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It’s fashionable these days to blame everything that goes wrong with anything on human interference with the climate, and we had yet another example last week when President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela fingered drought, El Niño and global warming as the reasons Venezuela’s lights keep going out. In this post I show that his Excellency has not a leg to stand on when he makes these claims, but that because no one ever looks at the data everyone believes him.

International Business Times: Venezuelan Leader Blames El Niño And Global Warming For Nation’s Energy Crisis

The fierce El Niño event under way in the Pacific Ocean and warming global temperatures have helped create the brutal drought now racking Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro said Wednesday night. Venezuela is facing its worst drought in almost half a century. The nation depends on hydropower for nearly two-thirds of its electricity, but the reservoirs that fuel its facilities are evaporating. Power outages in recent weeks have forced factories to send workers home early, slowing production, and many residents are now scrambling to secure enough drinking water supplies.

The fierce El Niño created the brutal drought now racking Venezuela, the worst in almost half a century. No pulling of punches. Boiled down to essentials, however, there are three issues here – a) is there really a “brutal” drought in Venezuela, b) if so, did the “fierce” El Niño cause it and c) has global warming made it worse? We’ll take a look at these issues shortly, but first it’s important to note that about 70% of Venezuela’s electricity comes from one massive installation, the Guri dam on the Caroni River (officially the Simon Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant) which holds back a 4,000 square kilometer lake, about the same size as Rhode Island or Somerset.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“It’s Pure Chaos Now; There Is No Way Back” – Venezuela Hits Rock Bottom As Its Morgues Overflow

April 10, 2016

“It’s Pure Chaos Now; There Is No Way Back” – Venezuela Hits Rock Bottom As Its Morgues Overflow

When we previewed Venezuela’s upcoming hyperinflation, which in January was predicted to be 720% and as of this moment is likely far higher…

… we said “This Is What The Death Of A Nation Looks Like” and said “there is no good news in any of the above for the long-suffering citizens of this “socialist paradise” which any minute now will be downgraded to its fair value of “socialist hell.”

Subsequent news that Venezuela was now openly liquidating its gold reserves while its president, in an amusing twist, announced last week, that henceforth every Friday will be a holiday, (the term there was a slightly different meaning) to cut down on electricity usage (while blaming El Nino for its electricity rationing) merely confirmed that the end if nigh for this once flourishing Latin American nation.

Sadly, while we have been warning for years about Venezuela’s inevitable, economic devastation, we said it was only a matter of time before the chaos spreads to broader society and leads to total collapse.

That may have arrived because as even the FT now admits, after visiting the main Caracas morgue, Venezuela risks a descent into chaos.

But back to the morgue of central Caracas, where FT correspondent Andres Schipani writes that the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.”

Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

February’s global temperature spike is a wake-up call

March 21, 2016

February’s global temperature spike is a wake-up call

Global temperatures for February showed a disturbing and unprecedented upward spike. It was 1.35℃ warmer than the average February during the usual baseline period of 1951-1980, according to NASA data.

This is the largest warm anomaly of any month since records began in 1880. It far exceeds the records set in 2014 and again in 2015 (the first year when the 1℃ mark was breached).

In the same month, Arctic sea ice cover reached its lowest February value ever recorded. And last year carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere increased by more than 3 parts per million, another record.

What is going on? Are we facing a climate emergency?

February temperatures from 1880 to 2016 from NASA GISS data. Values are deviations from the base period of 1951-1980. Stefan Rahmstorf

El Niño plus climate change

Two things are combining to produce the record warmth: the well-known global warming trend caused by our greenhouse gas emissions, and an El Niño in the tropical Pacific.

The record shows that global surface warming has always been overlaid by natural climate variability. The biggest single cause of this variability is the natural cycle between El Niño and La Niña conditions. The El Niño in 1998 was a record-breaker, but now we have one that looks even bigger by some measures.

The pattern of warmth in February shows typical signatures of both long-term global warming and El Niño. The latter is very evident in the tropics.

Further north, the pattern looks similar to other Februaries since the year 2000: particularly strong warming in the Arctic, Alaska, Canada and the northern Eurasian continent. Another notable feature is a cold blob in the northern Atlantic, which has been attributed to a slowdown in the Gulf Stream.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Venezuela Runs Out Of Electricity, Will Shut Down For A Week, El Nino Blamed

March 17, 2016

Venezuela Runs Out Of Electricity, Will Shut Down For A Week, El Nino Blamed

When last we checked in on our favorite socialist paradise, Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro’s opponents “had gone crazy.”

