It’s only the beginning of August and we already have Chris, a third named tropical depression heading on a projected track that could have it over South Florida by Sunday or Monday.
The folks at the National Hurricane center think if Chris keeps heading in its present direction, taking it over it over the Leeward Islands where friction caused by the islands could stop the infant Chris from becoming a nasty grownup capable of causing me and my neighbors a lot of anxious moments, if not a lot of storm damage as well.
Then there’s another system moseying along behind it that the Hurricane Center thinks could turn into another potential storm. And so it goes. And we have about three months of this before the hurricane season kisses us goodbye. That, however, is what we get for living in the path these storms seem to prefer to take. In return for not having to shovel snow we have to be ready to put plywood over our windows and sliding glass doors and huddle in our houses as they are lashed by violent winds.
Along with living for three or four months with the ever-present threat of the damage hurricanes can cause, we have also to listen to the chorus of the Al Gore contingent chanting the mantra that it’s global warming that is creating the kind of monster storms we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years. But then, there isn’t much bad stuff they aren’t blaming on global warming.
In a series of recent columns I have been harping on what Mr. Gore might call an inconvenient fact – inconvenient, that is, to his global warming theory that holds among other things that global warming is heating the world’s oceans, thus contributing to the development of hurricanes which depend on warm water to develop and grow in fury.
As my friend Bob Felix has explained until he’s blue in the face, it is not global warming that’s causing the oceans to heat, it’s heated oceans that are warming the globe, and setting up a scenario that includes among its consequences more and increasingly violent hurricanes, tornadoes and blizzards.
According to Bob, what is heating the seas is underwater tectonic activity such as submerged volcanic eruptions and other problems causing red hot magma to seep up through cracks in the ocean floor, heating the water around them.
Several readers have challenged me to cite “scientific proof, ” of this volcanic activity. In response let me cite evidence that this is happening and which Bob Felix has just reported on his web site, iceagenow.com.
“A new type of volcano may be heating up the floor of the western Pacific Ocean,” says this article posted on National Geographic News and onYahoo. (If you?ve read my book or tracked my web site, you know that?s what I?ve been saying for years — that underwater volcanoes are heating
the seas.)
“Scientists suspect the new volcanoes occur at cracks in tectonic plates caused by stress as the plates slide past each other.
“A group of small volcanoes called petit spot volcanoes has been discovered farfrom the tectonic-plate boundaries (like mid-oceanic ridges) that often spawnvolcanoes, earthquakes, and other geologic activity.
“Geoscientist Naoto Hirano’s team believes that the source of these volcanoes is melted rock from the upper mantle, which has been squeezed through cracks in the tectonic plate above.
“This type of [activity produces] tiny volcanoes, possibly now active, on the old, cold subducting Pacific plate,” said Hirano from his office at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography inLa Jolla, California. “This petit spot volcano theory suggests that this type of eruption can occur wherever the oceanic plate is flexed.”
“These small volcanoes may be widespread on ocean floors where the mantle just under the crust is squeezed out by tectonic forces when one plate moves under another, the researchers explained.
“Dubbed “petit spots,” these new types of volcanoes are difficult to spot usingsatellite technology. Specific geophysical and sampling expeditions would have to be carried out in order to locate them,” Hirano explained.
Want more? Record hotspot found underwater
Scientists working in the southern Atlantic Ocean have found a 407 °C hydrothermal vent, the hottest yet known on an ocean floor. Expedition leader Andrea Koschinsky ofInternational University in Bremen , Germany , and her team found the hydrothermal vent just south of the Equator on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a depth of 2,990 metres.
The vent is located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the African and the South American continental plates are moving apart at the relatively sedate rate of 3.2 cm a year. In the Pacific, by comparison, the Pacific and Nazca plates are speeding apart at some 15 cm per year.
The accepted wisdom has been that faster plate movement leads to more volcanic activity at the spreading site, says Colin Devey, a member of the team and a geologist at Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany . The discovery of this hotspot will change people’s thinking, he says. “The accepted wisdom is wrong.”
Story by Ned Stafford
Underwater volcanic activity in the Arctic Ocean
far stronger than anyone ever imagined!
(This strongly confirms my belief that underwater volcanic activity
is heating the seas; not human activity.)
