El Nino tells a story

Some food for thought.

Some more food for thought - The arctic meltdown

The sea temp picture Mark H located at http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/sst/latest_sst.gif  is probably worth a million or more words, and a kind of a early warning alarm as well. El Nino's have been historically running a normal pattern, if I am not mistaken, of one about every decade. This developing El Nino is the second one in three years. Actually, it is more like a continuance of the same El Nino three years ago, since the heating of this water never really ceased, or went away. And it is developing patterns like that which help to prove that the core of our planet is being exponentially excited, and therefore, inducing more earthquakes and volcanos, which in turn is heating up the water along the equator. Much like the spinning pail of milk that Thomas mentioned; things that spin, due to centrifugal force and friction, become heated, and even hotter at the thinest points of resistance, in this case, the earths equator. The increase in heating at this thin point happens in much the same manner as trying to put to many amps of electricity through a wire that is to thin to handle the load - I think everybody gets the picture of what happens when the wire fails because of the extra amount of heating. Now, envision the same thing happening along the equator.

That sea temp picture that Mark posted a URL for, tells a big story - a lot bigger than just the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf into the sea. Looking left and right from the 0 to -15 marks at the far right of the picture, that large concentration of red is where a lot of the earthquake and plate shifting activity is currently taking place on this planet, especially the area from New Guinea all the way over to the East Coast of Africa. 

Record sea temperatures threaten Great Barrier Reef

Friday, July 26, 2002By Michael Christie SYDNEY - 
Sea temperatures at Australia's Great Barrier Reef last summer were the warmest on record and this year's El Nino event means the risk of mass coral bleaching has increased considerably, scientists reported on Thursday. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has just completed an atlas of sea temperatures over the past decade and amalgamated it with historical data to show 2002 was the warmest year for water temperatures off northeast Australia since 1870. The rise in temperatures around the world's largest living organism coincided with mass bleaching earlier this year that affected around 60 percent of the Great Barrier Reef's 345,400 square kilometers (133,300 square miles) of coral.

"Unless the corals can adapt and become acclimatized, then obviously the long-term future for the coral is at risk," said AIMS oceanographer Craig Steinberg. "The outlook isn't good. If coral can't adapt, then they're going to bleach and you get mass mortality."

The sea temperature over the last century has risen by just half a degree Celsius. But corals tend to live within one to two degrees of their maximum temperature threshold, and a tiny increase is therefore enough to ensure a major impact. Bleaching occurs when coral becomes stressed. It involves a breakdown in the symbiotic relationship between the coral and algae, and in severe cases the coral will die. The last time the reef's coral bleached because of higher than normal temperatures was in 1998, when the El Nino weather phenomenon warmed the waters of the Pacific, bringing drought to eastern Australia and floods to parts of Latin America.

Last year was not an El Nino year, making the high temperatures even more unusual and meaning they were almost certainly a by-product of pollution-induced global warming, said AIMS climate expert Janice Lough. The onset of another El Nino this year, albeit one that U.S. experts say is likely to be mild, has increased the chances of another southern hemisphere summer of high sea water temperatures at the start of 2003.

"We've changed the baseline. It is a worry," Lough said from Townsville in the far north of Queensland state. Coral can recover after mild bleaching. But researchers fear that its ability to overcome heat stress may be weakened as high temperatures become more common. AIMS researchers are trying to establish whether coral has the ability to adapt quickly to changing temperatures. There is evidence that they can over long periods of time, but so far no indication of any short-term ability to acclimatize.

In the meantime, there is not a lot that can be done to protect the Great Barrier Reef, which is one of Australia's main tourist attractions and a World Heritage site. "Reef managers can do all they can to reduce all the other threats to coral reefs, but they can't solve individually the global problem (of climate change)," said Lough.

"It's not so much that the reef will die, it's that the reef will change," she said. "If you sort of knock out certain of the corals, then other organisms might take their place."