Or at least that’s how Maduro described the situation in a “thundering” speech to supporters at what he called an “anti-imperialist” rally in Caracas last Sunday.

Meanwhile, thousands of demonstrators held counter-rallies calling for the President’s ouster. Maduro angered the opposition – which dealt Hugo Chavez’s leftist movement its worst defeat at the ballot box in history in December – last month when he used a stacked Supreme Court to give himself emergency powers he says will help him deal with the country’s worsening economic crisis.

“Now that the economic emergency decree has validity, in the next few days I will activate a series of measures I had been working on,” he said, following Congress’s declaration of a “food emergency.”

Needless to say, Maduro’s “measures” didn’t do much to help the situation on the ground, where Venezuelans must queue in front of grocery stores and where 90% of medicine is scarce.

Venezuela is the world’s worst performing economy and barring a sudden (not to mention large) spike in crude prices, the country will in all likelihood default this year as 90% of oil revenue at current prices must go towards debt service payments.

But that hasn’t deterred Maduro, who has vowed to remain defiant in the face of (loud) calls for his exit. “Let them come for me,” he bellowed on Sunday. “I will hang on to power until the final day.”

Maybe so, but one place that’s not “hanging onto power” is the Guri Dam, which supplies more than two-thirds of the country’s electricity. As The Latin American Herald Tribune writes, the dam “is less than four meters from reaching the level where power generation will be impossible.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Global Warming Quickening?

March 16, 2016

Is Global Warming Quickening?

On Monday 14th March, Channel 4 News (UK terrestrial news channel) carried a report on catastrophic February warming and involved two distinguished UK climate scientists. What was said was so far away from the physical reality that I experience here on Earth that I was left wondering if they were talking about the same planet. So I have done a little digging.

Everyone who can should try and watch the 5 minute clip. The link takes you to a news catch up page. Select Monday 14 March and the clip titled “Is Global warming Quickening?”.

Figure 1 The NASA GISS LOTI (Land Ocean Temperature Index) graphic shown on Channel 4 News. This is a screen capture from the video archive linked above. Take a close look at the gradation of the colour scale that is discussed further below. This image bears no resemblance at all to the current NOAA SST image that appears immediately below the fold.

Sea Surface Temperatures (SST)

Let us begin by comparing the NASA GISS LOTI (Land Ocean Temperature Index) with current SSTs.

Figure 2 The full global SSTs as recorded on 14 March 2016. NOAA SSTs downloaded from this link. If anything I’m more concerned by all that blue. The dying remnants of the El Nino along the Equator cover a vast area that is not captured by this projection while the cold southern ocean covers a relatively small area.

The SSTs present a totally different picture. In fact a worryingly cool picture with the N Atlantic now looking as cool as I’ve seen it, a likely refection of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) preparing to flip to cool mode. The N Pacific and whole of the Southern Ocean are distinctly cool. How they manage to manufacture record warmth out of this is a story for another day. But how do Figures 1 and 2 appear so different. Part of the answer lies in the colour scale intervals that are chosen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder

February 11, 2016

El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder

This year’s El Niño phenomenon is spawning extreme weather around the planet. Now scientists are working to understand if global warming will lead to more powerful El Niños that will make droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes more intense.

Wild weather is gripping the planet. An El Niño has been wreaking havoc around the world, causing major flooding in South America, droughts in Indonesia and southern Africa, an unprecedented hurricane season in the North Pacific last fall, and much more.

Climatologists are still calculating whether this is the biggest El Niño on record. What they do agree on is that there have now been three “super-El Niños” in the space of just over three decades — in 1982-83, 1997-98, and now 2015-16. This unusual recurrence gives weight to a forecast made by Wenju Cai of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, two years ago that headline-grabbing “super El Niños” were in the process of upgrading from once every 20 years to once every ten years.

AFP/Getty Images

This town in Entre Rios Province, Argentina, was flooded after El Niño-related rains in December.

So what is going on? Is global warming beginning to cause more frequent and intense El Niños? And what effect might more powerful El Niño cycles have on the planet’s steadily warming climate?

