Monday, March 31, 2014

More Monday Muck

I'm unstuck due to the shallow coverage:

The slide was one of the deadliest in US history

RelatedMonday Morning Deja Vu

Sliding Away From the Boston Globe Muck 

Also seeRain soaks streets, floods tunnel ramp

Came down pretty hard here last night, and the ground is still soft and soggy. 

Meanwhile, the month is going out like the lion that it arrived.

"Scientists cite danger posed by Calif. fault" Associated Press   March 31, 2014

LA HABRA, Calif. — Scientists say a bigger earthquake along the lesser-known fault that gave Southern California a moderate shake Friday could do more damage to the region than the long-dreaded ‘‘Big One’’ from the more famous San Andreas Fault.

They getting the HAARP ready to drive the media away from the collapsing economy and war agenda?

The Puente Hills thrust fault, which generated Friday night’s magnitude-5.1 quake centered in La Habra and well more than 100 aftershocks by Sunday, stretches from northern Orange County under downtown Los Angeles into Hollywood — a heavily populated swath of the Los Angeles area.

Has a biblical feel to it, doesn't it? 

Keep the teem in mind for later.

A magnitude-7.5 earthquake along that fault could prove more catastrophic than one along the San Andreas, which runs along the outskirts of metropolitan Southern California, seismologists said.

The US Geological Survey estimates that such a quake along the Puente Hills fault could kill 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. In contrast, a larger magnitude 8 quake along the San Andreas would cause an estimated 1,800 deaths.

In 1987, the Puente Hills fault caused the Whittier Narrows earthquake. Still considered moderate at magnitude 5.9, that quake killed eight people and did more than $350 million in damage.

Part of the problem with the potential damage is that the fault runs near so many vulnerable older buildings made of concrete in downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood. And because the fault, discovered in 1999, is horizontal, heavy reverberations are likely to be felt over a wide area.

In Yellowstone National Park on Sunday, a 4.8 earthquake shook the northern part of the park, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of damage.

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The link to fracking not mentioned, nor was the alleged drought California is suffering. 

See if you can notice the odd omission in this $pew:

"Global warming dials up risks, UN says; Water availability, diseases, peace at stake, report says" by Seth Borenstein | Associated Press   March 31, 2014

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a United Nations scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun.

You know what I'm thinking, right?

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” Rajendra Pachauri, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman, said in a Monday news conference.

Or the 300 tons of radiated water being dumped into the Pacific every single day.

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia, and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand, and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, says a massive new report from a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists released early Monday. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes more, the report’s authors said.

These fart-mi$ting f***ers don't when to stop spewing!

“We’re all sitting ducks,” Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report, said in an interview.

After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 49-page summary, which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word ‘‘risk’’ an average of 5½ times per page.

“Changes are occurring rapidly and they are sort of building up that risk,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. These risks are both big and small, according to the report. They are now and in the future. They hit farmers and big cities. Some places will have too much water, some not enough, including drinking water.

Other risks mentioned in the report involve the price and availability of food, and to a lesser and more qualified extent some diseases, financial costs, and even world peace.

I am feeling a little conflicted by this totally reedited and rewritten focus.

“Things are worse than we had predicted” in 2007, when the group of scientists last issued this type of report, said report co-author Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Bangladesh. ‘‘We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated.’’

That's shameless, hey. 

Also see: Inspecting These Items From Bangladesh 

More of an immediate risk to life, but you know....

The problems have become so pronounced that the panel added a new and dangerous level of risks. In 2007, the biggest risk level in one key summary graphic was “high” and colored blazing red. The latest report adds a new level, “very high,” and colors it deep purple.

Brown is the color for bullshit alerts, and the thing is flashing now.

You might as well call it a “horrible” risk level, said report co-author Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “The horrible is something quite likely, and we won’t be able to do anything about it,” he said.

The report predicts that the highest level of risk would first hit plants and animals, both on land and the acidifying oceans.

Climate change will worsen problems such as poverty, sickness, violence, and refugees, according to the report. And on the other end, it will act as a brake slowing down the benefits of a modernizing society, such as regular economic growth and more efficient crop production, it says.

“In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans,” the report says.

If society doesn’t change, the future looks even worse, it says: “Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts.”

While the problems from global warming will hit everyone in some way, the magnitude of the harm won’t be equal, coming down harder on people who can least afford it, the report says. It will increase the gaps between the rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old, and men and women, van Aalst said.

How much wider can they get, especially when the Wall Street designed carbon tax credits come into play? 

This is ALL ABOUT BLAMING the WEATHER for the wealth inequality and economic woes -- while getting you to fork over more money to $ave certain intere$ts!

But the report’s authors say this is not a modern-day version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

 I told you to keep the biblical references in mind. 

What a piece of $hit propaganda I'm reading!

Much of what they warn of are more nuanced troubles that grow by degrees and worsen other societal ills.

