NASA: it rained so hard the oceans fell
“The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year's worth of mega-floods. “ -- Meteorologist Jeff Masters
I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.
As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.
Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.
According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.
Sea levels have been rising steadily for over a century as the ever warmer ocean water expands and the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets melt. In fact sea levels are rising twice as fast now as they were a few decades ago. As the NASA chart above shows there have been some ups and downs but nothing in the modern satellite record comes close to the 6 mm drop worldwide last year.
While 6 mm might not sound like a lot, when collected from the surface of all our planet’s oceans it adds up to 26,000 gallons of water per human.
So just where did all this missing water go?
The ringleader of the great water heist was one of the strongest La Nina cycles of recent times. La Nina shifted and altered weather patterns causing extreme precipitation to funnel into places like India, Pakistan, Australia, and northern tiers of both South and North America.
In the map below, produced from NASA’s GRACE satellite data, blue indicates areas that gained water last year. The darkest blue areas gained as much as 50 mm in one year.
These dark blue spots are also the sources of the world’s epic floods of the last couple years which not only left tens of millions homeless and destroyed agriculture and infrastructure, but also left behind so much water that global oceans were depleted by 6 mm.
A YEAR OF RECORD FLOODING
Last year 182 floods affected 180 million people, almost double the annual average for the last decade. Here are a few:
One fifth of Pakistan under water displacing 20 million people after freak monsoon rains that wouldn’t stop.
140 million Chinese affected by weeks of record flooding and landslides.
“Biblical” flooding in Australia covers an area the size of France and Germany combined. Australia had its wettest spring since records began 111 years ago, with some areas suffering over 4 feet of rain. At one point freak rains of six inches fell in just 30 minutes. Another town got 14 inches in one day.
Unprecedented flooding on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. A series of record-breaking “Snowmageddon” storms left the winter snow pack in parts of Canada and USA at record levels. When it melted, a huge swath of middle USA flooded. Major General Michael Walsh of the US Army Corps of Engineers laments: "Everyone I have talked with--from boat operators, to labors, scientist and engineers, and truck drivers have all said the same thing--I never thought I would see the day that the river would reach these levels.”
Manitoba wallows in 300-year flood after rapid spring snow melt in combination with heavy rains drive Assiniboine River to record flood levels.
Tennessee has 1000-year deluge flooding Nashville. In just two days up to 15 inches of rain (420 billion gallons) fell from the sky.
North Carolina suffers 500-year rainfall when up to 19 inches fell in three days. This is its second 500-year rainfall in 11 years.
Monster hail. Seven US states broke their records for largest hail stones with South Dakota setting the all-time USA record at 8.0” in diameter that fell on July 23, 2010. It takes extremely high energy storms to create big hail.
Brazil’s worst single-day natural disaster in its history. Rio de Janeiro inundated by torrential rains causing multiple landslides and deaths in heavily populated areas. Up to 12 inches fell in just a few hours in parts of Brazil.
Bolivia pounded by torrential rains that caused landslides and widespread flooding.
Columbia hobbled by 11 months of nearly non-stop rain as five to six times more rainfall than usual inundates the nation. Millions of disaster victims and billions in damages. Colombia’s President: “the tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history.” Country Director in Colombia, Gabriela Bucher: "Some parts of the country have been set back 15 to 20 years."
THE ROLE OF GLOBAL WARMING
Would these recent extreme events have happened without all our fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere? NASA’s top climatologist, James Hansen, says: "almost certainly not".
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, explains in Joe Romm’s must read Climate Progress blog:
“It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both… there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. “
Meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Jeff Masters told Joe Romm:
“In my thirty years as a meteorologist, I’ve never seen global weather patterns as strange as those we had in 2010. The stunning extremes we witnessed gives me concern that our climate is showing the early signs of instability.”
Munich Re, one of the world’s top re-insurance companies, states:
“…it would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change…Globally, 2010 has been the warmest year since records began over 130 years ago, the ten warmest during that period all falling within the last 12 years. The warmer atmosphere and higher sea temperatures are having significant effects. Prof. Peter Hoeppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Centre: ‘It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear. Unless binding carbon reduction targets stay on the agenda, future generations will bear the consequences.’”
As the Economist magazine recently summed up when talking about how some climate changes are happening much quicker than the worst case predicted by climate models:
"When reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should, a certain amount of nervousness is a reasonable response.“
Craig Fugate, head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, put it bluntly,
“The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.”
