Sunday funnies

How women have to navigate the world.  Being called Beyonce voters.  Misconceptions about the Hobby Lobby ruling.

All the tornadoes that have happened so far this year.  The weather next week.

World War I explained in 40 maps

Reporting the scientific news does not mean including 'opinions'.

The conservative mindset.  Paul Krugman explains their difficulties with the success of Obamacare.

Torches and pitchforks in the future.

Poisonous newts in your coffee?  Crickets singing hymns?

Putin has hurt Russia by attacking the Ukraine.

National parks feel climate change.

Censorship or protection?

Science is cool...

Spray-on solar panels.

British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology:

A small company in the north of England has developed the “air capture” technology to create synthetic petrol using only air and electricity. 

The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol. 

Company officials say they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside. 

The fuel that is produced can be used in any regular petrol tank and, if renewable energy is used to provide the electricity it could become “completely carbon neutral”. 

Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis. 

The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide. 

Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

El Nino will make your state drier than usual this rainy season... or very very soggy.  (Sorry about that, Florida).  But there is no signs of global warming.  Nope nope ignore that.

Curiosity digs up Martian dirt.  Planets in perspective.

Weather or whether, Sherlock...

Extreme Weather:

 

And more pictures.

The year in pictures. One, two and three.

 How to Occupy Populism.

The reason why corporations are dangerous without regulations?  Psychopaths are in power.

 Reviewers really liked the BBC's second season of Sherlock.

Monster storms

Here and there and everywhere...

Australia



US

Update: a much more impressive photo:





Don't even THINK about coming to Southern California! We ...uh... have earthquakes!

Update: More at Bryan's excellent blog.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit

The temperature in Southern California was a warm 65 degrees and sunny....

but getting more rain tonight! Does that make it better?

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye!

As we leave 2010 in the rear view mirror....

Amazing photos.

Wild weather.

Wingnuts rant about DADT.

Hissy fits and mean girls.

Finally losing the Civil War.

The funniest signs from December.

Pattycake cats:

Extreme weather

Talk about being beaten to death by icy golf balls...

Was it mainly over Washington D.C.?

Headline:
Global temperatures hit 'hottest March on record'.

I'm not cold, so the east coast snow doesn't exist

But then, I live in Southern California....

Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse explained. Briefly: global warming means warmer oceans, more moisture in the air and therefore more snowfall:

Warmer oceans increase the amount of precipitable water available to both summer and winter storms. Because the vapor pressure of water goes up in a rapid non-linear way with temperature, modest increases in sea surface temperatures can cause major increases in energy available to storms.

More data: January 13th, 2010 was warmest on record: (my bold)

So while it may be fun to watch the global temperature – a meaningless game that many people began to play in recent years because of the AGW fad (and yes, your humble correspondent only plays these games because others do, not because it is scientifically important) – it is very important to realize that the changes of the global mean temperature are irrelevant for every single place on the globe. They only emerge when things are averaged over the globe – but no one is directly affected by such an average.

Even if you accumulate a whole century of changes, the relevance of the global temperature will be essentially non-existent. A 1.5 °C warming of the global mean temperature is still less than one standard deviation of the monthly average at a given place. And the “local” climate may also shift – the January 2100-2150 average may be warmer than the January 1950-2000 average in Prague by much more than those 1.5 °C. Different regional climates change differently and most of these changes have nothing to do with the changes of the global mean temperature!

By the way, it’s almost certain by now that January 2010 will also be the globally warmest January on the UAH record – the anomaly will likely surpass 0.70 °C. It may even see the highest (or at least 2nd highest) monthly UAH anomaly since December 1978.

And apparently, since science is being used, Republicans make fools of themselves.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: Republicans Oppose Using Federal FEMA Funds For Snow Removal.

Because I really need it

Things that make me laugh:

Hilarious political signs.

You are being watched by a duck.

Censorship!

When weather goes wrong!

Owl ball.

