Tag Archives: international

Fracking won’t fix the climate

by AshleaMelina844 Posted on October 22, 2013

Fracking won’t fix the climate

By

WCN 24/7

The claim that natural gas is saving the climate is revealed as hot air.

Perhaps you’ve heard the claim that the natural-gas boom made possible by fracking is reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The logic underpinning this claim is that natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, and hydraulic fracturing has produced a surfeit of cheap natural gas. Ergo, fracking is helping power plants switch from coal to natural gas, helping the climate along the way.

But that’s only half the story.

A Stanford-led study, which was produced with input from 50 academic, government, and private-sector experts, concludes that natural gas is having only “modest impacts” on carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, natural gas is helping to dig a grave for coal. It’s the lesser of two fossil-fuel evils. But natural gas’s low price is also slowing down the country’s shift toward climate-friendly solar and wind power. From the Stanford report [PDF]:

Shale development has relatively modest impacts on carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions, particularly after 2020. Since 2006, electricity generation has become less carbon intensive as its natural gas share increased from 16 to 24 percent and its coal share decreased from 52 to 41 percent. Over future years, this trend towards reducing emissions becomes less pronounced as natural gas begins to displace nuclear and renewable energy that would have been used otherwise in new powerplants under reference case conditions.

Meanwhile, the study concludes that fracking is helping to slightly expand America’s economy — but not nearly to the extent that the industry would like us to think:

Shale development also boosts the economy by $70 billion annually over the next several decades. Although this amount appears large, it represents a relatively modest 0.46 percent of the US economy. Today total natural gas expenditures represent about one percent of GDP within this country.

Joe Romm of ClimateProgress points out that the International Energy Agency recently warned that the low price of natural gas is also hampering efforts to improve energy efficiency, which is bad news for greenhouse gas emissions.

“From a climate perspective, then, the shale gas revolution is essentially irrelevant,” argues Romm, “and arguably a massive diversion of resources and money that could have gone into deploying carbon-free sources.”


Source
Changing the game?: Emissions and market implications of new natural gas supplies, Energy Modeling Forum, Stanford University
Major Study Projects No Long-Term Climate Benefit From Shale Gas Revolution, ClimateProgress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Visit site: 

Fracking won’t fix the climate

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fracking won’t fix the climate

The Worst Wildfires in a Decade Pour Acrid Smoke Over Sydney

by surfikdon Posted on October 19, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Going outside in many parts of southeastern Australia right now is like sucking on a stogie filled with smoldering grass and bark. The countryside is alive with flame from nearly 100 rampaging blazes, which are drawing strength from feverish weather to slam a dirty-black lid of smoke over Sydney.

This breakout will go down as the worst regional fires in a decade. More than a third of the fires are out of control and behaving erratically thanks to screwy yet strong wind patterns. The Sydney Morning Herald has put together a timeline of events from Thursday, and it’s laden with cruel portents:

7am Day begins with warnings. There were 65 fires in NSW, 25 uncontained. Forecasts of hot and windy conditions….

3pm Multiple fires through the Blue Mountains. Ash starts to fall across Sydney….

6pm Parts of fuel store set alight at Blue Wren Drive near Wyong. Reports of explosions.

6.40pm RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons: ”This is as bad as it gets. We may be counting homes lost in the dozens or hundreds.”

While the situation on the ground must be nerve-racking, from space it looks fairly terrible, too. The above image, taken on Thursday afternoon by NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the earth spewing smoke like a titanic beater with a blown head gasket. The blazes are outlined in red; the largest in this shot is the State Mine fire at top left, a sower of destruction to more than 50,000 acres of land.

“In addition to the threat posed by the fires, the image shows that smoke pollution was a problem in populated coastal communities,” says NASA. “The densest plume of smoke hangs directly over Sydney, though the brighter white streak is probably a cloud.” Aside from the smoke, the locals are also having to deal with burning embers falling onto their properties, according to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. That agency is advising people to stamp out any spot fires they see, and also to (in very good advice) find shelter “if the fire impacts on your property. Protect yourself from the heat of the fire.”

