Our World and Everything in It

Is it just me or are there more earthquakes happening in more spots around the world? Not long ago, Ohio had tremors, and now Virgin Island residents woke to a 6.1 rumble on Saturday morning. Luckily no injuries or problems were reported.

This was the strongest earthquake to hit Puerto Rico in 20 years according to an article on Newsday.com, and it happened on the 90^th anniversary of the worst earthquake to ever hit Puerto Rico, “a magnitude 7.3 quake that killed 118 people in the western half of the U.S. Caribbean territory.” What are the odds of that happening on the exact same day?

Since earthquakes seem to be making the rounds in unlikely places, maybe Michigan will hear a rumble or two again. Earlier this year in April, earthquake tremors were felt in Kalamazoo from the 5.2 earthquake in Illinois. And I remember the Michigan earthquake in the 70’s. I want to say 1978, but I don’t remember the exact year. I do remember what most people report, “it felt like a truck hit the building,” and that’s exactly what I thought. The way my apartment shook at Charlotte Arms, I thought someone overshot their parking space and rammed the building.

I’m not keen on feeling that again anytime too soon.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-cb-virgin-islands-earthquake,0,5022590.story.

If you ever had any questions about a anything relating to earth and its functions, how it all happened, how our climate is changing and why, how we know this stuff, and many other things, watch National Geographic’s presentation “Planet Earth.” This is family stuff, enlightening, interesting, and a little bit scary.

Some of the presentations are explosive. It’s a little mind boggling how they are able to present prehistoric earth with video footage of events and places from the present. I watched the one about ice mass, and last night was about earthquakes, ending with volcanic eruptions. There is as much action as the latest Rambo movie. My husband was perturbed we changed channels from the movie “Mash,” but said it was really a great presentation and he wants to see more of it now. You’ll find yourself saying “Wow”  and “I didn’t know that!” more than once.

I know some people don’t get the National Geographic Channel, but the DVD set of “Planet Earth” is available. It’s better than any encyclopedia books I was brought up with. Maybe if they had this type of learning tool back then more of us would have went into science.

“Planet Earth” is on every night this week, beginning at 9:00 pm on the National Geographic Channel. Tune in.

 Since the Myanmar (Burma) hurricane, with already 100,000 people reported dead and 200,000 more missing, China was hit by a massive 7.9 earthquake with nearly 9,000 people dead and thousands missing or injured along with devastating tornadoes that ran through the middle of the U.S. all the way to Georgia leaving 23 dead, and there were very few reports about a tidal wave that hit S. Korea May 4^th, but it killed at least seven people when it hit a pier and seaside rocks sweeping away tourists and anglers. Who knows how many were in the area. 

So it’s been one heck of a week for big disasters. The tornadoes that keep hitting the center of our nation worse and worse every year are taking more and more lives. It wasn’t long ago that we could honestly make the statement that while tornadoes wreak a lot of damage across our country; very few usually die from them. Not so anymore.

Hits like this from Mother Nature are getting noticeably worse and more and more frequent. According to Wikipedia, as of May 8th, 819 tornadoes have been reported in the United States (of which at least 465 have been confirmed), with 98 confirmed fatalities. This already makes 2008 the deadliest year for them since 1998, and it’s not Memorial Day yet!

People can pooh pooh extreme weather all they want. I reported a long time ago in one of my blogs that I was curious about reports of global warming relative to increased disastrous weather/climate activity and researched the recorded events myself. This was back in 2000. I went to the NOAA website and printed extreme weather events worldwide from 1990 to 2000. 1990 events took up 1/3 of a page. By 2000, 3 ½ pages printed out for that year.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how fast weather events are advancing. We don’t hear enough about them in the media. We need to see it, and hear it, over and over until we have some notion of what some people are going through because of Mother Nature, not just look out our windows and say “Well, it’s not me.”

Great explanation and map of active fault lines and what causes earthquakes @:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7807001/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_of_2008

I’m addicted to the Science Channel. The topic of interest tonight was tsunamis. After the one in Indonesia that killed a quarter million people it should be of interest to everyone who lives on a coast somewhere. There are many shifting plates around the world known for their activity that can cause earthquakes. I had no idea how many there really are. There is a Eurasian-African plate, Indian Australian plate, the Alpine plate, Caribbean plate, a lot of plates for a lot of earthquakes.