Angry Norwegians in scuba gear chasing the Google Map car....

And speaking of cars... Toyota jokes!

Blog sprinkles

I always KNEW they were trashy rodents!

• Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

• Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blog.

• Great Britain in winter!

• Sunk Australia WWII hospital ship Centaur: first images

It's what you scream as you see it sail past? PHAaaaa!!! There are currently 1091 known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.

• Power Your Cellphone Off Coca-Cola

• You say El Nino, I say La Nina, let's call the whole thing off ... El Nino, La Nina

For the east coast

From sunny Southern California.

We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee......

Weird lights over Norway

Halo cloud over Russia

Meteor over Utah:



Update 12/10: New giant virus discovered!!

Update: Mahakal in comments links to the report:

Russia confirms failed missile launch

And this:



Ssshh... we really know space aliens are involved!

Sorry about that

Rain!

Actual wet stuff falling from the sky. Babies who were born in this last year are amazed. Dogs look confounded. Rain? Rain!



Let the fun begin....

Readers from cold countries know the importance of caution in icy or snowy conditions. In most cases, they have the experience to handle these.

However, you and they may not know that even a light rain may be as dangerous as the worst winter weather.

In much of Canada and the U.S., rainfall is very sporadic during Summer.

As a result, oil residue and dirt accumulates on roads, especially at intersections and on inclines where large vehicles must strain to maintain speed.

When the first rain comes after a dry period, roads can become every bit a slick as in the midst of winter because of the slippery mixture of oil, dirt, and water.

Use caution at the start of a summer rain, and be careful any time driving on slick roads when braking takes longer.

During really bad weather, you may want to check into a hostel or hotel for the duration, even if you are very used to this type of driving.

Otherwise, you'll be on the road with drivers who are not as careful or as skilful as you are.

This is especially true in places like Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Vancouver (both), Victoria, the California mountains, and the southern United States, where most drivers are not used to driving in snow all winter.

Snow? You can drive in snow?

Don't know much about geography

Don't know much trigonometry...

But try and calculate this: What if your house, your county, your country is destroyed by weather, water, war, terrorist acts, nukes? What rights do you have?

What if the rest of the world did not want you? Where would you go? You are the new 'climate refugees'.

Introducing the Tuvalu islands:

International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
Shuuichi Endou is photographing every single citizen in a country. It may sound ludicrous but it is entirely plausible. After all, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu only has about 11,000 inhabitants, and the 41-year-old Japanese photographer has already captured the images of the 340 people who live on the Nukulaelae atoll. By the time next year's G-8 Summit in Japan rolls around, the other 10,500 portraits should be finished. Endou wants to use them to give the rich and powerful a jolt, so that they finally understand the need to reduce emissions and stop global warming.

The photographs of the Tuvaluans are meant to give climate change a human face. They are a people whose country is doomed to disappear. The group of islands lies just 10 centimeters (roughly four inches) above sea level; if the average sea level continues to rise, in just 50 years there will be nothing here but waves.

Some of the islands are already uninhabitable; the ocean nibbles at the narrow landmass from all sides. Nine islands totaling just 26 square kilometers (10 square miles) in area make up the fourth-smallest country in the world. There's hardly any industry, no military, few cars and just eight kilometers of paved roads.

The majority of the people make their living from fishing and agriculture. The country is so small that there is only a rough division of labor, with people acting as cooks and captains, ice cream salesmen and politicians.

Environmentalists have long worried about the fate of this tiny Pacific state. Now, however, international legal experts have also taken up the topic of its imminent demise. A nation's "territorial integrity" is one of the paramount legal principles. It's unprecedented, however, for a country to completely lose its territory without the use of military force.

If we realized that all of us are on this planet together, that working together benefits all of us rather than killing each other for resources and space, it truly would be a wonderful world:

Hey, FEMA

This is how you help people deal with flooding, you tell them the perils and try to help:

Terry Standing, chief fire officer in the county, told thisisgloucestershire.co.uk: "It is a real tragedy that we have suffered two fatalities in the past 24 hours which were most likely due to people attempting to remove flood water."

