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Brazil mourns as flood toll tops 600
BRAZIL has declared three days of mourning for at least 610 people killed near Rio de Janeiro in the country’s worst flood disaster.
Emergency workers in the disaster zone, in the Serrana region just north of Rio, were overwhelmed by the body count. Refrigerator trucks were brought in to store corpses.
Workers transporting bodies said they feared the death toll from last Wednesday’s floods and mudslides could top 1000 as rescuers reached outlying hamlets.
An estimated 14,000 people were assisted by rescue workers or lost their homes in the Serrana area towns hardest hit about 100 kilometres from coastal Rio, civil defence figures showed.
The hardest-hit town was Nova Friburgo, where 274 people were killed. Nearby Teresopolis had 263 dead, 55 were killed in Petropolis and 18 lost their lives in Sumidouro, officials said.
Workers transporting bodies said they feared the death toll could more than double. President Dilma Rousseff declared three days of mourning, government news agency Agencia Brasil reported. Rio de Janeiro state authorities said their state would observe a week of mourning. ”I think in the end we’ll see more than 1000 bodies,” a funeral worker said.
Authorities made an urgent appeal for blood, bottled water, food and medicine.
At least four refrigerated trucks were outside an overflowing makeshift morgue inside a church in Teresopolis.
Flooding, Avalanche Threat Continues Across Northwest
Drenching rainfall from the latest in a series of storms will continue to cause flooding across parts of the Pacific Northwest today.
Another 1 to 3 inches of rain will fall today along the Pacific coast and in the valleys of western Washington and Oregon, including Seattle and Portland. Heavy rain will also douse areas well to the east of the Cascades, across parts of western Washington and Oregon, as well as parts of Idaho.
The rain will fall heaviest during the morning hours before becoming more showery-in-nature by tonight.
Regardless of intensity, any additional rainfall will only exasperate ongoing flooding, which could make for slow travel along the I-5 corridor south to Medford. Motorists should always avoid driving through areas where water is ponding.
Higher rainfall totals are likely in the upslope areas of the Cascades. River flooding is already ongoing along rivers flowing off the mountains, including the Cowlitz, Nisqually and Puyallup Rivers. Read more…
Chinese President Hu Disses the Dollar; Says U.S. System is a ‘Product of the Past’
“The current international currency system is the product of the past,” Hu noted in answers to questions submitted to his foreign ministry office by The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
BEIJING—Chinese President Hu Jintao emphasized the need for cooperation with the U.S. in areas from new energy to space ahead of his visit to Washington this week, but he called the present U.S. dollar-dominated currency system a “product of the past” and highlighted moves to turn the yuan into a global currency.
“We both stand to gain from a sound China-U.S. relationship, and lose from confrontation,” Hu said in written answers to questions from The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Hu acknowledged “some differences and sensitive issues between us,” but his tone was generally compromising, and he avoided specific mention of some of the controversial issues that have dogged relations with the U.S. over the past year or so—including U.S. arms sales to Taiwan that led to a freeze in military relations between the world’s sole superpower and its rising Asian rival. Read more…
World is ‘one poor harvest’ from chaos, new book warns
Like many environmentalists, Lester Brown is worried. In his new book “World on the Edge,” released this week, Brown says mankind has pushed civilization to the brink of collapse by bleeding aquifers dry and overplowing land to feed an ever-growing population, while overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
If we continue to sap Earth’s natural resources, “civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,” Brown, the founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, which both seek to create a sustainable society, told AFP.
What distinguishes “World on the Edge” from his dozens of other books is “the sense of urgency,” Brown told AFP. “Things could start unraveling at any time now and it’s likely to start on the food front.
“We’ve got to get our act together quickly. We don’t have generations or even decades — we’re one poor harvest away from chaos,” he said.
“We have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the question now is, can we save civilization?”
In “World on the Edge”, Brown points to warning signs and lays out arguments for why he believes the cause of the chaos will be the unsustainable way that mankind is going about producing more and more food. Read more…
Obama’s Push for China Currency Changes Could Cost U.S. Consumers
When President Obama meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao this week, one of the top items on the agenda will be resolving a dispute over how China sets the value of its currency. If Obama gets his way, it could spur U.S. exports, but it could also mean higher prices for American consumers.
For over a decade, China has held down the value of its currency, the Yuan, in relation to the dollar. That helps keep the cost of the goods Americans buy from China low and the price of American goods sold in China high. The cheap Chinese currency has helped open a wide trade imbalance between the two countries. In 2010, China’s trade advantage with the U.S. was more than $252 billion.
The Obama administration has made stopping China’s currency manipulation a central focus of the president’s push to increase American exports.
“China still closely manages the level of its exchange rate and restricts the ability of capital to move in and out of the country,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said is a speech last week. “As the [International Monetary Fund] has said consistently, these policies have the effect of keeping the Chinese currency substantially undervalued.”
On the surface, it’s a positive for Read more…
WikiLeaks: Iran developing nuclear bomb with help of more than 30 countries
The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten quotes U.S. diplomatic cables as saying that Iran is racing to achieve nuclear bomb before its economy collapses due to sanctions.
