Dozens
flee homes as wildfires rage in Greece, PM urges calm
Forest
fires fanned by strong winds and high temperatures broke out around
Athens and in other parts of southern Greece on Friday, sending
residents fleeing from flames threatening their homes.
Summer
wildfires, though common for the season, heaped additional misery on
the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which is struggling
to obtain a new bailout from foreign credдtors.
The
police said 52 separate fires had broken out on four main fronts in a
region stretching from the island of Evia, northeast of Athens, to
the southern Peloponnese.
A
58-year-old died after inhaling fumes and suffering respiratory
problems but there were no other reports of casualties.
Tsipras
urged calm as more than 140 firefighters with 80 fire engines and 11
aircraft battled the flames near Athens that crept close to homes.
A
neighborhood playground was razed and flames surrounded the local
church. Dozens of people, including elderly women covering their
faces with headscarves, tried to put out the flames with buckets of
water.
"We
all need to stay calm," Tsipras told reporters.
He
said he had asked the air force and armed forces for help and had
also appealed to other European countries for assistance with extra
fire-fighting aircraft.
Forest
fires are common during the summer months in Greece but memories
remain vivid of the huge damage and heavy loss of life in 2007,
during the most serious outbreak in decades.
The
fires started on several fronts was and Defense Minister Panos
Kammenos said arson was possible.
"Armed
forces have been ordered to start patrols throughout Greece, and
particularly in mountainous regions," he said.
Television
footage showed huge plumes of smoke billowing over the town of
Neapolis, with a wall of fire racing down a mountain fanned by very
strong winds. Authorities said three communities in the region were
evacuated.
"Things
are very bad," Peloponnese Governor Petros Tatoulis told state
television. "The situation is critical. We are working to
prevent casualties."
Snow
falls on Mauna Kea summit in July, road closure in effect
While most of Hawaii experiences sweltering conditions this July, part of the Big Island might seem like winter after Mauna Kea got some snow overnight.
Officials
have closed the road to the summit of Mauna Kea Friday after snow
fell and caused icy road conditions. A ranger reported mixed rain and
snow, fog and 1.5 inches of frozen snow on the summit.
It
is not known when the road will reopen to the public.
No
winter weather advisories have been posted at this time.
Mauna
Kea weather varies widely. A calm sunny day may quickly become
treacherous with hurricane force winds and blizzard conditions.
Summit winds above 120 mph are not uncommon. At 10:15 a.m. Friday the
temperature was still a chilly 36 degrees with the wind-chill dipping
to 27 degrees!
Cars
Catch Fire After California Wildfire Jumps Freeway
According to
the San Bernardino County Fire Department the fire was moving at a
“rapid rate.”
A
fast, wind-whipped wildfire swept over a crowded California freeway
Friday, sending drivers running for safety and setting more than a
dozen vehicles ablaze, officials said.
Twenty
vehicles were destroyed and 10 others were damaged after the
wildfire, dubbed the North Fire, jumped Interstate 15 in Cajon Pass
in San Bernardino, officials with San Bernardino National Forest
said. There were no injuries. Fire officials earlier reported that
several motorists suffered smoke inhalation and burns injuries.
The
interstate was packed with weekend getaway traffic when the blaze
broke out near the freeway at around 2:30 p.m. It quickly swelled to
hundreds of acres and strong winds sent the flames sweeping over the
interstate, officials said.
The
fire burned some vehicles and the flames then spread to others,
including a tractor-trailer and a towed boat, and explosions were
seen as some of the vehicles burned.
Firefighters
used helicopters and to try and douse the fires from above, as
firefighters on the ground tried to put out burning vehicles on the
interstate.
By
6 p.m. the fire grown to 3,500 acres, the forest service said. The
blaze burned five homes and threatened 50 others, officials said.
Several
cars were in flames after the rapidly-moving brush fire swept over
Interstate 15. KNBC
California
is in the fourth year of a historic drought, exacerbating wildfire
conditions. Hot, dry winds that gusted up to 40 miles per hour swept
the blaze over the interstate so fast officials couldn't stop
traffic, said Liz Brown, spokesperson for the California Department
of Forestry and Fire Protection.
"It's
so dry that its carrying that fire a lot faster, and put a little
wind on it and this is what we have," she said.
