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Earthquake deaths increasing worldwide – UN report
Charlotte Bellis took this photo in the Christchurch CBD shortly after the quake struck. – Source: ONE News
Fatalities from earthquakes are increasing worldwide but the chance of dying in a weather-related disaster is diminishing the United Nations said today.
The UN report also claimed economic losses from catastrophes are rising in all regions often due to a lack of investment
Damage to infrastructure – schools, health centres, roads, bridges – is soaring in many low- and middle-income countries despite improvements in many early warning systems, it said in the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.
Rich countries are also increasingly exposed, with damage on the rise following floods in Australia and earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand already this year, it said.
“Progress is mixed,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in the report.
“The recent events in Japan point to new and catastrophic risks that need to be anticipated,” he warned, referring to the earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan last March that triggered the worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.
Disasters have already caused more than $300 billion in losses so far this year, roughly the same as in all of 2010, a UN Read more…
Warm Water Causing Cold Winters
This map shows sea‑surface temperatures averaged over eight days in September 2001, as measured by NASA’s Terra satellite. Dark red represents warm water (32 degrees Celsius) and purple is cold (‑2 degrees Celsius). The Gulf Stream can be seen as the orange strip extending from the eastern U.S. toward the Atlantic.Imagine this: you are standing outside in New York City while waiting for a cab. It is in the winter and you are likely freezing. What if you were doing the same thing, but in Porto, Portugal?
Porto shares the same latitude at the Big Apple, but in Portugal you would be about 10 degrees warmer.
This happens for the northeastern coast of the U.S. and eastern coast of Canada. This is also true in other parts of the world. When the northeastern coast of Asia is colder, the Pacific Northwest is warmer.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have found an explanation. The culprit is warmer water off the eastern coasts of Read more…
New report confirms Arctic melt accelerating
FILE - In this July 19, 2007 file photo an iceberg is seen off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. A new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. (AP Photo/John McConnico, File)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and could raise the average global sea level by as much as five feet this century, an authoritative new report suggests.
The study by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, is one of the most comprehensive updates on climate change in the Arctic, and builds on a similar assessment in 2005.
The full report will be delivered to foreign ministers of the eight Arctic nations next week, but an executive summary including the key findings was obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
It says that Arctic temperatures in the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880, and that feedback mechanisms believed to accelerate warming in the climate system have now started kicking in.
One mechanism involves the ocean absorbing more heat when it’s not covered by ice, which reflects the sun’s energy. That effect has been anticipated by scientists “but clear evidence for it has only been observed in the Arctic in the past five years,” AMAP said.
The report also shatters some of the forecasts made in 2007 by the U.N.’s expert panel on climate change.
The cover of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, for example, is shrinking faster than Read more…
Ozone hole linked to southern rain increases
WASHINGTON — The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is a significant driver of climate change and rain increases in the southern hemisphere over the past 50 years, US scientists said Thursday.
The findings by a team at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science are the first to link ozone depletion in the polar region to climate change all the way to the equator.
Researchers said the analysis should lead policy-makers to consider the ozone layer along with other environmental factors such as Arctic ice melt and greenhouse gas emissions when considering how to tackle climate change.
“It’s really amazing that the ozone hole, located so high up in the atmosphere over Antarctica, can have an impact all the way to the tropics and affect rainfall there,” said Sarah Kang, lead author of the study in the journal Science. Read more…
Extreme weather is moving tectonic plates, scientists claim
People who are ridiculed for saying that earthquakes are a result of global warming could actually be right, scientists claim.
Long-term climate change has the potential to spin Earth’s tectonic plates, according to a news study from the Australian National University.
Working with researchers in Germany and France, they have established a link between the motion of the Indian plate over the last ten million years and the intensification of Indian monsoons.
Movements of the earth: Tectonic plate movement could be sped up as a result of the weather
Monsoon rain increased by four metres every year, speeding up the motion in the Indian plate by one centimetre a year, said Dr Giampiero Iaffaldano from the ANU research school of earth sciences.
They discovered that enough rocks were worn away from the eastern side of the plate to account for the plate’s anti-clockwise movement.
Dr Iaffaldano said: ‘The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates.
‘It is known that certain geologic events caused by plate motions – for example the drift of continents, the closure of ocean basins and the building of large mountain belts – have the ability to influence the Read more…
The latest unsmoothed global sea level data from JASON shows a sharp downtick and slight downtrend
One of the great things about WUWT is that it attracts commenters with a wide range of skill sets, who can often contribute far and beyond what we even see from our government sources. I’ve lamented the lack of updates from the University of Colorado sea level website, and when I got no response to emails, I decided to make a rare phone call and ask why. The answer I got from Dr. R. Steven Nerem was:
“This new website design won’t work with our current format, so if you can just be patient and wait a couple of weeks we’ll have it online.”
Not content to wait, and prodded by another commenter in an online tussle, CA and WUWT regular Roman M decided to find out himself. The results speak for themselves, quite a drop in the latest JASON-1 datapoint, with a general slight downturn in the JASON1-2 data since late 2009:
G2-Geomagnetic Storm / Solar Watch April 8th 2011
Sea level rises the fastest in 350 years
MELTING mountain glaciers are contributing to the fastest sea level rise in 350 years, according to research by Welsh scientists.
The team from Aberystwyth University, the University of Exeter and Stockholm University undertook a survey of the 270 largest outlet glaciers of the south and north Patagonian icefields of South America.
They mapped changes in the position of the glaciers since the Little Ice Age, which was the last time in the recent past when they were much larger.
The team calculated the volume of ice lost by the glaciers as they have retreated and thinned over the past 350 years and compared these volume losses to rates of change over the last 30 years.
They found that the rate at which the glaciers are losing volume over the past 30 years is between 10 and 100 times faster than the 350- year long-term average.
The study, which has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience, concludes the mountain glaciers have rapidly increased their melt rate in recent years and consequently their contribution to global sea level.
Lead author, Professor Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University, said the work was based on a longer timescale than any earlier glacier research conducted.
The second author Dr Stephan Harrison of the University of Exeter, said: “The work is significant because it is the first time anyone has made a direct estimate of the sea-level contribution from glaciers since the peak of the Industrial Revolution.”
NASA admits all previous warming trends caused by sun
I wonder what Al Gore’s rebuttal is going to sound like…
Under mounting pressure from scientists that reject the politically popularized man-made global warming and climate models—the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory—the American space agency NASA has admitted that all past warming trends were driven by solar activity.
A victory for the man-made ‘global warming deniers’
As more scientists have joined the outcry over the politicization of Earth’s climate cycles—the current number exceeds 20,000—promoters of the AGW model have denounced the “global warming deniers” countering that little evidence supports the view that the sun is driving the observed warming trend.
Now, however, new study released from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland measuring the global temperature variance during the past 100 years has found the sun’s heat and variable cycles have indeed made a significant, measurable impact and greatly influenced Earth’s climate.
In fact, the influence extends as far back as the Read more…
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