You knew it! Nepal earthquake caused by global warming
The basic story below is that tectonic instability is caused by rainfall variations and that global warming has caused rainfall instability. The first assertion is most implausible but, be that as it may, the theory -- and it is only a theory -- runs up against the fact that there has been no global warming for 18 years. So global warming did not cause the rainfall variations. Something that does not exist cannot cause anything. Rainfall is highly variable naturally so Occams Razor tells us that there was no need to invoke global warming anyway
The untold - and terrifying - story behind the earthquake that devastated Nepal last Saturday morning begins with something that sounds quite benign. It's the ebb and flow of rainwater in the great river deltas of India and Bangladesh, and the pressure that puts on the grinding plates that make up the surface of the planet.
Recently discovered, that causal factor is seen by a growing body of scientists as further proof that climate change can affect the underlying structure of the Earth.
Because of this understanding, a series of life-threatening "extreme geological events" - earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis - is predicted by a group of eminent geologists and geophysicists including University College London's Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards.
"Climate change may play a critical role in triggering certain faults in certain places where they could kill a hell of a lot of people," says Professor McGuire. Some of his colleagues suspect the process may already have started.
It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood apocalypse-fest - indeed the movie 2012 featured the Earth's crust collapsing after a rapid heating of the Earth's core. The mechanism here is rather more mundane, though potentially no less devastating.
Evidence from the end of the last Ice Age has already shown that the planet's uneasy web of seismic faults - cracks in the crust like the one that runs along the Himalayas - are very sensitive to the small pressure changes brought by change in the climate. And a sensitive volcano or seismic faultline is a very dangerous one.
The disappearing ice, sea-level rise and floods already forecast for the 21st century are inevitable as the earth warms and weather patterns change - and they will shift the weight on the planet. Professor McGuire calls this process "waking the giant" - something that can be done with just a few gigatonnes of water in the right - or wrong - place.
"These stress or strain variations - just the pressure of a handshake in geological terms - are perfectly capable of triggering a quake if that fault is ready to go," he tells Newsweek.
Any schoolchild geographer knows the underlying cause of earthquakes like that in Nepal: it is the uneasy grinding of the continent-sized plates that float over the Earth's molten core. This process that went into overdrive when the ice sheets started withdrawing 20,000 years ago, destablising the "mantle". The latest event in that endless process came just before midday local time on the 25 April, when the section that holds up India slipped under the Eurasian plate.
The effects were immediate and horrific - buildings collapsed over the region, leaving nearly 4,000 dead and many more injured. As Newsweek went to press, huge aftershocks were causing more chaos.
But the quake was widely predicted. The Himalayas themselves are the collateral damage of the endless shoving match between the two parts of the Asian continent. Earthquakes in Nepal have been charted for at least 700 years, and this one was an almost exact repeat of a 1934 event that killed 16,000 people in Nepal and northern India. Mahatma Gandhi, after visiting the stricken communities, said it was a providential punishment on Indians for failing to do away with the caste system.
What neither Gandhi nor 1930s scientists knew was that the rain that fills the huge rivers that rise in the Himalayas and run down to the Sea of Bengal is a crucial part of this process. Dr Pierre Bettinelli was the scientist who in 2007 first showed how this vast flush of rainwater, second only to that of the Amazon basin, affects earthquakes in the Himalayas. He spoke to Newsweek from a base in the Algerian desert where he is researching the effects of oil-well drilling - another man-made cause of earthquake.
"Imagine a piece of wood on water - that's the Indian plate - push down on it with your foot and you create compression, disturbance, in the water beside it. That you see in the increased number of seismic events at the edge of the plate."
The Himalayas bordering Nepal are the result of an endless shoving match between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, a natural phenomenon which can have devastating consequences.Newsweek Europe
With this insight - which has been generally accepted by scientists in the field - Bettinelli explained the seasonal differences in occurrence of earthquakes in the Himalayas. Quite simply, the coming and going of the weight of the monsoon rains was causing energy to build up at the edge of the plate.
"This effect could certainly have made the Nepal earthquake come sooner," says Professor Roland Burgmann, of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Meanwhile, of course, climate change has been shown to be causing enormous and disturbing changes in the size and shape of the South Asian monsoon, while human tampering has played a part in floods.
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Pacific Ocean far warmer than normal – NOT our fault
Volcanoes at work?
By Robert W. Felix
Record heat on the West Coast, record cold and snow on the East Coast, fish swimming into new waters, and hungry seals washing up on California beaches.
All of this and more can be blamed on a huge ‘blob’ of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 F) above normal, says a University of Washington news release.
According to climate scientist Nick Bond at the University of Washington, the “warm anomaly” is behind California’s ongoing warm and dry winters.
