Around two hundred thousand people are dead in the Irawaddy delta of Myanmar, and perhaps another two million are homeless, hungry, and thirsty. The weather event causing this was dubbed "Cyclone Nargis". Nargis caused a twelve foot surge of water to inundate this low lying area. Clearly the impact of the event was multiplied many times by the incompetence of the military junta that rules Myanmar. Warnings did not reach the victims, and aid still has not reached many, two weeks post event.
You can count on me to mention the fact that climate scientists have been sifting the data for hurricances over the past thirty years (and yes, technically, Nargis was a hurricane) in an effort to figure out if there is a correlation between the observed warmer tropical waters and the higher number of more powerful storms. Bottom line judgement so far is that the observed warming of tropical oceans has not resulted in higher number of hurricanes around our planet. However, there is concern that the numbers seem to support the notion that tropical warming may be associated with more POWERFUL hurricane events. Nargis packed a pretty good punch. Meteorologists figure that it achieved highest wind speeds of around 135 mph around landfall- that would be at the low end of category four on the Saffir Simpson scale, considerably above average for hurricane power. According to Wikipedia, Nargis is the deadliest named cyclone in the North Indian Ocean Basin, as well as the second deadliest named cyclone of all time, behind Typhoon Nina of 1975. Including unnamed storms, Nargis is the 8th deadliest cyclone of all time. Yes, the tremendous recent population increases in many coastal communities around our planet does make it inevitable that high mortality hurricane events will happen in the absence of effective warning systems. But even so, we are comparing apples to apples here, because we are talking about wind speed, not mortality.
So where does that leave us on the question of climate change's impact on hurricane intensity? Well, it is just another piece of the puzzle, but it is somewhat supportive of the "greater intensity" theory. I just wanted to mention that it is in fact a puzzle piece. In the midst of the death, chaos, and the political and foreign policy challenge of getting the Myanmar Junta bosses to actually allow international aid groups to save the lives of their people, we have so far failed to notice this topic. It needs to be noticed.
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Comments: 28
One of the longer lasting effects of this cyclone has been the "salting" of rich rice paddies and other agriculture in that region, from that huge surge. That is going to incredibly impact one of the world's most poverty and government controlled populations in the world. Well there's Darfur and North Korea... the list goes on...
And then, look at the absolutely unprecedented tornadoes all over America this year.
And, why not do your research on Gore. The facts ARE there. Facts DO matter. Regardless of how much effort and Co2 you expend on ignoring them.
Even the the Bush White House has bowed to the vast empirically derived evidence, that the human footprint on this planet has become an unprecedented influence in climate change's geological history.
From EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica):
Current levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.
That is the conclusion of new European studies looking at ice taken from 3km below the surface of Antarctica.
The scientists say their research shows present day warming to be exceptional.
Other research, also published in the journal Science, suggests that sea levels may be rising twice as fast now as in previous centuries.
Gas bubbles trapped as the ice formed yield important evidence of the mixture of gases present in the atmosphere at that time, and of temperature.
We find that CO2 is about 30% higher than at any time, and methane 130% higher than at any time; and the rates of increase are absolutely exceptional: for CO2, 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years, stated project leader Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
This extends the picture drawn by another Antarctic ice core taken near Lake Vostok which looked 440,000 years into the past.
The main thing that's changed since the 19th Century and the beginning of modern observation has been the widespread increase in fossil fuel use and more greenhouse gases, said Kenneth Miller from Rutgers University.
Please endeavour to UNDERSTAND my words. It is common knowledge that Co2 emissions are up, and I did NOT say that this evidence was disputable. What I DID say, and quite correctly, is that its' "effects" ARE. As I have said, the climate warms and cools, cyclically. The man-made contribution to this phenomenon is UNKNOWN. And negligible, if at all. That is not simply "my opinion." There are 31,072 American Scientists, including 9,021 who hold PhD's, who agree with me...
And I quote:
"The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of "settled science" and an overwhelming "consensus" in favour of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and subsequent climatological damage is WRONG. NO such consensus, or settled science, exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a VERY LARGE number of American Scientists reject this hypothesis.
Publicists at the United Nations, Mr. Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few "skeptics" remain-- skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global-warming emergency.
It is evident that 31,072 Americans with University degree's in Science - including 9,021 with PhD's, are not a "few." Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is also quite evident that these 31, 072 Scientists are not "skeptics."
These scientists are instead convinced that the HUMAN-CAUSED global-warming hypothesis is without Scientific validity and that government action based on this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage BOTH human prosperity AND the natural environment of the Earth."
