Yes, Hurricane Matthew IS Stronger Because of Global Waming

HURRICANE MATTHEW IS STRONGER, AND IT'S PART OF A PATTERN IN THE CURRENT ERA OF INTENSIFYING STORMS Matthew set a new record as the longest lived Category 4 (or higher) Atlantic hurricane in October — 84 hours. By Monday, it had already “generated the most accumulated cyclone energy” of any Atlantic hurricane ever recorded in the eastern Caribbean.
As a result, the 2016 hurricane season has “already generated the most accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic in October since 2005” (the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma).
Hurricane Matthew is super strong — because of climate change
“Category 4 and 5 hurricanes could double or triple in the coming decades,” expert warns.

Hurricane Matthew is slowly approaching the East Coast where it is expected to wreak havoc with storm surge, wind, and rain. Matthew has already set a number of records — and global warming is giving it a boost.
Hurricanes “extract heat energy from the ocean to convert it to the power of wind, and the warmer the ocean is, the stronger a hurricane can get if all other conditions that it needs to exist are present,” meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Jeff Masters explained last month on Living on Earth. “So, scientists are confident that as we continue to heat up the oceans, we’re going to see more of these high-end perfect storms.”
LATEST FROM SE FLORIDA: parts could be uninhabitable for months -- Melbourne office of National Weather Service, as of early Friday morning --As of 2 AM storm bypassed SE coast, but it could hit Central coast of the state
Let’s look at some of the latest climate science. One 2013 paper found that “since 1975 there has been a substantial and observable regional and global increase in the proportion of Category 4–5 hurricanes of 25–30 percent per °C of anthropogenic global warming.” Another 2013 paper concluded that “dramatic changes in the frequency distribution of lifetime maximum intensity (LMI) have occurred in the North Atlantic,” and the stronger hurricanes “have become more intense.”
In other words, warming oceans create stronger hurricanes, like the one we’re seeing now.

Matthew spun up from a tropical storm to a Category 5 superstorm in an alarming 36 hours. The latest research says this is also a result of global warming. “Storms are intensifying at a much more rapid pace than they used to 25 years back,” explained the author of a 2012 study. “They are getting stronger more quickly and also [to a] higher category. The intensity as well as the rate of intensity is increasing.”
A 2015 study, “A climatological study of the effect of sea-surface temperature on North Atlantic hurricane intensification,” found a statistically significant relationship between higher intensification values and higher sea surface temperature [SST] values. “On average, mean intensification increases by 16 percent for every 1°C increase in mean SST.”
This warming-driven trend toward more rapid intensification [RI] is very worrisome. “The vast majority (79 percent) of major storms are RI storms,” and “the most intense storms are those that undergo RI,” according to a 2016 study. The latest storm tracks for superstorm Matthew have it threatening the southeast coast.

See the conclusion of the article at Think Progress.

Scientist Speaks out, amidst media blackout"Amid Media Blackout over Climate Change Links to Hurricane Matthew, Top Scientist Speaks Out" -- Democracy Now

Oklahoma So Hot, Streetlamps Melting in Over 110 Degree Heat

Oklahoma is so hot that street lamps are melting"
By Tecca | Today in Tech, Yahoo News | August 2, 2012

Highs of 115 degrees are taking its toll on the nation's heartland

It's hard to not be concerned with global warming when its effects are right in front of your eyes. Sure, it's one thing when the ocean begins to reclaim islands, but when you can see the effects in your home town, well, that's another story altogether. Case in point: KFOR TV in Stillwater, Oklahoma is reporting that temperatures are so high that the street lamps have begun melting.

To be sure, Stillwater is suffering from one heck of a heatwave. It's expected to reach 115 there today, 108 on Friday, and 109 on Saturday. And warmer temperatures are nothing new: July represented the 23rd month out of the last 28 that came in warmer than average.