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Just wondering why the article needs to obfuscated by the fart mist of censorship:

"Warmer temperatures can lead to warmer tempers, UN report to say" Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

YOKOHAMA, Japan -- In an authoritative report due out Monday a United Nations climate panel for the first time is connecting hotter global temperatures to hotter global tempers. Top scientists are saying that climate change will complicate and worsen existing global security problems, such as civil wars, strife between nations and refugees.

OMG! 

Now the war-makers and mouthpiece media are trying to tell us it is nonexistent global warming that is CAUSING WARS! 

Yeah, it certainly isn't lying governments and their enablers in the propaganda pre$$! 

I gotta get out of this Globe mud that smells shit!

They’re not saying it will cause violence, but will be an added factor making things even more dangerous.

Has the war-promoting whoreporate ma$$ media have no shame, or is that why this artifice was quickly rewritten?! 

Jumping the shark with this crazy connection a real SBD, huh?

Fights over resources, like water and energy, hunger and extreme weather will all go into the mix to destabilize the world a bit more, says the report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Like they never have before even in good weather? 

WTF?

The summary of the report is being finalized this weekend by the panel in Yokohama.

Where is it being finalized??

That’s a big change from seven years ago, the last time the IPCC addressed how warming affected Earth, said report lead author Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science in California. The summary that political leaders read in early 2007 didn’t mention security issues will, he said, because of advances in research.

“There’s enough smoke there that we really need to pay attention to this,” said Ohio University security and environment professor Geoff Dabelko, one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on security and climate change.

Yeah.

For the past seven years, research in social science has found more links between climate and conflict, study authors say, with the full report referencing hundreds of studies on climate change and conflict.

PFFFFFFFT! 

The U.S. Defence Department earlier this month in its once-every-four-years strategic review, called climate change a “threat multiplier” to go with poverty, political instability and social tensions worldwide. Warming will trigger new problems but also provide countries new opportunities for resources and shipping routes in places such as the melting Arctic, the Pentagon report says.

Only a problem when it is Russia doing the drilling.

After the climate panel’s 2007 report, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote that along with other causes, the conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan “began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change. ”

I suppose post-nasal drip is next to be blamed. Strange how Sudan has been mostly absent my news pages lately -- until now.

While the IPCC report this year downplays global warming’s role in that particular strife, saying other issues were far more influential, the report’s drafts do add that there is “justifiable common concern” that climate change increases the risk of fighting in similar circumstances.

Like war-mongering governments and mouthpiece media liars.

“Climate change will not directly cause conflictbut it will exacerbate issues of poor governance, resource inequality and social unrest,” retired U.S. Navy Adm. David Titley, now a Pennsylvania State University professor of meteorology, wrote in an email. “The Arab Spring and Syria are two recent examples.”

Snow in Syria this winter one, too? 

Never mind that we know know all the Arab Spring uprisings were/are CIA driven and AmeriKa being hotter than hell.

But Mr. Titley, who wasn’t part of the IPCC report, says “if you are already living in a place affected by violent conflict — I suspect climate change becomes the least of your worries.”

Right. More worried about the depleted uranium causing horrifying birth defects.

That illustrates the tricky calculus of climate and conflict, experts say.

Something $WINDLERS must do!

It’s hard to point at violence and draw a direct climate link — to say how much blame goes to warming and how much is from more traditional factors like poverty and ethnic differences. Then looking into future is even more difficult.

Is that why the "terrorists" are Arab Muslims from the desert?


“If you think it’s hard to predict rainfall in one spot 100 years from now, it’s even harder to predict social stability,” said Jeff Severinghaus, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography who isn’t part of this climate panel. “Obviously that’s going to be controversial. The most important thing is that it’s going to be talked about.”

And laughed at! 

Maybe it won't be talked about judging how fast it was rewritten.

Severinghaus and other scientists say this will be one of the more contentious issues as the panel representing more than 100 nations meets here and edits word-by-word a 30-page summary of the multi-volume report for political leaders.

Print copy ends.

Observers said the closed door meeting went through the security and climate section Sunday, in the hurried last hours of editing.

So it's a piece of agenda-pushing slop?

There’s an entire 63-page chapter on security problems, but most leaders will read the handful of paragraphs summarizing that and that’s where there may be some issues, he says.

The chapter on national security says there is “robust evidence” that “human security will be progressively threatened as climate changes.” It says it can destabilize the world in multiple ways by making it harder for people to make a living, increasing mass migrations, and making it harder for countries to keep control of their populations.

Bankers can do the same thing!

The migration issue is big because as refugees flee storms and other climate problems, that adds to security issues, the report and scientists say.

Yeah, those ship singings of refugees fleeing AmeriKan-fomented conflict occasionally make the papers.

While some climate scientists, environmental groups and politicians see the conflict-climate link as logical and clear, others emphasize nuances in research.

