Hell is not a place; it’s a time. It starts with the experience of irreversible loss and ends as you learn to live with loss. My hell time began on a summer night in 2009 while wrapping brownies at the kitchen table in our Maine farmhouse.

Fifteen years earlier my husband and I gave up fame and fortune to raise our son and daughter on a Maine farm. We wanted them to grow up with the respectful down-to-earth values of our small Maine town. We hoped they would shape deeply lived authentic lives surrounded by natural beauty and bound to the rhythms of the seasons. Our life was a celebration of long Huck Finn summers and cozy snowy winters. We created an 18th century household filled with books, music, and memories in which we all worked and played. It was our sanctuary — the safest, happiest place on earth. Later our children taught us to be green. We installed windmills and solar panels, recycled and composted, and became more mindful of our footprint. Still, we felt safe from the worst ravages of global warming in our bucolic corner of the “first” world here in New England. The real catastrophes were “out there” in sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh, the Andes or tiny Pacific islands. Then global warming crashed our party in paradise.

That night I thrilled to the thunderstorm raging outside. Then a bolt of lightning crashed through the kitchen window, mowed me down like a freight train hurtling through my chest and triggered a blast so loud I thought the sound barrier had been breached somewhere between the crockery and the curtains. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor. Then came smoke. Fifteen minutes later we were out in the storm, watching in disbelief as our beloved home vanished in a towering wall of flame.

I am not a climate change scientist, but I have come to understand that I am a climate change victim. Our daughter took the lead investigating destructive lightning in Maine. She found that the NASA Goddard Institute estimates a 5-6% change in global lightning frequencies for every 1 degree Celsius global warming. The Earth has already warmed .8 degrees Celsius since 1802 and is expected to warm another 1.1-6.4 degrees by the end of the century. Maine’s temperatures rose 1.9 degrees Celsius in the last century and another 2.24 degree rise is projected by 2104. I learned from our insurance company that while the typical thunderstorm produces around 100 lightning strikes, there were 217 strikes around our house that night. I was shocked to discover that when it comes to increased lightning frequency and destructiveness, a NASA study concluded that eastern areas of North America like Maine are especially vulnerable. Scientists confirm a 10% increase in the incidence of extreme weather events in our region since 1949.

Was the lightning bolt in our kitchen caused by global warming? The facts are too compelling to ignore. It seems that global warming turned my family into refugees in our own lives, stripped of everything that once carried our memories and meaning. Since then I’ve learned some lessons that may help others reckon with the realities of climate change and the terrifying prospect that our future will be different from our past.

As thick smoke quickly filled the house, I had only a few minutes to do something. I ran upstairs, closing doors to protect the bedrooms from smoke damage. I ran back down and pulled photo albums off the living room shelves, tossing them on a sheltered porch. I was on my way for more when the fire marshal arrived. He pulled me back, shouting over the din of rain and thunder and ordered me away.

What was I thinking! There was so much I could have rescued in those minutes! Instead I closed doors to rooms that would no longer be. I sheltered precious photos on a porch soon to disappear. I acted as though our home faced a temporary assault — a blip and a return to baseline. It never occurred to me that my status quo confronted a mortal threat and could be extinguished forever. My mind did not conceive that in a few hours everything we had worked for and cherished would no longer exist.

I committed a cognitive error that I call “the error of predictability.” It is the deeply ingrained tendency of every living system — from the human brain to microorganisms to complex societies — to operate as though the near future will follow from the near past. As a social scientist I have studied this pattern for decades. I’ve pored over control room transcripts in which operators ignored catastrophic data, preferring to think “bad instruments” rather than “CATACLYSM!” I have worked closely with hundreds of adults in crisis struggling to cope with change. I’ve consulted with companies reluctant to let go of the past. The morning of the fire I completed work for a chapter in my new book. The title? The Error of Predictability. Apparently knowledge did not inoculate me from this error.

