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Brazil floods are early sign of global warming, expert warns
Nov 29, 2008, 15:18 GMT
Rio de Janeiro - The rains that devastated 30 towns in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina could be an early consequence of global warming, a climatologist from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) said Friday.
At least 99 people died and 80,000 had to be evacuated because of the rains and subsequent flooding. Santa Catarina was hit by a hurricane in 2004 and is frequently affected by tornadoes.
Climatologist Carlos Nobre told Globo TV that heavy, persistent rains in southern Brazil usually coincide with the climate phenomenon known as El Nino, which warms up the Pacific Ocean. However, this was not the case this year.
'In the years when the El Nino phenomenon does not happen, like now, and there are very intense rains, their causes still remain mysterious for meteorology. It is already possible to start to identify some relationship with global warming, both in the increase of intense rain and in the drought in the south,' he said.
According to Nobre, southern Brazil is more vulnerable to climatic problems, as it is here that warm, humid air coming from the north converges with cold, dry masses from the south.
Some experts noted that problems in southern Brazil could also be linked to deforestation in Amazonia.
There has been an outpouring of support for the Santa Catarina victims, including donations from Brazilian Formula 1 driver Felipe Massa, former tennis world number one Gustavo Kuerten and several football teams.
The Brazilian government provided 733 million dollars to help victims, while the state-owned Federal Economic Bank made available 657 million dollars in loans so that affected people could buy material for construction, home appliances and furniture.
Two bank accounts opened by Santa Catarina state authorities to receive donations got 776.8 million dollars from anonymous donors across the country.
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Older Talkback
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this is without question the biggest load of crap I have ever heard of....
The cult of Gullible Warming. It is like a religion, but with less science.
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SP4: Is this anything like....Nov 29th, 2008 - 18:03:45
...the total botch job NASA did on worldwide temperature? Read below!
Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago.
NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.
GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's data.
Those results set off alarm bells with Steve McIntyre and his gang of Baker Street irregulars at Climateaudit.org. They noted that NASA's data didn't agree at all with the satellite temperature record, which showed October to be very mild, continuing the same trend of slight cooling that has persisted since 1998. So they dug a little deeper.
McIntyre, the same man who found errors last year in GISS's US temperature record, quickly noted that most of the temperature increase was coming from Russia. A chart of world temperatures showed that in October, most of Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was not only registering hot, but literally off the scale. Yet anecdotal reports were suggesting that worldwide, October was actually slightly colder than normal. Could there be another error in GISS's data?
An alert reader on McIntyre's blog revealed that there was a very large problem. Looking at the actual readings from individual stations in Russia showed a curious anomaly. The locations had all been assigned the exact temperatures from a month earlier-- the much warmer month of September. Russia cools very rapidly in the fall months, so recycling the data from the earlier month had led to a massive temperature increase.
A few locations in Ireland were also found to be using September data.
Steve McIntyre informed GISS of the error by email. According to McIntyre, there was no response, but within 'about an hour', GISS pulled down the erroneous data, citing a 'mishap' and pointing the finger of blame upstream to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA).
NOAA's Deputy Director of Communications, Scott Smullens, tells DailyTech that NOAA is responsible only for temperature readings in the US, not those in other nations.
The error not only affected October data, but due to the complex algorithm GISS uses to convert actual temperature readings into their output results, altered the previously published values for several other months as well. The values for August 2008, for instance, changed by 0.11C and the global anomaly as far back as 2005 increased by a hundredth of a degree.
GISS is run by Dr. James Hansen, a strident global warming advocate who has accused oil companies of 'crimes against humanity'. Hansen recently made headlines when he travelled to London to testify on behalf of a group of environmentalists who had damaged a coal plant in protest against global warming. Hansen also serves as science advisor to Al Gore.
Dr. Hansen could not be reached for comment.
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