Here are photos from local observer Maarten Danial of the glum scene in Sydney:

And this is a zoom of the NASA image over the vicinity of Sydney. You can almost see a city (on the coast below the densest white cloud) through all that haze:

While the situation on the ground must be nerve-racking, from space it looks fairly terrible, too. The above image, taken on Thursday afternoon by NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the earth spewing smoke like a titanic beater with a blown head gasket. The blazes are outlined in red; the largest in this shot is the State Mine fire at top left, a sower of destruction to more than 50,000 acres of land.

“In addition to the threat posed by the fires, the image shows that smoke pollution was a problem in populated coastal communities,” says NASA. “The densest plume of smoke hangs directly over Sydney, though the brighter white streak is probably a cloud.” Aside from the smoke, the locals are also having to deal with burning embers falling onto their properties, according to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. That agency is advising people to stamp out any spot fires they see, and also to (in very good advice) find shelter “if the fire impacts on your property. Protect yourself from the heat of the fire.”

Here are photos from local observer Maarten Danial of the glum scene in Sydney:

And this is a zoom of the NASA image over the vicinity of Sydney. You can almost see a city (on the coast below the densest white cloud) through all that haze:

See the article here: 

The Worst Wildfires in a Decade Pour Acrid Smoke Over Sydney

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Worst Wildfires in a Decade Pour Acrid Smoke Over Sydney

How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

by GenevieveKunkel Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

What do Somali pirates have to do with climate change?

Not much, except that the threat of the machine-gun slinging bandits has ended critical oceanographic research on the seabed of the Indian Ocean—research that is crucial to our understanding of how and when, exactly, the world’s largest arid region dried out. Climate investigations off the Horn of Africa were suspended just weeks before September 11, 2001, after a scientific vessel, the Maurice Ewing, was attacked with rocket propelled grenades 18 nautical miles off the Somali coast.

But, amazingly, one final research vessel somehow passed through a phalanx of small-craft pirate boats in the Gulf of Aden unscathed.

“It was like the wild west out there,” Columbia University marine geologist Peter B. deMenocal told me in a phone interview. They were getting frequent emergency faxes saying that ships all around them were being attacked. But their vessel was seemingly invisible to the pirates, whose launches they could clearly see.

Continue Reading »

Visit site:

How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

by c7u433n Posted on October 16, 2013

Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

By

Shutterstock

What’s going on out there?

Climate change is scrambling the oceans. It’s raising water temperatures, lowering pH levels, reducing oxygen availability, and driving down the size of wildlife populations the oceans can sustain.

A study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology painstakingly chronicles many of the consequences of marine changes that the researchers describe as “unprecedented” during the last 20 million years:

Our results suggest that the entire world’s ocean surface will be simultaneously impacted by varying intensities of ocean warming, acidification, oxygen depletion, or shortfalls in productivity. Only a very small fraction of the oceans, mostly in polar regions, will face the opposing effects of increases in oxygen or productivity, and almost nowhere will there be cooling or pH increase. …

The social ramifications are also likely to be massive and challenging as some 470 to 870 million people – who can least afford dramatic changes to their livelihoods – live in areas where ocean goods and services could be compromised by substantial changes in ocean biogeochemistry.

It’s not all bad, according to the international team of researchers. Take a look at this chart from the study revealing cumulative net benefits expected by the year 2100 from changes in oceanic temperature (oC), oxygen content (O2), acidity level (pH), and productivity (Pr):

PLOS BiologyCumulative benefits of biogeochemical changes in the oceans to the year 2100. Click to embiggen.

Ah, that was kinda nice, wasn’t it. But if you want to stay in that happy place be sure to not look at the next chart, which, for comparison, reveals the cumulative negative consequences of all those biogeochemical changes:

PLOS BiologyCumulative negative impacts of biogeochemical changes in the oceans to the year 2100. Click to embiggen.

Yikes, that thing has more warning colors than a poison dart frog.

We’ll leave the final word for the researchers: “These results underline the need for urgent mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions if degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardship are to be prevented.”


Source
Biotic and Human Vulnerability to Projected Changes in Ocean Biogeochemistry over the 21st Century, PLOS Biology

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Food

View post – 

Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

The Food & Drink Issue: The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

by Myrna Posted on October 16, 2013

The Giant Pacific Octopus is, in the words of a Seattle conservationist, a “glamour animal.” It is also tasty. Therein lies the conflict. Original post: The Food & Drink Issue: The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle ; ;Related ArticlesEditorial: The Disappearing MooseAn American Shutdown Reaches the Earth’s EndAiling Occupants of the Bronx Zoo Get Sophisticated Medical Care ;

Read article here – 

The Food & Drink Issue: The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

Posted in alo, Casio, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Food & Drink Issue: The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

A Trip Through the Desert of Israeli Democracy

by mAskasieie45gg Posted on October 14, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

From the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seamlessly blended frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews “bludgeoned” and “left for dead” by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at US and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu’s gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the US, alienating even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country’s policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.

Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, “Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations at China’s Tiananmen Square, when the world’s attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented.”

Now the country’s top official, Netanyahu has updated the smokescreen strategy. While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to “concentrate” them in state-run, reservation-style townships. Authored by Netanyahu’s planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, and passed by a majority of the members of the mainstream Israeli political parties in the Knesset, the Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).

Expulsions in the Desert

On September 9th, I visited Umm al-Hiran, a village that the state of Israel plans to wipe off the map. Located in the northern Negev Desert, well behind the Green Line (the 1949 armistice lines that are considered the starting point for any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) and inside the part of Israel that will be legitimized under a US-brokered two-state solution, the residents of Umm al-Hiran are mobilizing to resist their forced removal.

In the living room of a dusty but impeccably tidy cinderblock home on the outskirts of the village, Hajj al-Ahmed, an aging sheikh, described to a group of colleagues from the website Mondoweiss and me the experience of the 80,000 Bedouin living in what are classified as “unrecognized” villages. The products of continuous dispossession, many of these communities are surrounded by petrochemical waste dumps and have been transformed into cancer clusters, while state campaigns of aerial crop destruction and livestock eradication have decimated their sources of subsistence.

Although residents like al-Ahmed carry Israeli citizenship, they are unable to benefit from the public services that Jews in neighboring communities receive. The roads to unrecognized villages like Umm al-Hiran are lined with electric wires, but the Bedouins are barred from connecting to the public grid. Their homes and mosques have been designated “illegal” constructions and are routinely marked for demolition. And now, their very presence on their own land has been placed in jeopardy.

Under the Prawer Plan, the people of Umm al-Hiran will be among the 40,000 Bedouins forcibly relocated to American-Indian-reservation-style towns constructed by the Israeli government. As the fastest growing group among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Bedouins have been designated as an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. “It is not in Israel’s interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev,” said Shai Hermesh, a former member of the Knesset and director of the government’s effort to engineer a “Zionist majority” in the southern desert.

According to the website of the Or Movement, a government-linked organization overseeing Jewish settlement in the Negev, residents of the unrecognized villages will be moved to towns constructed “to concentrate the Bedouin population.” In turn, small Jews-only communities will be constructed on the remnants of the evicted Bedouin communities. They will be guaranteed handsome benefits from the Israeli government and lavish funding from private pro-Israel donors like the billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ron Lauder. “The United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West,” Lauder has declared. “For Israel, that land is the Negev.”

When I met al-Ahmed, he described a group of 150 strangers who had suddenly appeared at the periphery of his village the previous day. From a hilltop, he said, they had surveyed the land and debated which parcels each of them would receive after the Prawer Plan was complete. Al-Ahmed called them “the Jews in the woods.”

Several hundred meters east of Umm al-Hiran lies the Yattir Forest, a vast grove in the heart of the desert planted by the para-governmental Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1964. The JNF’s director at the time, Yosef Weitz, had headed the governmental Transfer Committee that orchestrated the final stages of Palestinian removal in 1948. For Weitz, planting forests served a dual strategic purpose: those like Yattir near the Green Line were to provide a demographic buffer between Jews and Arabs, while those planted atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas would prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. As he wrote in 1949, once Israel’s Jewish majority had been established through mass expulsion, “The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee Palestinian Arab owners.”

As darkness came to the desert, I set out with my colleagues into the piney woods of Yattir. In a small car, we wound along its unlit roads until we reached a gate bristling with barbed wire. This was the settlement-style village of Hiran—”the Jews in the woods,” as al-Ahmed had put it. We called out into the night until the gate was opened. Then we parked in the middle of a compound of trailer homes. Like a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, the hard-bitten Imperial Russian territory once reserved for Jewish residency, the place exuded a sense of suspicion and siege.

