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Now the new report is being dismissed as Crackpot BS... It says that our own Conservationism may be reducing the Aerosols in the lower atmosphere that reflect sunlight into space...
Lets have a little Refresher course
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Looks like President Gore was correct about global warming
<hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> <hr style="color: rgb(221, 221, 221);" size="1"> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This year's ozone hole over Antarctica is bigger and deeper than any other on record, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday.
The ozone layer shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, and the layer thins out over the South Pole each year, primarily because human-made compounds release ozone-eating chlorine and bromine gases into the stratosphere.
"From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ," said Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.
==================================================
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.
Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said in a statement
The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early indicator of the consequences of global warming, so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.
"This is a very large change in a very short time," said Jay Zwally, a co-author of the study. "In the 1990s, the ice sheet was growing inland and shrinking significantly at the edges, which is what climate models predicted as a result of global warming.
"Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning to dominate the inland growth, and we are only in the early stages of the climate warming predicted for this century," Zwally said.
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Global Warming? SURE, just a fabrication from the Left
<hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> THANK YOU PRESIDENT GORE FOR HAVING THE GUTS TO SPEAK OUT AND TRY AND EDUCATE THE WORLD!!
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly, Study Says[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana,Sans-Serif]Email this Story[/FONT]
Sep 13, 7:41 PM (ET)
By SETH BORENSTEIN[/FONT] <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="210"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><table border="1" bordercolor="#cbcbcd" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="150"><tbody><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr align="center"><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif](AP) This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005. Arctic sea...
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www.WillYouJoinUs.com
Is Global Warming Real? - Get Renowned Financier George Soros' Opinion on Global Warming
www.georgesoros.com
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</td></tr></tbody></table> [FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it.[/FONT]
<table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="210"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><table border="1" bordercolor="#cbcbcd" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="150"><tbody><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr align="center"><td></td></tr><tr><td>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif](AP) This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005. Arctic sea...
Full Image[/FONT]</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent, according to Comiso.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]A second NASA study by other researchers found the winter sea ice melt in one region of the eastern Arctic has shrunk about 40 percent in just the past two years. This is partly because of local weather but also partly because of global warming, Comiso said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The loss of winter ice is bad news for the ocean because this type of ice, when it melts in summer, provides a crucial breeding ground for plankton, Comiso said. Plankton are the bottom rung of the ocean's food chain.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"If the winter ice melt continues, the effect would be very profound especially for marine mammals," Comiso said in a NASA telephone press conference.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The ice is melting even in subfreezing winter temperatures because the water is warmer and summer ice covers less area and is shorter-lived, Comiso said. Thus, the winter ice season shortens every year and warmer water melts at the edges of the winter ice more every year.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists and climate models have long predicted a drop in winter sea ice, but it has been slow to happen. Global warming skeptics have pointed to the lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The latest findings are "coming more in line with what we expected to find," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "We're starting to see a much more coherent and firm picture occurring."[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so," he added.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Serreze said only five years ago he was "a fence-sitter" on the issue of whether man-made global warming was happening and a threat, but he said recent evidence in the Arctic has him convinced.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Summer sea ice also has dramatically melted and shrunk over the years, setting a record low last year. This year's measurements are not as bad, but will be close to the record, Serreze said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Equally disturbing is a large mass of water - melted sea ice - in the interior of a giant patch of ice north of Alaska, Serreze said. It's called a polynya, and while those show up from time to time, this one is large - about the size of the state of Maryland - and in an unexpected place.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"I for one, after having studied this for 20 years, have never seen anything like this before," Serreze said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The loss of summer sea ice is pushing polar bears more onto land in northern Canada and Alaska, making it seem like there are more polar bears when there are not, said NASA scientist Claire Parkinson, who studies the bears.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The polar bear population in the Hudson Bay area has dropped from 1,200 in 1989 to 950 in 2004 and the bears that are around are 22 percent smaller than they used to be, she said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]---[/FONT]
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USA ... the Drought no one is talking about
<hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> Did you know there's a catastrophic drought occuring right here in the US?
Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 03:05:30 PM PDT
To see how the drought has developed over the three months, the Drought Monitor site also provides a nifty animation.