NOW WHAT?
Well in the short term the seas will start rising again. As the NASA report states:
“water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. ‘We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise’".
What happens in the medium and long term depends on us. We humans really have only one question to answer: To burn or not to burn?
OPTION A: Leave most fossil fuels in the ground -- forever.
OPTION B: Keep doing what we are doing and dig up every last crumb of carbon and burn it.
The climate science is clear that we cannot burn most of the fossil fuels we already know about and also have a stable enough weather system that we can continue to prosper.
As local Nobel laureate and world famous climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, explained in a talk at UBC the other night, just reducing the rate at which we burn fossil fuels won’t prevent dangerous levels of climate change beyond 2C warming. Instead we must totally eliminate fossil fuel emissions.
Weaver showed that even if humanity cut 90% of our fossil fuel use by 2050 but kept burning that last 10% into the future, then we would still heat the climate by more than 2C. That sends us into the realm of dangerous and dramatic climate changes that Canada, USA and every major nation has stated clearly we must avoid.
As Weaver summed it up:
"At some point we just have to say stop.”
In Canada that means forcing our governments to take responsibility for leaving most of our fossil fuels reserves – like BC coal, Alberta oil sands, frackable natural gas -- in the ground forever. It also means transitioning our own lives and businesses off of fossil fuel burning completely.
What we are doing right now -- our current path – is to burn it all. We have absolutely no limits, and none planned, for any of our nation’s fossil fuel resources. Weaver was asked to summarize the current climate policies of our federal government. He responded: “This will be quick. There aren’t any.” Instead we are heading full tilt towards ever “weirder” and ever more extreme weather.
Meteorologist Masters:
“I suspect that crazy weather years like 2010 will become the norm a decade from now, as the climate continues to adjust to the steady build-up of heat-trapping gases we are pumping into the air. Forty years from now, the crazy weather of 2010 will seem pretty tame. We’ve bequeathed to our children a future with a radically changed climate that will regularly bring unprecedented weather events–many of them extremely destructive–to every corner of the globe. This year’s wild ride was just the beginning. “
Hansen, an expert on the climate of both Earth and Venus, has a starker warning for us. In the face of continued political inaction to stop the climate threat, he decided to calculate what it would take for Earth’s climate to repeat what happened on our sister planet Venus – a runaway greenhouse effect that would boil away the oceans and destroy all life on the planet:
“I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and the tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty. “
Our Canadian government is currently using our tax dollars to market an aggressive expansion of the tar sands under the banner of “ethical oil”.
Hansen got arrested along with more than 1,200 others protesting this very attempt to expand production of the unconventional tar sands deposits for global markets saying:
“it is probably feasible to avoid dangerous climate tipping points, but only if conventional fossil fuel emissions are phased down rapidly and unconventional fossil fuel are left in the ground. If governments allow infrastructure for unconventional fossil fuel to be developed, either they don't ‘get it’ or they simply do not care about the future of young people.”
Repeatedly he has stated that if we fully exploit our unconventional tar sands it means “game over” for hopes of avoiding dangerous climate change.
At this point the climate science is clear that the only truly “ethical oil” is the oil we leave in the ground forever.
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(24) Comments
This is shocking. Thanks.
FAKE FAKE FAKE
Palq, please explain your hypothesis that leads you to shout FAKE.
Otherwise you leave us with nothing to consider. But I guess that's what you wanted to be known for: A voice in the denial wilderness signifying nothing.
Barry nice job .
The Extreme Rain Events of 2010This is just partial list of the extreme rain that fell in 2010 . If you know one, add it to this thread. All the reports listed here are from The National Weather Service, NOAA, and news reports.
The Swat Valley -
I never saw a number on just how bad the rainfall was there , until this story from the Guardian . " It was raining so hard, you couldn't see a man standing in front of you " ..............
" In more than 60 hours of non-stop torrential rainfall, the floods washed all that away. The north-west normally receives 500mm (20in) of rain in the month of July; over one five-day period 5,000mm fell. "It was incredible," said Sameenullah Afridi, a local United Nations official. "
That's 196.8 inches of rain , 16 feet .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/01/pakistan-floods-us-military
http://coloradobob1.newsvine.com/_news/2010/11/21/5504169-the-extreme-ra...
Minnesota's state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three "thousand-year rains" have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28hedin.html
RE The rain in the Swat Valley at the beginning , 16 feet of rain .
