Over 15,000 baby sea lions estimated dead as Pacific sea life dies off

NaturalNews

Monday, December 14, 2015 by: L.J. Devon, Staff Writer






(NaturalNews) The Marine Mammal Center rescued over a hundred sea lions in a 10-day period off the West Coast of California in the winter of 2015. The influx of stranded sea lions is a sign that the health of the ocean is deteriorating. From January 1 to February 12, 2015, National Geographic counted nearly 500 rescued sea lions, an amount that is alarming scientists. Something has gone awry in the West Coast waters.

The sea lions are not finding food, they are losing strength, and many are starting to wash ashore. The startling trend didn't start in 2015. The number of stranded sea lions began rising in the winter of 2013, when scientists started noticing waves of sea lion pups washing ashore. Scientists believe the ocean's temperatures have shifted. Warmer currents may be affecting food sources that the sea lions depend on. Others see problems in ocean water acidity. The animals are being forced to go on longer quests to find food. Many of the pups are being left behind, stranded, while their parents search for food.

One-third of sea lions born last summer wiped out

 

The death of this sentinel species is an indication of changes in ocean climate and ecosystem. Sea lion prey, which include sardines and crayfish, are reportedly disappearing in numbers as well, forcing the starving sea lions to go on longer quests in search of food. Scientists are concerned about ocean pH and rising acidity of the waters. According to San Jose Mercury News, marine biologists warn that, if the trend continues, an entire generation of California sea lions could be wiped out.
When speaking to NBC News, Sea World San Diego senior veterinarian Hendrick Nollens reported, "We had rescued 19 California sea lions in January [2013]. This year we already rescued 87 pups in that same month. So this event seems to be much larger."

According to the Daily Breeze, the "unusual mortality event" wiped out two-thirds of the sea lion pup population off the West Coast in 2013.

Rehabilitation centers are taking several hundred pups in this year to save the species from total extinction.

NOAA wildlife biologist Sharon Melin confirmed that most pups captured in the wild in 2013 were only half their weight. After they are released back into the wild, they are expected to maintain their weight. When Melin went on a research trip in September 2013, she reported that the weight of the pups was still low. She brought back the bad news: "We've told the centers to prepare for the worst."
The U-T San Diego concurred, reporting that pups in the Channel Island rookeries continued to struggle despite rehabilitation efforts. On average, pups were 19% below their average weight, even after rehabilitation.

Jim Milbury of NOAA Fisheries says that West Coast sea lions have a birth rate of about 50,000 a year, and San Diego 6 reported on Jan. 28, 2015, that nearly 1 of 3 pups born the previous summer have already died.

If 33% of pups born in 2014 have already died, then based on the average birth rate, over 15,000 have passed away in that short time frame. 

Ocean water acidity on the rise, subjecting aquatic life to disease

 

According to Jennifer Palma of Global News, ocean health is deteriorating, indicated by a die off of scallops and oysters. "Getting pacific oysters and scallops is next to impossible; the industry is in crisis. ... So what's killing the Pacific oysters and scallops? A possible combination of factors including warmer oceans, decreasing acidity levels and potentially disease," she said in a report.
University of British Columbia marine microbiology professor Curtis Suttle is concerned about changes in the pH of ocean waters. "The hypothesis -- there's a working hypothesis --w is that these changes, these excursions in pH, are making the shellfish vulnerable to infection by diseases that they would normally be resistant to."


Sources for this article include:


http://enenews.com
http://enenews.com
http://enenews.com
http://www.dailybreeze.com

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Obama beats global warming drums while NOAA admits 6 year cooling trend in the Antarctic and refuses to testify before Congress defying subpoena.

     

The New American

 

Friday, 04 December 2015

At UN Summit, Obama Blames America for Global Warming

Written by Alex Newman

 

Speaking at a United Nations “climate” summit in Paris, Obama blamed America for alleged man-made global warming and claimed that the nation embraces its responsibility to “do something” about the alleged problem. That “something,” of course, at least in the administration's view, involves redistributing the wealth of embattled U.S. taxpayers to Third World governments and dictatorships for climate reparations, as well as shackling the American economy with draconian controls to reduce emissions of what serious scientists know as the “gas of life.” Sounding like a wannabe messiah, Obama even claimed that “we finally determined we would save our planet.” However, lawmakers in Congress and the American people have made clear that they neither believe in the increasingly discredited anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) theory nor in the alleged solutions to the supposed problem.

