Wednesday, November 21, 2018


Climate change will make us more likely to wet the bed and may trigger a plague of ticks, snakes and VOLES as 'devastating' droughts and flooding send nature haywire by 2100

Just another speculation-based scare.  I can give you some non-speculation-based information about hot climates.  I was born and bred in the tropics well away from major European population centres and it was WAY hotter there than in those major European population centres.  And guess what?  We lived relaxed and pleasant lives -- so much so that people moved there from cooler climes.  We probably did drink more beer though.

There were indeed more ticks, snakes, spiders, crocodiles, poisonous jellyfish and sharks but we worked out systems for avoiding much in the way of problems with them.  The jellyfish were/are the biggest problem.  But you only get them in the sea


Climate change will make us more likely to wet the bed and trigger a plague of ticks, snakes and voles, research claims.

A rise in 'devastating' droughts, floods, wildfires and other weather events caused by global warming will impact nature in a number of bizarre ways, the study shows.

As emissions increase, society faces a much larger threat from climate change than previously thought, the team from University of Hawaii in Manoa said.

They analysed thousands of scientific papers on climate change, uncovering 467 different ways that greenhouse gases impact life on Earth.

They include an increase in floods, drought, wildfires and hurricanes that the team projects will hit both rich and poor communities.

Some of the stranger effects included changes to animal behaviour, including ticks, snails and snakes.

Rising temperatures will likely alter the distribution of snails in China, pushing them into regions that were previously too cold for them to inhabit.

Snakes and ticks are also heavily impacted by atmospheric temperatures, and countries with low numbers of the creatures could see a rise by 2100.

In Sweden, an invasion of voles in 2007 was attributed to reduced snow cover after an unusually warm winter - similar plague could become more common.

The team behind the new study said warmer temperatures may also cause people to wet the bed more.

Previous research has shown that pregnant women exposed to heavy flooding gave birth to children who wet the bed more, and were aggressive toward other children.

The increasing exposure to the multitude of climate hazards will impact both rich and poor countries - especially in tropical coastal areas.

In the year 2100, New York is expected to face up to four climate hazards, if greenhouse gas emissions are not mitigated.

Sydney and Los Angeles will face three concurrent climate hazards, Mexico City will face four, and the Atlantic coast of Brazil will face five.

The study was co-authored by 23 scientists, including several who are on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and they have released an interactive map of the threats.

SOURCE





Bitter Cold Thanksgiving Will Be Among the Coldest on Record in Parts of the Northeast

After alleged warming going back over 70 years (to 1945) we are still having this?  Exactly where is this alleged warming?

For some Northeast cities, high temperatures on Thanksgiving could be close to the coldest on record no matter what day of the month the holiday was celebrated (e.g. Nov. 22, Nov. 24, Nov. 26, etc.).

The official U.S. Thanksgiving Day has been celebrated the last Thursday of November from 1863 to 1938, the next-to-last Thursday from 1939 to 1941 and the fourth Thursday from 1942 to the present.

New York City has only had three Thanksgivings dating to 1870 when the high temperature failed to rise out of the 20s, according to National Weather Service statistics. The coldest was a high of 26 degrees on Nov. 28, 1901.

Forecast highs Thursday could be near that all-time record-coldest high set almost 117 years ago.

In southern New England, Boston looks increasingly likely to shatter its coldest Thanksgiving high of 24 degrees, also set Nov. 28, 1901.

Providence, Rhode Island, Philadelphia and Burlington, Vermont, are also increasingly likely to see their coldest highs on record for Thanksgiving Day.

Low temperatures Thanksgiving morning and Black Friday will likely be 15 to 30 degrees below average for late November.

The temperature for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City is expected to be in the low 20s. It will feel even colder when you factor in the wind chill, possibly in the single digits.

A low temperature of 20 degrees Thursday morning would also be near the record-coldest Thanksgiving low at New York City's Central Park.

Elsewhere, low temperatures Thursday and Friday mornings will be in the single digits and lower teens across the interior Northeast. Closer to the coast, it will be in the teens or lower 20s.

Wind chills Thanksgiving morning, will be in the teens, perhaps 20s below zero in northern New England and the Adirondacks of upstate New York. Subzero wind chills are possible in parts of southern New England, western and central New York, and northern Pennsylvania, including Boston, Hartford, Providence, Albany and Syracuse.

Daily record lows for Nov. 22 (Thursday) or Nov. 23 (Friday) will likely be broken from parts of New York state and Pennsylvania into New England.

This includes Albany, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island, where the daily record-low temperature Thursday is 9 degrees and 16 degrees, respectively.

Although it will be cold, the air will also be dry, which means there won't be any snowfall to worry about Thursday and Friday.

SOURCE





Trump Announces Major EPA Shakeup

Andrew Wheeler, a former congressional aide and lobbyist who has led the Environmental Protection Agency since his predecessor resigned earlier this year, has gotten President Donald Trump’s nod for the permanent job.

Wheeler’s promotion from acting to permanent EPA chief would keep him as a methodical and effective agent in Trump’s mission of rolling back environmental regulations that the administration regards as excessive and burdensome to business.

A veteran on Capitol Hill, Wheeler worked from 1995 to 2009 as a staffer for Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and then for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“The perfect choice to lead the EPA,” Inhofe tweeted Friday. “Great pick.”

Wheeler later worked as a lobbyist, including for coal giant Murray Energy Corp., which pushed hard at the outset of the Trump administration for coal-friendly policies from the EPA and other agencies.

