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Just bringing some attention to the global warming problem. Tuvalu will be affected before many of us.

http://www.tuvaluislands.com/warming.htm

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada’s remote north.

Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. (Watch the satellite images that clued in ice watchers)

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,” Vincent said Thursday.

In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.

Source: AP/CNN

–And from the coincidence department, I just saw “Inconvenient Truth” last night.

Here is an interesting article where Cait Murphy, points out some interesting facts about The Kyoto Treaty and how much America is hated for avoiding it, but in reality, other countries should harbor blame just as much.

But is it? Take a close squint at the numbers, and frankly it looks as if many of the countries that did sign Kyoto share Bush’s concern that the economic pain might outweigh the green gain.

Look at those nice people north of the border: Canada agreed to cut emissions by 6 percent. Whoops. The country is running 24 percent ahead, a lot more than the United States, which is 15.8 percent above 1990 levels. Japan has the same 6 percent target, and is also missing big, by about 13 percent.

–Are you shocked Canadians? Take your comments here.

Source: Fortune

“Using a standard statistical test, there is more than a 50 percent chance that a violent eruption will happen at Vesuvius next year. With each year that goes by, the statistical probability increases,” he said.

Source: Discovery

According to a report by the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission, one of the world’s leading bodies of whale biologists, the evidence linking sonar to a series of whale strandings in recent years is “very convincing and appears overwhelming.” Despite the broad scientific consensus that military active sonar kills whales, the use of this deadly sonar in the world’s oceans is spreading.

From the NRDC.org Website

–Not a direct prediction, but this is environment related. I wanted to hopefully bring some attention to NRDC, especially with the recent Whale lost in the Thames river.

whales, dolphins, nrdc, endangered

Get up offa that thing and dance till you got power!

Well I don’t have power, but I do have internet access. Wilma was kind to my house and my family. Lost a fence, major pool debris, lost a portion of baby gate fencing, lock broke off on a different fence, and lost some trees. We were fully prepared with supplies ranging from food and water to baby supplies. Our car’s gas tanks were filled to capacity before the storm and this turned out to be a real life saver.

The biggest and most important item after a hurricane is gas. Second would be cash. This list is for able bodied people though. You can take care of everything if you have gas and cash.

A gas station near my house had an 8 hour gas line. I saw national news trucks reporting, so you might have seen them on tv at this 4 pump Hess station working off a generator.

I’m going to just come right out with this prediction that at least 45% of the trees in Broward County fell over outright and at least 75-80% of trees were severly damaged. The tree damage is unbelievable.

Going to the grocery store as well as other stores was kinda surreal. No lights and people didn’t stick to their traditional “grocery store patterns.” It was an observers paradise.

I want to thank all the power companies who have lent South Florida their manpower and trucks. I don’t know who they are except Pike electric. I seem to see their trucks everywhere and I do know some Canadian power company is also pitching in from a news blip I caught on tv.

Power is so important that I wish it wasn’t.

electricity, hurricane wilma, power, south florida

If I don’t post for awhile it will be because I lost power, not because I don’t love you, despite what you’ve heard.

I have a feeling that when Wilma hits the west coast of Florida it will drop to a CAT 1 or really low CAT 2. Its about a 1 hour drive from the east coast to the west coast. Thats alot of land for this storm to cover so I’m expecting a significant decrease in wind speed and severity.

The news services always play the safe side and says the worst is happening, however, I’ve lived here all my life and probably have watched over 4 gazillions hours of storm tracking. Thats 3.9 gazillion more hours than the weather man they just picked up from Omaha, Nebraska.

Steel shutters are a pain in the ass, I gotta get the accordion shutters instead. If my roof blows off, I can always drive somewhere safer, but I don’t want to forget my newly purchased Belgian Beers. So those will be coming with me.

I picked up a Grundig Emergency Radio from RadioShack in case the power goes out. Its got a rechargeable power crank. So this radio and my Belgian beers will go with me if I have to run.

*Note I had to use MSPAINT, lol. Laptop usage.

hurricane wilma, hurricane, weather

This is a year of freak weather and is telling us that we are fugging up our planet with all the variety of gases caused by man made objects.

The most comprehensive climate model to date of the continental United States predicts more extreme temperatures throughout the country and more extreme precipitation along the Gulf Coast, in the Pacific Northwest and east of the Mississippi.

Similarly, the continental United States will experience an overall warming trend: Temperatures now experienced during the coldest two weeks of the year will be a past memory, and winter’s length will diminish as well, according to the model.

The model, Diffenbaugh said, assumes that greenhouse gases will attain a concentration more than twice their current levels, but he said he is confident that the model’s performance gives as accurate a picture of the future as we can hope for at the moment.

“We checked our model’s performance by analyzing the period from 1961 to 1985 for which, of course, we do not need a prediction,” Diffenbaugh said. “The model performed admirably, which tells us we’ve got a good understanding of how to represent the physical world in terms of computer code. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’ll need a computer at least 100 times as powerful as the cluster we used to really improve the accuracy. We would like to have access to such computing power in the future.”

Source

This comes the day before the STRONGEST HURRICANE ON RECORD formed in the Atlantic basin.

hurricane wilma, climate, weather, hurricanes, weather predictions

So is the H5N1 Avian Bird Flu real or just a media hoax ala Y2K?

Mr. Pink thinks so.

Mr. Pink’s Prediction

Bloggers around the net think the blogosphere will have to take part in helping prevent the pandemic from happening by educating the public and keeping communication lines open and free. Bloggers can do this safely from the comfort of their homes thus keeping you (assuming you are reading said blogs in your chair in front of your computer) out of harms way. Just wait till you need to purchase toilet paper.

A slightly smaller crisis, but not less important, will be when the entire blogger community and the readers on the net finally unstick their butts from their computer chairs and get up at the same time to purchase toilet paper at the store. Can you imagine the long “bread lines,” except this will be for TP.

Some bloggers are predicting that a major economic crisis will happen if the bird flu materializes, setting us back to the stone age. If this is true, we will all be wiping our asses with leaves.

bird flu, bird flu hoax, media hoax, toilet paper, bloggers, H5N1