Dictators and other heads of state have typically arrived at UN conferences toward the end of the show. This time, however, hoping desperately to secure a global “climate” agreement where past summits have failed, UN organizers decided Obama and other “world leaders” should show up at the start. Obama complied, spewing gargantuan amounts of CO₂ and arriving in Paris to deliver various speeches hyping the AGW theory, along with illegal pledges to hand out your money. “I've come here personally, as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it,” Obama claimed at the ongoing conference, which featured some 150 dictators and heads of government and state.

Of course, Obama is not the “leader” of the “world's largest economy.” His job description is to serve as the chief executive of the federal government, to faithfully execute the laws, and to uphold and defend the Constitution. His other claims were even more ludicrous. For instance, the notion that America recognizes its alleged role in creating the alleged problem could not be more wrong. According to a Pew survey released last year, just 40 percent of Americans even believe the increasingly discredited AGW theory. And without a doubt, far less than that would agree that the nation should shackle its economy and redistribute its wealth to Third World regimes under the guise of dealing with a problem that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not even believe exists.

Obama also apparently sought to deceive his fellow rulers by touting his unconstitutional and illegitimate decrees, without noting that the American people's elected representatives, state governments, and the courts are currently in the process of dismantling those decrees. “Over the last seven years, we've made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions,” he told the UN and its member regimes, touting half-baked, taxpayer-funded “renewable energy” schemes imposed by the federal government (such as the now-bankrupt crony solar company Solyndra, which put huge sums of taxpayer funds into the pockets of Obama donors). Obama also touted his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline and the “the first-ever set of national standards” purporting to regulate what Obama referred to as “carbon pollution.”

  Read More Here

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Obama blames America for non-existent global warming

September 24, 2014 6:52 AM MST

Barack Obama speaks at U.N. climate summit.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

While speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday, President Obama blamed the United States for global warming, even though there has been no global warming for nearly 18 years. While the administration insists global warming is a real threat, one professor issued a paper saying there has been no global warming for 19 years.

 "But there should be no question that the United States of America is stepping up to the plate," Obama said. "We recognize our role in creating this problem; we embrace our responsibility to combat it. We will do our part, and we will help developing nations do theirs. But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation –- developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass."

Obama hyped action the United States has taken, touting moves taken against power companies in what has been described as a "war on coal." According to the president, the United States has reduced its total "carbon pollution" by more than any other nation.

  Read More Here


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FULL Speech HD: Barack Obama at Paris Climate Conference (Cop21)

Best Videos HD

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Published on Nov 30, 2015

FULL Speech HD: Barack Obama to give final statement on last day in Paris (Cop21) chttps://youtu.be/Nq5oG6kIIPA

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US President Barack Obama holds news conference at Paris Climate Summit - COP21

The Best Videos HD

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Published on Dec 1, 2015

US President Barack Obama holds news conference at Paris Climate Summit - COP21

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ScienceInsider

Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy

NOAA

Data collected by NOAA ocean buoys like this are at the heart of the dispute.

House science panel demands more NOAA documents on climate paper

By

Carolyn Gramling

5 November 2015 12:00 pm

Carolyn is a staff writer for Science and is the editor of the In Brief section.

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It’s getting hot in here. A dispute between the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over a climate change paper published this summer is escalating. The latest salvos include a second letter from Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan seeking internal communications and documents authored by NOAA employees and a letter from the American Meteorological Society condemning Smith’s demands and warning about its implications for all federally funded research.

The quarrel began with a paper by NOAA scientists published 5 June in Science that revised historical atmosphere and ocean temperature data records found to have been poorly calibrated. In 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had noted that the temperature data seemed to suggest that global warming had slowed down beginning around 1998. But the Science paper showed that apparent slowdown in global warming vanished when the data were corrected to account for various sources of bias.

That paper immediately caught Smith’s attention, triggering multiple committee requests for data and methodologies related to the study. NOAA told the committee that the findings were already publicly available and met twice with committee staff to brief them on the results.

But that response didn’t satisfy Smith. On 13 October, he subpoenaed all of NOAA’s internal emails related to the paper, asking for the information by 27 October. In response, the committee’s Democrats wrote to Smith on 23 October, noting that the subpoena “appears to be furthering a fishing expedition” and saying that it oversteps the committee’s bounds, as the paper is a research study and not a policy decision. House Republican leadership this year had given Smith the authority to issue subpoenas without the consent of the minority party.