A bearded religious nationalist stepped out of an aluminum-sided synagogue and met us at a group of picnic benches. His name was Af-Shalom and he was in his thirties. He was not, he said, permitted to speak until a representative from the Or Movement arrived. After a few uncomfortable minutes and half a cigarette, however, he began to hold forth. He sent his children, he told us, to school over the Green Line in the settlement of Susiya, just eight minutes away on an Israelis-only access road. He then added that the Bedouins were “illegals” occupying his God-given land and would continue to take it over unless they were forcibly removed. Just as Af-Shalom was hitting his stride, Moshe, a curt Or Movement representative who refused to give his last name, arrived to escort us out without a comment.

“The World’s Biggest Detention Center”

Only a few kilometers from Umm al-Hiran, in the southern Negev Desert and inside the Green Line, the state of Israel has initiated another ambitious project to “concentrate” an unwanted population. It is the Saharonim detention facility, a vast matrix of watchtowers, concrete blast walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras that now comprise what the British Independent has described as “the world’s biggest detention center.”

Originally constructed as a prison for Palestinians during the First Intifada, Saharonim was expanded to hold 8,000 Africans who had fled genocide and persecution. Currently, it is home to at least 1,800 African refugees, including women and children, who live in what the Israeli architectural group Bikrom has called “a huge concentration camp with harsh conditions.”

Like the Bedouins of the Negev’s unrecognized villages, the 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers who live in Israel have been identified as a demographic threat that must be purged from the body of the Jewish state. In a meeting with his cabinet ministers in May 2012, Netanyahu warned that their numbers could multiply tenfold “and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” It was imperative “to physically remove the infiltrators,” the prime minister declared. “We must crack down and mete out tougher punishments.”

In short order, the Knesset amended the Infiltration Prevention Act it had passed in 1954 to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever reuniting with the families and property they were forced to leave behind in Israel. Under the new bill, non-Jewish Africans can be arrested and held without trial for as long as three years. (Israel’s Supreme Court has invalidated the amendment, but the government has made no moves to enforce the ruling, and may not do so.) The bill earmarked funding for the construction of Saharonim and a massive wall along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Arnon Sofer, a longtime Netanyahu advisor, also urged the construction of “sea walls” to guard against future “climate change refugees.”

“We don’t belong to this region,” Sofer explained.

Continue Reading »

Link – 

A Trip Through the Desert of Israeli Democracy

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Trip Through the Desert of Israeli Democracy

Can America Survive Parliamentary Norms in a Presidential System?

by Laura Posted on October 14, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’ve written before that America is in danger of adopting de facto parliamentary rule, but within a presidential system that never developed the parliamentary norms to make this work. A regular reader emailed this weekend to ask a very basic question: what does this mean? How does a parliamentary system work, anyway?

I’m reluctant to take this on, because there are lots of different kinds of parliamentary systems and lots of subtleties about how they work. Still, at the risk of being inundated with comments about all the stuff I’m leaving out, maybe it’s worth providing a really simple primer about this.

Roughly speaking, in a parliamentary system there’s only a single house of the legislature. (If there are two, the upper house usually has very limited powers these days.) As a voter, the only thing you do in an election is vote for a member of parliament for your district. Whichever party wins the most seats is the winner of the election.

There’s no president in this system.1 The leader of the winning party becomes prime minister and forms a government. Party discipline, in most cases, is absolute. The party leadership submits legislation to implement its campaign platform, and every member of the party is expected to vote for it. Thus, the kind of gridlock we suffer from is very rare: the prime minister and his or her cabinet always have a majority of the votes in parliament, so they can be assured that their platform will be implemented exactly as they want it to be. Only in rare cases will members of the majority party decline to support the leadership on an important vote. When this happens, it’s taken as a vote of “no confidence” in the government and a new election is held.

The advantage of a parliamentary system is accountability: the parties run on their platforms, and the winning party always has the authority to implement its platform. If the voters don’t like it, they can throw the bums out at the next election. The biggest drawback, probably, is the difficulty of forming a government if no single party wins a majority. In this case, the party that won the most seats typically tries to form a coalition with other likeminded parties. As you can imagine, coalitions can be fairly fragile, and if they fall apart too often you can end up with frequent elections and pretty chaotic governance.

That’s the nickel explanation. So what’s this business about “de facto parliamentary rule” in the United States? The key issue here is party discipline. In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties had fairly weak discipline. It was common for Republicans and Democrats to defect to the other side on particular votes, and this kind of horse-trading allowed us to muddle along fairly well even when Congress and the president were of different parties.