He urged the public to think "safety first" when trying to pump out floodwaters

Despite widespread devastation, there have been few flood-related deaths so far.

[snip]

News of the deaths came as thousands of Britons already hard-hit by the worst flooding for decades faced more downpours today in the wettest early summer on record.

The Met Office confirmed that the period from May to July was the soggiest since records began in 1766 - even before July has ended. According to the Met, 387.6mm (16 inches) of rain has already fallen across England and Wales, double the average.

The worst of the day's heavy rain was expected to fall south of the areas currently worst affected. But flood-hit communities in Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire also faced heavy spells.

However, the Met Office said this spell of rain should pass through relatively quickly in most places.

Even as Oxfordshire fire and rescue service confirmed that waters in Oxford had begun to subside, experts warned of the dangers of disease from the muck left behind.

A floods expert, Professor Ian Cluckie, told reporters: "People need to realise this is raw sewage they are walking around in. I've seen pictures of kids walking around in the flood water. For God's sake don't let them."

The health and protection agency said: "The floodwater affecting your home or other property may have been contaminated with sewage, animal waste and other contaminants. However infection problems arising from floods in the UK are actually rare."

The agency also advised people to avoid contact with the floodwaters. A spokeswoman said: "We would discourage people from walking around in the murky waters. They won't be able to see obstacles in the water, which could cause injury, and there's a risk of contamination from untreated sewage."

[snip]

In Gloucestershire, officials were still struggling to distribute water supplies to 350,000 people left without running tap water.

Bowsers, or street tanks known, set up in almost 1,000 locations, were beginning to run dry in some places as Severn Trent Water said there had been difficulties filling them up as regularly as planned."We have had 34 tankers on the road to refill bowsers. We do know there are problems trying to achieve the four or five fills that are our target," David Wickens, Severn Trent's environmental manager, told BBC radio.

He said the issue had arisen because large tankers were struggling to navigate small streets while there was a lack of smaller tankers or qualified tanker lorry drivers.

The Red Cross, which has raised £500,000 through its national floods appeal, will also deliver 400 food parcels to the most vulnerable people affected.

A prediction for this summer

Anyone keeping score?

Countries around the Mediterranean are set to suffer up to five times as many dangerously hot summer days if greenhouse gas emissions continue their relentless rise, say researchers.

France will see the greatest increase in extreme summer temperatures, they predict.

Noah Diffenbaugh at Purdue University, US, and colleagues used a climate model for the Mediterranean region, which was so precise that they were able to resolve regional changes in temperature for every 20 square kilometres.

The model calculated an overall increase in temperature and also an increase in number of extremely hot days. Of all the Mediterranean countries, France will experience the greatest increase in extremely hot temperatures – in some French regions, summer days will be 8°C hotter than they were between 1961 and 1989.

Dangerously hot

But the thin strip of coast around the Med will see the largest increase in the number of dangerously hot days – up to 40 more days per year along the coastlines of Spain, Egypt and Libya.

The article finishes by reminding us:

...what makes the Mediterranean region so sensitive to climate change is a "surface moisture feedback": as temperatures rise, the landmass not only gets hotter, it gets drier too. "This means there is less evaporative cooling," explains Diffenbach.

The 2003 heatwave is thought to have killed 35,000 people across Europe, nearly 15,000 of which were in France.

Update 6/21:

ATHENS, Greece, June 21 Sweltering weather blanketed much of southeastern Europe Thursday, bringing a deadly storm to Vienna and power problems in Greece.

[snip]

In Athens, temperatures were expected to hit 110 degrees by the weekend, Ekathimerini reported. The Public Power Corporation Wednesday asked Athens residents to shut off air conditioners and refrain from cooking to save energy.