If not, you're not alone.
In fact, we knew there were "concerns," pockets of dry conditions here and there, but really had no clue how bad and widespread until recently. See, we (myself, spouse and four children, ages 4-9) have been traveling via RV for throughout the US for ten of the past 15 months (the last four for Draft Gore 2008 PAC), starting in Maine last June, and have visited most states east of the Mississippi, and, more recently, a half dozen on the west side. We're currently holed up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, having traversed the state from East to West earlier this week. Earlier this month, we spent time in Wisconsin, the U.P. of Michigan and Minnesota, and the entire month of July in Iowa.
In the Upper Peninsula, the corn (what little is farmed) was a bit taller and less brown, but this offered little comfort when my spouse interviewed a farmer from downstate Michigan. He'd been farming over fifty years, and allowed how the growing season for corn over that period had increased from 90 days to the current 109. And, yep, the past few years were drier than any since the 50's, and how he expected more than a few of his over-extended neighbors, those who'd had to borrow to buy their seed and thus had the extra cost of mandatory crop insurance, might not make it if without perfect growing conditions.
[On top of the drought, which we'd seen developing the previous year in our first travels to the U.P., we noted another truly strange phenomenon: People actually swimming in Lake Superior. Life-long residents who had never put more than a toe in the famously icy waters were flat-out swimming over their heads in suddenly balmy waters.]
Traveling back through Wisconsin into Minnesota provided more fuel to our growing eye-witness concerns over what appeared to be a developing agricultural catastrophe, but the trek across South Dakota confirmed our worst fears. Most farmers have in fact cut their losses and harvested what they could, despite it being early August. Wheat production is 14% lower than 2005 totals. Grasslands are now brown, and entire herds of cattle have been sold due to lack of fresh grass, water and the cost of hay. The outlook for sunflowers was bleak as well:
The drought conditions have led to perfect conditions for wildfires, however; Nebraska alone has lost over 65,000 acres of grasslands to wildfires. It has also had a real effect on power generation in the region, as hydro-electric dams reduce output as reservoirs dry up. This past Tuesday, we were camped below the Big Bend Dam on the Missouri, one dam downstream from the one noted in the linked article, and water levels were at lows not seen since the dam's construction in 1963. All told, the Western Area Power Administration has seen a 40% decrease in power output this year. To compensate, they are expecting an 18% increase in rates in 2006 and 2007.
Critical to this discussion is whether the drought is forecast to end anytime soon. Below is the NOAA's outlook through November. While it appears things are getting better for some of the drought stricken areas, the precipitation deficits are substantial.
This map indicates the amount of rainfall needed to bring drought stricken areas back to within "normal" precipitation levels. For much of South Dakota, that number is between six and nine inches; annual rainfall for the state averages about 17 inches.
Apparently, the Climate Prediction Center doesn't expect that "improving" conditions will have much of an effect on soil conditions, according to it's own forecasts:
I know you're all wondering, well, if it's really all that bad, how come we haven't heard much about it? Well, if you live in the affected regions, from Texas to Montana and east to upper Wisconsin, then chances are, you have. A search of Google News on the terms "Great Plains" and "drought" retrieved 265 references over the past month. However, if you live on either coast and get your news from, say, the New York Times, Washington Post and/or Los Angeles Times, you might have missed their coverage. In fact, the same search terms with any of these sources added came up empty. CNN and Fox News were no better. Thus for much of the US population, this potentially catastrophic event is no where on the radar.
Unfortunately, the USDA, and in particular, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, doesn't seem all that concerned, despite Johanns former position as governor of Nebraska.
Although he issued a disaster declaration for 24 South Dakota counties in early August, Johanns has declined to visit the area. The declaration only makes emergency Farm Service Agency loans available to farmers and ranchers who have suffered losses from drought, but provides no other aid. SD Senator Tim Johnson has attempted to tap into more than $3.9 billion in agricultural disaster relief appropriated by Congress, but which was withdrawn after Bush threatened a veto.
Aberdeen American News, one of South Dakota's few dailies, was not impressed with Johanns' effort:
I strongly urge readers to learn all they can on the building drought and drought mitigation. Contact your current members of Congress and ask them to support drought assistance, and if they won't, actively support the campaigns of their opponents who will. In comments below, please share any information you have about the position of your local Congressmen and what we all can do to help.