El Niños are short-term aberrations of ocean currents and weather systems that start in the waters of the tropical Pacific and send shock waves around the world. They usually occur after several years of calm conditions during which prevailing tropical winds blowing across the world’s largest ocean pile warm water up in the west of the Pacific, around Indonesia.

This cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, there is a breakout. The warm waters turn and wash back east toward the Americas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle

February 8, 2016

Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle

It’s now a top priority for our species

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it’s making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.

Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:

Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.

Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.

Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The Level Of Alarm Is Extremely High” As Zika “Spreading Explosively” WHO Warns

January 28, 2016

“The Level Of Alarm Is Extremely High” As Zika “Spreading Explosively” WHO Warns

Meet the new Ebola.

Well over a year since the global fears over the Ebola epidemic sent US stocks reeling in late 2014 ahead of an even sharper rebound, today the head of the World Health Organization delivered a very stern warning when she said that the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that may cause birth defects when pregnant women are infected, has been “spreading explosively” in South and Central America.

“The level of alarm is extremely high,” WHO director general Margaret Chan said Thursday in an e-mailed statement according to Bloomberg. Chan said she will convene an emergency meeting on Feb. 1 in Geneva to consider whether to declare the outbreak a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” which can coordinate government responses to direct money and resources at the virus. She added that the spread of the mosquito-borne disease had gone from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions.

Bloomberg adds that according to Chan researchers are working to determine the exact link between the virus and birth defects such as microcephaly, which causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and potential developmental problems. “The possible links, only recently suspected, have rapidly changed the risk profile of Zika, from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions,” Chan told members of the WHO executive board in Switzerland.

One way in which the Zika virus is comparable to Ebola is that in both cases there is no vaccine and it could take years before one is available.

Another way the Ebola scenario could come back with a vengeance is that the WHO said that it expects the infection to eventually become common in the U.S. Travelers from countries with outbreaks have already been diagnosed on their return to America.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“It’s Hot Out There” – Here’s Why In One Visualization

December 19, 2015

“It’s Hot Out There” – Here’s Why In One Visualization

It’s not just warm, but very warm,” exclaims one east coast ski resort owner, adding “I can’t remember it ever being like this here.” But why? As WSJ reports, two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.

Typically this time of year, Arctic Oscillation would bring cold air to the Eastern U.S., bringing temperatures down. But so far this year, the oscillation has stayed much farther north, allowing warm air from the south to fill the void, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center.

The other factor is El Niño, a periodic climate cycle in which sea surface temperatures over the eastern Pacific become warmer than usual. The effects from changes in Arctic Oscillations generally last only a few weeks, but the balmy weather in the Northeast could continue because of the El Niño effect, experts say.

El Niños push the subtropical and polar jet streams, which help define weather around the world, to the north. The result is that the southern U.S. gets rain that normally falls in Central and South America, while the Northeast and Midwest get a reprieve from winter as the polar jet stream is pushed up into Canada.

“If people are nervous, they should be nervous.”

The current El Niño is on track to rank among the top three strongest since record-keeping began in 1950, according to federal climatologists.

“The El Niño impact is not dominating yet,” said Bill Patzert, a climate scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s like the tale of two climates here.

And since every failure of central planning to achieve its seasonally-adjustedeconomic targets must be blamed on something, even something as ridiculous as the weather, regardless if it is “too cold” like in the past two years, or “too hot”, now we know why Q4 GDP will be crap!

Hottest five-year period on record is 2011-2015, says WMO

November 28, 2015

Hottest five-year period on record is 2011-2015, says WMO

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) announced today that 2015 is likely to top the charts as the hottest year in modern observations, with 2011-15 the hottest five-year period on record.

With two full months still to add in, the global average surface temperature for January to October in 2015 was 0.73C above the 1961-1990 average. This already puts it a long way above 2014, in which average global temperature reached 0.57C above the 1961-1990 average.

This year’s record is down to a combination of rising greenhouse gases and a boost from the strong El Niño underway in the Pacific, says the WMO.

Today’s announcement is timed to coincide with the gathering of world leaders on Monday to begin talks in Paris aimed at striking a deal to reduce global emissions.