Discovered in the fall of 2013, the area of super-heated water is roughly 1,000 miles in each direction, about 300 feet deep, and is about 3øC (5øF) warmer normal for that part of the Pacific ocean, according to Bond.
Bond, who coined the term "the blob" last June in his monthly newsletter as Washington state climatologist, said as air passes over the huge patch of warm water it brings more heat and less snow to coastal areas, which helped cause drought conditions in California, Oregon and Washington.
Brings very cold, wet air to the central and eastern states
The blob’s influence may reach much farther inland- possibly including the last two brutal winters in the eastern U.S.
A separate study by UW professor of atmospheric sciences Dennis Hartmann explores the relationship between the warm anomaly and the cold 2013-14 winter in the central and eastern United States.
Hartmann found a decadal-scale pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean and North Pacific that brings warm and dry air to the West Coast and very cold, wet air to the central and eastern states.
In a blog post last month, Hartmann focused on the winter of 2014-15 and argued that, once again, the root cause was surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.
Second only to El Ni¤o
That pattern seems to have become stronger since about 1980, and lately become second only to El Ni¤o in its influence on global weather patterns, says Hartmann.
Today, the blob is still out there, “squished up against the coast and extending about 1,000 miles offshore from Mexico up through Alaska, with water about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal.”
Not exactly a small “blob”
The media may call it a “blob,” but please note that the “warm anomaly” is not only 1,000 miles wide, it is also 1,000 miles long.
Multiply 1,000 by 1,000, and you come to the startling realization that this monster patch of warmer-than-normal water covers one-million square miles.
Enabling “warmest year on record” pronouncements
I think NASA is using this huge area of super-heated water to bolster its deceptive “warmest year on record” pronouncements.
Remember if you will, NASA’s claim that 2014 was the warmest year on record. Now, NOAA claims that we just endured the warmest March on record.
How did NASA and NOAA come up with those claims? Because both of these politically motivated entities use globally averaged temperature taken over both the land and the oceans. Yes, both the land and the oceans.
Look at a globe. The world’s oceans cover almost 71% of our planet. No wonder the numbers are skewed.
Parts of the oceans now warmest on record -- and again, it is NOT caused by humans
But it gets worse. Not only are large portions of the oceans much warmer than normal, they are the warmest on record, according this map from NOAA. (The areas in bright red are the warmest on record, says NOAA.)
Bond, along with co-authors Meghan Cronin, Nate Mantua and Howard Freeland, believe the warm anomaly was created when a high-pressure system got stuck over the blob’s location, allowing the ocean water to stay calmer and warmer.
Megaplumes
But I’m more inclined to agree with geologist James Kamis, who thinks the blob has all the characteristics of a megaplume. Megaplumes are massive underwater vents – underwater volcanoes, in other words – that spew vast amounts of heat into the ocean.
Kamis thinks the giant cell of warm water, heated by submarine volcanoes, is altering normal California climate patterns and inducing a long term drought.
Not only do I agree with Kamis, but I take it one step further. I fear that this super-heated cell of warm water could lead us into the next ice age. And that is exactly what I say in Not by Fire but by Ice.
As underwater volcanoes heat the seas, ever more moisture rises into the skies. If those skies have been cooled by above-water volcanoes – presto! – you have the recipe for a new ice-age. Warmer seas and colder skies . . . a deadly combination.
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Interesting admission from Scripps Institution of Oceanography: Arctic Sea Ice Loss Likely To Be Reversible
Scenarios of a sea ice tipping point leading to a permanently ice-free Arctic Ocean were based on oversimplified arguments
New research by Till Wagner and Ian Eisenman, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, resolves a long-running debate over irreversible Arctic sea ice loss.
Ever since the striking record minimum Arctic sea ice extent in 2007, the ominous scenario of a sea ice tipping point has been a fixture in the public debate surrounding man-made climate change and a contingency for which Arctic-bordering countries have prepared.
For decades, scientists have been concerned about such a point of no return, beyond which sea ice loss is irreversible. This concern was supported by mathematical models of the key physical processes (known as process models) that were believed to drive sea ice changes. The process models forecasted that increased global warming would push the Arctic into an unstoppable cascade of melting that ceases only when the ocean becomes ice-free.
Implications of a permanently ice-free Arctic for the environment and for national and economic security are significant, driving deep interest in predictive capabilities in the region.
Wagner and Eisenman's research was co-funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and by the National Science Foundation. It supports the goals of the Navy's U.S. Arctic Roadmap, which calls for an assessment of changes in the Arctic Ocean to clarify the national security challenges for future naval operations as this strategic region becomes increasingly accessible.
"The Navy has broad interest in the evolution of the Arctic," said the ONR's Frank Herr. "Sea ice dynamics are a critical component of the changing environmental picture. Our physical models lack important details on the processes controlling ice formation and melting, thus ONR is conducting a series of experimental efforts on sea ice, open water processes, acoustics, and circulation."