Read More Here

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Investors.com

Investors Business Daily

Did Federal Agency Commit Climate Fraud? Sure Looks Like It

 

10/28/2015 06:30 PM ET

 

Junk Science: Worried about climate fraud, Congress is investigating a federal agency for allegedly manipulating weather data to show recent global warming when there is none. So why is the agency refusing to cooperate?

First, a little background: Satellite temperature readings clearly show no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.

This fact is significant for two reasons: One, satellite temperature readings are the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, two, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming agenda of the environmental movement and its allies on the left who see in climate change an opportunity to impose greater government control over our lives.

Yes, we're skeptical of "climate change," at least as defined by the green extremists. Climate is always changing. No one denies that. What's at issue is how it's changing and why. The science is still unclear.

 Earlier this year, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found — no surprise — that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist.

 Their change didn't come from actual temperature readings. It came from extensive data manipulation and tinkering. Instead of a pause, they found a surge.

Read More Here

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NOAA Scientists In Standoff With Congress Over Climate Study - Newsy

Newsy Science

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Published on Oct 28, 2015

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is refusing to hand over its climate scientists' emails to Rep. Lamar Smith. See more at http://www.newsy.com/ 

Follow Sebastian Martinez: http://www.twitter.com/sebastiansings 

 Sources: House Committee on Science, Space and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSEXF... 

Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/... 

NASA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaJJt... 

C-SPAN http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4549291... Science http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348... 

The Hill http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/2529... 

Getty Images http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/new... 

Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/john_fi... 

Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/2180443... 

 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtpJs... 

World Climate Research Programme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6jXc... 

Nature http://www.nature.com/news/us-science... 

Image via: Getty Images / Mark Wilson http://gettyimages.com

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Family Survival Protocol – Microcosm News

Learning to Create A Better Future

In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended. ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, study finds.

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In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended. ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, study finds.

GLOBAL WARMING? NASA says Antarctic has been COOLING for past SIX years

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA.

 

By Jon Austin

 

PUBLISHED: 07:51, Sat, Nov 28, 2015 | UPDATED: 12:58, Sat, Nov 28, 2015

 

 

NASA

Heimdal Glacier southern Greenland, from NASA's Falcon 20 aircraft at 33,000 feet above sea level.

An intensive scientific study of both Earth's poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region.NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles.In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended.Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global tenperature as often is claimed.

 

 

 

NASA

Map showing the extent of ice during the NASA studies

Read More Here


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Examiner.com

New paper claims no pause in warming, but unaltered data says otherwise

Thomas Richard

Boston Environmental Policy Examiner

 

November 25, 2015 9:20 AM MST

Photo by Aaron Harris

Environmental activists have plundered Nature's Scientific Reports and released a paper yesterday that they claim removes all doubt there is a global warming pause. After examining 40 peer-reviewed papers that show a global warming hiatus, they claim the papers didn't examine a long enough period of time. In fact, the authors—Stephan Lewandowsky, James Risbey, and Naomi Oreskes—broke the golden rule of science: they started with a predetermined outcome and then cherry-picked the data to fit their conclusion. It also runs counter to the unaltered datasets from leading climate institutions.
The paper assessed the "magnitude and significance of all possible trends up to 25 years duration looking backwards from each year over the past 30 years." Unsurprisingly, the authors thought the papers didn't use a long enough time frame to show a clear global warming pause over the entire global warming "record." Here we document how this extended global warming record has been tampered, altered, and utilized for politicized "green ideology," and how massive alterations were made to both NASA and NOAA's temperature data series.

According to the satellite record (the most accurate), weather balloons, radiosonde data, sea surface temperatures, and weather stations (least accurate), previously unadulterated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) data showed a long-term definitive trend: no increase in tropospheric temperatures when the Industrial Revolution began in earnest after World War II.

We do have weather station temperature data, albeit spotty, that goes back to 1881 and it shows regular intervals of warming and cooling, and not the popular upward slope in temperatures used by environmentalists and governments to illustrate dramatic global warming. More on that shortly.

