Latest news on the river.

[dfiant]

Mum, the trough that was affect you is set to cross the boarder tonight and combine with a deep tropical low sitting off Marybourough and developing into a Cyclone. We are on Cyclone watch to the NSW border now. I didn't see that one coming.

[Rainbowmum]

Oh my , that is terrible , please keep safe son , my thoughts are with you and yours.
Keep us updated.

[dfiant]

It's all good now. it fizzled out and headed out to sea. The doom and gloom predictions for the Gold Coast this week haven't come to fruition. It was supposed to be wet and windy until the weekend. Glad to tell you the sun has been blazing all day and the weather is perfect

[Rainbowmum]

Glad to hear it son.

This way we have plunged straight into winter yesterday and today , bitter cold rain.
Temp not reaching higher than 17 degrees , low over night 11 degrees.

Oh and the river is back up again 4.8 meters .
Global warming my @$$.

[Inchante]

Glad to hear it son.

This way we have plunged straight into winter yesterday and today , bitter cold rain.
Temp not reaching higher than 17 degrees , low over night 11 degrees.

Oh and the river is back up again 4.8 meters .
Global warming my @$$.

Well, it has been a rather warm winter here, and we are having rather unusual weather.



By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK, March 5 (Reuters) - When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday.

According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms.

"As spring moves up a week or two, tornado season will start in February instead of waiting for April," said climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Whether climate change will also affect the frequency or severity of tornadoes, however, remains very much an open question, and one that has received surprisingly little study.

"There are only a handful of papers, even to this day," said atmospheric scientist Robert Trapp of Purdue University, who led a pioneering 2007 study of tornadoes and climate change.

"Some of us think we should be paying more attention to it," said atmospheric physicist Anthony Del Genio of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA.

The scientific challenge is this: the two conditions necessary to spawn a twister are expected to be affected in opposite ways. A warmer climate will likely boost the intensity of thunderstorms but could dampen wind shear, the increase of wind speed at higher altitudes, researchers say.

Tomorrow's thunderstorms will pack a bigger wallop, but may strike less frequently than they have historically, explained Del Genio.

"As we go to a warmer atmosphere, storms - which transfer energy from one region to another - somehow figure out how to do that more efficiently," he said. As a result, thunderstorms transfer more energy per outbreak, and so have to make such transfers less often.

In a 2011 paper, Del Genio calculated that, "especially in the central and eastern United States, we can expect a few more days per month with conditions favorable to severe thunderstorm occurrence" by the latter part of this century if the global climate grows warmer.

Indeed, the world has been experiencing more violent storms since 1970, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent assessment.


EXTENDING TORNADOES' PATH

Purdue's Trapp and colleagues got a similar result in their 2007 study, which they confirmed in research published in 2009 and 2011. "The number of days when conditions exist to form tornadoes is expected to increase" as the world warms, he said.

In addition, they found, regions near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts not normally associated with tornadoes will experience tornado-making weather more frequently. They projected a doubling in the number of days with such conditions in Atlanta and New York City, for instance.

More powerful thunderstorms would be expected to produce more tornadoes, but wind shear could prove a mitigating factor.

Because climate change is not uniform, Del Genio wrote in the 2011 paper, "in the lower troposphere, the temperature difference between low and high latitudes decreases as the planet warms, creating less wind shear."

Other scientists are not so sure, and they see a surge in tornadoes last year as ominous. April 2011 was the most active tornado month on record, with 753, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), compared to the previous record of 267 in April 1974.

"I have no doubt that there will be many times when wind shear is plenty strong to create a tornado," said Trenberth.

That is what Trapp's team concluded in their 2007 study. "Over most of the United States," they wrote, the increase in the power of thunderstorms will "more than compensate for the relative decreases in shear."

As a result, "the environment would still be considered favorable for severe convection" of the kind that creates tornadoes.

From March to May the projected increase in severe storms is "largest over a 'tornado-alley'-like region extending northward from Texas," Trapp found. From June through August, the eastern half of the country is projected to experience such an increase.

If there are more days in the future when wind shear is too weak to produce a tornado from a thunderstorm, said Trenberth, then "the frequency of tornadoes may decrease but the average intensity might increase. You could have a doozy of an outbreak, and then they could go away for a while."

On average, about 800 tornados are reported annually in the United States. About 70 percent are "weak," finds NOAA, with winds less than 110 mph (177 kph) . Just under 29 percent are "strong," with winds between 110 and 205 mph (177 and 329 kph) . Only 2 percent of all tornadoes are what NOAA characterizes as "violent," with winds in excess of 205 mph (329 kph) , but they account for 70 percent of all twister deaths.

[dfiant]

I was just looking a photos of Sydney Mum and saw waterfalls running off the steps at the pavillion on Bondi Beach, and pictures of the Parramatta River in flood.

Fingers crossed and my thoughts are with you and the family Mum

[Rainbowmum]

That's really strange Inchante , we had a really cool summer.
It's almost like the Earth has shifted slightly of it's axis, and no one has bothered to tell us about it.

Very strange indeed.

[dfiant]

We haven't had a typical summer since 2006 and most of the last 10 summers have been the coolest in a century and our last winter saw my suburb go sub zero for the first time in recorded history.

Global what? Oh that's right. 'climate change'

Weather in my opinion is a freak of nature rather than a predictable science and always will be until all scientist agree.

This is all propaganda to create new taxes and justify the role of environmentalists


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I am here: http://tapatalk.com/map.php?bun2ge

[dfiant]

Other scientists are not so sure, and they see a surge in tornadoes last year as ominous. April 2011 was the most active tornado month on record, with 753, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), compared to the previous record of 267 in April 1974.