It's possible the heat itself isn't responsible for the event — it's being reported on Facebook that a nearby dumpster fire may have been the cause of the melting plastic light housings. Still, that dumpster fire was caused and aggravated by the record heat and dryness. And if dangerous, spontaneous fires aren't reason enough to go green, we don't know what is.

[Image credit: Patrick Hunter via Facebook]

This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca

Fortunately, despite 15 straight days of 100 degree + temperatures, there have been no heat-related deaths.
"This July, EMSA [Emergency Medical Service Authority] responded to 127 heat-related emergencies and took 82 people to the hospital . . . .
This year, Grandfield has had 41 days of triple-digit heat, and Oklahoma City has had 20 days. No official heat-related deaths had been reported in 2012 going into Wednesday, according to the medical examiner’s office."

Drought's Impact on Economy - Shouldn't We and Obama Be Talking About This?

This is the drought of a generation:

The summer, 2012 drought is the worst in decades, and John Eligon in the New York Times tells us that it will likely last into October. (See this series of drought maps in the New York Times for the continental United States, reaching back decades. This is the worst drought since 1956, in terms of our widespread the drought is against the lower 48 states.)

And its affect on the food economy? Huge. Particularly since the parts of the United States where it is hitting hardest are grain producing areas.

The United States is a rice producer and the signature states in this chart are in the impacted area. (See this article on home brew sake for major rice producing states: "Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas are the rice producing states.")

The area of severe to extreme drought reaches pretty much continuously from central Kentucky and Tennessee west to eastern Utah. The severe or extreme drought areas reach to Nebraska and parts of Wyoming and South Dakota. Basically, the drought reaches into America's breadbasket heartland.

Corn prices, and all the foods reliant on corn or corn syrup, are expected to head up. Mark Huffman, July 16, 2012, in Consumer Affairs, wrote that corn futures have already increased 50 percent since the drought started. The effects reach beyond straight corn. Corn syrup is used in a wide range of baked foods such as breads, crackers and chips, as CNN reported this week. Expect the up-to-now cheap drinks sweetened by high fructose corn syrup to increase in price. Ethanol and vitamins also rely on corn. Livestock are fed corn, so impacts will be felt with chicken, egg, pork and beef prices. As Akweli Parker wrote at the How Stuff Works site, besides ethanol, industrial uses of corn include vitamins, paper and cardboard production.

So, as some observers anticipate global consequences of the drought of 2012 (noted by Naomi Spencer and by contributor at Business Insider, is it not time for the last doubting Republican politicians to stop playing chicken and to start acting constructively to reverse the climate changing impact of global warming? Will traditionally red, conservative states tilt more liberal in this cataclysmic year?

And Barack Obama thinks that he's got problems with the manufacturing and service economies? Using climate change and food prices would seem a good strategy to whip Republicans into shape, or at least to whip up public sentiment to turn the troglodytes out of office.

Obama calls out GOP for Holding FEMA Funds Hostage

The House Republicans are refusing to give more money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.
(This is a particularly big issue right now, since the money could be of great used for helping the people that are suffering from the effects of Hurricane Irene, and FEMA has run out of money. Of course it has run out of money: this year has seen so much extreme weather, and we have four months to go in the remainder of 2011.)

So, it was quite proper when President Barack Obama criticized the GOP for holding FEMA funds hostage.
Los Angeles Times: White House blasts GOP over FEMA funding".

Now, one wonders whether some middle of the road voters in flood besieged New Jersey will reconsider support for Republican congressional or presidential candidates. Just consider how the supposedly moderate N.J. Governor Chris Christie has taken the state out of the Northeast carbon cap compact.
Will weather disaster-plagued districts flip from Republican to Democratic in the Presidential and Congressional votes in the 2012 general election? Just note (on the 2010 Congressional elections map below) the red district from northeastern North Carolina to New Jersey. Will voters see the light about global warming (as opposed to deniers Rick Perry and Chris Christie?

Well, maybe it will take more 100 degree days and destructive hurricanes. Click on this link for "Natural disaster risk assessment reveals most and least dangerous cities" at AgentGenius.com for natural disaster risk. The very Republican red Southeast has the most cities that are indicated to be the riskiest in which to live.