Ambulances
and medical helicopters were sent to the the interstate. San
Bernardino County Fire prepared for a mass casualty event. Interstate
15 is a major thoroughfare from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
Paris,
Jul 16 (EFE) .- Scorching temperatures in France from June 29 to July
5, setting all-time highs in several parts of the country, caused 700
more deaths compared to records from years with milder summers.
Health
Minister Marisol Touraine said on Thursday in a press conference that
this staggering statistic represents a 7 percent increase in the
number of deaths compared to the average during the same dates, minus
the heat wave.
The
minister also noted that 3,580 people had to be treated in emergency
medical centers, representing a three-fold increase from a 'normal
period.'
Touraine
nevertheless noted that the mortality jump could be understood from a
macro perspective as "limited."
NZ
gets 'a battering' from storms
Two
storm systems are forecast to batter the country over the next two
days.
The
first is expected to bring cold winds and snow to low levels in
Fiordland, Southland, Canterbury and Marlborough, with very heavy
snow possible to 300 metres in Otago.
The
second is expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds to most North
Island regions and the top of the South tomorrow, with gale warnings
for Wellington and eastern Marlborough from tonight.
A
heavy rain warning is in place for the Bay of Plenty.
A
DEEP freeze not seen in NSW for at least 20 years has caused havoc on
the roads, closed schools and services, and put Sydney commuters
through one of their coldest mornings on record.
The
apparent temperature in Sydney’s CBD dropped to -1C at 7am today,
believed to be the coldest for the city since hourly wind chill
readings began in the 1990s, with rain exacerbating the discomfort.
Further
west it was snow causing most of the trouble.
More
than 40 schools in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands had to
be closed because of snow.
An
estimated 9500 homes in those regions were without electricity on
Friday morning after snow-laden tree branches hit power lines.
Every
day they update the numbers. And every day, the number of acres
burned in Alaska seems to leap higher yet again.
As
of Monday, it is at 4,447,182.2 acres, according to the Alaska
Interagency Coordination Center — a total that puts the 2015
wildfire season in sixth place overall among worst seasons on record.
It’s very likely to move into fifth place by Tuesday — and it’s
still just mid-July. There is a long way to go.
According
to the Center, 2015 is now well ahead of the rate of burn seen in the
worst year ever, 2004, when 6,590,140 acres burned in 701 fires.
“Fire acreage totals are more than 14 days ahead of 2004,” the
agency notes. In other words, and although the situation could still
change, we may be watching the unfolding of the worst year ever
recorded.
But
it isn’t just Alaska — even more acres have burned this year
across Canada. As of Sunday, 2,924,503.01 hectares had burned in
4,921 fires — and a hectare is much bigger than an acre. In fact,
it’s about 2.47 of them. Thus, some 7,223,522 acres had burned in
Canada as of Sunday. In Canada, too, wildfire activity this year is
well above average levels.
Overall,
the 2015 Canadian and Alaskan fire seasons have seen 11,670,704 acres
burned so far, based on these numbers. (Which are always growing large.)
One
reason that’s so worrisome: Alaska is 80 percent underlain by
permafrost, and Canada is 50 percent underlain by it. These frozen
soils now have a large number of fires burning atop them, and when
permafrost thaws, it can begin to release carbon dioxide and methane
into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. (Fires also worsen
global warming in another way — by releasing huge amounts of carbon
into the air due to the combustion of organic material.
California’s
towering redwood trees are dying of thirst.
“They
require enormous amounts of water,” said Anthony Ambrose, a tree
biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been
studying redwoods and giant sequoias for nearly two decades. “For
the big, old trees, they can use more than 2,000 liters of water per
day during the summer.”
Water,
however, is in increasingly short supply in the Golden State. All
around drought-stricken California, coast redwoods appear to be
suffering. They’re shedding leaves, turning brown, and dropping
undersized cones. Some of the state’s younger trees, situated in
parks and residential areas hundreds of miles away from their native
forests, are even dying.
What
does that mean for the state’s ancient redwood forests, where the
trees are often centuries old and climb hundreds of feet into the
air?
Models
of past eras show that oxygen can influence global temperature and
humidity as its concentration changes
Earth
has a surprising new player in the climate game: oxygen. Even though
oxygen is not a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, its concentration in
our atmosphere can affect how much sunlight reaches the ground, and
new models suggest that effect has altered climate in the past.