The social science literature has shown an indirect link, especially with making poverty worse, which will add to destabilization, but it is not the same as saying there would be climate wars, said University of Exeter’s Neil Adger, one of the study’s lead authors. It’s not exactly the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he adds.

There is that biblical reference again, but not in capitals. 

I see a link with war profiteers' profits, how about you?

Joshua Goldstein, an international relations professor and expert on conflict at the University of Massachusetts, sees that link, but says it is probably weaker than people think. It’s not as a big a problem as other impacts from climate change, like those on ecosystems, weather disasters and economic costs, he says.

And it certainly wouldn't be making Israel behave the way it does, right?

Poverty is the issue when it comes to security problems — and policies to fight climate change increase poverty, says David Kreutzer at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

But environmental groups such as the Environmental Justice Foundation are issuing reports that dovetail with what the IPCC is saying.

It doesn't matter if the propagandists are all singing in uni$on.

Titley, the retired admiral, holds out hope that if nations deal with climate change jointly, it can bring peace instead of war to battling regions.

Not to me!

--more--"

I guess you can die like an eagle or fry like an eagle, folks. We just won't talk about it.

I tried to build a seawall against such fart-mi$t, but....

"After Hurricane Sandy, officials consider artificial islands" by Wayne Parry | Associated Press   March 30, 2014

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. — A string of artificial islands off the coast of New Jersey and New York could blunt the impact of storm surges that proved so deadly during Hurricane Sandy, according to a proposal vying for attention and funding as the region continues its recovery.

It’s a big proposal that would cost $10 billion to $12 billion. But it’s also the kind of innovative idea that federal officials requested as they consider how best to protect the heavily populated region from storms.

‘‘We’ve discussed this with the governor’s office of Recovery and Resiliency and the Department of Environmental Protection, and they all look at me like, ‘Whoa! This is a big deal!’ ” said Alan Blumberg, a professor at New Jersey’s Stevens Institute of Technology. ‘‘Yes, it is a big deal. It can save lives and protect property.’’

The ‘‘Blue Dunes’’ proposal is part of Rebuild By Design, a competition sponsored by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to come up with novel ways to protect against the next big storm.

Related: Sandy Anniversary

It is one of 10 projects that will be evaluated and voted on this week, but there’s no guarantee any of them will receive funding. Other ideas include building sea walls around cities, reestablishing oyster colonies in tidal flats to blunt wave action, and creating water-absorbent nature and recreational preserves.

The artificial islands plan was created by Stevens Institute, along with the WXY architectural firm and West 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture. It is designed to blunt the worst effect of Sandy: the storm surge that pounded the coast. From Maryland to New Hampshire, the storm was blamed for 159 deaths, and New Jersey and New York claimed nearly $79 billion in damage.

‘‘How do you protect New Jersey and New York at the same time from the storm of the future?’’ Blumberg asked. ‘‘Our idea is to build a chain of islands, like a long, slender banana. The wave action and storm surge will reflect off these islands and go back out to sea rather than hitting the coast. Barnegat Bay would not be pounded, nor would lower Manhattan or Hoboken.’’

The islands 10 to 12 miles off the coast would be uninhabited, though day trips for surfing or fishing might be allowed, Blumberg said. They would be built by pumping sand atop some hard base made of rock, concrete or other material, he said.

Don't you get mud when you mix sand and water?

Steve Sandberg, a spokesman for US Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said funding for at least some of the proposals is already available as part of the $60 billion in Sandy aid that Congress passed last year. Other money could come from disaster recovery grants as well as public and private-sector funding, according to the Rebuild by Design website.

A gap would be left between the New York and New Jersey island groups, mainly to allow water from the Hudson River to flow out into the ocean.

*************

Surfers aren’t stoked by the idea. ‘‘This would forever change the Jersey shore,’’ said John Weber of the Surfrider Foundation. ‘‘Bayfronts are very different from oceanfronts, and this would change oceanfronts into bayfronts. People that spent all that money to live on the ocean would be facing something very different. And this does nothing to address rising sea levels; we’ll still have homes that will still get flooded due to rising sea levels.’’

Not! 

See: The Rising Level of Bulls***  

I would have thought surfers would know better. 

George Kasimos founded the Stop Fema Now grassroots campaign against higher flood insurance rates after his Toms River home was flooded during Sandy. He welcomed the attention on coastal prevention but said the money would be better spent on building or strengthening dunes along the existing shoreline.

Related: Markey's Herbalife Mi$chief 

You have to let the tide go out first.

They are months behind on the sand replacement, so....

‘‘Anything to help protect our coast,’’ he said. ‘‘All we need to do is build a proper dunes system, sea gates, and sea walls. It seems like $10 billion to build something 12 miles out is overkill. Typical government overkill.’’

Blumberg acknowledged the obstacles but also said computer modeling has shown.....

It didn't help me win the college basketball pool, so.... pfft!

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And just off the coast: Going Green