-Global-Warming Petition Project
In an ironic and delicious twist, the slight increase's (by our Earth's standards) in Co2's actually benefit the planet. These benefits include INCREASED greenery, plant-life and foliage, and therefore INCREASED habitat for the Earths' wildlife. BONUS!
My point, then, is this...despite the claims of the "pantywaists" and the Left, it is NOT agreed-upon Science that we are responsible for this "catastrophic" -one or two-degree cycle. To insist upon this notion, in face of the facts, requires an individual hubris that I am not familiar with.
Also, Chris; McCain is a fool, and is engaging in what has come to be known as "Political Expediency"... and Obama and Clinton are simply just fools.
I think I will just allow your argument to stand or fall on its own merit, and wish you a nice evening.
I can't imagine the environmental impact of the Iraq War, never mind the multitiered social impacts, which also feedback into all the other natural systems on Earth. And don't even get me started on spirituality and non-duality philosophy.
Those whom we elect to represent our interests in world political policies had better come with ideas that have nothing to do with how we've done business for a few thousand years.
And do not even get me started on Michael Crichton, who studied medicine, never practiced, wrote some fairly good but far fetched science fiction novels, then somehow became a leader of the climate change denial movement as if he actually knows anything about the topic. If we want to talk about Al Gore's "point of view", let's admit first of all that Al Gore is not the IPCC, then let's also admit that the denial crew has a very definite point of view and are not seeking objective truth in the slightest. You could record a January temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Fargo North Dakota and these guys would shrug it off saying that one event is not statistically significant.
But it was just a moment ago in time that conventional science believed bacteria and other microorganisms to simply spontaneously generate, until Pasteur and others disproved that. And then a bit later, a monk in Holland wondering about wrinkled peas, and a curious guy on a ship that sailed to some remote islands, and looking at how birds of a feather adapt differently due to variations in the ecosystems on those islands, began making us clever about the very macroscopic and microscopic scales of systems driving biological evolution.
In much of the "modern" world, we feel so safe in our homes, driving our cars on highways, going to stores with a bit of smart plastic to buy almost whatever we want, flick a switch at night to see, and another to entertain ourselves... and we feel more and more isolated from the hierarchy of powerful carriers of forces in the universes raging all around us, and locked up in substances under the earth we walk, with a relatively fragile energy umbrella high up in the atmosphere naturally shielding us from most of all that coming from the sun and distant other bodies. Or something old, heavy and unstable in the ground, residual from old interactions, reaching up from industry having exploited a feature in it, and dumped some of it near a farm, and somebody ingesting it. And let just one incident of those countless types of ionizing particles, or a massless gamma "beam, wave, packet" however one wants to frame that type of energy, slipping through all that, managing to transfer some of its potential or kinetic energy, like a pool ball striking another and changing the course of events in what it affected by transferring a bit of its energy in the encounter... in a cell that'll eventually undergo mitosis cell division, and several months later, after increasingly worrying about a growing patch of skin on one side of your face that's loosing feeling, your doctor totally rocks every notion you ever had of feeling safe and secure: brain tumor. That microcosmic transfer of energy had mutated one cell in the brain, and in dividing, its daughter cells began growing something "alien" in your brain that'll eventually overtake its "normal" functions on that scale, until all life in your body ceases to tick anymore.
You might get really ticked off at the universe for having produced energy or a bit of unstable substance to have made you sick, unless you learn that without all those (probably) 15 billion years of activity, time, space and everything within would (probably) disappear in less than a moment, and every thought pattern in your brain would simply never have existed... probably (smile).
And perhaps to survive some extra years, you are actually treated to a similar energy as had made you sick.
And after fear, anger and all sorts of emotions, perhaps, you get peacefully humble again as in childhood, and realize that our brains, no matter how clever, are not the masters of the universe. For inside the brain's smallest neuron cell's smallest molecule's smallest atom's smallest fundamental particle's smallest quantum property, "probably" sits attributes and horizons that "probably" have scales of influence that are infinitely unimaginable. Otherwise, what brought about the (probable) Big Bang. Much like the question, what were we before we had the first thought in infancy?
OK, so we can get humble through this sort of incidental, individual suffering. But that does not change the courses of behaviors among the rest of us nearly 7 billion arrogant slobs on the planet, who all too many of us are stupidly yelling louder and louder at each other over who is right or who is wrong about what makes anything on this rare planet tick, and who "owns" the minuscule of all that "ticking" that our minds have managed in some nearly improbable series of cosmic events to have provided us with to exploit... or creatively play with, to paraphrase some of Einstein's and other humble physicists' thinking in recent history.
