Back to Basics

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

This morning while flipping between CNN, Fox News and some of the network shows, there was a collective media letdown as predictions were revised downward to match the reality of a storm that was incapable of matching the apocalyptic hype:

There was almost palpable disappointment among the TV big guns rolled out for the occasion when Irene was downgraded to a mere ‘tropical storm”. In New York city, CNN’s silver-haired Anderson Cooper, more usually seen in a tight t-shirt in a famine or war zone, was clad in what one wag dubbed “disaster casual”.

He looked crestfallen fell briefly silent when a weatherwoman told him that the rain was not going to get any worse. “Wow, because this isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s an annoying rain but it isn’t even a sideways rain.”
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For politicians, Irene was a chance to either make amends or appear in control. The White House sent out 25 Irene emails to the press on Saturday alone.

There were photographs of President Barack Obama touring disaster centres and footage of him asking sombre, pertinent questions. With his poll ratings plummeting, Obama needed to project an aura of seriousness and command. He was all too aware that the political fortunes of his predecessor George W. Bush never recovered after the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005.

The press mostly reported the message the White House had carefully crafted: “Obama takes charge” read the headline of one wire service story.

When it hit the Jersey shore, Irene unfortunately wasn’t even powerful enough to wash Snooki out to sea.

That said, the storm wasn’t nothing — people died and there will be billions of dollars of damage — but the real danger in over-hyping is that the next time it might be the real deal, and fewer people will pay attention.

We’ll see what the damage from this ends up being, but I for one slept better last night knowing that Chief Meteorologist Obama was on the job.

Al Gore is going to be very busy pulling the puppet strings on his AGW bots all day:

Hurricane Irene hadn’t even made landfall in the United States before some people figured out what to blame it on.

“Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming,” environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote Thursday night in The Daily Beast. He argued that this year’s hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures and active spree of hurricanes — coupled with droughts, floods and melting sea ice elsewhere on the globe — are “what climate change looks like in its early stages.”

Besides, “what’s a ‘tropical’ storm doing heading for the snow belt?” asked McKibben. He also said the storm represented bad timing for the Obama administration’s favorable environmental impact statement on TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which environmentalists label a danger to the Earth’s climate.

These people really are self parodies.

What’s a tropical storm doing heading for the snow belt? I don’t know… what was one doing heading for the snow belt over 70 years ago?

New York City and Long Island have been hit by nine previous hurricanes from 1858 to 1991, according to NOAA records, including the disastrous 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express. And the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history struck 111 years ago — the 1900 storm that killed an estimated 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas.

In other global warming news, Al Gore wants you to give up your meaty diet — probably so there’s more left for him. Yeah, when you look at Jabba the Nut the first thing you think is “vegan.” Oh, and if you don’t agree with Al Gore, you’re also a racist… or something. That from the guy whose father voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Will this fraud ever go away?

As for Hurricane Irene, I see Janet Napolitano on TV now, so if you’re in the path of the storm and are comforted by that fact, you don’t know nearly enough about J-Nap.

Update: The hurricane is also caused by Republicans — but that goes without saying, since Republicans cause global warming.

(Above: Fox News meteorologist Maria Molina.) The news media, especially Fox News Channel, have performed remarkably in their storm coverage. Credit: FNC/NewsCorp

As east coast states, cities and towns prepared for Hurricane Irene, emergency response personnel will implement the Homeland Security Department’s “All-Hazards Plan” that addresses man-made (terrorist attacks, industrial accidents) and natural (earthquakes, hurricanes) disasters.

Phobias are usually considered mental illnesses that require psychological treatment. However, in the nearly 50 years that I have been a resident of America’s “Hurricane Alley” I have learned that Hurricane Phobia is one of the only – if not THE ONLY—phobia that is considered perfectly normal by physicians, shrinks, and lay people. For good reason. Only a fool is not afraid of a hurricane. And like his money, a fool not afraid of a hurricane will soon be parted from his life as well.

Hurricanes change everything. If one is unlucky enough to be caught in the right front quadrant of a hurricane it can be a hundred times scarier than an earthquake. An earthquake last for a few seconds to a couple of minutes, usually. A hurricane lasts for many, many hours.

As of this writing Hurricane Irene is approximately 500 miles south of me. Yet, the weather and the ocean waters are already being affected. Even if the eye of Irene storm remains at sea, I am well within the “wind field” and the reach of the “rain bands.”

I man a small weather monitoring station here and report to the various news media in the region. Already this month, alone, I have recorded 7.63 inches of rainfall. Sounds good, I’m sure, to those folks in drought wracked areas of the state and the country. But – consider this: The soil is already wet, very wet. And even though it is not saturated with water, enough has fallen and been absorbed into the ground that the tree root systems are loosened.

