My grandfather died during the 2000 heatwave...

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

I made this picture (and posted it) on 12 January:

An article in News Scientist says:

Freak winter is Europe's warmest for 700 years - earth - 20 June 2007 - New Scientist Environment

Separately, the temperatures experienced during autumn 2006 and winter 2007 are likely to have been the warmest in 500 years, they say. But the sequential combination of two such warm seasons is a still rarer event - probably the first since 1289.

Nomad or anyone, do you know more about this?

Luterbacher says the 1289 temperatures may have been caused by a large volcanic eruption in the tropics

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

...and then the storm came:

from 33 to 18°C in twenty minutes, it was quite spectacular. But I guess you in Western Europe had the pleasure already.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

The weather here is unusal too. It is warm and muggy, not really hot and we have lots of thunderstorms. I just read that we had 141.1 l per m2 in June instead of the usual 87 l per m2. Today the river finally started to rise and flooding.

It was 39 C here (Athens) today - and it seems it'll reach 42 by Sunday - and it will stay above 40 at least until Tuesday. We're going to roast. And yes, this is unseasonally hot even for Athens (in June)

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

We've known all along that pumping more heat into a chaotic system would manifest as more rapid state changes and greater extrema, i.e., more rapid shifts between more extreme conditions.  Even in my area, a temperate/mediterranean climate almost ideal for Anglo-Euros, we see a perceptible shifting of the goal posts with hotter hot spells transitioning more abruptly into colder cold spells.  The climate here is tempered by a massive heat sink in the form of a large shallow (geographically) and deep (vertically) bay.  Inland, in mountain ranges and valleys, hot spells are hotter, rainfall is lower and winds are higher than average.  Freakish windy weather damaged stonefruit crops this year and drought threatens the late summer crops.

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

    They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

    Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

    In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the "gravest threat" of climate change.

    "Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures," the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

footnote

Nomad may well scold us all as pollopequenistas (Chicken-Little-ists for the Spanish-impaired) but the science wonks are right to point this out

"Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. "To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built," they say.

The foolish belief that civilisation is the base condition for agriculture -- rather than the other way around -- fuels, so to speak, the notion that "land is not productive" and that what we do to our climate, water, and soil is less important than the games we play in cities with money, laws, hierarchy, costumes, ranks, rituals, etc.

Without robust biotic infrastructure and the climatic stability it encourages -- a huge pyramid of life on whose narrow tip we perch, top predator species, rapidly simplifying and eroding the pyramid beneath us -- we don't eat, or breathe (oxygen, anyone?) or drink (watersheds that provide our potable water depend on snowpack for storage and on complex networks of vegetation, soil porosity, etc to slow its downward rush to the sea).  How often and how loudly do we have to say this?  We can't eat an iPod.  A car doesn't give milk.  We can't plant a dollar bill and grow a shirt.   Ubiquitous WiFi can't pollinate an orchard.  Industrial chemicals can destroy life, but they can't create it.  Our technologies are contrabiotic, i.e. they are corroding the pyramid of self-organising life out from under us.

If our civilisation falls -- all bets are off -- it could be said that it was because we allowed merchants, bankers, and engineers to dream that they were more important than farmers;  and then we tried to turn farmers into merchants, bankers, and engineers, and food into a fungible commodity and an industrial product.  We even tried to commodify the rain (Bechtel in Bolivia).

Or perhaps it was because we invented a new religion (neolib economics) that justified and promoted our worst habits better than any previous religion...

Or perhaps we really aren't, in the aggregate, any smarter than yeast?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

wow -- T Boone Pickens goes wind-powered?

Lubbock, Texas - Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is planning to cash in on the wind energy boom by building the world's largest wind farm in West Texas.

    The oil tycoon wants to install large wind turbines in parts of four Panhandle counties in a project that would produce up to 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

    If Pickens' company, Mesa Power LP, does build the wind farm it would be the largest in the world, American Wind Energy Association spokeswoman Susan Williams Sloan said. It would generate more than five times the 735 megawatts produced at the present largest wind farm near Abilene.

Sometimes when I hear people talking about how renewables can "never" meet realistic needs (usually w/o reviewing consumption or attempting any realistic definition of "realistic"), I hear the echo of confident pronouncements of the past...