Since that night I’ve been on an inner search for an antidote to the error and discovered a special kind of capability that I think of as “the pivot.” The mechanism of a pivot is paradoxical because it unites two opposites: the still point and the swivel. It’s the fixed center that enables response across a broad range. The pivot is a way of holding yourself toward the future. It entails a self knowledge and resilience that run deeper than words, but also a flexibility that can adapt deftly to any situation. Think of a master tennis player holding herself still in readiness to return the serve but able to reach in any direction quickly and effectively. I’ve learned that no instant is ordinary. Each is replete with every potential from the miraculous to the catastrophic. Living with this attitude, I don’t assume continuity. Now I try to stay open to the surprise within each moment — and pivot.

Climate change is not a blip but an epochal shift, yet we seem unable to do much more than close the doors to rooms bound for extinction. Are we in a countdown to a hell time of irreversible loss or to a renaissance of invention and adaptation? It depends on how we learn to pivot. Every level of the system — from each person to the governments of the world — can learn to understand and confront the error of predictability. Naming it and identifying its consequences is a start. Then let’s learn how to teach our children, our leaders and ourselves what it means to live without terror in the knowledge that our planet is spinning on a new course.

I thought I could keep my children safe in this peaceful place. Now I know that no one of us can keep our children safe. There is no shelter from the storm of global warming. All we can do is learn how to pivot and impart that soulful skill to those we love. Breed it in their bones that they may become agents of adaptive change in these new times. We are all just earth travelers now: many addresses but only one home.

Follow Shoshana Zuboff on Twitter:

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shoshana-zuboff/global-warming-lightning-strikes_b_1471783.html

With all this talk and complet certainty of global warming, opps I mean climate change. I Just had to look at scientific ocean levels chart for the last 9,000 years “Holocene Sea Level chart” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/17/sea-level-may-drop-in-2010/ among other charts all show the same thing.

Why isn’t

Article source: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/stories/wind-turbines-contribute-to-global-warming-media-outlets-say-t

By Nina Chestney

LONDON |
Sun Apr 29, 2012 1:32pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) – Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels contribute to global warming, which could lead to the melting of glaciers, sea level rise, ocean acidification, crop failure and other devastating effects, scientists say.

In a move to cut such emissions, many nations are moving towards cleaner energy sources such as wind power.

The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.

“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.

“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.

MORE RESEARCH NEEDED

But the researchers said more studies were needed, at different locations and for longer periods, before any firm conclusions could be drawn.

Scientists say the world’s average temperature has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1900, and nearly 0.2 degrees per decade since 1979. Efforts to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are not seen as sufficient to stop the planet heating up beyond 2 degrees C this century, a threshold scientists say risks an unstable climate in which weather extremes are common.

The Texas study found the temperature around wind farms rose more at night, compared with nearby regions. This was possibly because while the earth usually cools after the sun sets, bringing the air temperature down, the turbulence produced by the farms kept the ground in their area warm.

Previous research in 2010 by other U.S. scientists found wind farms could make the nights warmer and days cooler in their immediate vicinity, but those effects could be minimized by changing turbines’ rotor design or by building the farms in areas with high natural turbulence.

That research was based on evidence from two meteorological towers over a six-week period.

Although the warming effect shown in that study and the latest research is local, and small compared to overall land surface temperature change, the findings could lead to more in-depth studies.

The authors of the study released on Sunday said: “Given the present installed (wind farm) capacity and the projected installation across the world, this study draws attention to an important issue that requires further investigation.”

“We need to better understand the system with observations and better describe and model the complex processes involved to predict how wind farms may affect future weather and climate.”

Commenting on the study, Steven Sherwood, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said: “Daytime temperatures do not appear to be affected. This makes sense, since at night the ground becomes much cooler than the air just a few hundred meters above the surface. The wind farms generate gentle turbulence near the ground that causes these to mix together, thus the ground doesn’t get quite as cool.”

(Edited by Pravin Char)

Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/29/us-wind-farms-climate-idUSBRE83S0BG20120429

By: Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer

Global warming is revving up the planet’s cycle of evaporation and precipitation, making wet places even wetter and dry places drier, a new study suggests.