Residents describing the deluge say it began with a constant, pounding rain that started around July 28 and continued for a week. There were brief pauses of stifling heat and humidity, quickly followed by more rain. It went on that way for over a month. The center of Nowshera was flooded in some places up to 10 feet above street level.
Government officials say that from July 28 to Aug. 3, parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded almost 12 feet of rainfall in one week. The province normally averages slightly above 3 feet for an entire year.
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/10/12/12climatewire-the-night-the-river-roared-in-like-a-demon-23379.html?pagewanted=2
Two different locations report 16 and 12 foot rains.
It might occur to the geniuses at NASA that flooding rivers flow back into the sea.
The 1931 flood in China killed 2 million people. The 1881 flood killed almost as many. Much of the country was 20 feet deep in water. The author has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
Without any mention of current extreme droughts, a balanced perspective missing. And with 7 billion people consuming water as never before, every single influence must be carefully considered for any accurate measure of the total of Mother Earth's water. My perspective: http://www.standupfor2013.com/RespectWater.html
Interesting, but I did notice that many of the places cited as having massive floods came from places that had less rainfall than usual. Curious.
It sounds like nature is in another round of serious weather events around the world. Just curious. David Icke in his book 'The Biggest Secret (published in 1999) states a scientist friend of David told him that we were soon to enter an interstellar energy cloud. He said it would raise our vibration and advance consciousness. Not easy but positive.
In July 2010 a 'SolarStormWarning.com' website states that a Russian scientist tells us we have entered this energy clooud. He says it is affecting the planets, sun, and the earth recieves the energy and it causes earthquakes. When asked what the affects on the earth would be he says, "Global catastrophe. Not in the tens of years from now, but in the ones of years." Sounds like poetic doomsday.
I checked NASA.GOV website on the scientist, Alexey Dmitriev. He checks out as real. I checked Interstellar Energy Cloud on the site and all I get is a discription of other stars and clouds and other mundane stuff. Nothing on what we have entered. I entered the scientists name and interstellar energy cloud. Nothing. At least not on what is supposedly affecting the earth.
Maybe someone knows where to look. Unless NASA does not want this to be known.
When heavy rain happens in areas that have experienced recent drought conditions it tends to run off and cause flash flooding. Periodic drought is a common occurrence in some areas and has little or nothing to do with the 3-5% of total atmospheric CO2 that humans produce.
All one has to do is look out the door on any given day that you can see blue and you realiize it has more to do with their socalled "geo engineering" In Portland OR you could see them dumping tons of crap in our skys everyday. I got so I could call the big storm in midwest like magic. All the sheeple thought I was a some kind of a seer. Spray Spray Spray. Dumb a@@es
It might occur to the geniuses at NASA that flooding rivers flow back into the sea.
It's quite obvious what's likely happening here. It's only my hypothesis however.
A combination of low solar activity, antropogenic CO2 emissions and rapid El Nino and La Nina fluctuations have altered precipitation patterns around the globe. When it rains rapidly in areas that are normally dry, it's a direct consequence of taking water vapor OUT of areas that are in drought, which remain dry for a certain length of time. When the pattern shifts again, yet other areas experience flood, and still other areas experience drought.
When all this extra rain washes onto the ocean surface, areas of the ocean are temporarily freshened. Fresh water evaporates more quickly than saltwater, and more evaporation means both more cooling of the ocean, and more rain deposited somewhere else. A lot of these cycles are self-feeding. When you get floods on the Missouri or Souris for example, that water eventually makes it to the ocean, but much of the remaining land remains dry. This cycle of flood, then drought, then flood, is very damaging to crops around the world, and seems to be getting worse in recent years.
It's important to learn the big picture skillfully, and yet not go crazy over it. In fact, it really doesn't matter whether the main cause of the near-linear sea level rise trend over the past century man-made or natural. The important thing is that there are occasionally deviations as seen in the 2010-2011 data, and we need to understand what's behind these changes. Maybe it's caused by all this extra rain, and MAYBE it's a sign that Earth's climate is shifting away from natural variability. To claim that this one-year data point disproves man-made climate change, or that it proves the Earth is cooling, is downright ridiculous.
Personal opinions, politics and emotions inevitably get in the way on the subject of climate change. However, this is SCIENCE we are talking about. When people don't make an effort to understand, or make an effort NOT to understand, we fail to recognize some important things in our world.
