Rare snowfall across South Africa/Hottest July Ever!

[ELVIS]

Aug 2, 2006 (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060802/sc_afp/safricaweathersnow_060802180049)

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20060802/capt.sge.bfc43.020806180044.photo00.photo.default-512x315.jpg?x=380&y=233&sig=20DllPRuLmExErlHU44uBg--

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - Snow fell on South Africa's biggest city Johannesburg for the first time in 25 years as icy temperatures gripped vast swathes of the country, the weather office said.

"It (the snow) is by no means freakish but I would certainly classify it as rare," said Kevin Rae, assistant manager of forecasting at the South African Weather Service in Pretoria.

Forecasters said snow was reported in the southern Johannesburg township of Soweto and the posh northern suburb of Sandton, as well as the nearby towns of Carletonville and Westonaria.

Johannesburg last had snow on September 11, 1981.

"Sleet has been recorded occasionally since then, but never snow," added climatologist Tracey Gill.

Bloemfontein, the capital of the central Free State province, got its first snow in 12 years, receiving 13 centimetres (5.2 inches).

Comparable widespread snow across the country had been recorded only twice in the past 20 years, in 1981 and 1988, said Rae.

Some welcomed the colder weather, however.

At the Tiffindell ski resort in the southern Drakensberg mountains of the Eastern Cape province, guests were elated.

"They are very excited," said the resort's chief snow-maker, Johan Smuts. "It is not every day that you get to see snow fall in Africa."

In warmer weather, Smuts oversees the manufacture of snow for the resort through a process involving water and air compression.

Tiffindell usually gets about five snowfalls a year, he said, but rarely 25 centimetres in one day, as on Tuesday.

The weather service posted a warning on its website of very cold temperatures for the southeastern high elevations of the country into Thursday.

It expected snowfalls to continue over areas of the central Free State, the Drakensberg and the Eastern Cape, but to have passed by Friday.

In the northern provinces, the snow was expected to clear by Wednesday afternoon, said Rae.



:elvis:

[Nickdfresh]

Let's see, it's been the hottest first seven months of almost any year in recorded history, SO YES IT IS GLOBAL WARMING!

Yes, the planet is heating up
Hottest year on record; more to come

Jane Kay, Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/30/WARMING.TMP) Environment Writer

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Northern California, withering under last week's punishing heat, wasn't the only hot spot in the world this year -- thermometers have spiked throughout much of the United States, Canada and Europe, and scientists are predicting more intense, longer and more frequent heat waves in the future.

While leading climate scientists have been reluctant to link regional heat waves with rising temperatures in the world's atmosphere and oceans, they say the recent weather patterns are consistent with computer projections for global warming.

In the United States, the first six months of 2006 were the hottest recorded in more than a century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. Canada reported the hottest winter and spring since it started keeping track about a half-century ago, while England, Germany and France are sweltering, and the Netherlands is recording the hottest month since temperatures were first measured 300 years ago.

"The current heat waves throughout much of North America and Europe are consistent with the predictions of our global climate models," said physicist John Harte, a professor and researcher in UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group and the Ecosystem Sciences Division.

"In the future, we can expect more intense, more long-lasting, and more frequent heat waves as a consequence of global warming. If you warm the planet as a whole, as we've been doing, it's likely that any particular heat wave is going to be hotter with global warming, and any hurricane will be more intense. You warm the whole, and you warm the parts," Harte said.

Temperature trends for the rest of the world won't be known until the end of the year.

In Northern California, it was hotter for longer than ever on record, hitting 110 degrees four consecutive days in the nine-county Bay Area. Towns from Rio Vista in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Modesto in the Central Valley, Danville in the East Bay and Palo Alto on the Peninsula had temperatures in the triple-digits.

The heat wave was blamed or suspected in the deaths of at least 126 people in the region, while livestock died, crops burned up, power failed and energy bills soared.

Every hot spell can't be blamed on global climate change, scientists say. But the planet's dramatic warming over the past 50 years has made matters worse, and the continuing rate of discharge from carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases will keep raising the world's temperatures throughout the rest of the century and beyond, they say.

"But you can't predict where those parts will be," said Harte, who is cautious about the ability of regional models to forecast the weather in areas the size of California.

On a larger scale, the current pattern of warming is consistent with what scientists have projected would happen in global climate models, as an oversupply of greenhouse gases from industrial and traffic sources trap some of the heat that once radiated into space.