If we'd just drop this ownership issue, cooperatively work together to better understand all these hierarchies of forces in our universe, from what's making the universe expand until probably not even an atom can remain stable anymore anywhere, to the solar and more local hierarchy of systems that for a few billion more years, probably could allow enough reasonably relative stability on this planet to continue functioning for human brains to keep evolving... so our hands can continue creating ever-evolving technological tools, to perhaps explore horizons outside even our solar system's life expectancy. But I fear that if we spend one more century with this patriarchal nonsense on our planet, a series of natural events - like having gotten mad at a pool game and and just hurled a bunch of cue balls onto a table with a lot of other cue balls moving about on our planet to regain without thinking a measure of stability, from energy systems driving the winds, oceanic currents and endless other systems so that the entropy locked up in all motion and energy destabilizes those systems that produced what we call life on Earth.
And each human organism on this planet can never ever isolate itself from all that.
Stop all that alpha monkey yelling at each other, dudes! For it generally is the male brain driving all this nonsense. We are becoming mad apes that got a hold of a stone big enough, when if hurled, not only will it destroy what what we're mad at to satisfy a fleeting emotion, but destroy everything we hold precious and dear. We have to work together, man! At least, if we want our children's children's children to even be able to pick their noses or fart, if they so feel inclined.
So how do we work together?
This writer sure doesn't know, but I feel personally grateful for not being overly concerned, since I intuitively feel that who we truly are can't even be locked up by the whole of the universe. But that bit of thinking in me does not in the smallest way change the course of a typhoon. We are children of the stars, you know. If you look at your hand, all those atoms that make up the molecules of your skin come from the first hydrogen atoms to have formed a hiccup after a huge battle of unimaginable forces produced hydrogen in a plasma state, much like in our sun... every hydrogen atom anywhere in the universe comes from that. And as suns came and went, those forces fused more and more elementary particles into those original hydrogen atoms to eventually give us the whole periodic table of elements. So here we are...
Like I said, I haven't a clue how we are going to survive much more than a century of this nonsense. But I honestly believe we can, if we'd get out of our isolation tanks of selfish activity, work together under the sun, and have lots of fun in the process.
I'm going to inject a little fairy tale I wrote a few decades ago to give you an example of how we can work together. Man, this comment is turning into one huge article.
Let me see if I can find it.
The scene: a normal, crowded, buzzing confluence of people somewhere in midtown New York City. All around, yellow taxicabs blare their horns, smelly street peddlers shout, smoke belching buses hiss their brakes, belly-bouncing workers operate their clangorous jackhammers, a thousand and one scents vie for dominance, and a particularly attractive woman unconsciously blocks out 99% of this maddening assault on her senses. Most especially, she blocks out the hardened scowls pasted on so many faces. Subconsciously, she is very aware of every one of these chaotic sensory inputs but rarely does any of it percolate onto the conscious architecture of her mind. She'd literally go mad otherwise.
Her mind is focused on getting to work, in her downtown medical laboratory at NYU. Somewhere, her mind is wondering how she'll ever find the solution to the virus challenge she has been working on for years. Some way to introduce, perhaps by a simple vector, a small change in the destructive retrovirus' genetic coding to prevent it from so efficiently mutating.
Then it happens.
A radiating, simple smile from a child in the crowd draws her attention. The child's unadulterated mannerism instantly penetrates all her defenses, and a wild pang of joyous, contagious energy surges through her. And in that moment, the answer to her problem, which had been lurking there all along behind all those defenses, bursts through in a wild epiphany.
Years later, when AIDS is relegated to the same historical status as perhaps polio, and she is awarded a Nobel prize for her efforts, she will wonder who that simple child was.
Now maybe some of you will get it why I get so damn black-and-white hopping mad, when it comes to adults hurting children in some of my articles. But really, we all are children... children of the stars. So let's start behaving among ourselves that way, and every answer to every puzzle will unfold before our very eyes without the slightest effort, almost.
I think I'll stick this really really long post into a couple of other places, where I've been involved in a similar debate with good people.
I would like to thank You for the thoughtful and didactic words. I certainly did appreciate them! I can also appreciate the focus and fortitude required to attain such outstanding academic achievements! What a wonderful and pedigreed life you've lived thus far; You are truly a fortunate man. In stark contrast, I have never attended a University class.