Study the earthquake and volcanic patterns at the following sites to get a complete overview of this increased activity :

http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/ 

http://www.volcanolive.com/volcanolive.html 

http://www.sveurop.org/gb/news/news.htm 

http://www.volcanolive.com/contents.html 

Looking at the sea temp picture, where Central America up through Mexico is located, you will once again find a reddish plume of heated water, and again, it is in an area where there has been increased earthquake and volcanic activity.

There was a 6.1 earthquake in the Banda Sea on March 19, and again, if you will look at the sea off the northern part of Australia, in the sea temp picture, you will see that this area is also red, and in an area maked by extremely active tectonic plate boundaries.

I first saw a sea temp picture like the one mark sent a URL for, about three years ago at the start of the first El Nino. Of special concern to me now, is something that I had previously not noticed or even seen before. Look at where the red touches Africa on the East Coast in the picture, just to the left is where the Goma volcanic activity, and fissures of the land mass in and around Goma has been taking place. Moving further to the left [West] all the way across Africa, notice the very small finger of red just off the west Coast of Africa. Could this be an early indicator of a tear through the mantle and crust developing across that part of Africa, and the development of an entirely new and major size tectonic plate? With the types of earthchanges that are currently underway, and many major ones still ahead of us, I am not discounting anything.

One of the latest "official" takes of what is causing the El Nino, which I heard lately, is that the sea currents have slowed down due to an ever so minor decrease in the earths rotation. As one can clearly see when comparing all of the pictures, and looking at the different pictures as if they were all one great big complete picture, the real evidence from the so called official sources, is not at all the truth.

So, what is the truth? The truth is in all of the pictures and in the earthquake and volcanic information that goes along with those pictures, much of that information located at the URL's presented in this material, and elsewhere on the Earthchanges_discussion_prep_planetx group pages at :http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Earthchanges_discussion_prep_planetx/  There is another discussion group at: (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/planetx2003/ ) 

There is no better truth than that, and in what the earth is telling us: Major earthchanges are underway, and the worst is yet to come.

The Arctic meltdown: Quick thaw alarms natives and scientistsBy Usha Lee McFarling   Los Angeles Times ; The Seattle Times Monday, April 15, 2002 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific 

YANRAKYNNOT, Russia — The native elders have no explanation. Scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Eskimo — the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland — has started to thaw.

Strange portents are everywhere. Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind now blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards.

"The Earth," one hunter concluded, "is turning faster." In recent years, seabirds have washed up dead by the thousands and deformed seal pups have become a common sight. Whales appear sick and undernourished. The walrus, a mainstay of the local diet, is becoming scarce, as are tundra rabbits.

The elders, who keep thousands of years of history and legend without ever writing it down, have long told children this story: If the ice that freezes thick over the sea each winter breaks up before summer, the entire village could perish.

The children always laugh. Here in the Russian Arctic, the ground is frozen nearly year-round. The ice blanketing the winter seas around the Bering Strait is thick enough to support men dragging sleds loaded with whale carcasses.

Even Zoya Telpina, the schoolteacher in this outpost of 350 Chukchi reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters, said a winter sea without ice seemed like "a fairy tale."

But last winter, when Telpina looked from her kitchen window toward the Bering Sea, she saw something she'd never seen in her 38 years: the dark swell of the open ocean, water where there had always been ice. Telpina's husband, Mikhail, a 38-year-old dog-sled musher, has seen mushrooms on the tundra shrivel and whole herds of reindeer starve.

He has cut open the bellies of salmon to find strange insects inside. He has seen willows rise where he has never seen trees before. The changes are so widespread that they have spawned changes in the Eskimo languages that so precisely describe ice and snow. In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on. In Nunavut, Canada, the Inuit people say the weather is uggianaqtuq — like a familiar friend acting strangely.

What the residents of the Arctic are reporting fits convincingly with powerful computer models, satellite images and recently declassified ice measurements taken by Russian submarines.