Read More Here



Next: How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause

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Nasa Earth Observatory

Earth is Cooling…No It’s Warming

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was entering a period of global cooling. Decades prior, the brilliant Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch had explained how our world warms and cools on roughly 100,000-year cycles due to its slowly changing position relative to the Sun. Milankovitch’s theory suggested Earth should be just beginning to head into its next ice age cycle. The surface temperature data gathered by Mitchell seemed to agree; the record showed that Earth experienced a period of cooling (by about 0.3°C) from 1940 through 1970. Of course, Mitchell was only collecting data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere—from 20 to 90 degrees North latitude. Still, the result drew public attention and a number of speculative articles about Earth’s coming ice age appeared in newspapers and magazines.

Initial efforts to observe Earth’s temperature were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, and they showed a cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 (jagged line). Scientists estimated the relative effects of carbon dioxide (warming, top curve) and aerosols (cooling, bottom curve) on climate, but did not have enough data to make precise predictions. (Graph from Mitchell, 1972.)

But other scientists forecasted global warming. Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko had also observed the three-decade cooling trend. Nevertheless, he published a paper in 1967 in which he predicted the cooling would soon switch to warming due to rising human emissions of carbon dioxide. Budyko’s paper and another paper published in 1975 by Veerabhadran Ramanathan caught Hansen’s attention. Ramanathan pointed out that human-made chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) are particularly potent greenhouse gases, with as much as 200 times the heat-retaining capacity of carbon dioxide. Because people were adding CFCs to the lower atmosphere at an increasing rate, Ramanathan expressed concern that these new gases would eventually add to Earth’s greenhouse effect and cause our world to warm. (Because CFCs also erode Earth’s protective ozone layer, their use was mostly abolished in 1989 with the signing of the Montreal Protocol.)

Read More Here

 

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Climate change: How do we know?

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO₂ has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)

 

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.¹
 
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.

Read More Here

 

The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:

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  Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise

  Photograph by Shahee Ilyas  
  

  Malé, capital of Maldives  Wikipedia.org

  Sea level rise

  Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.⁴

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  Global temperature rise

  All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.⁵ Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.⁶ Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.⁷

   

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  Warming oceans

  The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.⁸

   

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  Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet

  Shrinking ice sheets

  The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

  
  

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California's ongoing drought has left millions of waterfowl that migrate from northern climes with fewer places to land, seek food.

VOA Voice of America

California Drought Affects Winter Refuges for Migratory Birds

 

 

Sandhill cranes land in flooded fields at the Sandhill Crane Reserve near Thornton, California, Nov. 3, 2015. The state's ongoing drought has left millions of waterfowl that migrate from northern climes to California with fewer places to land, seek food.

 

 

Reuters

 

November 07, 2015 10:43 AM

LODI, CALIFORNIA—With their red heads, 2.13-meter (7-foot) wingspan and a trilling call, migrating Sandhill Cranes provide a dramatic sunset spectacle as they land by the thousands in wetlands near Sacramento each night during the fall and winter.

But the state's ongoing drought has left the cranes, along with millions of other waterfowl that migrate from Canada and other northern climes to spend the winter in California, with fewer places to land, threatening their health as they crowd in on one another to seek shelter and food.

"They're left with fewer and fewer places to go, which will start to have impacts on their population," said Meghan Hertel, who works on habitat issues for the Audubon Society in California. "They can die here from starvation or disease or be weaker for their flight back north."


Beloved sight


The cranes are a beloved sight in California's Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys when they arrive each fall.

Tourists flock to see them as they take off en masse at dawn or land in a series of swooping, trilling groups as the sun goes down.

Read More Here

Related Articles

•  Long Drought Affecting California’s Sequoias
• California's New, Unending Fire Season Takes Toll on Firefighters
•  Shortage of Fresh Water Threatens to Become Global Crisis

Climate scientists have produced an atlas reconstructing weather conditions over the last millennium, offering greater perspective on current weather phenomenon.

 

Sputnik

 

Climatologists Piece Together a Millennium of Droughts and Downpours

© Photo: Wikimedia commons

Environment

22:00 07.11.2015(updated 22:08 07.11.2015)  

 

The new Old World Drought Atlas of droughts and wet weather in the Old World gives climate scientists greater perspective on current weather phenomenon.

 

© Pixabay

Weather 75 Light Years Away: Hot Dust Clouds and Molten Iron Showers

Climate scientists have produced an atlas reconstructing weather conditions over the last millennium, in an effort to understand more about current changes to the weather.

 

They hope their Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) will allow for a greater understanding of climate forecasts.