‘Significant’ milestone

To put today’s news another way, global temperature in 2015 is likely to pass the “symbolic and significant” threshold of 1C above preindustrial levels, says the WMO.

This follows the recent announcement from the Met Office that temperature in the HadCrut4 dataset – one of three global datasets the WMO uses – is expected to pass the 1C mark in 2015. Dr Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading said today:

Roughly 1.0 degrees Celsius of this warming, or around 95%, is due to human activity. Natural cycles in the climate system, including El Nino, solar activity and natural variations in weather, are likely to be responsible for the remainder of the warming.

Earlier this month, the WMO said greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had reached a new high, with spring concentrations in the northern hemisphere exceeding 400 parts per million.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will Indonesian Fires Spark Reform of Rogue Forest Sector?

November 5, 2015

Will Indonesian Fires Spark Reform of Rogue Forest Sector?

Massive fires in Indonesia caused by the burning of forests and peatlands for agriculture have shrouded large areas of Southeast Asia in smoke this fall. But analysts say international anger over the fires could finally lead to a reduction in Indonesia’s runaway deforestation.

The fires that blazed in Indonesia’s rainforests in 1982 and 1983 came as a shock. The logging industry had embarked on a decades-long pillaging of the country’s woodlands, opening up the canopy and drying out the carbon-rich peat soils. Preceded by an unusually long El Niño-related dry season, the forest fires lasted for months, sending vast clouds of smoke across Southeast Asia.

Fifteen years later, in 1997 and 1998, a record El Niño year coincided with continued massive land-use changes in Indonesia, including the wholesale draining of peatlands to plant oil palm and wood pulp plantations. Large areas of Borneo and Sumatra burned, and again Southeast Asians choked on Indonesian smoke.

Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

Smoke last month in South Sumatra, Indonesia, from illegal burning of forests and peatlands.

In the ensuing years, Indonesia’s peat and forest fires have become an annual summer occurrence. But this summer and fall, a huge number of conflagrations have broken out as a strong El Niño has led to dry conditions, and deforestation has continued to soar in Indonesia. Over the past several months, roughly 120,000 fires have burned, eliciting sharp protests from Singapore and other nations fed up with breathing the noxious haze from Indonesian blazes.

The pall of smoke still drifting over Southeast Asia is the most visible manifestation of decades of disastrous policies in Indonesia’s corrupt forestry and palm oil sectors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Is This Happening? Unprecedented Flooding Has Hit The U.S. Within The Last 30 Days

October 26, 2015

Why Is This Happening? Unprecedented Flooding Has Hit The U.S. Within The Last 30 Days

Over the past 30 days, major floods have hit the east coast, the west coast and now the middle part of the country. So why is this happening? Why is the U.S. being hit by so many catastrophic weather events all of a sudden? During the past month flooding has caused billions of dollars in damage, and in many areas the clean up is going to take well into next year. Some pundits are blaming El Nino, but others are pointing to other potential reasons for why this may be happening. Let’s start by taking a look at some of the biggest flood events that have happened over the past 30 days…

Hurricane Joaquin never made landfall on the east coast, but moisture from the storm had a tremendous impact – particularly in South Carolina. In fact, the governor of the state said that the region had not seen that type of rain “in a thousand years”…

“We haven’t had this level of rain in the low-country in a thousand years — that’s how big this is,” said South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Days of record rainfall and catastrophic flooding left at least seventeen people dead in South Carolina and two dead in North Carolina, Oct. 6, 2015. Thirteen dams have failed.

It would be very difficult to overstate the amount of damage that was caused by this storm. Some officials are estimating that the total amount of economic damage done “will probably be in the billions of dollars”…

The rains may have stopped in South Carolina, but the danger and the work to rebuild are far from over.

“I believe that things will get worse before they get better,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin told reporters Monday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists Warn ‘Godzilla’s Coming!’ – Millions Potentially Endangered By Coming Monster!

October 19, 2015

Scientists Warn ‘Godzilla’s Coming!’ – Millions Potentially Endangered By Coming Monster!

Prepare! Deadly Rains Targeting Coast Loom!

