship was traveling through and automated buoy data indicates significant wave action at the time. A buoy operated by Meteo France in the area recorded waves to 21 feet high and winds in excess of 40 mph.
The 680 foot ship is owned and operated by Louis Cruises and had 1,350 passengers and 580 crew members on board at the time of the accident. The nearly 41,000 ton ship is “the most stylish and biggest ship in the fleet” according to Louis Cruises.
The debate about manmade climate change continues with a group of climate scientists now seeking to launch a PR campaign against skeptics.
Climate science and the purveyors of the manmade climate change theory have been sent reeling backwards over the past year. Errors discovered in their data and reporting, the Climategate email scandal and the shame it brought upon them, and continued cooling of the globe have set back their efforts. Now, a group of climate scientists is working to take the offensive against skeptics.
The Washington Times reports today that a number of scientists will start a new public relations campaign in the hopes of turning back the tide. Among the efforts by the scientists are to solicit a group of them to donate $1,000 each toward purchasing an ad in the New York Times.
One of the scientists, Dr. Stephen Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University lamented the state of the debate and sought to call up fears of the hunt for communists. “I don’t want to see a repeat of McCarthyesque behavior and I’m already personally very dismayed by the horrible state of this topic, in which the political debate has almost no resemblance to the scientific debate.”
Schneider is most famous in many circles for making outrageous claims. In 1989 he told Discover magazine, “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
More recently, here on Examiner.com he told San Francisco Environmental Policy Examiner Thomas Fuller that any those who doubt the anthropogenic global warming theory would be “slaughtered in public debate.” When a number of notable scientists including Roger A. Pielke Sr. offered to debate him, Schneider quickly backpedaled.
The Earth's axis was shifted slightly and our days shortened by last Saturday's earthquake in Chile. (NASA)
NASA scientists have determined that the massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile on Saturday has shortened our days and shifted the Earth’s axis. Officials said that the effects of the event while not unusual are a testament to the power of the temblor.
Richard Gross, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said his team had determined the Chile earthquake shorted the length of an Earth day by 1.26 microseconds. A microsecond is one millionth of a second.
The 2004 earthquake in Sumatra which triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people was a magnitude 9.1 temblor. That event shortened the days by 6.8 microseconds according to the same computer models.
Most interesting is the effect the quakes had on the earth’s axis. Saturday’s earthquake shifted the earth’s axis by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). The Sumatran quake shifted the planet’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).
The scientists said the 2010 Chile quake had a greater effect on the Earth’s axis than the 2004 temblor because it occurred in the planet’s mid-latitudes. By contrast, the Sumatran quake was near the equator.
Researchers have said that all earthquakes affect the Earth’s axis. Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said “Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation, from seasonal weather down to driving a car.”
For the first time since at least 1950, no tornadoes were recorded during the month of February. (Chris Foltz, NOAA)
While there was plenty of notable weather last month in the United States including the severe winter storms in the northeast, tornadoes were not one weather phenomena anyone had to worry about.
According to the National Weather Service, there were no twisters reported during February 2010 – the first time since record keeping began in 1950 that February did not have any. The previous low number of tornadoes in February was 2 in 2002.
Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory, said the last time the United States went a calendar month without a tornado was January 2003. Through yesterday it has been 36 days since the last twister struck on the 24th of January in Tennessee.
Brooks cautions against reading too much into the statistic. He said it tells us, “Somewhere between a little and nothing at all.”
Most years that start out slow in terms of tornado events end average or below average Brooks said. However, he also points to 2003 when the year started out 45 days without a tornado but by the middle of May the season was above normal.
In the wake of the Climategate email scandal, the failure at the climate summit and with revelations of errors in IPCC documents, Al Gore has been conspicuously absent - until now.
Former Vice President Al Gore had been conspicuously absent from the public eye recently. Following on the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit and new revelations of errors in key climate science reports, the Nobel Laureate was nowhere to be found. On Sunday he returned with an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the ‘attacks’ on the manmade climate change theory.
As is the norm for his work, Gore as always takes the opportunity to use over-the-top language to push for action against what he describes as an “unimaginable calamity” that will be visited on the earth. He used the liberal ‘Old Gray Lady’ to discuss his thoughts on the errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) work, the Climategate email scandal and took jabs at news organizations like FOX News.
Gore only concedes two of the many errors – the one concerning Himalayan glaciers and another comical one about the Netherlands finding itself flooded. He says science will “never be completely free of mistakes” and says that “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.”
Few would argue that science is perfect in any area of study. However, many would simply expect that if drastic measures are to be taken to combat the purported threat of manmade climate change, the science should be sound before jumping in.
A crushed car in a parking garage in Concepcion Chile following the earthquake early Saturday morning Feb. 27, 2010. (TVN)
Buildings lie in heaps of rubble, highway overpasses collapsed and large crevices opened in the earth following a massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Chile yesterday. Aftershocks continue to rock the nation while rescuers try to reach an untold number lying buried in the remnants of towns and cities.
Yesterday’s earthquake struck the nation early in the morning hours when most residents were still sleeping. The temblor’s 8.8 magnitude rating demonstrates the power of the quake and put the event in a tie for the fifth most powerful earthquake since 1900.
Tsunami warnings were issued immediately following the quake for thousands of miles of coastline surrounding the Pacific Ocean. From California and Alaska to Hawaii and Japan, officials worried about a devastating wave that could have been generated by the quake.
Near the epicenter, Chile is under a ‘state of catastrophe’ and officials work to direct recovery efforts. Outgoing President Michelle Bachelet said, “It was a catastrophe of devastating consequences.”
Officially the death toll from the quake stands at 214 however officials warn that number will almost certainly grow. 500,000 homes were damaged by the quake and 1.5 million residents have been affected.
Concepcion, the largest city closest to the epicenter, saw widespread destruction and the greatest count of fatalities thus far. Buildings across the city were collapsed into ruin and rescuers were working to comb the rubble for survivors.
The nation’s capital, 200 miles from the epicenter, was not spared. Elevated highways collapsed and apartment buildings were reduced to piles of brick and mortar.
Rescuers were struggling to reach possible survivors as they run low on supplies and gasoline. Adding to the difficulty are ongoing aftershocks that threaten to bring down already weakened structures. More than 80 aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 have occurred since the main quake struck at 3:34am Saturday.
Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey said yesterday’s quake was several hundred times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 quake that devastated Haiti last month. Chile however is in an earthquake-prone region and newer buildings have been built to withstand quakes.
The service also said that the Chile quake was centered 21.7 miles beneath the earth’s surface, considerably deeper than the 8.1 mile depth of the Haiti quake. Its magnitude 8.8 rating puts it in a tie as the fifth largest earthquake to strike the globe since 1900.
.jpg "The debate about manmade climate change continues with a group of climate scientists now seeking to launch a PR campaign against skeptics.")