As for us, we'll be continuing our trip through the West, gathering information and making contacts for the Draft Gore 2008 PAC. Next on our itinerary are eastern Wyoming and Colorado, both states also greatly effected by the current drought. If you like to join us, or support Draft Gore in other ways, please join us at our website.
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Lets have a little Refresher course
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Looks like President Gore was correct about global warming <hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> <hr style="color: rgb(221, 221, 221);" size="1"> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This year's ozone hole over Antarctica is bigger and deeper than any other on record, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday.
The ozone layer shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, and the layer thins out over the South Pole each year, primarily because human-made compounds release ozone-eating chlorine and bromine gases into the stratosphere.
"From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles ," said Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington.
==================================================
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.
Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said in a statement
The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early indicator of the consequences of global warming, so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.
"This is a very large change in a very short time," said Jay Zwally, a co-author of the study. "In the 1990s, the ice sheet was growing inland and shrinking significantly at the edges, which is what climate models predicted as a result of global warming.
"Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning to dominate the inland growth, and we are only in the early stages of the climate warming predicted for this century," Zwally said.
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Global Warming? SURE, just a fabrication from the Left <hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> THANK YOU PRESIDENT GORE FOR HAVING THE GUTS TO SPEAK OUT AND TRY AND EDUCATE THE WORLD!!
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly, Study Says[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana,Sans-Serif]Email this Story[/FONT]Sep 13, 7:41 PM (ET)
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</td></tr><tr><td>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif](AP) This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005. Arctic sea...Full Image[/FONT]</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td width="100%"> <script> if (NAV_NS&&NAV_VER<6) document.write("
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</td></tr></tbody></table> [FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it.[/FONT]
<table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="210"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><table border="1" bordercolor="#cbcbcd" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="150"><tbody><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr align="center"><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif](AP) This satellite image released by NASA shows the concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005. Arctic sea...Full Image[/FONT]</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent, according to Comiso.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]A second NASA study by other researchers found the winter sea ice melt in one region of the eastern Arctic has shrunk about 40 percent in just the past two years. This is partly because of local weather but also partly because of global warming, Comiso said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The loss of winter ice is bad news for the ocean because this type of ice, when it melts in summer, provides a crucial breeding ground for plankton, Comiso said. Plankton are the bottom rung of the ocean's food chain.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"If the winter ice melt continues, the effect would be very profound especially for marine mammals," Comiso said in a NASA telephone press conference.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The ice is melting even in subfreezing winter temperatures because the water is warmer and summer ice covers less area and is shorter-lived, Comiso said. Thus, the winter ice season shortens every year and warmer water melts at the edges of the winter ice more every year.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Scientists and climate models have long predicted a drop in winter sea ice, but it has been slow to happen. Global warming skeptics have pointed to the lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The latest findings are "coming more in line with what we expected to find," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "We're starting to see a much more coherent and firm picture occurring."[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so," he added.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Serreze said only five years ago he was "a fence-sitter" on the issue of whether man-made global warming was happening and a threat, but he said recent evidence in the Arctic has him convinced.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Summer sea ice also has dramatically melted and shrunk over the years, setting a record low last year. This year's measurements are not as bad, but will be close to the record, Serreze said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]Equally disturbing is a large mass of water - melted sea ice - in the interior of a giant patch of ice north of Alaska, Serreze said. It's called a polynya, and while those show up from time to time, this one is large - about the size of the state of Maryland - and in an unexpected place.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]"I for one, after having studied this for 20 years, have never seen anything like this before," Serreze said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The loss of summer sea ice is pushing polar bears more onto land in northern Canada and Alaska, making it seem like there are more polar bears when there are not, said NASA scientist Claire Parkinson, who studies the bears.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]The polar bear population in the Hudson Bay area has dropped from 1,200 in 1989 to 950 in 2004 and the bears that are around are 22 percent smaller than they used to be, she said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Sans-serif]---[/FONT]
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USA ... the Drought no one is talking about <hr style="color: rgb(43, 41, 94);" size="1"> Did you know there's a catastrophic drought occuring right here in the US?
Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 03:05:30 PM PDT
To see how the drought has developed over the three months, the Drought Monitor site also provides a nifty animation.
If not, you're not alone.
In fact, we knew there were "concerns," pockets of dry conditions here and there, but really had no clue how bad and widespread until recently. See, we (myself, spouse and four children, ages 4-9) have been traveling via RV for throughout the US for ten of the past 15 months (the last four for Draft Gore 2008 PAC), starting in Maine last June, and have visited most states east of the Mississippi, and, more recently, a half dozen on the west side. We're currently holed up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, having traversed the state from East to West earlier this week. Earlier this month, we spent time in Wisconsin, the U.P. of Michigan and Minnesota, and the entire month of July in Iowa.
- mbw's diary :: ::
In the Upper Peninsula, the corn (what little is farmed) was a bit taller and less brown, but this offered little comfort when my spouse interviewed a farmer from downstate Michigan. He'd been farming over fifty years, and allowed how the growing season for corn over that period had increased from 90 days to the current 109. And, yep, the past few years were drier than any since the 50's, and how he expected more than a few of his over-extended neighbors, those who'd had to borrow to buy their seed and thus had the extra cost of mandatory crop insurance, might not make it if without perfect growing conditions.
[On top of the drought, which we'd seen developing the previous year in our first travels to the U.P., we noted another truly strange phenomenon: People actually swimming in Lake Superior. Life-long residents who had never put more than a toe in the famously icy waters were flat-out swimming over their heads in suddenly balmy waters.]
Traveling back through Wisconsin into Minnesota provided more fuel to our growing eye-witness concerns over what appeared to be a developing agricultural catastrophe, but the trek across South Dakota confirmed our worst fears. Most farmers have in fact cut their losses and harvested what they could, despite it being early August. Wheat production is 14% lower than 2005 totals. Grasslands are now brown, and entire herds of cattle have been sold due to lack of fresh grass, water and the cost of hay. The outlook for sunflowers was bleak as well:
As of Aug. 13, NSA officials reported that only 4 percent of the South Dakota sunflower crop was rated as good and 30 percent as fair. None of the state's sunflower crop was rated excellent, 27 percent was considered poor and 39 percent was ranked as very poor.
According to the according to the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, more than 60% of the US is experiencing abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin.The drought conditions have led to perfect conditions for wildfires, however; Nebraska alone has lost over 65,000 acres of grasslands to wildfires. It has also had a real effect on power generation in the region, as hydro-electric dams reduce output as reservoirs dry up. This past Tuesday, we were camped below the Big Bend Dam on the Missouri, one dam downstream from the one noted in the linked article, and water levels were at lows not seen since the dam's construction in 1963. All told, the Western Area Power Administration has seen a 40% decrease in power output this year. To compensate, they are expecting an 18% increase in rates in 2006 and 2007.
Critical to this discussion is whether the drought is forecast to end anytime soon. Below is the NOAA's outlook through November. While it appears things are getting better for some of the drought stricken areas, the precipitation deficits are substantial.
This map indicates the amount of rainfall needed to bring drought stricken areas back to within "normal" precipitation levels. For much of South Dakota, that number is between six and nine inches; annual rainfall for the state averages about 17 inches.
Apparently, the Climate Prediction Center doesn't expect that "improving" conditions will have much of an effect on soil conditions, according to it's own forecasts:
I know you're all wondering, well, if it's really all that bad, how come we haven't heard much about it? Well, if you live in the affected regions, from Texas to Montana and east to upper Wisconsin, then chances are, you have. A search of Google News on the terms "Great Plains" and "drought" retrieved 265 references over the past month. However, if you live on either coast and get your news from, say, the New York Times, Washington Post and/or Los Angeles Times, you might have missed their coverage. In fact, the same search terms with any of these sources added came up empty. CNN and Fox News were no better. Thus for much of the US population, this potentially catastrophic event is no where on the radar.
Unfortunately, the USDA, and in particular, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, doesn't seem all that concerned, despite Johanns former position as governor of Nebraska.