The grandson of a coal miner, Wheeler told staffers in his first days as the agency’s acting head this summer that he was proud of his roots in coal country. In the acting role, Wheeler has a reputation as a more open and cordial boss for employees than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt was, and for producing regulatory rewrites more likely to stand up to court challenges.

Trump announced his plans for Wheeler almost in passing Friday at a White House ceremony for Presidential Medal of Freedom honorees.

Singling out Cabinet members in the audience at the ceremony, Trump got to Wheeler and said, “Acting administrator, who I will tell you is going to be made permanent.”

“He’s done a fantastic job and I want to congratulate him, EPA, Andrew Wheeler. Where’s Andrew?” Trump continued. “Congratulations, Andrew, great job, great job, thank you very much.”

The White House said Trump was signaling his intent to nominate Wheeler. The nomination would require Senate confirmation. Senators approved Wheeler as the agency’s deputy administrator in a 53-45 vote last April.

Since becoming acting EPA head, Wheeler has advanced proposals that would ease emissions limits for power plants, for cars and for oil and gas facilities, rejecting earlier EPA findings that some of the moves would lead to increased deaths from pollutants.

However, Wheeler also has slowed another Pruitt-era rollback that would have allowed trucks rigged with outdated, dirtier-burning engines to stay on the road.

“Compared to Administrator Pruitt, Mr. Wheeler is better,” Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat and one of the most consistent critics of Trump’s EPA, said Friday in a statement after Trump’s announcement.

“Compared to Administrators Ruckelshaus or Whitman, he’s not doing nearly as well,” Carper added. He was referring to William Ruckelshaus, who was appointed by Richard Nixon to head the EPA in 1970, and Christine Todd Whitman, who was appointed to the post in 2001 by George W. Bush.

“If the president intends to nominate Andrew Wheeler to be the administrator of EPA, then Mr. Wheeler must come before our committee so that members can look at his record as acting administrator objectively to see if any improvements have been made at the agency since he took the helm.”

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Environmental groups condemned the announcement.

“In normal times, a zealous fossil fuel apologist and the top official in charge of protecting children’s health from pollution would be two separate people with conflicting agendas,” Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said in a statement. “But this is the Trump administration, where a former top coal lobbyist could become administrator of the EPA.”

SOURCE





Ice Melt And Sea Level Rise Refute Alarmist Predictions. Again

The year 2018 could mark the beginning of the end of climate change alarmist reporting. Projections of catastrophic melting of the ice sheets and sea level rise swallowing up the Earth’s coasts are increasingly undermined by observations.

Extensive glacier and ice sheet melt resulting in an accelerated sea level rise threatening the world’s population centers living along the coasts is indeed the most legitimate threat posed by a global-scale warming trend.

Alarming sea level rise predictions abound. Several meters of sea level rise due to the catastrophic melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been predicted based on anthropogenic CO2 emissions scenarios.

For example, claims that we shall experience 260 centimeters (2.6 meters or 8.5 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 unless we dramatically curtail our fossil fuel consumption have been published by authors like Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Richard Alley (Garner et al. 2017).

These same authors even suggest seas will rise by 17.5 meters (19.1 yards) in the next 180 years (Mörner et al., 2018).

Despite the hackneyed practice of reporting “staggering” ice sheet melt for both Greenland and Antarctica in recent decades, the two polar ice sheets combined added just 1.5 centimeters (0.6 in) to sea level rise between 1958 and 2014 (graph from Frederikse et al., 2018); global sea levels only rose by “1.5 ± 0.2 mm yr−1 over 1958–2014 (1σ)” or “1.3 ± 0.1 mm yr−1 for the sum of contributors”.

That’s about 7.8 centimeters (3.1 inches) of global sea level change in 56 years.

Even more significantly, satellite observations all across the globe show that the coasts of islands and sandy beaches and continents have not only not been shrinking for the last several decades, but they’ve also been stable to growing on net average.

Along the world’s coasts, there is today more land area above sea level than there was in the mid-1980s (Donchyts et al., 2016), leaving scientists “surprised”.

“We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” said Dr. Baart. “We were able to create more land than sea level rise was taking.”  (BBC press release for Donchyts et al., 2016)

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner – a world-renown sea level expert who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University – and three other co-authors have concluded that sea-level rise projections of 2.6 m by 2100 and 17.5 m by 2300 are “deeply flawed” and “not rooted in facts” (Mörner et al., 2018).

What follows is a very abbreviated summary of the dozens of alarmism-quelling papers published in 2018 pertaining to ice sheet melt, sea level rise, and coastal expansion.

More HERE (See the original for links)




ANOTHER blackout in South Australia

Their "Green" electricity supply is very fragile and easily knocked out by normal wind

Strong wind gusts cut power to thousands of South Australians and whipped up a giant dust cloud over Adelaide as a cold change swept in on Monday evening.

After a 36C day, a southwesterly wind change swept across the Yorke Peninsula towards Adelaide, causing damage across the metropolitan area, Mt Lofty Ranges and parts of the Mid North.

The bureau issued a warning for damaging winds, which was cancelled later on Monday evening.

At the height of the blackout more than 11,000 customers were without power — these were across all the metropolitan area, as well as some towns on the western Eyre Peninsula.

The larger outages included almost 3000 people at Henley Beach, 2000 near Goodwood and 3000 in Somerton Park.

Power is now being restored. Today’s forecast is 20C, with medium chance of showers in the morning.

Accompanying the cool change were high winds of more than 90km/h that brought down trees and power lines.

SOURCE

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