“Storms will reign,” LA Times reported on October 15 after the National Weather Service issued a warning that El Niño is getting stronger, raising odds of more deadly heavy rains and mudslides. (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-el-nino-forecast-20151015-story.html) Hours later Thursday, flash floods in California sent water and mud flowing into roads Thursday, triggering mudslides that buried cars and forcing closure of a portion of Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Mountains, a highway known locally as “the grapevine.” California Highway Patrol said Friday night that I-5 had reopened after a cleanup.

First responders scrambled to rescue motorists stranded on roadways as flash floods and large hail pounded areas north of Los Angeles, Southern California authorities began digging out Friday. That storm is a clarion call to Californians and Northern Baja California Sur, Mexico residents.

While lower-profile weather forecasters had already issued the warning weeks ago, the National Weather Service stated for the first time on Thursday that it, too, expects El Niño to bring storms along with their wetter-than-average rains to virtually all of California. The statement followed a series of deadly environmental events across the globe that claimed hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of destruction, as though few knew and were prepared.

El Niño is expected to send more big storms throughout Southern California and as far north as San Francisco Bay Area. The forecast includes mountainous feeding California’s most important reservoirs, that then feed water into much of the entire state – and that means mudslides.

Being a season of unusual disastrous weather-related events, west coasters are urged to take note and prepare.

A “number of significant storms” will bring heavy rains.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bushfires rage in Australia as ‘Godzilla El Nino’ takes affect

October 6, 2015

Bushfires rage in Australia as ‘Godzilla El Nino’ takes affect

A charred car stands destroyed after a bushfire moved through the area near One Tree Hill in the Adelaide Hills on January 5, 2015. © AFP

Over 100 bushfires are blazing in the state of Victoria, Australia, with over 200 homes at risk. Unusually high temperatures and strong winds have fueled the fires, which are threatening areas about 80 kilometers northwest of Melbourne.

Firefighters are struggling to put out the blazes, with changing wind directions making their task even more difficult. Aerial water bombers have also been called in to provide assistance, as gusts of wind have reached over 100 kilometers an hour.

View image on Twitter

Follow

Edgar’s Mission @edgarsmission

Smoke blowing over @edgarsmission #Lancefield #VicFires @CFA_Updates

1:02 AM – 6 Oct 2015

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) says that over 100 fires are raging north of Melbourne, while local politicians have been urging locals to take precautions.

“The 15/16 fire season is here now. It is absolutely on us and we need to understand that this is going to be a long, hot, dry, and dangerous summer and people need to be very clear and get your fire plan in order,” Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews told ABC News.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

3 major hurricanes recorded over the Pacific for first time ever

August 31, 2015

3 major hurricanes recorded over the Pacific for first time ever

In a historic development this weekend, three major hurricanes were recorded over the Pacific Ocean for the first time since records have been kept.

Hurricane Kilo, Hurricane Ignacio and Hurricane Jimena were all classified as Category 4 storms on Sunday, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the second highest classification on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

It was the first time on record that there were three Category 4 hurricanes in the Pacific at the same time, and the first time three major hurricanes—defined as Category 3 or higher—were recorded over the Pacific, according to Weather.com.

“Sea surface temperatures are extremely warm, averaging 2 to 5 degrees above normal,” said meteorologist Chris Robbins, a former NHC forecaster and founder of Robbins Meteorological Consulting and iWeatherNet.com. “This anomaly is well north of the oceanic warming associated with a typical El Niño.”

The rare event was greeted with some enthusiasm by hurricane expert Eric Blake of the NHC on Twitter:

Eric Blake @EricBlake12

Historic central/eastern Pacific outbreak- 3 major hurricanes at once for the first time on record! #ElNino #climate pic.twitter.com/t4fdIZwhOO

4:52 PM – 29 Aug 2015

J Whitehead @ntxweathersoonr

@EricBlake12 i sense some drooling

Follow

Eric Blake @EricBlake12

@ntxweathersoonr one can’t use enough superlatives to talk about how unusual it is. Cpac has no business looking like this

4:56 PM – 29 Aug 2015

By 8 a.m. Eastern time Monday, Hurricane Jimena, still classified as Category 4, was moving west with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. The hurricane was not expected to lose much strength in the next couple of days, according to the NHC’s latest advisory.

Hurricane Kilo also remained a Category 4 and was heading toward the international dateline, according to the NHC. The storm was located about 1,370 miles west of Honolulu and had maximum sustained winds of 135 miles per hour.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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