1974 was also an unusual year in Australia. We had a cyclone develop just north of Brisbane and make landfall in NSW, Cyclone Wanda.

It was also the year that Brisbane experienced record flooding.

In 1974 the whole estern seaboard of Australia experience freakish weather.

2001 and 12 is basically a repeat of that, we ALMOST had a cyclone form just north of Brisbane a few days ago.

So I ask you, if we experience these weather conditions periodically is it really evidence of climate change, or is it just a catch cry to produce fear. There is no conclusive evidence that what we are experience is or is not a normal pattern in earths 4.5 billion year history?

Yes they have core samples that give indications what the climate was like millenia ago, but that isn't proof. ALL we know for sure is what we can see in a couple of hundred years of record keeping in most places on the planet.

I'm not anti-enviroment, I'm anti-propaganda and pro-facts.

There are no conclusive facts on either side to prove or dis-prove each sides arguement, but in my mind the evidence of this being NORMAL with the odd anomoly thrown in seems to be the most sensible scenarios.

Live long and prosper

[Inchante]

"It Ain't Necessarily So" Gershwin, Arranged by Jascha Heifetz.



Scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during a cooler period. Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

The concept became notable after John A. Eddy published a landmark 1976 paper in Science titled "The Maunder Minimum". Astronomers before Eddy had also named the period after the solar astronomer Edward W. Maunder (1851–1928) who studied how sunspot latitudes changed with time.

Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.

So I ask you, if we experience these weather conditions periodically is it really evidence of climate change, or is it just a catch cry to produce fear.

Yes and no and definitely not. That is, it certainly evidence of a change, even if it is only for a short time. No, it is not NECESSARILY indicative of long term climate change IN AND OF ITSELF. Well, while I have no clue what a catch cry is, its sole purpose is not to induce fear, but to inform people of two opposing perspectives on how Global Climate Change may effect storm systems in the United States.

There is no conclusive evidence that what we are experience is or is not a normal pattern in earths 4.5 billion year history?

No where in the article or in my own comments is there anything to indicate favor toward the theory of anthropogenic climate change over naturally occurring climate change.


Chalk is one of the best known of rocks, recognisable for its white colouration in striking land features such as the White Cliffs of Dover.

Most chalks formed during the Cretaceous period, between 100 and 60 million years ago, and chalks of this age can be found around the world. The Cretaceous chalks record a period when global temperatures and sea levels were exceptionally high. This coincided with the break up of the supercontinent Pangea, which broke apart to form the continents of today. As continents move apart, an ocean forms between them, and new ocean-floor is added along the line of spreading (known as the mid-ocean ridge) by magma which rises from below. As the continents moved apart in the Cretaceous, a very high volume of magma rose up to form the new ocean-floor in what is known as a superplume event. The mid-ocean ridges became swollen, and large volumes of magma spilled out elsewhere onto the ocean floor, displacing water onto the continents (causing sea-level to rise). The volcanic activity also produced greenhouse gases which raised temperatures, prevented ice from forming at the poles and hence kept sea levels high. Chalks formed in the sea-ways of the flooded Cretaceous continents.

Yes they have core samples that give indications what the climate was like millenia ago, but that isn't proof. ALL we know for sure is what we can see in a couple of hundred years of record keeping in most places on the planet.

Global temperature data

Each of the four agencies that report global temperature trends—NOAA, NASA, HADCRU, and JMA—show the warming trend.


Global sea level rise

Satellite altimeter and coastal tide gauge data show rising sea levels since 1870.




While proxy records are, by definition, not as accurate or precise as direct measurements, they provide a robust picture of thousands of years of the Earth's history. Three main types of proxy records used to create this picture are:

Ice cores
One proxy method is to drill into glaciers and ice sheets to extract ice samples. Since the ice was formed from snow that fell over the centuries, the deeper you drill, the farther back in time you are looking.

The chemical composition of the ice correlates very strongly with temperature. Scientists have constructed temperature records from ice cores taken from Tibetan and Andean glaciers, an ice cap in the Canadian Arctic, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. These records show that, at low latitudes, 20th century climate was unusually warm compared to the previous 2,000 years.

In the Canadian Arctic, warming over the past 150 years is unprecedented compared to the previous millennium. In Greenland and coastal Antarctica, there is clear evidence of warming over the past century. Ice cores from Antarctica's interior do not show warming over the past century.

Tree rings
In temperate regions, trees generally produce one ring a year, and some tree species are extremely long-lived. (A bristlecone pine, for example, can live more than 4,000 years.) Patterns in the width and density of tree rings provide year-by-year temperature information.

Scientists have tree ring records from more than 2,000 sites on all inhabited continents, though most of the records are from temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere. These records show that 20th century warming was unusual compared to at least the past 500 years.

Coral reefs
Corals build their hard skeletons with annual bands of calcium carbonate. The geochemical composition of each annual band varies depending on the temperature of the water at the time the band was formed. Scientists have coral proxy records from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans, with most of these going back 400 years. Coral proxy records indicate sea surface warming in most tropical locations over the past century.

I'm not anti-enviroment, I'm anti-propaganda and pro-facts.

Hmmm . . . if you are anti-propaganda and pro-facts, why did your response focus on Anthropogenic Climate Change when all that was mentioned was general Climate Change? This seems like a Pavlovian response where in as soon as you hear or see something that refers to Climate Change you instantly think of theories surrounding man made climate change. I wonder how that came to be when the definition of climate change is far more expansive.