“German-American researchers have discovered more hydrothermal activity at the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean than anyone ever imagined.
“The Gakkel ridge is a gigantic volcanic mountain chain stretching beneath the Arctic Ocean. With its deep valleys 5,500 meters beneath the sea surface and its 5,000 meter- high summits, Gakkel ridge is far mightier than the Alps.”
‘Two research icebreakers, the “USCGC Healy” from USA and the German “PFS Polarstern,” recently joined forces in the international expedition AMORE (Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition). In attendance were scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and other international institutions.
“The scientists had expected that the Gakkel ridge would exhibit “anemic” magmatism. Instead, they found “surprisingly strong magmatic activity in the West and the East of the ridge and one of the strongest hydrothermal activities ever seen at mid-ocean ridges.”
“The Gakkel ridge extends about 1800 kilometers beneath the Arctic Ocean from north of Greenland to Siberia, and is the northernmost portion of the mid-ocean ridge system.”
“To their surprise, the researchers found high levels of volcanic activity. Indeed, magmatism was “dramatically” higher than expected.
“Hydrothermal hot springs on the seafloor were also far more abundant than predicted. “We expected this to be a hydrothermally dead ridge, and almost every time our water measurement instrument came up, they showed evidence of hydrothermal activity, and once we even ‘saw’ an active hot spring on the sea floor,” said Dr. Jonathan Snow, the leader of the research group from the Max Planck Institute. ”
Okay. So what does this ocean warming do? As I have written, simply put the heated ocean water causes increasing amounts of Carbon Dioxide and moisture to rise up into the atmosphere where the moisture becomes precipitation – heavy rain in the spring summer and fall, and snow in the winter. (That’s where all that CO2 greenhouse gas comes from, not from manmade causes such as the burning of fossil fuels and grilling hot dogs on your backyard grill.
Do I need to point out that the world has been experiencing incredible amounts of rainfall in the past couple of years. Last year, for example., parts of New England got drowned in over 20 inches of rain in a couple of days and this year they had a repeat performance that caused disastrous flooding. Had this occurred in winter, that 20 inches would have been 20 feet of snow! And last January parts of Japan got a taste of what that means when they got buried under 13 feet of snow in one storm.
All of this is symptomatic of an approaching end to the interglacial period we’ve been enjoying for the last 12,000 years. Keep in mind that the paleological evidence shows that that for at least the last 5 million years or so, the world has experienced about 90,000 years of glaciation followed by about 12,000 years of interglaciation. Note that the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago.
The point of all this is what is in the immediate future for mankind? The transition period between interglacial periods and glaciation is not a smooth one –history shows it to be violent beyond imagination. And it may be just around the corner. If the unchallenged results of the work of Genevieve Woillard and others who studied past ice ages are any indication of the pace of glaciation, once it starts, the transition period is a mere twenty years or so. And we may be well into that 20-year period now. Woillard estimated that the period before that final 20 years — when the earth began gearing up for an end to the interglacial period — could be as long as 150 years and as short as 75 years.”
According to Woillard’s studies and those of other paleological climate researchers the transition between interglacial and glacial periods is one of increasing violence — more volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
In the face of this we have Mr. Gore’s acolytes in the media and in academia blithely ignoring the facts. Let me cite the example of the media accepting without challenge an assertion by one Professor Naomi Oreskes of UC San Diego that “there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic [manmade] climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.”
Nobody bothered to point out that instead of a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic [manmade] climate change there exists a petition produced by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has been signed by over 18,000 scientists who are totally opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, which committed the world’s leading industrial nations to cut their production of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels.
Then there is Britain‘s acclaimed environmentalist Dr. David Bellamy of Oxford who charges that “the world’s politicians and policy makers … have an unshakable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credo of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.
“They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.
“As a result of their ignorance, the world’s economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and rubles into solving a problem that actually doesn’t exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic.”
“Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we’ve had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere – and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist – will blame the weather on global warming.
“But they will be 100 per cent wrong. Global warming – at least the modern nightmare version – is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world’s politicians and policy makers are not.”The point here is that we may well be facing a great global calamity in the near future and here we are being diverted by the global warming fantasy when we should be thinking about what our response should be to the very real catastrophe waiting in the wings.
Oremus
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”