Australia is particularly concerned. It seems the most likely place a tsunami will hit as it has before is the East Coast of Australia where sits Sydney. There is a huge public beach there with thousands of beachgoers in the summer season. A simulated video showed how a Tsunami like that in Indonesia would travel up an inlet there and really cause trouble because the coastline is lined with boulders. Imagine a wall of water coming at you full of boulders. If the water doesn’t kill you the debris does.

Australia has suffered two large tsunamis near Sydney and a bunch of small ones in the past. Earthquakes along the Alpine Fault next to New Zealand are to blame. Earthquakes there happen every 500 years and guess what’s overdue? It was stated that just because it hasn’t happened does not mean it’s not going to. It means it will really be big when it does. Sounds like giving birth doesn’t it?

Hawaii has been hit by tsunamis in the past also. But now Hawaii has the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center to give notice as soon as possible. But will it be soon enough? Right now Dr. Stephen Hickman, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Society is involved with drilling down and across the San Andreas Fault off of San Francisco in order to secure seismic meters there in an attempt to have the earliest warning possible of any and all earthquakes. I was reading more about this project on the Southern California Earthquake Center website and the author, part of a film crew, says he was standing on the drilling platform of the SAFOD or San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth project when an earthquake hit. Now that’s reporting firsthand. It was a 6.0 and the comment was that this was probably ‘the most well-recorded earthquake in history.’

It’s an interesting and humorous story, and quite a fluke that the author was actually there on top of the quake shaking violently on the drilling platform. This is quite a new and innovative project, but in the end may save millions of people if it can forecast big and small, upcoming quakes, and broadcast threats of any resulting tsunamis. I wonder how or who is placing those seismic meters in the tunnels? Considering what happened, not a good job to have. Kind of like putting the first construction cone out on the highway.

http://www.scec.org/education/041007parkfield.html
 

Now we’re finally getting solid documentation that man is indeed having a great impact on the environment. The NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that humans caused nearly ½ of the bad weather we experienced last year. This is not a U.N. conspiracy like some like to call environmentalism. This is that voice on the weather band on your car audio: “This is NOAA weather and hazard” at least that’s what it sounds like. This is our national weather service that did the study spanning 1998 to 2006.

The NOAA ran 42 different tests using data of weather conditions relative to human activity and El Nino’s. The article I read on MSN went into detail how they did it, why it took awhile, and the not so surprising results. At least a growing majority of us are seeing and believing. It’s a pretty good weather page from MSN.

Look at some of the weather reports on there for just this past week:

A cyclone hit the coast of Bangladesh with winds up to 155 mph.  At least 425 people were killed, 1000 fishermen, and hundreds more are unaccounted for. The summer floods there just killed 1000 people.

Vietnam flooded last weekend. 100,000 people have no food. They lost it all, 190,000 houses are submerged. The flooding has been going on for a month with over 250 dead.

A major 7.7 earthquake in Chile “crushed cars, damaged thousands of houses, blocked roads and terrified people for hundreds of miles around Wednesday. Chilean authorities reported at least two deaths and more than 150 injuries.

The quake, which struck at 12:40 p.m., shook the Chilean capital 780 miles to the south of the epicenter, and was felt as far away as the other side of the continent — in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1,400 miles to the east.”

The next day the northern part of Chile was hit with huge aftershocks of 6.2 and 6.8 injuring about 100 people and killing 2.

Atlanta’s out of water.

This is a wake up call. The longer we wait for policy, the more it’s not going to be pretty. On the NOAA weather site they have listed the major catastrophic weather events going back to 1990. I did the same about 2 years ago, and wouldn’t have now that I see how nicely they’ve compiled it!  I went back to 1990 and printed a list of all catastrophic events per page for each year to 2001. 1990 barely filled a quarter of a page. 2001 was 2 ½ pages printed no double spacing. I don’t think I used NOAA, but another International Weather Service that had the events by year but not in a neat little list.

Check out the NOAA website yourself and scan the climate events. There are many recently and as you scan down to 1990 it dwindles to about 2 or 3 events. That’s a scannable eye opener. Every line scanned represents a catastrophe somewhere in the world where someone died.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20481186/wid/18298287/.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/hazards/index.php.
 

One of my blogs was about the forests lost to forest fires and that it was really odd to see the woods of Minnesota burn since the state is noted for its many inland lakes. Then I read that the global warming impact of forest fires in our western states is the equivalent of a more severe hurricane season in the gulf. But hurricanes are over in a few days, forest fires can burn for months. About.com stated: “Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona found four times as many large wildfires occurred in Western forests between 1987 and 2003 compared to the previous 16 years.”