Today, that’s changed. Like a parliamentary system, we have pretty tight party discipline with virtually no defections. That works fine if you actually have a parliamentary system, where the majority party always has the power to pass laws and implement its platform. And the existence of no-confidence votes provides an escape valve that allows early elections if the government fails in some spectacular way or public opinion changes dramatically.

But strict party discipline doesn’t work so well in a presidential system like ours. There’s no formal mechanism to force agreement between a Congress and a president of opposite parties, so when traditional horse-trading disappears you have a recipe for gridlock. Nor is there an equivalent of a no-confidence vote. If the government is gridlocked, you’re out of luck until the next scheduled election.

Parliamentary systems with strict party discipline work fine because the rules are set up to accommodate that. Presidential systems with weak party discipline can also work fine because informal horse-trading between the parties usually allows everyone to cobble together a working compromise of some kind. But a presidential system with parliamentary-style strict party discipline? Not so good. This is why it’s rare for presidential systems to endure.

Ours is the exception, having endured for over two centuries. But the development of strict party discipline over the past couple of decades has put us in a dangerous position. One way or another, governments have to work. Right now, ours doesn’t, and something has to give. But what?

1Actually, there is, sometimes. But it’s usually a fairly minor post with mostly ceremonial powers.

See original article here: 

Can America Survive Parliamentary Norms in a Presidential System?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Can America Survive Parliamentary Norms in a Presidential System?

What You Need to Know About The Massive Cyclone Heading Towards India

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on October 12, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Cyclone Phailin NOAA

By Saturday afternoon, a massive cyclone currently traveling across the Bay of Bengal is expected to hit the coast of India. The government has evacuated more than a quarter million people to prepare for the storm, named Cyclone Phailin (pronounced: phie-lin), which it expects to cause massive power outages, floods, and damage to homes in the region. Here are some facts on the storm, and what’s ahead:

How bad is this storm?

The India Meteorological Department describes Phailin as a “very severe” storm, and the National Center for Atmospheric research rates it as a Category 5. It’s expected to hit the coast with winds up to 137 miles per hour, 9.8 or more inches of rain, and storm surges up to 11.5 feet. For reference, the storm surge in the Battery in New York City during Superstorm Sandy peaked at 9.2 feet, and the surge in nearby Kings Point, NY was 12.7 feet according to the Weather Channel. The India Meteorological Department predicts “extensive damage” to houses made from hay and mud, which are common in the region, as well as flooding, power outages, traffic disruption, and “the flooding of escape routes” in areas affected by the cyclone.

Writing at Quartz, meteorologist Eric Holthaus thinks that Cyclone Phailin could be more damaging than current estimates (emphasis added):

At one point (2 am Friday, India time), one satellite-based measure of Phailin’s strength estimated the storm’s central pressure at 910.2 millibars, with sustained winds of 175 mph (280 kph). If those numbers were verified by official forecast agencies, they would place Phailin on par with 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, and break the record for the most intense cyclone in Indian Ocean recorded history.

To get a sense of the size of the storm, this satellite image from the University of Wisconsin shows the cyclone, which appears to be about half the size of India.

Where is it heading?

Cyclone Phailin will primarily hit two states on the eastern coast of India, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, and is expected to cause heavy rainfalls in a third, West Bengal. Low-lying areas near the coast, which is dotted with small fishing towns, are expected to be damaged by the storm surge. Reuters reports that the Indian government has made an effort to evacuate people, though not all of them are willing to leave:

Some 260,000 people were moved to safer ground and more were expected to be evacuated by the end of the day, authorities in the two states said. Not everybody was willing to leave their homes and belongings, and some villagers on the palm-fringed Andhra Pradesh coast said they had not been told to evacuate.

“Of course I’m scared, but where will I move with my family?” asked Kuramayya, 38, a fisherman from the village of Bandharuvanipeta, close to where the hurricane is expected to make to landfall, while 3.5-metre (12-foot waves) crashed behind him. “We can’t leave our boats behind.”

What’s the difference between a cyclone and a hurricane?

There isn’t one. Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon, but they have different names depending on where they occur. (This National Geographic article has a complete breakdown of storm names by region.)

Do cyclones hit India often?