A "yellow code," signifying dangerous heat, remained in effect in Bucharest and southwestern Romania, hotnews.ro reported. Daytime temperatures were around 100 degrees. Authorities set up tents to provide emergency first aid in many cities in the region.

A severe drought has also hit Romania, with the government declaring the southwest a disaster area.

In Athens, a meteorologist told Ekathimerini that city residents should try to get out into the suburbs if they can. Matthaios Santamouris of Athens University said temperatures are likely to be 15 degrees lower away from the city.

The satellite is failing! The satellite is failing!

Chicken Little he ain't, but he's being told to shut up anyway:

MIAMI — The director of the National Hurricane Center, who has been outspoken in warning about an aging satellite used for hurricane forecasting, was chastised today by a superior for his comments.

Bill Proenza has been talking about the QuikScat satellite since taking office in January. The satellite was launched in 1999 and designed to last two to three years but is now showing signs of its age. Certain hurricane forecasts could be up to 16 percent less accurate if it fails, Proenza has said. That could lead to wider areas placed under hurricane watches and warnings. A satellite with technology meant to replace QuikScat would not fly until 2016, seven years later than planned, The Associated Press reported this week.

On Friday, Proenza was given a 3-page letter from the acting head of the Weather Service, Mary Glackin. Proenza’s recent statements “may have caused some unnecessary confusion about NOAA’s ability to accurately predict tropical storms,” Glackin wrote.

Update 6/18: Excellent overview of the history of QuikScat and an attempt to head off political biases clouding up the issue by the Combat Philosopher:

QuikScat was launched in 1999, as an emergency replacement for the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT) instrument on Japan’s Midori satellite (previously known as the Advanced Earth Observation Satellite (ADEOS)). This satellite failed, about nine months after launch. QuikScat was supposed to be a 'quick and dirty' stop gap measure, with a limited intended life span, of at most two or three years.

In the words of an insider,

"It [QuikScat] was built in 13 months (hence the Quik) from spares from the one already in process, modified to fit on a commercially available satellite bus (Ball BCP2000) and launched on a surplus obsolete TitanII the AirForce had sitting around....

The instrument was designed as part of an effort to collect 10 years or more of continuous data as part of an overall "understand the interactions of air and sea" program. So JPL developed a ground data system oriented towards that need (hosted at PODAAC). As it happens, we also had a real time feed of the data to NOAA (think of a "tee" early in the data pipeline), which, it turns out, has been very useful in the forecast business (back in 1999 and earlier, when this was all being done, people weren't sure it would be useful.. certainly not to the point of kicking in large sums of money to that end..). It took several years for the forecast community to start heavily using QS data (they were justifiably nervous about depending on an experimental satellite that was never intended to run this long...)"

So, when this satellite was put up, it was at best a short term hack. Furthermore, at the time, the usefulness of the data was not fully appreciated. When these facts are combined with the length of time usually required for a satellite deployment (normally around 8 years, or so), in conjunction with cost, it is really not too surprising that there is no replacement for QuikScat, as yet.

Hurricane in Oman

Via Bryan at Why Now? and the excellent Dr. Jeff Master's site, updates on the first ever hurricane to come aground in this area:

Weather obs from Musqat showed that pressure went down to 993mb and stayed there for three hours, and winds have been steady at around 30mph with gusts to 50mph.

The AP reported, 'Oman's eastern provinces were cut off, with heavy rains making the roads unusable and communication lines severed. "We have no communication with them, nothing," said a senior police officer.'

GulfNews notes: 'Azhar Al Kindi, a member of Oman's National Committee for Civil Defence, said the government was working to restore power to the region.

He added: “There is extensive damage to properties in most towns in the eastern region including Sur and Ras Al Hadd.'

Gonu has weakened and is moving parallel to the Oman coast, but enough offshore that there will be very little in the effects of wind -- however surge and waves will still be a problem, and possibly rain.

(Picture taken from article)

Updating from this post.

What kind of weather will our nine warships in the Persian Gulf experience?