In the last century, parts of the Arctic have warmed by 10 degrees Fahrenheit — 10 times the global average. Sea ice covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago, and that ice has thinned from an average of 10 feet to less than 6.

A group of scientists who spent a year aboard an icebreaker concluded that the year-round sea ice that sustains marine mammals and those who hunt them could vanish altogether in 50 years.

The U.S. Navy, already planning for an ice-free Arctic, is exploring ways to defend the previously ice-clogged Northwest Passage from attack by sea.

Without the stabilizing effect of great land masses, the Earth's watery north is exquisitely sensitive to warming. A few degrees of warmth can mean the difference between ice and water, permafrost or mud, hunger or even starvation for the inhabitants of these remote lands.

Yet, explaining the quick thaw and determining its cause — whether human or natural — has so far eluded the experts.

There are few long-term climate observations from the Arctic: Weather stations in the Far North are just 50 years old. And there is almost no data from places like Russia's Chukotka Peninsula, only 55 miles from Alaska.

In their search for information, Western scientists are turning to sources they once disparaged. In a rare convergence of science and folklore, a group of scientists is mining the memories of native elders, counting animal pelts collected by hunters and documenting the collective knowledge of entire villages.

These threads, which stretch back generations, may be the only way to trace the outlines of the half-century of change that has resculpted the Arctic and to figure out its cause.

"We have all these people paying very close attention to the animals they hunt and the sea ice they travel on," said Henry Huntington, a scientific consultant in Alaska. "It's often extremely accurate and far better than anything science has come up with."

Native observations that at first don't seem consistent with the warming — such as snowier winters and colder summers — also fit the scientists' models. Warmer air is expected to usher more storms and precipitation into the Arctic. Melting sea ice in summer can lower the water temperature and lead to cooler temperatures on adjacent land.

Despite parallel observations, Western researchers and Arctic dwellers still look at each other suspiciously across a cultural divide. Many scientists remain uncomfortable with any information not backed by numbers and measurements. Many native elders resent scientists who come ashore with their strange machines thinking they know more about the place than those who live there.

Others mistrust Western scientists -ho come to gather data and never send back word of their findings. They recall a group of toxicologists who came to remote villages here several years ago to collect women's breast milk to measure pollution levels. The scientists detected organic pollutants such as dioxin and PCBs in the breast milk. But the women say they were never contacted about the results.

For scientists, the facts are mostly a matter of academic, and sometimes political, interest. But for the natives, they may be a matter of life and death.

The subsistence hunters of Chukotka live in small villages without pickup trucks or snowmobiles, without supply ships or supermarkets. They have 19th-century harpoons, small boats and limited fuel for their hunts.

These villagers, who depend almost entirely on the icy sea for their food, may be witnessing the demise of their ancient way of life. Caleb Pungowiyi, an Eskimo who works with scientists to record the observations of his elders and peers, put it this way: "When this Earth starts to be destroyed, we feel it."

Ice is a second home for Gennady Inankeuyas, a 42-year-old hunter considered the best harpooner on the Chukotka Peninsula. For years, Inankeuyas has prowled the ice for seals and walrus, dragging heavy sleds and animal carcasses over the frozen ocean.

This year, Inankeuyas returned to the uncertain ice. He had to. "Of course it's dangerous," he said. "But the village needs the food." That food is not as easy to come by now that the weather has changed. "The south wind is a bad wind. It moves the walrus to another place," said Igor Macotrik, a 42-year-old Eskimo hunter. "The walrus is hard to find."

Scientists understand such observations. Their data show that the walrus are declining, possibly because they also have to work harder to find food. Walrus mothers nurse their babies on sea-ice floes. As melting ice recedes, the walrus do, too. Far from the coast, the mothers must dive longer and deeper from the ice to the sea floor to find clams.

In recent years, the Eskimo hunters have also noticed that gray whales have become very skinny. The meat of some freshly killed whales smells rancid, "like medicine," said Maxim Agnagisyak, a 28- year-old hunter. The sled dogs won't eat it.