Now, bring in to the equation powerful winds, sometimes straight line winds, at frightening speeds, and those trees begin popping out of the ground in a fashion akin to a cork on a fishing line popping to the surface. Add to that tree bark that becomes soddened with the weight of all that water, especially on far reaching limbs and branches, and the stage is set for massive power outages as those same trees and tree branches fall across power lines taking down the power lines and often the utility poles upon which they are affixed. I have even witnessed electricity drop or feeder lines from the main lines to house snatched right off the sides of the homes sparking fires, if, of course, those lines still had electricity at the moment they were so forcibly ripped off the homes.

No electricity in these modern times spells abject misery … especially in 90+degree weather with the humidity resting near 100%. (I have recorded only four days this month during which the relative humidity at my home was below 90%.)

Until you have seen the power of wind rip and tear a structure apart, you just cannot comprehend wind’s power. Remember, hurricanes are gigantic tornadoes.

And then – there is the sound. The sound, alone, is terrifying. It is felt in your bones. I cannot describe it here simply because it defies description. Once you have experienced the eardrum throbbing and screeching mingled with the sounds of your home being torn apart, with you in it, you cannot begin to grasp that horrifying assault on your sense of hearing.

Riding out a hurricane during the hours of darkness can only be described as a nightmare of undeterminable horror.

Here’s a photo gallery of the terrible aftermath of the storms in Joplin, Missouri.

The death toll has passed 125 and the search for the missing continues.

Amid the devastation, neighbors, friends, and strangers are pulling together.

Jim Hoft has the story of a St. Louis Facebook group organizing 4 truckloads of supplies to Joplin.

Relief organizations are in full force.

Reminder:

Text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation, or visit the website to donate, give blood or volunteer.

AmeriCares has sent disaster-relief personnel to Joplin, and it’s working with Access Family Care Clinic to help victims. This expands AmeriCares’ tornado relief operation, which has been assisting various Southern states as they recover from their own recent tornado outbreak.
Tornado devastates neighborhood
Tornado chaser: ‘I got it on video’
‘As if bomb went off’ in Joplin

Donations to AmeriCares can be made online or by phone at 1-800-486-HELP.

Those interested in volunteering should list their availability and expertise on their Joplin Storm Recovery Volunteer Form.

The anguish in the news media over the opening of the spillways along the Mississippi is a gorgeous example of the journalists’ determination to find sorrow and danger at every turn in our lives. The AP lamented earlier this week that “Over the next few days, water spewing through a Mississippi River floodgate will crawl through the swamps of Louisiana’s Cajun country, chasing people and animals to higher ground while leaving much of the [farm] land under 10 to 20 feet of brown muck.”

Now, the floodgates have been opened. Thousands of acres of crops most likely have been lost for this year. Wildlife has had to swim or run. But, what did the AP think happened almost every spring in Cajun country before the levees and spillways were built in the 1920s? Now it hadn’t happened for 40 years. That sounds like success.

Only in paragraph seven of the AP story do we learn that not opening the spillways could have flooded New Orleans with more water than drowned it during Hurricane Katrina!  And the water would probably have been flowing much faster. One victim of the 2005 flooding said then that his mother’s brick house had “disintegrated” when the water hit it. What’s the next threat level up from “disintegration”?

The federal bill for Katrina now stands at $62 billion and counting, but that wasn’t the fault of the spillways.  The spillways weren’t designed to protect New Orleans from a downriver hurricane once every 50 or 100 years. The spillways and the levees were built to deal with the mighty Mississippi, which floods dangerously more years than not.

And they are working!

The spillways were built after the record Mississippi flooding of 1927. That flood killed thousands of people and destroyed a massive number of homes and businesses. In Greenville, Mississippi, more than 13,000 flood-displaced sharecroppers were stranded for weeks on a stretch of high-ground railway embankment; the rest of the railway had been washed away. The planters wouldn’t let the farmers be evacuated by boat for fear they would never come back.

In 1927, New Orleans was saved from a flood just about as bad as today’s might have been—by the city’s businessmen. They bought $2 million worth of dynamite and blew out the levee below the city. That took the pressure off the upstream levees that were threatening to wash out. Instead, all of St. Bernard parish was flooded. New Orleans had promised to compensate the people of St Bernard, but few ever saw any New Orleans cash.

To add just one further bit of perspective, it will now be about two years before the eco-activists start lamenting again about how much wildlife has been displaced by the levees and spillways that keep the Mississippi within its banks most years, and which protect thousands of square miles of high-yield farmland. They’ll propose again that the whole system be destroyed. How many animals would be displaced if the food grown on those farmed acres had to be grown on new farmland cleared somewhere else?

Fears that a mega-thrust quake like the type that struck Japan on March 11, 2011 are mounting among leading American geologists.

A killer superquake is long overdue in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and when—not if—it hits it will trigger a massive tsunami that will virtually wipe out many of the cities on the northern West Coast. The tsunami may be so powerful it could even reach as far as eastern Japan, warn scientists.

New data revealed by intensive research undertaken by the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Laboratory at Oregon State University has raised awareness of the horror that awaits the Northwest when a 9.0 or greater earthquake slams the unprepared population of such cities as Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.