Big Tar Sands Sit-in Protests at White House -Will Obama Listen?

Interesting timing that global warming protests at the White House were scheduled for a week right after Hurricane Irene, the largest Mid-Atlantic and New England --very convenient, and pertinent.

140 protesters were outside the White House on August 29, 2011, submitting to arrest. (Today is day 10 of a two-week protest.) They were protesting against Keystone's Tar Sands pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Texas, U.S. As an opponent of the pipeline noted, we have seen an increasing number of episodes of extreme weather.

Now, albeit, a single incident of extreme weather does not always indicate an effect of global warming. Take for example, the cycle of large hurricanes hitting the New York City/ Long Island region in recent decades, 1938, 1960, 1985, 2011. In the cycle we have hurricanes coming about every 25 years. And, the scientific consensus is that we cannot we identify a causal relationship of global warming upon tornadoes.

But, in aggregate, we are seeing more days of very high temperatures, weeks of 90s, 100s degree temperatures from Texas to Florida. And we are seeing severity of weather patterns in certain parts of the country: in the Southwest and Mountain West: drought and wildfires; and in much of the rest of the continental U.S.: record rainfalls.

WHAT IS THE TAR SANDS PIPELINE PROJECT?
There is much oil in Alberta, Canada. The United States has a high appetite for fossil fuels. Transcanada, is building the Keystone Pipeline to carry diluted bitumen, a crude oil, from there to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. Proponents of the project say that the oil from the project will help ween the United States off its dependence on foreign oil (often pundits mention the Middle East, but they omit Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela).

You can watch a short debate between an opponent and a proponent of the pipeline on the PBS News Hour show of August 29. Here, below, is a map of the pipeline's projected route. (Note its path through several red states and to Rick Perry's Texas. Watch Governor Perry gloat over the money that it brings through the state and ignore Obama's role in the pipeline.)

Read more background on the Keystone Project at PBS News Hour's Rundown blog, "Proposed Tar Sands Oil Pipeline Elicits Protests."

Then again, consider the above mentioned signs of worsening weather, the melting of glaciers, and the international scientific consensus: we are experiencing global warming, and humans ARE causing this.
We should be investing in renewable energies: wind, solar, corn-based ethanol. We should be shifting from investments in roads and airports to inter-city trains, and for regional population clusters, high speed rail. We should be developing residential and work communities in compact arrangements, similar to the patterns that we see in the older cities of the Mid-West and the Northeast. The judgment behind this pipeline proposal is questionable.
Protesters were calling on President Barack Obama to take action to stop the project. Specifically, they want Obama to deny a permit to the project. Details, see "NW environmental news: Oil sand pipeline in the crosshairs of activists", at OregonLive.com, August 29, 2011.

The organized opposition has been going for two years now. The current protest has given the story more legs. At earlier this month, Daily Kos ran this post with an online petition to Obama to stop the pipeline.

NASA'S JAMES HANSEN'S CRITICISMS
Number 112 of the 140 arrested today at the White House was James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, New York. Elizabeth McGowan in "Amid Cheers, NASA Chief Is Arrested at Oil Sands Pipeline Protests: James Hansen, the 70-year-old renowned climate scientist, was the 112th of 140 arrested on day 10 of the Keystone XL pipeline sit-ins", wrote:

Hansen—who has been arrested a couple of times before for protesting the harvesting of fossil fuels—regularly criticizes the Keystone XL pipeline as the "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet." The Obama administration is expected to issue a decision on the international project by the end of the year.

WILL PRESIDENT OBAMA BE MOVED?
Given that President Obama is heeding the prerogatives of the Corporate Occupied Political System, the odds are very slim that he would to anything to oppose this project. His record in the past two years has shown that he attends to the interests of corporations. Plus, he's got the Tea-Party Republicans, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann breathing down his neck to keep oil prices down. My prediction, despite any protests, Obama will be more concerned with satisfying vehicle drivers that want low gas prices. Despite the protests, Obama will not deny the pipeline project a permit. He will play to the middle and show himself to be the centrist that he is.