During the past several years, scientists using global climate models (GCMs) that are more complex than process models found sea ice loss in response to rising greenhouse gases in their computer simulations is actually reversible when greenhouse levels are reduced.
"It wasn't clear whether the simpler process models were missing an essential element, or whether GCMs were getting something wrong," said Wagner, the lead author of the study. "And as a result, it wasn't clear whether or not a tipping point was a real threat."
Wagner and Eisenman resolve this discrepancy in the study in an upcoming Journal of Climate article, "How Climate Model Complexity Influences Sea Ice Stability."
They created a model that bridged the gap between the process models and the GCMs, and they used it to determine what caused sea ice tipping points to occur in some models but not in others.
"We found that two key physical processes, which were often overlooked in previous process models, were actually essential for accurately describing whether sea ice loss is reversible," said Eisenman, a professor of climate dynamics at Scripps Oceanography. "One relates to how heat moves from the tropics to the poles and the other is associated with the seasonal cycle. None of the relevant previous process modeling studies had included both of these factors, which led them to spuriously identify a tipping point that did not correspond to the real world."
"Our results show that the basis for a sea ice tipping point doesn't hold up when these additional processes are considered," said Wagner. "In other words, no tipping point is likely to devour what's left of the Arctic summer sea ice. So if global warming does soon melt all the Arctic sea ice, at least we can expect to get it back if we somehow manage to cool the planet back down again."
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Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong
By Alan Caruba
I have devoted the better part of more than two and a half decades speaking out against the charlatans that have created and maintained the greatest hoax ever imposed on modern man. At the heart of this hoax has been the United Nations environmental program and at the heart of that program is an agenda to initiate a massive redistribution of wealth from industrialized, successful nations to those who have suffered, as often as not, from being ruled by despots of one description or another.
It is with profound sorrow and disappointment that I must now speak out against Pope Francis, the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, whom observers have noted has "a green agenda." He has become an outspoken advocate on environmental issues, saying that taking action is "essential to faith" and calling the destruction of nature a modern sin.
Before proceeding, let me note that I am not Catholic. My thoughts regarding the Pope are rooted in my knowledge of the long record of lies, false predictions, and claims by various environmentalists over the years.
When the Vatican announced it would hold a conference on April 28 called "Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development", I wondered why the Vatican is not holding a conference to organize the protection of Christians-particularly in the Middle East-against the wholesale genocide that is occurring. The Pope is not alone in this. There appears to be little urgency in addressing a threat comparable to the Holocaust of the last century that consigned six million Jews to death for being Jews.
I frankly do not know what is meant by "the moral dimensions of climate change." Climate change is something that was occurring long before there was a human population on planet Earth. It is the measurement of the previous global cycles through which the Earth has passed for billions of years. It is profoundly natural. Applying a moral dimension to it makes no sense whatever.
As for "sustainable development", that is a term that environmentalists use to deny any development that benefits the human population.
Environmentalism is deeply opposed to the use of any energy resource, coal, oil, natural gas, as well as other elements of the Earth we use to enhance and improve our lives with habitat of every description from a hut to a skyscraper. Over the last five thousand years we have gone from being largely dependent on wood to the use of fossil fuel energy that keeps us safe against nature-blizzards, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, et cetera.
At the heart of environmentalism, however, is a deep disdain and antagonism to the human race. From its earliest advocates, one can find allusions to humanity as "a cancer" on the Earth. The Catholic Church has been an advocate for the human race, most notably opposing abortion that kills humans in the womb. Its charitable work is legendary.
To grasp how far the conference is from the most basic beliefs of Catholicism, one need only take note of the persons scheduled to speak. They include the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, the leader of the institution in which the hoax of global warming was created and advanced. Another is Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, another voice for global warming
The Green's response to the voices of those scientists who courageously spoke out to debunk their lies has been to denounce and try to silence them. There is no science to support the global warming hoax.
Is there a religious or spiritual aspect to opposing the forthcoming conference and encyclical? One need look no further than Genesis. In a Wall Street Journal commentary, William McGurn drew the lesson that it offers "a reminder that God's creation is meant to serve man-not man the environment.
Quoting Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" concluding that "the Earth is to be worked and that this work and the fruit it bears are also blessed." The spiritual truth to be drawn from this is that man is the steward of the Earth. That does not mean its resources should be abandoned because of bogus claims that the Earth is doomed.
McGurn reminds us that "it is the have-nots who pay the highest price for the statist interventions so beloved the Church of St. Green." There are more than a billion on Earth who do not have any access to electricity which, in addition to hydropower, is generated by coal, oil and natural gas. Lacking the means to deter the impact of insects and weeds on agriculture, much of the Earth's annual crops are lost. Lacking access to the beneficial chemicals that protect humans from the diseases transmitted by insects, millions die needlessly.