Has no one here noticed that our weather has only changed in accordance with removing God from this nation ? With each level of removal, our weather/disasters have increased. What's more, we need not stop burning our own fossil fuels ; we need better understanding on HOW to burn them. Slow this nation down to where we are not running all over and we will greatly reduce emissions. Todays "going green" is only for making a profit & opening us up to forgien gov. control. I for one would rather pollute than pay terrorists for fuel. I am a First Responder & due to having electric cars we have to learn a new method on an accident scene especialy if water/rain is involved. If I go to asses a victim and have to go through a puddle I could get electrocuted. plus that scene has become a Hazmat zone. Re-think this thing ; once upon a time, back in 6th grade science we were taught that the Milkyway was the ONLY Galaxy. So much for scientist knowing it all !
This talk is the latest on our collective situation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOq2A_SGTYA&feature=channel_video_title
Late in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) announced we were committed to warming the planet by about
1 C by the end of this century. Never mind that we were almost there
when they reached this profound conclusion. Simply for elucidating
the obvious, the IPCC was granted a share of the Nobel Peace Prize
(climate-change crusader Al Gore received the other half).
A year later, late in 2008, the Hadley Centre for Meteorological
Research provided an update, indicating that, in the absence of
complete economic collapse, we’re committed to a global average
temperature increase of 2 C. Considering the associated feedbacks,
such an increase in temperature almost certainly spells extinction of
Homo sapiens sapiens, the “wise” ape.
In September 2009, the United Nations Environment Programme
concluded we’re committed to an average planetary temperature
increase of 3.5 C by 2100. This leaves little doubt about human
extinction by the end of the current century. Such a rapid increase in
global average temperature almost certainly sets into motion a series
of positive feedbacks that lead to runaway greenhouse, including
decreased solar refl ectance from light-colored surfaces due to melting
of planetary ice, release of carbon previously locked in peat throughout
the world’s northern regions, and release of methane hydrates from
deep beneath the world’s seas.
In October 2009, Chris West of the University of Oxford’s UK
Climate Impacts Programme indicated we can kiss goodbye 2 C as a
target: four is the new two, and it’s coming by mid-century. Yet again,
the latest scenarios do not include potential tipping points such as the
Scientists are saying if the ice caps melt,sea levels will rise.
But if I understand this study,if the frozen fresh water stored in the ice caps melt,it will evaporate in to the atmosphere and be deposited back on the earth as rain flooding the earth.
And the sea levels will either lower or stay the same.
The water will just be redistributed upon the earth.
I always wondered why they call this planet Earth when it is over 70% covered with water.
On the one hand, doomsayers offer no alternatives but for total or near total abstinence from fossil fuel, a position they cannot hope to win in the near term (being ineffective just allows you to say I told you so, it doesn't actually help). On the other hand, deniers live only for today, figuring out money will buy them out of the problem.
Yet, there are energy sources that have zero to near-zero long term impact, some even well-developed. For example, rainfalls flow into the ocean. It either gives up its potential energy as heat, or turn turbines on its way out, giving "free" energy on a long term basis. Similarly, generation of electricity by wind, tide and solar collection methods also have zero impact due to the laws of conservation of energy. So, why are we wringing our hands instead of doing something about it?
Back and forth these comments go. All I know is that clean air and water are in decline. Can you drink from the river? Progress is great until there is no air to breathe. Little was mentioned about children who are obese, asthmatic, have little hope for a healthy, wealthy life like their parens had. We have to slow down our "rat race" so that the generations after us can have a life, too.
I see that half a dozen people disliked my last comment. Would anyone care to explain the reason behind this? And why do many of us prefer to blame chemtrails or HAARP or religion-associated topics for environmental changes rather than something else in which we all contribute to the problem - basic human psychology?
Great article but the CORRECT spelling of ColOmbia is NOT ColUmbia
we all know about creation and the flood. jesus said the world would get as bad as noahs time before Jesus comes back. i guess that means the natural world too not just the spiritual condition of the world. jesus went up in the clouds. he comes thru the clouds and meets my family at church when we get there at 8 am. service doesnt start til 10, but my dad is an usher, my stepdad is the pastor so i have to be there that early cause i cant drive with bipolar meds.
It might occur to the geniuses at NASA that flooding rivers flow back into the sea.
It did.
[quote]Well in the short term the seas will start rising again. As the NASA report states:
“water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. ‘We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise’".[quote]