Oxygen
currently makes up about 21 percent of the gases in the planet’s
atmosphere, but that level hasn’t been steady over Earth’s
history. For the first couple of billion years, there was little
oxygen in the atmosphere. Then, about 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen
started getting added to the atmosphere by photosynthetic
cyanobacteria. “Oxygen is produced as a waste product of
photosynthesis. It is consumed through respiration,” explains
University of Michigan climate scientist Chris
Poulsen,
lead author of the studypublished
today in Science
Unless
humans slow the destruction of Earth's declining supply of plant
life, civilization like it is now may become completely
unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University
of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
"You
can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very
slowly over billions of years," said the study's lead author,
John Schramski, an associate professor in UGA's College of
Engineering. "The sun's energy is stored in plants and fossil
fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be
replenished."
A
shift in a decadal-scale cycle of Pacific Ocean temperatures could
lead to a spike in global warming the next few years, climate
researchers said after tracking a subsurface layer of unusually warm
water in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The
layer, between 300 and 1,000 feet below the surface, has been
accumulating more heat than previously recognized, according to
climate researchers from UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
who published their finding in the journal Science
Earlier
this week, I wrote about the global coal renaissance — arguably the
most important climate-change story in the world right now. Since
2000, developing countries like China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia
have been building coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace.
On
the upside, this boom has helped these countries lift themselves out
of poverty. But the growth in coal has also meant a surge in global
carbon-dioxide emissions — and if coal continues to be the world's
energy source of choice, we'll have little hope avoiding drastic
global warming.
So
that brings us to the next question: How long will this global coal
boom continue?
NASA
reported
Wednesday that this was the hottest June on record (tied with 1998).
And it’s now all but certain 2015 will be the hottest year on
record, probably by a wide margin — as what increasingly appears to
be one of the strongest El Niños in 50 years boosts the underlying
global warming trend.
Climate expert Dr.
John Abraham amended this NASA chart to show how the first six months
of 2015 compares to the annual temperatures of previous years:
Over
many years, glaciers helped form Greenland’s fjords, those narrow
and deep inlets in the sea that are often surrounded by steep
cliffs and serve as exit routes for the vast ice sheet’s
sea-terminating outlet glaciers.
And, according to
new research, fjords in West Greenland are much deeper than
previously thought. That means the world’s sea levels could rise
faster than anticipated, because those outlet glaciers are more
exposed to warm water. The findings have been peer-reviewed
and accepted for
publication in Geophysical Research Letters. The
shape and depth of fjords have big implications for the ice sheet,
which has been melting both from the top and the bottom andcontains
20
feet of potential sea level rise in total. Warm air erodes ice
above the water, but warmer waters — which reside at deep levels in
some parts of thepolar
regions — undercut glaciers and melt ice from below. “As
they melt faster, they can slide out to sea,” said Eric Rignot,
leader researcher and a glaciologist at the University of California
at Irvine.
It’s
the season when wildfires rage, and this year they’re raging
particularly hard: In June alone, Alaska saw 1.1 million acres go up
in flames. In California, firefighters had responded to 3,381
wildfires by July 11, “1,000 more than the average over the
previous five years,” The New York Times reports in a big feature
on wildfires in the state.
And
that’s likely not a coincidence. A study published this week in
Nature Communications connects worsening wildfire seasons to climate
change, and suggests the trend will continue in the years ahead as
climate change rolls forward. “Wildfires occur at the intersection
of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources,” the study’s
authors write. Of those factors, “weather is the most variable.”
The
study also suggests that wildfires will themselves play a role in
driving climate change, creating a nasty feedback loop. From THE most unlikely source!
An
article in the July 10 edition of Science Magazine on the global mean
sea level has concluded that there is one major factor which is
predicted to outstrip all other reasons for the rise, namely the
melting of both Polar ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. The
research
also points out that in the past warmer polar temperatures were
experienced.
The
article in the recent edition of Science Magazine (July 10) entitled"Sea-level
rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods"
brings two conclusions: firstly that among the various reasons for
Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) rise - expansion of seawater caused by
rising temperatures and the melting of mountain glaciers, the run-off
flowing down into the sea from rivers - the
main one which "is expected to exceed other contributions to
GMSL" is mass loss from the polar ice caps in Greenland and
Antarctica.