Everything about fires has increased due to global warming. The latest fires burned 6.5 times more land, increased from around 8 days to 37 days in duration, and the whole fire season has expanded 78 more days. Here’s the interesting part. You know there are television personalities like Regis Philbin who make fun of a one degree weather change, but most of the increase in our fires corresponds with a simple 1.5 degree rise in temperature out west during the same time frame of 87 to 2003. The slightly warmer temperatures lead to longer, drier seasons that are ideal for a flash fire.

This is the first study that links global warming and forest fires. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The researchers examined U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service records of every forest fire that burned at least 1,000 acres from 1970 to 2003. They found that of 1,166 fires in that period, four-fifths of them, or about 900, occurred after 1987.” The article went on to say, “Steven Running, a professor in the School of Forestry at the University of Montana who wrote an accompanying article about the report for Science hopes to include Westerling’s findings in a report on the ecological consequences of climate change for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

I don’t doubt that sooner or later science will find a link between all major eruptions on earth such as volcanoes, and earthquakes with the rise in hurricanes, flooding, fires, etc., that are due to man’s impact on this same environment with some form of pollution. We simply haven’t given much thought to our ever increasing world population in ratio to its output of pollution. Imagine if every growing population turned into a capitalist society like ours where demand for everything under the sun in huge amounts is an everyday occurrence. Capitalism to me is more a throw away society than a recycling society right now. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. We’re into supply and demand and haven’t caught on that some of the supply can come from what has already been used. It’s simply not a good thing for the earth to start from scratch every time when there is perfectly good base material out there to be recycled.

This has just given me an idea to blog about what is currently offered in the recycled goods market and for what use. I do know that recycled plastics offer picnic tables, park benches, and even parking curbs out of high density plastic material instead of wood that rots or concrete that eventually cracks. Every Parks and Recreation Commission in all cities should be looking into recycled products like these for all of our recreational areas. It would make all of us feel a little better about all the plastic products we consume and throw away into a trash dump versus the local park or for some future use wouldn’t it? We should see how truly efficient we can be. After all our country should be viewed as a business and isn’t that the essence of business anyway to garner the greatest profit with the least overhead, and the least waste?
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My Christmas message was about God’s emphasis on the earth.  The word “earth” is in the bible almost 700 times. It is IMPORTANT! 

I woke up this morning to news of more horrible weather again. Christmas meant disaster for many people. The message is clear to me that the earth, our environment, is in distress. The distress isn’t some cosmic happening out of our control. We cause the earth’s strain by pollution we’ve failed to control.

We watched as Colorado was hit by the worst storm they’ve had in years. 4000 people were stranded. The fifth busiest airport in the country shut down for 2 days, compliments of El Nino. El Nino’s are more frequent because of global warming.

This morning there was news that 6 tornadoes ripped through Florida. People lost their homes on Christmas due to nature, an El Nino season. No one was injured. There were plenty of warninings. The tornadoes themselves are warnings, don’t you think?

On the other side of the world Taiwan was hit with a 7.2 earthquake that generated a small tsunami. So many more earthquakes are happening, volcanoes too. Volcanoes have recently been associated with global warming. It’s evident that warming air that affects the top layers of water to produce more El Ninos also affects landmasses in adverse ways. Land is affected where it is most vulnerable along fault lines, and volcanic areas. And we already know big events like earthquakes, trigger other horrible events elsewhere. The tsunami from Taiwan’s earthquake is supposed to hit the Philippines soon.

The weather patterns are getting worse, and closer together. These patterns are not a normal course, as some would suggest. Weather patterns are spiking in the extreme. I wanted to see for myself. A couple of years ago, I researched a World Climate Center website for data. I looked for extreme weather events only. I printed out ¼ of a page for 1990. I printed 2 1/2 pages solid by 2001.

We’ve been lucky in Michigan so far. But luck is a gamble and gambling has its place. I don’t think we should gamble our clean air, water, and earth, especially our water. If we lose, we’ll be oh so sorry after the fact. Think green as much as possible. Our current administration  is coming around to recognize global warming and are offering incentives for thinking green at tax return time.

Beginning this year, if you improve your home to be more energy efficient, such as  installing new windows, insulation, new energy star appliances, solar panels, etc., you can deduct as much as $500 from your tax bill.

THE BIGGEST DEDUCTION IS FOR BUYING A HYBRID CAR. Depending on the car, as much as $2600 can be deducted from your tax bill.

Hopefully, 2007 will be a year of increased awareness for the environment by Michigan residents. We’ve been spared bad weather so far. We should give thanks by doing our best to keep it that way.