Global Warming affecting the weather? Absolutely. The weather in Minnesota (where I live) is bizarrely warm. In fact, we are experiencing the warmest November on record. I have heard other people in the northern U.S. talk about how strangely warm it is where they live, too. You would think Americans would put together record-breaking warmth with global warming, but they don’t. In England, they are suffering from record torrential rains and flooding.
Torrential rains and flooding rivers turn British town into an island
Floods and wet belongings in the UK. Photo from The Guardian.
Martin Wainwright in the Guardian (UK): The twin rivers that bring thousands of tourists to Cockermouth turned on the town after the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, driving 250 people out of their homes. Torrents flung cars across the picturesque centre, sweeping through Wordsworth’s birthplace and ransacking one of the largest concentrations of small, independent shops in the north.
“See that oven,” said Keith Fair, who opened an upmarket kitchen shop in Market Square two years ago. “That was in the window last night. Now it’s on its side, halfway out of the back door.”
“We were lucky – sort of,” says his fitter Jim Woodford, a burly six-footer who had to cling to railings before flinging himself on the rescue boat. He points at the broken roof of a four-storey Georgian building. “The RAF’s Sea King was up there this morning, winching out a group of people in their 70s and 80s.”
Like many in Cockermouth, the pensioners had refused to believe that their cosy homes, painted in seaside pastel and newly strung with Christmas lights, might be death traps if water inundated the ground floors. The town has had three floods in the last 10 years and hosted an Environment Agency forum on six defence options only last month.
“But there’s been nothing remotely like this,” said Jeremy Petman, head brewer at Jennings, whose riverside malt store was awash with two waterlogged skips of spent hops. “This was a different scale. There’ll be no brewing now for a long time.”…
Australian Heatwave In Carbon Trade Battle
CANBERRA – Australia’s government demanded on Thursday that conservative rivals stop opposing carbon trade laws, citing a heatwave searing the country’s biggest cities as evidence of Australia’s vulnerability to climate change.
With Australia on bushfire alert, the government said record temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) across three states this week showed the need to act urgently against climate change.
“November this year has seen a long and intense heatwave across much of southern and eastern Australia. The trend is absolutely clear, the climate is warming,” Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet told parliament.
The opposition is negotiating changes to the government’s carbon trade laws, which will be voted on next week in parliament’s upper house Senate, but some opposition members are not convinced that human activity is driving climate change. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said negotiating with the opposition was like dealing with a mediaeval court.
“It is as if we are back into the trial of Galileo or something and they are simply arguing somehow that the science is fiction and that they alone, in their own prejudiced universe, occupy fact,” Rudd told parliament. The government wants carbon trading to start in July 2011, covering 75 percent of emissions in what could become the second domestic trading platform outside of Europe.
Changing Weather/Wettest month makes this Britain’s new Wild West — “I like weather. But it’s changing. Our winters are getting wetter. Rainfall patterns are shifting. It’s most notable in the west.
This week, Cumbria and Dumfries and Galloway have been worst affected. In 2006, it was Swansea; in 2005, Carlisle. We’ve just had the wettest November day since records began in England and Wales in 1766 – 243 years ago. The problem is, the record’s being rewritten so quickly.
When a breathless television reporter says it’s “a once-in-millennia event”, that is meaningless. We’re in new meteorological territory. The record could be broken right here, in south Wales, this weekend.”
Made in America by China: New Turbine Factory Offers Glimpse into the Future
China-based A-Power’s new deal to build a $50 million wind turbine factory in the United States is about helping America meet its surging demand for wind power, the company said in its announcement.
But it’s about far more than that: The plant is a sign that Chinese energy firms are using America’s renewables boom to establish their brands stateside — and everywhere.
The new factory will produce 1,100 megawatts of “highly advanced” wind energy turbines each year at an unannounced U.S. location. That’s enough to power 330,000 homes. The facility will also generate about 1,000 domestic jobs upon completion, according to A-Power.
Great Barrier Reef Survival “Requires 25 Percent CO2 Cut
SYDNEY – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has only a 50 percent chance of survival if global CO2 emissions are not reduced at least 25 percent by 2020, a coalition of Australia’s top reef and climate scientists said on Tuesday.
The 13 scientists said even deeper cuts of up to 90 percent by 2050 would necessary if the reef was to survive future coral bleaching and coral death caused by rising ocean temperatures.
“We’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes. Climate change is already impacting the Great Barrier Reef,” Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a briefing to Australian MPs on Tuesday.
Australia, one of the world’s biggest CO2 emitters per capita, has only pledged to cut its emissions by five percent from 2000 levels by 2020.
It has said it would go further, with a 25 percent cut, if a tough international climate agreement is reached at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen in December, but this is looking increasingly unlikely with legally binding targets now off the agenda.
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