"Climate model projections suggest widespread drying in the Mediterranean Basin and wetting in Fennoscandia in the coming decades largely as a consequence of greenhouse gas forcing of climate," write the scientists in their paper, published in Science Advances on Friday.

© AP Photo/ Kamran Jebreili

Scorching Sun, Extreme Humidity to Make Persian Gulf Uninhabitable by 2070

The researchers used archaeological tree ring data to measure more than a thousand years of European weather. They compared their findings to historical accounts of severe droughts, wet weather events or other catastrophes, and found that the tree ring data corresponds with many documented incidents of extreme weather.

 

 

Read More Here

 

 

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The 700 Year Old Weather Chart That Gives Me Butterflies

Posted by Dan Satterfield

 

Oh, and look at 1741, and the terrible drought. The trees are showing the results of the cold and dry spell that began in 1739. This is the year of the great Irish famine, and it killed millions as well. Here’s what the paper has to say about the 1741 map:

The Irish famine of 1740–1741: This event has been attributed to unusually low winter and spring temperatures in 1740, resulting in crop failures and subsequent famine (17). The OWDA is not well suited for determining temperature anomalies because it primarily reflects warm season

hydroclimate. However, climate field reconstructions of seasonal precipitation from documentary and early instrumental data (18) indicate that spring-summer rainfall over Ireland in 1741 was well below normal relative to the modern average. Drought over Ireland may therefore have contributed to the severity of the famine through its negative impact on food production in 1741. The OWDA map of 1741  indicates severe drought over Ireland that also extended over England and Wales, consistent with previously reported record rainfall deficits.




Is it just me, or does this give you the willies? It’s like looking at that big high pressure over the NW Atlantic on the night of April 14,1912. The Titanic survivors reported the ocean as still as a mill-pond, and I have the surface weather map that proves they were right. That’s how I feel about these rainfall charts. That horrible famine was seven long centuries ago, but the trees still remember, and they tell us that those old faded pieces of parchment were not exaggerating. It was real, and it left millions dead, and millions more in grief.


This Old World Drought Atlas will have great benefits in climate research, and historians will find them invaluable as well, but they also give us a warning. Our limited 100 years or so of written weather records can be deceiving. We think we know what a bad crop year is, and how long a bad drought can last, but our lifetimes are rather short, and perhaps we are fools. Knowing this makes fooling with our planet’s temperature control even more egregious.
The paper is open access and you can read it all HERE.



Read More Here

Scientific research has extended Utah's climate record back to 1429 using tree rings. Revealing extreme droughts, including one that lasted 16 years.

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Tree rings reveal nightmare droughts in Western U.S.

May 1, 2014

Source:

Brigham Young University

Summary:

Scientists extended Utah's climate record back to 1429 using tree rings. They found Utah's climate has seen extreme droughts, including one that lasted 16 years. If history is repeated in the rapidly growing Western states, the water supply would run out based on current consumption.

Scientists extended Utah's climate record back to 1429 using tree rings. They found Utah's climate has seen extreme droughts, including one that lasted 16 years. Credit: Image courtesy of Brigham Young University
..

If you think the 1930s drought that caused The Dust Bowl was rough, new research looking at tree rings in the Rocky Mountains has news for you: Things can get much worse in the West.

In fact the worst drought of this century barely makes the top 10 of a study that extended Utah's climate record back to the year 1429.
With sandpaper and microscopes, Brigham Young University professor Matthew Bekker analyzed rings from drought-sensitive tree species. He found several types of scenarios that could make life uncomfortable in what is now the nation's third-fastest-growing state:

• Long droughts: The year 1703 kicked off 16 years in a row with below average stream flow.
• Intense droughts: The Weber River flowed at just 13 percent of normal in 1580 and dropped below 20 percent in three other periods.
• Consecutive worst-case scenarios: The most severe drought in the record began in 1492, and four of the five worst droughts all happened during Christopher Columbus' lifetime.

"We're conservatively estimating the severity of these droughts that hit before the modern record, and we still see some that are kind of scary if they were to happen again," said Bekker, a geography professor at BYU. "We would really have to change the way we do things here."
Modern climate and stream flow records only go back about 100 years in this part of the country, so scientists like Bekker turn to Mother Nature's own record-keeping to see the bigger picture. For this study, the BYU geographer took sample cores from Douglas fir and pinyon pine trees. The thickness of annual growth rings for these species is especially sensitive to water supply.