Scientists are beginning to analyze samples of whale blubber from the region to seek an explanation. For several years, record numbers of gray whales have washed up dead and emaciated as they migrate to their winter calving grounds in Baja California.

Land animals are also under stress. Reindeer herds plummeted after the Soviet Union collapsed and the government subsidies that helped sustain the herds were cut off. The animals began starving, and their numbers continue to decline.

Scientists have not studied the reindeer herds of Chukotka, but they have seen similar starvation in Canadian caribou. The grazing animals normally survive the winter by nosing through soft, dry snow to feed on the tundra vegetation insulated below. In recent warm years, winter rains have alternated with snow, leaving an icy crust that is difficult to penetrate and cuts the animals' legs.

Scientists are only beginning to catch up with native observations on many other aspects of the Arctic environment, such as tundra vegetation. They are monitoring a tree line that is advancing north as the Arctic warms. And scientists from Russia, Delaware and Ohio have just started a large-scale project to study the permafrost as it thaws.

It is unclear if the changing climate will let them finish their work. With scientists still debating the trajectory of change in the Arctic, the fate of the Siberian Eskimo remains as uncertain as the

Arctic ice in late spring. Hunters with tiny boats and little fuel must now go much farther out to sea for food. Sometimes they return empty-handed. Sometimes they return with prey unusual for the season, or fish native to warmer waters. Sometimes, when the seas are rough, they do not return at all.

The hunters willingly talk about the many changes they see around them. But they don't spend much time worrying about climate change. For the moment, they have more pressing concerns: gathering enough ammunition for the spring hunt and stretching their supply of stored whale meat.

2002 'warmest for 1,000 years' By Charles Clover, Environment Editor (Filed: 26/04/2002)

THE first three months of this year were the warmest globally since records began in 1860 and probably for 1,000 years, scientists said yesterday. Dr Geoff Jenkins, director of the Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre, said the record on land and sea was consistent with computer predictions of the effects of man-made global warming.

The three months were about 0.71C warmer than the average for 1961 to 1990, itself the warmest period for 1,000 years according to ice-core analysis, he added. The record warm period was the more remarkable because there was no sign of the cyclical El Nino in the tropics, which has attended the succession of record warmest years in the past decade.

The global record comes in the wake of observed changes in the British climate since 1900: a lengthening of the growing season for plants by one month in central England, a temperature increase of 1C, and a 10cm sea level rise.

Margaret Beckett, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, said: "In recent years more and more people have accepted that climate change is happening and will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren. I fear we need to start worrying about ourselves as well." She was speaking at the publication of a report, The UK Climate ImpactsProgramme, a joint venture between her department, the Hadley Centre, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. Scientists, who compiled different scenarios for high, medium and low emissions of greenhouse gases, predicted the following changes in the British climate by 2080:

A rise in average temperature of 2-3.5C, probably with greater warming in the south and east. Generally, the climate will be like Normandy, the Loire or Bordeaux, according to the amount of global emissions. Hot days in summer will be more frequent, with some above 40C (104F) in lowland Britain under the high emissions scenario. Summer rainfall will decrease by 50 per cent and winter rainfall increase by 30 per cent under the highest emissions projection. Snowfall will decrease throughout Britain, by 90 per cent in Scotland according to the highest greenhouse gases scenario. Sea levels will rise by 26-86cm (10-34in). The probability of a storm surge regarded as extreme will increase from one in 50 years to nine in 10 years under the high emissions scenario. A cooling of the British climate over the next 100 years because of changes to the Gulf Stream is now considered unlikely.

Mrs Beckett said some of the predicted impacts were already irreversible, but others could be slowed by international action under the Kyoto climate treaty.

17 April 2002: Flood risk from mountain lakes 22 March 2002: Tree rings may point to earlier global warming 20 March 2002: Giant ice sheet's break-up 'is a warning to world' 29 December 2001: Ice experts predict rise in sea levels 19 December 2001: Second warmest year on record

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