Inconvenient COINCIDENCES ...........

I heard that the number of major weather events has increased 8-fold in the last decade. I don't think that counts as being anecdotal. What does count as an anecdote is the Oklahoma tornado being the strongest ever recorded.

Hi. On reading your words, Chuckle8, this is what came to mind: The increasing technology capabilities of GEO-ENGINEERING, ionosphere manipulation, weather modification, and weather weaponry have followed the same trajectory as these increasing storms.

Coincidental, I guess.

But I think it must be an inconvenient truth that the topic of increasing storms is more complex than just what the media limits the discussion to -- that is, a one option answer -- climate change due to CO2.

How do we decide who deserves relief? What disasters warrent relef? Natural disasters, economic disasters, dsasters caused by terrorist attacks or disease or...? Individual disasters, state disasters? Didn't this generation decide that people were supposed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, take personal responsibilty, and not look to government as the solution? We're "rugged individuals," each of us alone, each on our own. l don't agree with any of this, but that is what Americans have been saying for years.

5 of the 6 (and possibly even the sixth) mass extinctions throughout Earth's history were caused by sudden GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE..regardless of whether the catalyst was volcanic activity, algae growth or bolide events, the resulting climate change wiped out species. Species are going extinct all around us. In our arrogance we scoff at reality when it reveals to us that which we would ignore. We are adaptive!!

However, what does history show about our appreciation of natural forces when we build our house in the same spot that 2 previous hurricanes have leveled it? Or when we rebuild a community devasted by tornados but dont build suitable shelters? When we build and rebuild a city on the coast that sits in a bowl below sea level? We build highways on fault lines, strip mine our forests, pollute our estuaries, dredge every nutrient out of our soil and bury our nuclear waste in caves right next to our water table. Then we just strut like cocks onto the public media stage and declare we have it all figured out. Perhaps the next big event on Earth will be one of ass extinction.

For all you deniers out there I highly recommend the time lapse satellite images of climate change. Just google them! Of course we can't let this inconvenient truth also known as science get in the way of the fossil fuel industry profits.

The Kochs along with the rest of their oil pals remind me of fools crossing an expansive desert on foot carrying heavy sacks of gold in place of water. Problem is they have many of the rest of us on this same foolish trek, minus the gold and against our will. Actually they have the entire planet on this same suicidal trek, irregardless of complicity.

I can't help but think there's an alien world out there someplace taking bets right now on how long the human species has left.......

I think it is worse than we realise. We may be beyond the point where the planet kicks in and undergoes the transformation of leading into another Ice Age.

When we first heard about Climet Change it was as though it wouild effect out great great grandchildren, yet here we are now seeing its effect.

It is similerto the subject like devices of war, we do not see the current Aircraft, Submarine, Tank, Missile ectra.....

What we see is the older stuff, for security reasons.

I think that very soon we will see millions, or perhaps billions of people moving across the planet because their homeland is no longer inhabital. All because all of the developed countries governments who may have had a chance to stop it, were slowly overtaken by the corperate interest.

Her I am at 56 years old & perhaps likely going to see the beginning of the end....jimi

Quote Global:Watermelon philosophy and liberal statist control; green on the outside and red on the inside.

Good point Global! Racist; but, good logic. 400 points per million of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere for the first time in human history is a fact. What caused it, or what the effects on the planet will be are pure conjecture. Pointing fingers at each other at this point is futile. Personally, I hope Thom is right and you are wrong. I hope climate change brings us to the brink of extinction. I hope it happens soon. The sooner the better. Why?

Because the first thing that is going to go extinct are rich, right-wing lug nuts like you and your Corporate friends. The sheer masses of desperate people will remember just who got us into this mess and how they delayed any attempts to reverse the damage. If indeed, Thom and the environmental scientific community are right and you and your friends are wrong you folks will be the first to be sacrificed on the altar of an outraged multitude. Good riddance!

It will be worth near extinction just to be rid of you and the rest of your Corporatocracy Cabal. It would also be a sweet, sweet irony as well if "Global" warming has nothing to do with carbon emissions at all; and, was just a natural part of the planet's evolutionary cycle. Your own demise set up by the natural evolution of the planet combined with your own greed, arrogance, and your big mouth. Now that would be really,really funny. Keep talking! I love it! Hasta La Vista!

I could cut & paste comments too, but I just want to go to the bottom line.

My place runs on solar pv panels and solar hot water. We're completely off grid. We do have a backup generator. We're expanding the solar with a larger battery bank (from 5 to 10 deep cycle lead/acid). I've recently installed a 21 foot utility pole that for now is used to bring in internet, bundled w/sat tv. This pole will soon sport a VAWT (vertical axis wind turbine) to augment solar, being useful at night and during winter months. My place is oriented east-west for passive solar as well.

We live in the mountains SE of Tucson AZ. So wind and solar is a natural here. I'm semi-retired and am working on a solar-thermal parabolic trough in hopes of making a solar air conditioning system (absorptive) and then also solar-thermal electrical generation (rankine cycle). In the not so distant future I may be able to sell energy back to the grid.

The idea of "distributed generation" has come of age and is being implemented in some parts of the US. I hope to be part of the solution. And not just full of hot air.

Thanks, Thom. You make sense.

Each major devastating natural disaster makes me think of this passage from the sacred writings of the Baha'i Faith:

"O YE THAT ARE LYING AS DEAD ON THE COUCH OF HEEDLESSNESS! Ages have passed and your precious lives are well-nigh ended, yet not a single breath of purity hath reached Our court of holiness from you. Though immersed in the ocean of misbelief, yet with your lips ye profess the one true faith of God. Him whom I abhor ye have loved, and of My foe ye have made a friend. Notwithstanding, ye walk on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you. Were ye but to open your eyes, ye would, in truth, prefer a myriad griefs unto this joy, and would count death itself better than this life. [emphasis added]

http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/b/HW/hw-93.html

- By Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words (#20 of the Persian section), from the Bahá’í Faith, www.bahai.org or www.bahai.us

This is not the same thing as saying that God is punishing us for our myriad faults, but it is saying that we are not behaving as another excerpt from the writings describes: "Noble have I [God] created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.” Maybe if we rose up to practice the 'love thy neighbor' that all the major Faiths of God teach - and treat the earth better, too - the earth would be nicer to us.

Just something more to ponder...

Yes the greedy Republicans will do anything to try and make Obama look bad If the people in Oklahoma have any brains , they will vote OUT these losers

Global -- I still want to know if you are being funded by the CATO institute?

I wonder if the cooling was due to the extra particulate matter in the atmosphere. I wonder if humans reacted by decreasing the particulae matter and in the process accelerated global warming.

Back to your previous blog, I am glad the humans had enough "fatal conceit" to close the hole in the ozone layer.

It is just unfathomable heartlessness. Where are their soul's??????? Maybe the good doctor Coburn would have different sentiments if he was seeking another term.

Newsweek article 1975;

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.