Interestingly, and once again, my point was either mis-interpreted, or misunderstood. Let it be known that, aside from my appreciation for Your achievements, I have little use for "academia" or "University Scientists." I have been chastised by the Left (which is predominate here) many times for saying so. ( I do not say this as indictment, but for enlightenment.) You indict my sources for avarice: I've indicted your sources for socialism. Fair enough. It is not difficult to find any majority in European "academia" who wouldn't relish the opportunity to take a position contrary to that of a group of "academicians" of American pedigree. I cite 31,072 American Scientists not as a claim to the veracity of this, or ANY, group of "academicians" or "University Scientists;" but to bring with my words a right that is equal to that of your citations. University "acamedicians" are, after all, prone to a hubris, an ignorance and a moral confusion of their own: it was they who invited a sociopath to speak at Colombia. Therefore, please read my words carefully, and I will endeavour to make my original point once again:
"…There is NO "consensus" or "settled science" in favour of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage…"
Therefore, Gore's claims of "a settled matter" or "a consensus," or that "there are FEW remaining skeptics and they are being paid by oil companies" or "the debate is over" are erroneous, and dubious, if not deceitful. The debate regarding "causation and effect" is NOT a settled matter. As a learned man, I'm certain you understand what I try to impart to you on this. You wouldn't want to be caught rejecting the belief of half of your fellow academicians simply because they disagree with your particular ideology, now would you?
Interestingly as well, you've introduced Greenland, and have assisted me in making my point. Prior to the most recent "ice-age," Greenland was discovered in much the same state that it is RETURNING to now. Natural Science is CYCLICAL, my newfound friend; cyclical.
Permit me to say; I have a deep understanding of the complexities and the inter-woven intricacies of the Natural Sciences. Much of what I know is derived through impirical means; and much through Discernment. Mine is an understanding, that would simply not be accepted by those who are predisposed to an immoveable slant to the Left. Therefore, I will not burden you with it.
Bent, I should like to think that we would have a wonderful and endless conversation over a fine glass of Scotch. I've appreciated your insight, and your opinions, and thank you for allowing me mine.
Chris, I would like to thank you, as well, for allowing me time on this forum. Yours was a good article, despite your point of view; and I've enjoyed the opportunity to express myself here. And, when Gore sells his G5's and his 20-family mansion, and donates this and the lions'-share of his kickbacks from this global-warming, carbon-credits sham to his favourite charity (other than himself), we will have some honest ground upon which to "exchange our views." Impirical evidence, my friend; Impirical Evidence.
But, enough of "pearls to swine…"
I have certainly noticed, and appreciate, that you derive enjoyment from following me around this site, eager to interject your comments. I had no idea you were such a fan; Thank You!
I truly do believe that you are a thoughtful and honest man, Jerry; and I'm not certain that I wouldn't enjoy a long and open converstion over a glass of Fine Scotch with you, as well!!!
Rising sea levels do not help either and will cause more problems in the future.
Two interesting aspects of the warming vs. quantity and intensity question ought to be considered:
One is that warming is not equally distributed around the globe and it is not instantaneous. Warming MAY equate to less storms in the future due to less temperature differences both vertically and laterally. But until we get there, the period of change will likely be MORE hairy.
Two is that predictions of intensity are given as averaged percentages, but individual events do not work as averaged numbers which are used convey understanding in compressed terms. So, to say that storms may be 4% more intense, is NOT to say that ALL storms will be 4% more intense. It is to say that some will be Much more intense and some will be more intense to a lesser degree. Who knows which will be which and where they will be...
So we are spinning the roulette wheel (or the Russian Roulette chamber) with storms that are orders of magnitude greater than what we generally experience now.
The KEY point to understand now, is not to hang the "MAN MADE" label on all natural processes. It is to UNDERSTAND that we NOW exist in a world where elements of the natural system are driven by Human influences to a major degree. Global Climate is one of those systems.
That was so well put. As to academia, here's what CG Jung said,
The man who would learn the human mind will gain almost nothing from experimental psychology. Far better for him to put away his academic gown, to say good-bye to the study and wander with the human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the asylum, and the hospital, in the drinking shops, brothels and gambling halls, in the salons of the elegant, in the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals, the sectarian extasies, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body he would reap richer store of knowledge than text-books a foot thick give him. Then he would doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.
And recently, I've seen from satellite imaging, warmer waters invading certain regions off Antarctica near off South America, and my other concern is what happens when predatory sharks can manage to survive in those regions, where really the only predators to have evolved with the penguins has been the leopard seal?