Bangladesh and the eastern coast of India have a history of devastating cyclones. According to Weather Underground‘s history of cyclones in the region, “most of the deadliest tropical storms on earth have occurred in the Bay of Bengal when tremendous storm surges have swamped the low-lying coastal regions of Bangladesh, India, and Burma.” Of Weather Underground‘s list of the 35 deadliest storms on record, 26 of them occurred in the Bay of Bengal.

As cyclone Phailin heads towards land, the Hindu Times reports that many people are recalling the massive Cyclone 05B, often referred to as the Odisha cyclone, that hit the area in 1999 and killed nearly 10,000 people.

Read this article: 

What You Need to Know About The Massive Cyclone Heading Towards India

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What You Need to Know About The Massive Cyclone Heading Towards India

Deadly Cyclone Hits India

by maciao85 Posted on October 12, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Cyclone Phailin NOAA

UPDATE 10:45 a.m. PT, Sunday, October 13, 2013: According to CNN, in India’s Odisha state, which was battered this weekend by Cyclone Phailin, “at least 13 people were killed after trees fell and walls collapsed when the storm hit, Police Chief Prakash Mishra said. Another death was confirmed in Andhra Pradesh state, India’s disaster management authority said. Many had feared the death toll would be higher. Massive evacuation efforts helped limit the number of casualties, officials said.”

UPDATE 7:30 p.m. PT, Saturday, October 12, 2013: Cyclone Phailin made landfall on Saturday night around 9 pm local time, according to the Times of India. “Broken glass pieces, wood shreds and asbestos sheets flew like killer projectiles in the adjoining cities of Gopalpur and Berhampur,” the Times reported. An estimated 12 million people were in the storm’s path by the time it made landfall, with wind speeds around the predicted 130 miles per hour. 18 fishermen were stuck at sea when the cyclone hit, according to the Times. As the sun rises in India Sunday morning, the country will begin assessing the damage.

By Saturday afternoon, a massive cyclone currently traveling across the Bay of Bengal is expected to hit the coast of India. The government has evacuated more than a quarter million people to prepare for the storm, named Cyclone Phailin (pronounced: phie-lin), which it expects to cause massive power outages, floods, and damage to homes in the region. Here are some facts on the storm, and what’s ahead:

How bad is this storm?

The India Meteorological Department describes Phailin as a “very severe” storm, and the National Center for Atmospheric research rates it as a Category 5. It’s expected to hit the coast with winds up to 137 miles per hour, 9.8 or more inches of rain, and storm surges up to 11.5 feet. For reference, the storm surge in the Battery in New York City during Superstorm Sandy peaked at 9.2 feet, and the surge in nearby Kings Point, NY was 12.7 feet according to the Weather Channel. The India Meteorological Department predicts “extensive damage” to houses made from hay and mud, which are common in the region, as well as flooding, power outages, traffic disruption, and “the flooding of escape routes” in areas affected by the cyclone.

Writing at Quartz, meteorologist Eric Holthaus thinks that Cyclone Phailin could be more damaging than current estimates (emphasis added):

At one point (2 am Friday, India time), one satellite-based measure of Phailin’s strength estimated the storm’s central pressure at 910.2 millibars, with sustained winds of 175 mph (280 kph). If those numbers were verified by official forecast agencies, they would place Phailin on par with 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, and break the record for the most intense cyclone in Indian Ocean recorded history.

To get a sense of the size of the storm, this satellite image from the University of Wisconsin shows the cyclone, which appears to be about half the size of India.

Where is it heading?

Cyclone Phailin will primarily hit two states on the eastern coast of India, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, and is expected to cause heavy rainfalls in a third, West Bengal. Low-lying areas near the coast, which is dotted with small fishing towns, are expected to be damaged by the storm surge. Reuters reports that the Indian government has made an effort to evacuate people, though not all of them are willing to leave:

Some 260,000 people were moved to safer ground and more were expected to be evacuated by the end of the day, authorities in the two states said. Not everybody was willing to leave their homes and belongings, and some villagers on the palm-fringed Andhra Pradesh coast said they had not been told to evacuate.

“Of course I’m scared, but where will I move with my family?” asked Kuramayya, 38, a fisherman from the village of Bandharuvanipeta, close to where the hurricane is expected to make to landfall, while 3.5-metre (12-foot waves) crashed behind him. “We can’t leave our boats behind.”