A team of researchers found the intensity of the water cycle increased roughly 4 percent over the last half of the 20th century by examining changes in the ocean’s salt content.

This means more movement of water between the locations where it’s stored, such as the atmosphere, oceans and lakes. Their results indicate that as a result, salty places are becoming saltier due to more evaporation, while fresh places are becoming fresher due to more precipitation.

A warming world

During the study period, from 1950 to 2000, global surface temperatures rose 0.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees Celsius).

“There are all of these independent lines of evidence that climate is actually changing. What this result provides us with is another piece of the puzzle,” said study researcher Paul Durack, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Not only was the shift in the water cycle observable — with spatial patterns of evaporation and rainfall intensifying over the world’s oceans — but the observations agreed with theoretical expectations for how climate change would affect the water cycle, he said. [The World's Weirdest Weather]

An ocean gauge

When looking at how water cycles through the environment — falling as rain or snow, then evaporating, then eventually cycling back as precipitation — it makes sense to look at the oceans. They occupy 71 percent of the planet’s surface, and an even larger share of evaporation and precipitation takes place over them.

“The oceans are where all of the action is happening,” Durack said.

The ocean surface’s salinity, or salt content, increases with evaporation and decreases when more rain falls into the water, serving as a sort of gauge for large-scale patterns. These changes don’t last forever; over long periods, ocean circulation driven by winds and large-scale currents redistributes the salt.

For more than a century, scientists have been recording ocean salinity, which is measured by looking at water’s ability to conduct electricity. Since salt is composed of charged atoms, called ions, its presence enhances electrical conductance.

In the last decade, a network of floating sensors, called Argo, that collect data from different depths has greatly increased the information available to scientists. Research ships also continue to contribute measurements, according to Durack.

Computer models that make climate-change projections produce more conservative estimates of shifts in the water cycle than those observed, but the models appear to be correctly capturing the nature of the changes, Durack said.

A question of scale

The team’s analysis reveals changes over a large geographic scale over the oceans; they expect to see similar changes over the continents. On a smaller scale, however, these changes are expected to become much more complex.

“What is the more interesting question is how regionally those changes will happen,” Durack said. “No one actually experiences global mean rainfall; what we experience is our own regional change in rainfall.”

The research conducted by scientists at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California appears in the April 27 issue of the journal Science.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

50 Amazing Facts About Earth
The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted
The World’s Biggest Oceans and Seas

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Also on HuffPost:

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/global-water-cycle-study_n_1458528.html

How tough are times for adherents to the theory that global warming is going to kill us all?

James Lovelock just admitted this week that he does not know what the climate will do.

Lovelock is the godfather of global warming.

Losing him comes after three major discoveries announced this month that refute several gloom-and-doom predictions.

Officials in Canada discovered more polar bears than they thought they had. The reason polar bears are thinner and heading south is classic overpopulation, not melting ice.

The second revelation is that we have twice as many Emperor penguins along the coast of Antarctica as we thought. Using satellite pictures, scientists counted nearly 600,000 penguins in 44 colonies, including seven previously unknown colonies.

The third revelation is that far from disappearing by 2035, the glaciers of the Himalaya Mountains are stable and expanding in some areas.

Now the adherents to this theory have lost Lovelock, the godfather of global warming.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” Lovelock told MSNBC on Monday.

“We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.”

How nice of him to finally admit what was obvious to some of us all along: We don’t know.

Along with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that everything on the planet is closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system.

Some say it is another New Age religion.

One of the tenets of his hypothesis is that because of man’s sinful activity, Gaia will kill us all in a fiery inferno.

His first book was “Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity.”

But as his forecasts and those of lesser lights such as Al Gore have proved to be false, the public woke up and smelled the coffee.

It was not always that way.

In 2006, Lovelock wrote a piece in the Independent, a London newspaper, which predicted mankind would not survive the end of the century and there would be 100,000 years of near lifelessness on the planet.