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers ."
-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-Bill Gates, 1981
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us,"
-Western Union internal memo, 1876
"I don't know what use any one could find for a machine that would make copies of documents. It certainly couldn't be a feasible business by itself."
-the head of IBM, refusing to back the idea, forcing the inventor to found Xerox.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
footnote

this is the closest I get to cheerful, so do try to appreciate it while it lasts... :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

The extremely warm period until mid January seems to have occurred across most of the Northern Hemisphere.  And now it's hot and dry.

Where I'm at in Eastern Indiana, the grass has gone brown a full month early, and there's been very, very little rain.  And it's been warm, like 30-32°C until it cooled down last week.  

On the plus side, coming back home after a month away at my apartment looking for a summer job, the little garden I reclaimed from the grassy backyard has taken off.  Fertilizer does wonders.  I set it up so all my mother has to do is water, and my 4 little cucumber plants have about 100-150 cucumbers on the way.  There's probably 200-250 tomatoes, and another 100 or so peppers on the way.  All this out off a patch barely 2 square meters.  

Here in the US, it's almost a given that a house that's maybe 125-150 square meters will sit on a minimum 700 square meter lot.  And if you're willing to play with the dirt a little, I see that you could easily grow enough food to fulfill half a families food needs on 40-50 square meters.  Which I suspect may become something the urban dwellers become accustomed to as the growth of biofuels starts consuming corn previously used for food.

I had a long conversation with my uncle yesterday who in a previous life was a county agricultural exchange agent.  Because of the lack of rain, the corn field down the street from him never took off.  As bio-fuels start to make economies dependent on converting corn to fuel, that's going to suck up crops previously dumped on underdeveloped countries.  Which of course means that famines are in the offing to make the car culture sustainable.  I much prefer bio-diesel, so that the corn is raised, fed to animals, animals make manure, manure is converted to fuel.  It's a circular approach.

Back to my original tangent, I think that urban gardening, particularly in those countries with a tradition of a yard, or front and rear "garden", is going to become a more visible aspect of life.  And I thought about how nice it would be to use the power of social networking to create trading networks where people exhange crops they have in excess for things that they want.  The older I get, the more interesting this becomes.  There's something about working earth that's appealing.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Where i live, our winter is becoming freezing with a chilling 18*C and 11*C at night, i turned on the heater last night for the first time of the year.

:-)))

Another thing I would hope Nomad or some other geo-science-knowledgeable could comment on. In a comment to my previous hot-weather-bemoaning diary, I wrote:

There was one thunderstorm just over Budapest. Another was just approaching my hometown. And the two were connected by a giant S-shaped, narrow dark band of clouds with sharp contours (bridging a distance of c. 20 km, but longer due to the bends). As I neared home, it seemed that the S-shaped cloud is moving towards/winding up on the second stormcoud.

Anyone ever seen someting similar?

Now I find that something very similar was photographed the day before (credit is due to Attila Schné from Vesztprém):

The accompanying article (in Hungarian) calls the band of clouds above a "pseudo cold front", and explains that it is created by the outward running winds of a storm cell chain, because that wind is 'ordered' and thus creates a mini cold front.

If that explanation is right, and also applies to what I saw, it still remains to be explained how a spiral form could have been formed, and how at least one end could connect to the storm cell's actual clouds.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

but it has been rather mild of late by central valley summer standards, only a week over 100 F (38 C), and then back into the low 90s (33 C or so). we had a rather warm winter (with a couple bad freezes), albeit nowhere near as freakishly warm as what you guys had in europe.

then again, since california's "normal" climate is itself a rather erratic swing between extremes of all sorts (hot, cold, floods, drought), i suspect that we'd be the last to notice catastrophic climate shifts.

the global warming-driven early melting of the sierra nevada snowpack will certainly cause catastrophic problems here, since we are generally bone-dry in the summer and fall, and depend almost exclusively on that meltwater for half of the year.

In the mean time in Portugal we are having a unusually long Spring, with temperatures around 22°C and characteristically unstable weather. Seems next week will get warmer and sunnier.

In Budapest, the average temp over the past year was 3degC greater than the average mean ...

More locations here:
Temperature: Global temperature time series

Precipitation: Global precipitation time series

There is power in going back over local records and pointing toward the growing irregularity of weather patterns and how these changes seem to fit within expectations of what will come with Global Warming.

See, for example, "Just no normal weather anymore. Anywhere."

Now, of course, Global Warming Deniers are more seriously a problem in the US, but, as Jerome highlighted recented for all of us, there are prominent people (unbelievable about Vaclav Klaus' denier OPED) in Europe who could be puppets for Dick Cheney on this issue.

(If interested, excellent Rolling Stone article: The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming.

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