Hundreds of thousands could be killed

The potential devastation is so great it seems unreal. The most terrifying Hollywood disaster movies barely begin to scratch the surface of the death destruction and smoldering aftermath of ruins left in the wake of the coming superquake.

Like the Pacific plate thrust that decimated northeastern Japan, the greater portion of the sprawling Pacific seaboard faces a similar catastrophe.

The Pacific Northwest is at the mercy of a huge tectonic plate known as the Juan de Fuca plate. When it is eventually forced beneath the titanic North America plate on the Cascadia fault line Doomsday will have arrived for the people along the northern coast.

Energy released by quakes of that magnitude are literally off the chart. The Japanese mega-thrust quake has been estimated by seismologist David Wald to have released energy about equal to all the energy the United States uses in an entire year.

And it released all that energy in a handful of minutes.

According to the London Times, the cracking Juan de Fuca plate slips about every 240 years generating a megaquake of magnitude eight or higher.

The last superquake along the Cascadia fault occurred more than 300 years ago, so following the average the Pacific Northwest is 60 years overdue for a major to great quake.

Infrastructure risks

The potential disaster zone sweeps downward from Vancouver Island to the northern region of California. Experts worry about the infrastructure as many skyscrapers at at risk, thousands of schools, and thousands of coastal cities.

All could be inundated, swept away by a roaring tsunami pushing a wall of water towering five stories or higher hundreds of miles an hour along the coast.

The surging tidal water would act like a merciless blade scraping the coastal regions clean as far as several miles inland.

Odds increasing

Scientists believe the odds of such an event occurring in the near future have now reached the proverbial 50-50 range.

In essence, that means they just don’t know. But all agree that a mega-thrust quake will hit the region, it’s not a question of if, but when.

“We don’t know how to tell you, ‘Hey, next week, you know, get out of town there’s going to be a big earthquake,’” said Tom Jordan, the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center to the Times.

All day long April 27, meteorologists warned that conditions were rife for a severe weather outbreak in the South, and Alabama was expected to be ground zero. The sky was warm and moist, the sun was shining, dew points were abnormally high and Southeasterly winds coming off the Gulf of Mexico were stewing the air. Higher up was a wedge of cold air. It came from the North, creating wind shear.

The numbers meteorologists look at to predict storms, numbers that make sense only to those with an obsession over weather, were frightening to even the casual observer. Compared to the conditions that created an EF5 tornado that scoured the Alabama countryside on April 8, 1998—a tornado that killed 32 as it cut a mile wide swath of destruction across Alabama for more than 30 miles—Wednesday’s numbers were off the charts.

One of the State’s most seasoned meteorologists said the numbers were among the highest he’d seen in his 20-plus years of weather forecasting.

The damage actually began in the early morning hours. A line of storms with strong, straight line winds—and sometimes containing small, pop-up tornadoes—whipped across the State before daybreak. They knocked down trees and power lines. But they only foreshadowed what was to come.

Shortly after 3 p.m. a tornado dropped from the sky and began churning across North Central Alabama. It was one of the first of dozens that would churn up the landscape that afternoon and early evening. While it seemed significant enough at the time, it was far from the largest that would grind over Alabama.

As the afternoon wore on, larger tornadoes spun up and dropped from the sky. They obliterated much of Tuscaloosa—damaging the campus of the University of Alabama—and wiped the smaller towns of Pleasant Grove, Concord, Hackleburg and many small communities completely off the map… literally. Not a structure or tree remained. It was if a giant scythe had swept across the landscape. The town of Cordova and the city of Fultondale suffered major damage. Other towns and communities suffered similar fates.

The tornado that decimated Tuscaloosa stayed on the ground through Birmingham and into neighboring Georgia—grinding along for more than 70 miles—and left in its wake a scene of devastation that words cannot describe. Houses were scrubbed down to their foundations, cars and trucks disappeared and could not be found, couches and pianos were tossed across several yards, mattresses and box springs hung suspended from bare tree trunks and bodies lay in the streets and fields.

By Saturday, the death toll in Alabama was at 240 and climbing. But dozens, or even a couple hundred or more were missing, so the count was expected to go higher. Across the South the death toll from the tornado outbreak topped 300.

The tornado that dropped out of the sky at 3 p.m. aimed its fury on the city of Cullman.

“Climate Pollution Deniers.”

Shorter Think Progress headline via VerumSerum: “Tornadoes bring death, justice to climate deniers.”

Of course.

Never mind the facts:

US meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.

“If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it’s agreed upon by the tornado community that it’s not a real increase,” said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University.

“It’s having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we’re seeing them more often,” Dixon said.

But he said it would be “a terrible mistake” to relate the up-tick to climate change.

No matter. Being a Soros-funded smear merchant means never having to say you’re sorry.

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Via Doug Powers, Brian Williams — trolling for an Honorary Soros Monkey Award — laps up the eco-nitwittery.

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