Iran has been developing contacts in more than 30 countries to acquire technology, equipment and raw materials needed to build a nuclear bomb, a Norwegian newspaper said on Sunday, citing U.S. diplomatic cables.
Aftenposten said that according to the cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, more than 350 Iranian companies and organizations were involved in the pursuit of nuclear and missile technology between 2006 and 2010.
 Technicians measuring parts of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant in this undated photo. |
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| Photo by: AP |
Iran says its nuclear program has purely peaceful aims but the West suspects is designed to develop a weapons capability.
“For years, Iran has been working systematically to acquire the parts, equipment and technology needed for developing such weapons, in violation of UN sanctions against the country Read more…
The sun rises two days early in Greenland, sparking fears that climate change is accelerating
The sun over Greenland has risen two days early, baffling scientists and sparking fears that Arctic icecaps are melting faster than previously thought.
Experts say the sun should have risen over the Arctic nation’s most westerly town, Ilulissat, yesterday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness.
But for the first time in history light began creeping over the horizon at around 1pm on Tuesday – 48 hours ahead of the usual date of 13 January.
The mysterious sunrise has confused scientists, although it is believed the most likely explanation is that it is down to the lower height of melting icecaps allowing the sun’s light to penetrate through earlier.
Climate change? The sun rose in Ilulissat, Greenland, two days early on Tuesday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness. One theory is that melting ice caps have lowered the horizon allowing the sun to shine Read more…It Really Is a Small World
There is a flood in Australia of biblical proportions though it must be said there is little news of it in the U.S. media. Much of Queensland is under water which would be comparable to saying that much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a large portion of New York is under water. Australia is very big.
If that news was not disturbing enough, on Tuesday, Krakatau volcano in Indonesia erupted, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands in its vicinity as ash rained down on two large provinces. Meanwhile, the Kizimen volcano on Kamchatka is erupting as well.
England is passing through the worst winter in the last hundred years of recorded history. Its heavy investment in clean energy, specifically wind turbines, has turned out to be a bad idea since they tend not to turn much when the weather turns cold. Having shut down most of its coal mines, England is experiencing a lack of electrical power that is killing some folks.
No, it is not the Apocalypse, but it might as well be for people fleeing or trapped by these huge events.
No doubt some people are trying to organize efforts to save the kangaroos and koala bears in Australia while others are worrying about indigenous animals in Indonesia. If this sounds like they have idiotic priorities, they do. The same indifference Nature shows to these critters applies to you as well.
The anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, January 13, will occasion a flurry of articles and analysis of what has happened since (not much) but will fade by the weekend. Haiti hasn’t had a good day for centuries.
Meanwhile, snow has fallen in 49 of the U.S. States including Hawaii! It covered 69% of the lower 48. The northeast just experienced its second blizzard since Christmas.
Time to panic? Hardly.
So when should we panic? I would suggest a good time would be when we in America wake up and discover that the current administration has forced enough coal-burning utilities to shut down and there’s no electricity or just not enough to go around. Coal provides fifty percent of all of the electricity we use in the U.S.
We might begin to panic when we realize that the government remains steadfastly in the way of building more nuclear plants to generate electricity, despite its rhetoric stating the opposite.
Most Americans will begin to get angry when a gallon of gasoline hits $4 or more and will wonder why without wondering what happens when the U.S. government shuts down much of the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by simply not issuing permits and forbids exploration or drilling off the long East and West coasts where billions of barrels of oil are believed to exist. Brazil is doing it. Why not us?
Oil is a global commodity which means that its price is determined by supply and demand. Right now, as China’s economy continues to surge and ours continues to stagnate, China is buying up as much oil as it can get its hands on. It is drilling for it off the coast of Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the tip of Florida.
Due to the floods in Australia, a major producer of coal, China is looking to purchase coal dug out of the mines in Appalachia, precisely where the Obama administration has done its best to shut down mines.
So, you see, it really is a small world after all.
The last great eruption of Krakatau actually lowered the temperature worldwide by throwing so much “schmutz” into the atmosphere it interfered with the Sun’s warming rays.
No matter where you live, it helps if the government doesn’t behave in a totally irrational and stupid way in the name of some bogus notion like global warming.
By the way, where is Al Gore these days? I hear China is experiencing some monster snow storms and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear he’s over there.
© Alan Caruba,
Year of Extremes, Strongest La Nina: What It Means for Coming Months
2010 was a year of extreme weather events with epic flooding, snowstorms, drought, heat waves and severe cold unfolding across the U.S. and the globe. It tied 2005 as the warmest year on record, and was also a year in which one of the strongest December La Niñas in recorded history was observed.
La Niñas, which occur when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean are below normal, play a significant role in the overall weather pattern across the globe. The current La Niña has been influential in 2010’s extreme events. Details on those events and their connection to La Niña can be found in this AccuWeather.com news story.
While some of the extremes have fallen in line with overall weather conditions typically expected during a La Niña, other events have been the complete opposite. Disastrous flooding in Southern California during December and recent extreme cold, snow and ice in the Southeast are examples of events in contrast with what is typically expected during Read more…
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