Chris Christie Joins Global Warming Denying Flat Earthists; Bias By Millionaire TV Anchors

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (Republican, of course) has left the northeastern political consensus that policies should be pursued to reduce carbon emissions. (Reduction of carbon pollution emissions is aimed at tackling global warming.)
Since May he has opposed the Northeast agreement (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, RGGI) to cap carbon emissions.
(Christopher Baker in NJ.com, "Gov. Christie announces N.J. pulling out of regional environmental initiative", May 26, 2011.)

Christie vetoed state legislature law last Friday that committed to supporting carbon emission controls by 2018.
Democrats will try to engineer an override of Christie's veto.

As a moderate blogger said, Christie has just nixed his chance to become presidential nominee in 2012.

* * *

Wonder why television anchors and other news personalities are so bent on pursuing the center-right pro-corporate consensus (notice how some of them pushed Christie to run for president)?
Perhaps their big salaries have something to do with it. The multi-millionaire anchors have it in their interest to oppose President Barack Obama's talk about taxing millionaires.

See this report from August 9, 2011 in MediaBistro: Alex Weprin, "Who Makes What in TV News?"

The highest paid news anchor is NBC “Today” anchor Matt Lauer, who brings in around $17 million a year.
. . .
Among the evening news anchors, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams leads the way with a $13 million a year contract, followed by Diane Sawyer at $12 million. “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley makes less than $5 million a year, or less than a third of what Katie Couric was making on the program.

On cable, Anderson Cooper‘s CNN/Warner Bros. syndicated show deal brings in $11 million a year, followed by Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, who makes $10 million a year.

NBC's "Meet the Press"' David Gregory's salary is publicly unknown, but FAIR has suspected that he is earning something in the neighborhood of the $5 million that Chris Matthews is making.

David Gregory, Fat Cat in Denial
02/23/2009 by Jim Naureckas

David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09):

There's a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more...the shares of...these banks gets talked down...the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it's, it's not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, who is not just a fat cat, the investor is us.... It is the taxpayer, it's the teacher, it's someone who's invested in a 401(k). The investors on the sidelines, scared to death about taking any risk. And unless that changes, this economy really can't turn around.

Matthew Yglesias writes today (2/23/09) on the oddity of Gregory making a distinction between fat cats and people like himself. I can't find a published estimate of Gregory's salary, but his NBC colleague Chris Matthews reportedly makes $5 million a year (Washington Post, 1/8/09), as did his Meet the Press predecessor Tim Russert (Washington Post, 5/23/04), so Gregory's salary is probably in that neighborhood, give or take a few million. This is a hundred times the median family income in the U.S.--not counting Gregory's spouse's income; she used to be a vice president at Fannie Mae, making an estimated $3 million a year.

N. Klein on Democ Now: “My Fear is that Climate Change is the Biggest Crisis of All”: Naomi Klein Warns Global Warming Could Be Exploited by Capitalism and Militarism

Naomi Klein yesterday on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now:
“My Fear is that Climate Change is the Biggest Crisis of All”: Naomi Klein Warns Global Warming Could Be Exploited by Capitalism and Militarism

Global warming and detailed rising sea levels map

There is an excellent global map at geology.com for the seeing effects on coastlines from rising sea levels, due to global warming, or what some call climate change.

The map has zooming capabilities, so that you can closely look at the country or region and see just how intensely the particular areas would be affected by rising se levels. You can also set the interactive map to see how different levels of increases in the sea level, from 1, to 2, to 3, and so on up to 14 meters will affect the coastlines.

The map shows that even at modest increases, such as 2 meters, about half of the Netherlands, the entire Venice region and the lower islands of the Florida Keys will be submerged under water.

You will also note that, despite dire predictions for New York City, the areas to see the worst effects are in eastern Brooklyn and southern Queens.