What’s the difference between a cyclone and a hurricane?

There isn’t one. Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon, but they have different names depending on where they occur. (This National Geographic article has a complete breakdown of storm names by region.)

Do cyclones hit India often?

Bangladesh and the eastern coast of India have a history of devastating cyclones. According to Weather Underground‘s history of cyclones in the region, “most of the deadliest tropical storms on earth have occurred in the Bay of Bengal when tremendous storm surges have swamped the low-lying coastal regions of Bangladesh, India, and Burma.” Of Weather Underground‘s list of the 35 deadliest storms on record, 26 of them occurred in the Bay of Bengal.

As cyclone Phailin heads towards land, the Hindu Times reports that many people are recalling the massive Cyclone 05B, often referred to as the Odisha cyclone, that hit the area in 1999 and killed nearly 10,000 people.

This article is from: 

Deadly Cyclone Hits India

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Deadly Cyclone Hits India

6 Ways the World Is Reacting to the Shutdown and Debt Ceiling

by paczaizmon Posted on October 11, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The government shutdown and the threat of default are making Americans angry, and for good reason. As it turns out, a bunch of foreign governments and international political movements aren’t too happy about our political situation, either. Here are some of the powerful people abroad who are shaking their heads—if they’re not straight-up laughing at us.

1. China is very worried about the whole debt-ceiling thing. Beijing is “naturally concerned about developments in the US fiscal cliff,” Zhu Guangyao, China’s vice finance minister, told reporters, adding that it is Washington’s “responsibility” to not default and ruin Chinese investments. China holds $1.28 trillion in US Treasuries.

2. So is Japan. China and Japan are the two biggest foreign creditors of the US. So they are pulling hard for America to raise the debt ceiling from its current $16.7 trillion. “The US must avoid a situation where it cannot pay, and its triple-A ranking plunges all of a sudden,” Taro Aso, Japan’s finance minister, said. “The US must be fully aware that if that happens, the US would fall into fiscal crisis.” Japan holds $1.14 trillion in US Treasuries.

3. An Egyptian government official is inconvenienced. Diplomat and ambassador Mahmoud Karem wasn’t pleased with the incredibly long lines at Washington’s Dulles International Airport that were caused by the government shutdown. “It’s true that two other international flights landed at about the same time, but I would expect Washington to be prepared for that,” he said. “We had to stand in the line for three hours, there was no place for the old people to sit, and children were crying…It was very bad for America’s image.”

4. The Taliban is trolling us. The Taliban—the violent Islamist movement responsible for much bloodshed, many human rights violations, mediocre, chauvinist poetry, and inadvertent falcon conservation—sees the shutdown as another instance of American evil. “The American people should realize that their politicians play with their destinies as well as the destinies of other oppressed nations for the sake of their personal vested interests,” the Taliban said in a statement. “Instead of sucking the blood of their own people…Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars should be utilized for the sake of peace.”

The statement also describes the shutdown-related closure of the Statue of Liberty, and a decline in tourist revenue in Washington, DC.

5. Russia’s Pirate Party wants to help out NASA. Due to the government shutdown, many government websites have gone dark. The Pirate Party of Russia—a political party formed in 2009 dedicated to copyright and patent reform, online privacy rights, and government transparency—wants at least one of them back. Here’s their statement, posted on October 3:

To NASA, USA
from Pirate Party of Russia

Dear Madame/Sir,

We do care about the situation around your web site and the budget crisis in USA. Thereby we would like to offer you bulletproof collocation or dedicated servers on our hosting platform till the end of the crisis. We stand for Internet privacy, and as the result you would not have to worry about programs such as PRISM and other illegal activities of secret services of different countries. Your traffic, your activity and the activity of your users will be in safety.

We love Mars!

Thanks, guys.

6. South Korea’s central bank wants Republicans to knock it off with the shutdown. The Bank of Korea, the South Korean central bank, is similarly agitated about the shutdown and the US debt-ceiling fight. “The global economy will sustain its modest recovery going forward, but the heightening of uncertainties surrounding the US government budget bill and debt ceiling increase,” the BOK statement reads.

View this article: 

6 Ways the World Is Reacting to the Shutdown and Debt Ceiling

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 Ways the World Is Reacting to the Shutdown and Debt Ceiling