A
cyclical pattern
The
research team, led by Andrea Dutton, of the Department of Geological
Sciences, University of Florida, USA, used evidence from interglacial
periods when polar temperatures were greater than today and
correspondingly, the sea level was also higher. The records of sea
levels studied by the team reveal that there was a variation in the
levels due to the influence of various factors.
The
study indicates that today, the academia have
mastered new techniques in deciphering indicators of sea-level
variation,
referring to "advances in our understanding of polar ice-sheet
response to warmer climates" and adds that records indicate
several incidences of warmer periods which have occurred during the
last hundreds of thousands of years.
"This
enables us to infer that during recent interglacial periods, small
increases in global mean temperature and just a few degrees of polar
warming relative to the preindustrial period resulted in ≥6 m of
GMSL rise".
Three-meter,
twenty-foot rise
In
other words, if the climate change is to be what experts
predict, namely a variation in a few degrees Celsius, the sea level
will rise by up to six meters, or eighteen feet.
The impact on coastal areas around the world will be devastating with
entire cities, many of them capital cities, submerged.
The
report underlines this fact: "Our present climate is warming to
a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the
past".
While
further study is needed to make
precise calculations, and while it is now apparent that climate
change and temperature variation are cyclical and follow patterns
over time, it
also seems apparent that the faster the temperature rises, the more
probable it will be to see sharks swimming along the main arteries of
our cities. And crabs crawling along the sidewalks twenty feet below
them, with no sign of Humankind.
Article:
Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm
periods, sciencemag.org edition of July 10 2015 by A. Dutton, A.E.
Carlson, A.J Long, G.A. Milne, P.U. Clark, R. DeConto, B.P. Horton,
S. Rahmstorf and M.E.Raymo
A
bird that mates for life and flies over 6,000 miles for food, the
albatross has seen profound population declines over the past several
decades. It appears now as though a harbinger for its own demise.
Or
take the Fiji petrel, a black, tube-nosed bird that spends almost its
entire life skimming the oceans. The petrel, the albatross and other
birds suffer when the oceans are polluted and overfished and a new
study in PLOS One suggests they are paying a heavy price. Since the
1950s, the study concludes that seabird numbers have dropped by
nearly 70 percent.
"Seabirds
are particularly good indicators of the health of marine ecosystems,"
said University of British Columbia's Michelle Paleczny, a co-author
of the study and a researcher with the Sea Around Us project. "When
we see this magnitude of seabird decline, we can see there is
something wrong with marine ecosystems. It gives us an idea of the
overall impact we're having."
Summer
is upon us, and that means one frightening truth for those living
around the Great Lakes; soon, their water will start turning
disturbing greens, browns, and reds. Soon, signs will start appearing
at your favorite watering holes that advise against swimming. And for
Lake Erie, the worst harmful algae bloom (HAB) ever measured might be
right around the corner.
With El Nino settling
into a strong-to-monstrous mode and with the world now baking under 1
C of global temperature increases since the 1880s, a large swath from
South American through to the Caribbean is suffering from extreme
drought.
One-hundred-and-thirty
people have died in an outbreak of dengue fever in Sao Paulo. More than 460,000
cases have been reported so far this year. The disease is spread
by mosquitoes and the epidemic is blamed on wet weather, and on
storing contaminated water - at a time of water shortages across the
country.
Video:
Forest fire at Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan, 13 July 2015
Everything on expected line - We are in for huge destruction by peaking and falling of energy in accelerated manner - Earth is struggling to sustain her equilibrium at all cost – it is time to Awaken https://www.scribd.com/doc/270257614/What-is-Happening-to-Earth-Its-climate-and-Biosphere-Are-we-Approaching-Sixth-Mass-Extinction
Heavy
snow was experienced around Gisborne earlier this week. Photo: SUPPLIED
/ Nicholas Barclay
Crummer
Street, off Ponsonby Road. Photo: RNZ
/ Sharon Brettkelly
- See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/15-07-2015/131344-sea_level-0/#sthash.BNEmbHEN.dpuf
Everything on expected line - We are in for huge destruction by peaking and falling of energy in accelerated manner - Earth is struggling to sustain her equilibrium at all cost – it is time to Awaken https://www.scribd.com/doc/270257614/What-is-Happening-to-Earth-Its-climate-and-Biosphere-Are-we-Approaching-Sixth-Mass-Extinction
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