The warming has been the greatest in the Arctic regions, particularly Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia, as melting ice and snow reflect less sunlight back into the atmosphere and expose more land to heat and warmth. Antarctica also has warmed. Within the United States, the warming is greater in the West than in the East.

"This is expected," said James Hansen, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The subtropics, which include the American Southwest and the Mediterranean regions, become hotter and drier with increasing greenhouse gases, he said.

"Weather will fluctuate a lot from year to year. But the situation this year is of the nature of the expected trend. So get used to it," Hansen said.

While most global-climate modelers say they can' t yet correctly predict patterns of regional climate change, they say high latitudes should warm more than low latitudes, and the land should warm more than the ocean, Hansen said. The higher temperatures being recorded around the world are consistent with those predictions, he said.

During the past century, global surface temperatures have increased 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to weather records. But within the century, the past 25 to 30 years have been even hotter, leading scientists to calculate that over a century the rate would be 3.2 degrees, with some of the highest increases occurring in the high latitudes, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

Three degrees might not seem like much, but it represents more than the annual average temperature difference between San Francisco and Santa Barbara, said Christopher Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's branch at Stanford University.

Most of the world's leading climate experts agree that the current warming is not part of Earth's natural fluctuations. They base conclusions on studies that assess carbon dioxide and temperature levels from borings of Antarctic ice cores carrying trapped gaseous bubbles. The cores date 650,000 years, covering six periods of ice ages and warming periods.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased 35 percent since before the Industrial Revolution, from about 278 parts per million to 378.9 parts per million in 2005, the highest level on record.

Harte, in collaboration with Margaret Torn, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, added insight to global climate models in May in a paper based on the ice-core data and published by the American Geophysical Union.

They concluded that temperatures by the end of the century will be even hotter than the models currently predict because of the heretofore uncalculated feedback effects of global warming brought about by increasing amounts of greenhouse gases.

If emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue as expected, and carbon dioxide levels reach 560 parts per million by 2060 as projected, temperatures could increase by 12 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial global temperatures, the study found. Current models project a rise of 8 degrees.

"These findings add to the sense of urgency that we do something about the problem," said Harte. "The predicted warmer future is not inevitable." Regulating energy efficiency in transportation and deploying solar and wind energy, he added, "can greatly reduce the threat of global warming."

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[ELVIS]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Let's see, it's been the hottest first seven months of almost any year in recorded history, SO YES IT IS GLOBAL WARMING!



You're full of shit, dumbfuck...

Later...

I'm outta here on that one...:rolleyes:

[Nickdfresh]

Oh, another day of Elvira getting own3d.:)

Yeah, I'm "full of shit." You're an ignorant hick who sees only what he wants too. Stick to selectively misreading the Bible, science just isn't for you.

[ELVIS]

You're one arrogant piece of shit...

No way are you fit to moderate this forum...



You're also one stupid motherfucker...

[VAN HLN CA]

Watched the 60 minutes special last Sun we have a window of 10 years before a tipping point of no return.
Showed the ice pack in Anarctica and it has receded farther than several football fields.....

point is the guy speaking is the leading scientist on the subject and each time he submits a report to Bush Admin, it get censored and all the warning and reallity gets removed.

This is the worlds job to find out how to cut back on fossil fuels ...
Eyes are opening because we think this summers hot now. Well LAST summer was the hottest on record and just a year later is WAY WORSE. Were all gonna need solar and ethanol alternatives by the 5 year point hope its not 130 in NYC by then.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ELVIS
You're one arrogant piece of shit...

No way are you fit to moderate this forum...



You're also one stupid motherfucker...

LOL@the "Christian" Elvira, you were more fun when you were drinking I think. Maybe they can put you back into this forum so you can dumb it back down and call everybody who disagrees with you "an idiot?"

Stupid people like you make it tough not to be a little arrogant, you 'hunk a hunk a burnin' cunt.':)

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ELVIS
You're one arrogant piece of shit...

No way are you fit to moderate this forum...



You're also one stupid motherfucker...

And oh yeah, at least I cuntribute to my Forum assfuck. What have you done in the main Elvira, other than purge it of any mention of Sammy Hagar so we can only talk about Dave's great bluegrass and radio endeavours?

Shut your hole hypowit!

[ELVIS]

So now you want to be both Me and FORD ??

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ELVIS
So now you want to be both Me and FORD ??

Are you drinking the mouthwash again?

[ELVIS]

No...