The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank is leading the effort to alert people to the dangerous message of the Vatican conference because "many people of faith who are familiar with the science and economics of climate change are worried this event will become a platform for alarmism over a controversial scientific issue" noting that "there is no scientific `consensus' on whether there is any need to reduce mankind's use of fossil fuels."
The conference agenda is "profoundly anti-poor and anti-life" says the Institute. Plainly said, the Vatican conference incomprehensibly would advocate policies whose only result would be the reduction of human life in order to "sustain" the Earth.
"These unnecessary policies would cause the suffering and even death of billions of people. All people of faith should rise up in opposition to such policies."
Says Morano, 'Instead of entering into an invalid marriage with climate fear promoters-a marriage that is destined for an annulment-Pope Francis should administer last rites to the promotion of man-made climate fears and their so-called solutions.
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A 4000-Year History of Climate Change in North Xinjiang, China
Discussing: Zhang, H., Zhang, Y., Kong, Z., Yang, Z., Li, Y. and Tarasov, P.E. 2015. "Late Holocene climate change and anthropogenic activities in north Xinjiang: Evidence from a peatland archive, the Caotanhu wetland". The Holocene 25: 323-332.
Using multi-proxy records -- including data on pollen, charcoal, phytoliths, total nitrogen, total organic carbon and loss-on-ignition from a 268-cm-long sediment core extracted from the Caotanhu wetlands of Xinjiang, China, in August of 2007 -- Zhang et al. (2015) reconstructed a temperature history stretching some four millennia back in time, as indicated by radiocarbon dating of sequential segments of the sediment profile. And what did they thereby find?
The six scientists report that one of what they call the "significant climate events during this period" was the Medieval Warm Period, which held sway from approximately AD 700-1200, and which they say "was also revealed at some other sites in Xinjiang," citing Zhang et al. (2009), as well as Nakai (1972) and Wang and Ji (1995), who had identified "a moderate climate around 700 a BP," which was close to the time of peak temperature in their own reconstruction, which was about 1.3°C higher than what had been the case at any other time over the past 3,000 years (see figure below).
Reconstructed annual temperature of Xinjiang, China. Adapted from Zhang et al. (2015)
In addition, it is worth remembering that at the time of the peak temperature implied by the data of Zhang et al. (2015), the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was only about 280 ppm, whereas that of today is approximately 400 ppm, which is over 40% greater than it was back in the days of the Medieval Warm Period, when it was significantly warmer than it is today (see our Medieval Warm Period Project), which facts clearly demonstrate that none of the level of warmth currently being experienced by the Earth need be attributed to any of the CO2 released to the atmosphere since the dawning of the industrial era.
SOURCE
Note that the Minoan Warm Period (about 3500 years ago) also occurs in this data
Australia: Rogue union on the side of the Warmists
Collusion between two lots of crooks. ETU members get to install a lot of the "sustainable" crap
Thousands of Australian jobs in the renewable energy sector are at risk due to the ongoing failure of the Federal Government to adopt a reasonable renewable energy target, Electrical Trades Union assistant national secretary David Mier has warned.
"The Abbott Government has already destroyed jobs, trashed Australia's renewable energy sector, destabilised the industry and damaged its international reputation with its ideological crusade against renewable energy," Mr Mier said.
"It is time for the Federal Government to pull its finger out and come to the negotiating table on this vitally important matter, before further damage is done.
"We've waited for well over 12 months for Abbott and co to get it together on renewable energy, and they're still quibbling over a matter of 1000 gigawatt-hours. In the interests of industry, workers and the country, they need to make a deal."
Mr Mier said that the Labor Opposition had led the way on the target, maintaining their pre-election promise of a decent renewable energy target and working with industry to form a plan for the future.
"This morning on ABC radio we saw Mr Shorten indicate the ALP was willing to consider accepting 33000 gigawatt-hours if that's what it takes to resolve the impasse, 500 less than what was offered for bi-partisan support last month," he said.
"Labor's offer to take a bipartisan approach to the renewable energy target, in line with the recommendations of the industry, puts the ball firmly in the Federal Government's court.
"The Government can't blame the Senate cross-bench for causing uncertainty, because there is now a clear offer on the table that could pass through the parliament that also comes with industry backing."
Mr Mier said that it was vital for Australia to adopt a progressive and ambitious renewable energy target, in order to take its place among the world's leaders in the sector.
"Let me be clear -the original RET target was appropriate and it has only been the Government's intransigence and incompetence that has led to this point. We need to forge ahead on this issue," he said.
"A deal needs to be done, and it needs to be done now. But then it needs to be improved on, and quickly. "Our jobs, our businesses, and our nation's energy future depends on it."
Press release
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Jim Hansen and his twin