Although he issued a disaster declaration for 24 South Dakota counties in early August, Johanns has declined to visit the area. The declaration only makes emergency Farm Service Agency loans available to farmers and ranchers who have suffered losses from drought, but provides no other aid. SD Senator Tim Johnson has attempted to tap into more than $3.9 billion in agricultural disaster relief appropriated by Congress, but which was withdrawn after Bush threatened a veto.
Aberdeen American News, one of South Dakota's few dailies, was not impressed with Johanns' effort:
The United States will, and should, do all it can to revive agriculture in Iraq, but first let's make sure our own agriculture house is in order. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns was in Iraq recently to get a first-hand understanding of just how dire the shape of agriculture is there. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., states are suffering from drought and a lack of federal assistance to address the issue. Johanns has yet to visit South Dakota, and some of the hardest-hit drought areas in the Midwest.
Johanns said this week that the U.S. will do all it can to help revive agriculture in Iraq, but drought aid doesn't seem to be a government priority at home - at least in the executive branch of government. For example, members of the Senate have made efforts to secure drought assistance for South Dakota producers and other states who are currently being impacted by drought. Aid packages have been included in supplemental funding, but have later been removed due to a veto threat by President George Bush.
In closing, I'll add some food for thought on how this may tie in with current concerns over global warming. In March 2004, before the current Great Plains drought gained a real foothold, NASA scientists reported that they had developed models which explained the "Dustbowl" phenomena of the 1930's. The researchers found that overly warm Atlantic waters, similar to what has set up over the past two years, along with a cooler than normal Pacific, fueled the conditions under which the infamous 1930's drought developed:Johanns said this week that the U.S. will do all it can to help revive agriculture in Iraq, but drought aid doesn't seem to be a government priority at home - at least in the executive branch of government. For example, members of the Senate have made efforts to secure drought assistance for South Dakota producers and other states who are currently being impacted by drought. Aid packages have been included in supplemental funding, but have later been removed due to a veto threat by President George Bush.
The model showed cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures and warmer than normal tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to a weakened low-level jet stream and changed its course. The jet stream, a ribbon of fast moving air near the Earth's surface, normally flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns northward pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Great Plains. As the low level jet stream weakened, it traveled farther south than normal. The Great Plains dried up and dust storms formed. The research shed light on how tropical sea surface temperatures can have a remote response and control over weather and climate. It also confirmed droughts can become localized based on soil moisture levels, especially during summer. When rain is scarce and soil dries, there is less evaporation, which leads to even less precipitation, creating a feedback process that reinforces lack of rainfall.
The study also shed light on droughts throughout the 20th century. Analysis of other major U.S. droughts of the 1900s suggests a cool tropical Pacific was a common factor. Schubert said simulating major events like the 1930s drought provides an excellent test for computer models. While the study finds no indication of a similar Great Plains drought in the near future, it is vital to continue studies relating to climate change.
Are we headed towards another Dustbowl event? And what, if any, effects might such a severe drought have on both the 2006 midterms, as well as the 2008 Presidential election? In 1932, the second year of the Great Drought, Democrats took 97 House seats and 12 Senate seats from Republicans. In 1934, they took an additional nines seats in each chamber. By 1936, the height of the Dustbowl catastrophe and FDR's government-centric response, Democrats controlled 334 seats in the House, and 76 seats in the Senate.The study also shed light on droughts throughout the 20th century. Analysis of other major U.S. droughts of the 1900s suggests a cool tropical Pacific was a common factor. Schubert said simulating major events like the 1930s drought provides an excellent test for computer models. While the study finds no indication of a similar Great Plains drought in the near future, it is vital to continue studies relating to climate change.
I strongly urge readers to learn all they can on the building drought and drought mitigation. Contact your current members of Congress and ask them to support drought assistance, and if they won't, actively support the campaigns of their opponents who will. In comments below, please share any information you have about the position of your local Congressmen and what we all can do to help.
As for us, we'll be continuing our trip through the West, gathering information and making contacts for the Draft Gore 2008 PAC. Next on our itinerary are eastern Wyoming and Colorado, both states also greatly effected by the current drought. If you like to join us, or support Draft Gore in other ways, please join us at our website.
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