Read More Here

Increasingly harsh drought conditions in the US Midwest's Corn Belt may take a serious toll on corn and soybean yields over the next half-century

Credit DS Pugh / Wikimedia Commons

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Increased drought portends lower future Midwestern U.S. crop yields

May 1, 2014

Source:

North Carolina State University

Summary:

Increasingly harsh drought conditions in the US Midwest's Corn Belt may take a serious toll on corn and soybean yields over the next half-century, according to new research. Corn yields could drop by 15 to 30 percent, according to the paper's estimates.

Increasingly harsh drought conditions in the U.S. Midwest's Corn Belt may take a serious toll on corn and soybean yields over the next half-century, according to research published today in the journal Science.

Corn yields could drop by 15 to 30 percent, according to the paper's estimates; soybean yield losses would be less severe.
North Carolina State University's Roderick Rejesus, associate professor of agricultural and resource economics and a co-author of the Science paper, says that corn and soybean yields show increasing sensitivity to drought, with yields struggling in dry conditions in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana during the 1995 to 2012 study period.
"Yield increases are getting smaller in bad conditions," Rejesus said. "Agronomic and genetic crop improvements over the years help a lot when growing conditions are good, but have little effect when growing conditions are poor, like during droughts."
U.S. corn and soybeans account for approximately 40 and 35 percent of global production, respectively, making the results important to the world's food supply.

Read More Here

Related articles

• Increased drought portends lower future Midwestern U.S. crop yields
• Extreme Midwest Droughts May Risk Corn and Soybean Crops in the Next Half-Century
• Corn crops increasingly vulnerable to drought - study
• Field of (Bad) Dreams: Increased Drought Takes Toll on Midwest Corn
• Cornfields Could Yield Less by Midcentury

Snow Storm - Russia [Asia], Chelyabinsk Oblast, Chelyabinsk

Earth Watch Report  -  Snow Storm

Young women cross a snow-covered bridge after a snowstorm in Yekaterinburg. (RIA Novosti/Pavel Lisitsyn)

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Snow Storm

Russia [Asia]

Chelyabinsk Oblast, Chelyabinsk

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RSOE EDIS

Snow Storm in Russia [Asia] on Saturday, 26 April, 2014 at 13:31 (01:31 PM) UTC.

Description Electricity was cut off to more than 150 residential localities in the Chelyabinsk region hit by a heavy snowstorm on Friday. Electro-transmission lines were covered with snow and torn by strong winds. Electricity supply was resumed to most of the houses overnight, but 13 residential localities of 9,369 people had no electricity on Saturday morning, the Russian Emergencies Ministry's Chelyabinsk regional department reported. Repairs were planned to be completed at 16:00 Moscow time. Mass cultural events and school classes were cancelled in Chelyabinsk on Saturday, and all services in the city remained on alert because of the severe weather. Emergency services organized work to clear roads of snow and help drivers. Hospitals were ready to receive affected people. The Emergencies Ministry reported that the bad weather with heavy snow and winds of 20-25 m/sec would remain in the region on Saturday.

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Winter comes again suddenly for Russia’s Urals (PHOTOS)

Published time: April 26, 2014 13:24

Pedestrians cross the street during a heavy blizzard in Chelyabinsk, Russia (RIA Novosti/Aleksandr Kondratuk)

Russia’s Urals region has been hit with freak winter weather, with severe snowstorms causing massive traffic jams, flight delays, power blackouts and school closures.
Just when everybody in the cities of Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk thought they had waved winter good-bye and was anticipating greener spring weather, blizzards dragging the region back to winter.

Having heard the forecast for snow, internet users were taking photos of the frail Urals spring that was proclaimed doomed by meteorologists.
Those would later be used in “before and after” collages with “goodbye summer” hashtags.
“We have snow falling the whole day without stopping,” an Instagram user wrote. “It’s sweeping severely, everything’s white. My daughter even wanted to go for a snow-tubing ride.”

Winter struck the region hard, with precipitation twice the monthly average coming as a shock to already burgeoning grass and trees.


Chelyabinsk made headlines across the world last year when a huge meteorite rocked the region. These late April blizzards have led to numerous online jokes over the region’s “misfortune.”

“Chelyabinsk’s somewhat harsh,” one Twitter user wrote. “They either have meteorite or snow at the end of spring.”

The sudden return of winter has led to chaos on the region’s highways.

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