“We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” Lovelock wrote.

In 2006, the theory of Gaia’s revenge was at the height of its popularity.

Polls showed that people believed it, and the next year would bring a Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But 2006 was also the year that the producers of the satirical cartoon show, “South Park,” created the character ManBearPig, which mocked Gore’s forecasts of doom.

Never underestimate the power of humor.

In 2009, Climategate – the unauthorized release of emails by scientists – showed that scientists manipulated data to make it look as if the world was burning up.

The emails revealed that the science in the Nobel-winning IPCC report was based in part by press releases from the World Wildlife Fund.

While the U.S. government continues to insist that every year is one of the hottest on record, our eyes tell us otherwise.

Alaska and Central Europe suffered record snows and China felt record cold this winter.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium,” Lovelock said.

“Twelve years is a reasonable time . . . it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising. Carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”

I should be happy to see this nonsense abandoned, but the benefits of global warming — a longer growing season, more land to farm, and more diversity among the species — far outweigh the risks.

Perhaps the revenge of Gaia is to ignore these little human bugs that crawl upon her surface.

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Article source: http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/54629

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Whatever the Public’s Opinion on Wild Weather and Climate Extremes, World’s Scientists Report the Same Manmade Warming, but Worsening — With New Discoveries About the Jet Stream

——-

Nature’s Edge Notebook #25       

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

Just a quick note on an engaging video that can give you a glimpse of the new science on the jet stream… following a brief thought on public opinion and the worsening wild weather around the planet.

Recent reports say public opinion is beginning to swing back up to a larger majority who “believe in global warming.”

A New York Times headline says, “In Poll, Many Link Weather Extremes to Climate Change.”

Actually, that link appears to be old news.

Professor Jon Krosnick, who has been doing energy and climate public opinion research at Stanford University’s Woods Institute, has looked closely at the opinions of the 30 percent of people who have low confidence in scientists — crucial “swing voters” in polls about  climate.

He tells ABC News that his polling data, going back a number of years, shows that the belief in global warming among this “low confidence 30 percent” goes up and down each year in step with how bad or extreme the weather was in the previous year.

And that it doesn’t seem to be responding all that much, he says, to whatever the global warming denialist campaigns may have been doing.

For the past two years, wild weather has been breaking records not only in the United States but in most regions around the world.

TV screens everywhere have presented repeated scenes of flood, massive precipitation (snow in winter, rain in the other seasons), drought, swamped communities and burning brush land and forests, as well as unusual extreme cold spells — all “weather weirding,” as it is sometimes called.

It is also old news now that the world’s climate scientists firmly link this overall global pattern of world-wide extreme weather with manmade global warming.

For one thing, it exactly fits the patterns they predicted decades ago: As more energy — in the form of heat and the excess moisture it holds — piles up in the air, year after year, without dissipating, it’s like “weather on steroids,” as some of them describe it.

For another, a steady flow of new studies keeps arriving from academies of science in the United States and around the world that add newly discovered connections between the increasing weather extremes and manmade global warming — warming that is rising steadily over 20-year averages, just as predicted by the climate scientists decades ago, in step with increasing excess greenhouse emissions.

Obviously, whatever the public’s overall opinion in any given year, it will have little effect if any on the physical reality… until and unless, say the world’s climate scientists, opinion leads to significant and drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions.

“The air doesn’t care about our opinions! It doesn’t even have a brain to think with! It just heats up when you pour more greenhouse gas into it!” — the sort of exclamation this reporter has often heard from exasperated climate scientists.

The New Science of Warming’s Effect on the Jet Stream — The TV Weather Forecaster’s ‘Escape Cause’

A number of America’s TV meteorologists and other broadcast weatherpersons have been accused by peer-reviewed climate scientists either of being greatly uninformed about the science of the basics of manmade global warming, or, at the very least, of shying away from any mention of it during broadcasts for fear of losing ratings by driving their audience away with worrisome news.