Wednesday 28 June 2017

Extreme weather and abrupt climate change update -06/27/2017






North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum proclaimed a statewide fire and drought emergency Monday, ordering state agencies to "maintain high levels of readiness."

The executive order activates the State Emergency Operations Plan and authorizes the North Dakota National Guard to activate if needed.

Drought conditions and high winds have created a fire emergency in North Dakota.
The U.S. Drought Monitor report released last week showed 8 percent of the state in extreme drought, 32 percent in severe drought, 27 percent in moderate drought and 33 percent abnormally dry. The conditions have increased the fire risk for North Dakota, with 30 counties issuing emergency declarations, burn bans or other fire restrictions so far.


Arizona is so hot that cactus are dying, food is baking and plastic is melting as record breaking temperatures persist



Areas across Arizona are so hot that cactus are dying, food is baking and plastic is melting.

"Arizona has had record or near-record heat for over a week now," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Ken Clark said.

While the heat will ease this week, temperatures will remain higher than normal, Clark added.

On June 20, 2017, Phoenix hit a new daily heat record at 119 degrees Fahrenheit, surpassing the previous record of 116 F.

A high fire danger is in place due to the blistering heat and occasional wind, according to Clark.



The Hellenic National Meteorological Service warns that temperatures are expected to escalate as high as 45C over the next few days as Greece witnesses the summer's first heatwave.

On Tuesday the heat that started at the end of last week is expected to intensify as temperatures are expected to reach a minimal of 37-38 degrees Celsius on the mainland, while in Athens temperatures will reach 35-36 degrees and western Greece is expecting heavy rains around mid-day.

Also expecting heavy storms on Monday are the areas of Epirus, Sterea, Peloponnese, Western and Central Macedonia.

From Wednesday the mercury will rise even further with temperatures in Athens reaching a minimal of 38 degrees Celsius with areas on the mainland reaching over 40 degrees Celsius.




Scientists have for the first time tracked soot from Canadian wildfires all the way to the Greenland ice sheet, where they found that the dark, sunlight-absorbing particles landed on the ice and had the potential to significantly enhance its melting — pointing to a possible new driver of sea level rise.

It’s the first end-to-end documentation of a process that, it’s feared, could hasten Greenland’s melting in the future — and since the ice sheet could contribute over 20 feet of eventual sea level rise, any such process is one that scientists weigh carefully.

That’s the first time we’ve been able to connect that whole logic chain from, here’s a fire and here’s where it ended up on the ice sheet,” said Chris Polashenski, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory.



Satellites Keep Eye on Huge Crack in Antarctic Ice Shelf

The Larsen C ice shelf is about to calve one of the biggest icebergs on record. The iceberg-to-be is hanging on by a thread, with just eight miles of solid ice standing in the way of a rift that's spent years carving through the ice. Scientists can track the growth of the crack with precision during the summer season by flying over it, but even during the dead of Antarctic night, they're still able to see it clearly thanks to eyes in the sky.

Two European satellites, known as Sentinel-1, criss-cross over the region every six days like clockwork. Their sensors are able to see through clouds and darkness to provide a real-time image of the most-watched patch of ice on the planet.








CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if it should be the cleanest in the world.

But on a cliff above the sea, inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.

For more than two years, the monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has continued into 2017.

Scientists are concerned about the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the 1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from the data that countries compile on their own emissions.

That raises a conundrum: If the amount of the gas that people are putting out has stopped rising, how can the amount that stays in the air be going up faster than ever? Does it mean the natural sponges that have been absorbing carbon dioxide are now changing?


"The climate affects the spread of a mosquito-borne virus in two main ways. First, it plays a crucial role in the geographical distribution of the mosquitos, which can only thrive in the long term if temperature and precipitation levels are high enough. Second, the virus replicates especially quickly in the body of the mosquito if the ambient temperature is high and remains relatively constant over the course of the day. For this reason, the risk of being infected with the Chikungunya virus has – until now – been mainly limited to tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and South America."



The mosquito-borne viral disease Chikungunya is usually found in tropical areas. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm have now discovered how climate change is facilitating the spread of the Chikungunya virus. Even if climate change only progresses moderately – as scientists are currently observing – the risk of infection will continue to increase in many regions of the world through the end of the 21st century. If climate change continues unchecked, the virus could even spread to southern Europe and the United States. The researchers have published their findings in Scientific Reports.


It is the Asian tiger mosquito and yellow fever mosquito that infect humans with the Chikungunya virus. The climate affects the spread of a mosquito-borne virus in two main ways. First, it plays a crucial role in the geographical distribution of the mosquitos, which can only thrive in the long term if temperature and precipitation levels are high enough. Second, the virus replicates especially quickly in the body of the mosquito if the ambient temperature is high and remains relatively constant over the course of the day. For this reason, the risk of being infected with the Chikungunya virus has – until now – been mainly limited to tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and South America.

Utterly flawed process of the IPCC revealed by Guy McPherson



Lightning Sparking More Boreal Forest Fires


A new NASA-funded study finds that lightning storms were the main driver of recent massive fire years in Alaska and northern Canada, and that these storms are likely to move farther north with climate warming, potentially altering northern landscapes.

The study, led by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of California, Irvine, examined the cause of the fires, which have been increasing in number in recent years. There was a record number of lightning-ignited fires in the Canadian Northwest Territories in 2014 and in Alaska in 2015. The team found increases of between two and five percent a year in the number of lightning-ignited fires since 1975.

BangladeshDeclares Lightning Strikes a Disaster as Deaths Surge



FILE - People gather at a local shop during a thunderstorm in the outskirts of Dhaka, Banglaesh. The South Asian country has seen a near-record number of deaths in 2016 from a phenomenon that appears to be worsening with climate change: lightning strikes.




Bangladesh has seen a near-record number of deaths this year from a phenomenon that appears to be worsening with climate change: lightning strikes.

So far this year, 261 people have died from lightning in the country, putting the South Asian nation on track to beat last year's 265 deaths. Most lightning deaths usually occur during the warm months of March to July.
India has seen a similar surge in lightning deaths, with 93 people killed just in the past two days, officials said
The study found that a specific atmospheric event, a snowstorm in late July and early August of 2013, was the critical factor in delivering the soot to the surface of Greenland. Without that storm to bring them down from the atmosphere to the surface, the soot particles could have traveled over the ice sheet at a high altitude and never landed.
A lot of the time, the wind blows from a fire to the ice sheet and the black carbon doesn’t actually end up on the ice sheet,” said Polashenski.

Greenlandnow a major driver of rising seas: study

Ocean levels rose 50 percent faster in 2014 than in 1993, with meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet now supplying 25 percent of total sea level increase compared with just five percent 20 years earlier, researchers reported Monday.
The findings add to growing concern among scientists that the global watermark is climbing more rapidly than forecast only a few years ago, with potentially devastating consequences.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world live in low-lying deltas that are vulnerable, especially when rising seas are combined with land sinking due to depleted water tables, or a lack of ground-forming silt held back by dams.
Major coastal cities are also threatened, while some small island states are already laying plans for the day their drowning nations will no longer be livable.
"This result is important because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)"—the UN science advisory body—"makes a very conservative projection of total sea level rise by the end of the century," at 60 to 90 centimetres (24 to 35 inches), said Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Oxford who did not take part in the research.



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