As I posted in comment to your cat-thief video today...

Are you truly suggesting this... trying to be funny... or intentionally clogging the home page. This belongs on your blog, if you like, but I don't see the video or message having much value on Home....

You take important messages here and in the world and dilute and trivialize them with random other peoples stuff. We didn't have the earthquakes you predicted in 2010 so you just seem to cry wolf.

You were wrong about earthquakes before so I guess you don't know shit... is that how we should think about you and your warnings of earthquakes in Ohio (where there are earthquakes and could well be a tragic one). So, you want people to NOT BE PREPARED because they thought you were a lunatic instead of forward-thinking?

Want people to compare corrupt building inspectors and CDC staff to a cat? Please, God shoot me.

Stay focused. This site is called Real Economics Action Links for North East Ohio... should we change the name to random other people's videos? The Global Weather Channel?

That's called YouTube... I've got an account there for my videos (which I shot and are generally local... one has 150,000 views)... set up an account there.

This type of action makes me view you as a disruption to the community, rather than as an asset. Is that your intent?

I don't truly believe that but have my doubts. You put those doubts in my mind with every distracting message you send... so I just ignore all of it (and don't want to see it on my home page either)... just like I ignore the crap Buster has been posting the last year or so, since he went mutant.

Regarding this Earthquake video - the Kiwis have it easy in CHRISTCHURCH... check out the unholy mess in DARWIN... highlighting natural disasters in the world is not a challenge... pretty boring already... less than a 15,000 death count (like from the drought and heat wave in Moscow this Summer.. with so much more death to come) seems trivial:

Northern Territory Chief Minister on Carlos’s deluge: “So a really one in 500 year event; nobody’s experienced anything like this before.” - Paul Gilding: "The Great Disruption has arrived"

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 06:45 AM PST

Darwin, Australia suffered its greatest 24-hour rainfall in its history [last] Wednesday, when a deluge of 13.4 inches (339.4 mm) hit the city when Tropical Cyclone Carlos formed virtually on top of city and remained nearly stationary. Carlos has now dissipated, and brought only an additional 1.50″ (38 mm) of rain yesterday to Darwin. Over the past four days, Carlos has dumped a remarkable 26.87″ (682.6 mm) of rain on Darwin (population 125,000), capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Australia’s west coast is also watching Tropical Cyclone Dianne, which is expected to remain well offshore as it moves southwards, parallel to the coast.

How extreme was the latest Australian deluge, which Dr. Jeff Masters described above?  The Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson said:

Over 420 ml of rain in that catchment in less than 24 hours is off the charts since records began and certainly that combined with a six metre high tide, that water came up very, very quickly. So a really one in 500 year event; nobody’s experienced anything like this before.”

I asked Paul Gilding, author of the forthcoming book The Great Disruption, to comment on the implications of the off-the-charts weather Australia has been suffering though.  He wrote:

Any doubt that climate change is an economic problem, not just an environmental one, was washed away with people’s lives, homes and businesses in Australia over the last few months. Floods of biblical proportions, and just weeks later, a cyclone of record intensity, saw people torn from inside their disintegrating houses as walls of water literally shattered whole communities. Also washed away was any doubt that the window for early action was now firmly closed. Now is the time to prepare for our new climate, a climate we helped to create with our massive coal exports and use. The good news is that faced with such catastrophic impacts, we will surely now wake up to the need to act urgently to stop climate chaos accelerating our of control.  Humanity has shown itself to be good in a crisis, as witnessed in the mobilisation for World War II. We are more than capable or responding rapidly, we just need to decide to act. That decision is coming soon.

Gilding is former executive director of Greenpeace International.  Gilding has a longer piece on his blog, “The Great Disruption has arrived,” which concludes:

More than anything else, I believe food will come to define our entry into this period. Food prices, after hovering around long-term highs for several years, are now passing the extreme peaks of 2008 as climate chaos takes hold.

Still, he remains optimistic. You’ll have to read his blog (and his book) to learn why.

Related Posts:

• Warmest sea surface temperatures on record fuel ‘biblical’ Australian floods
• High Water: Hottest year ends with unprecedented Australian floods covering an area “the size of France and Germany combined.”
• Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming”; “Scientists: Climate Change No Longer a Theory, It’s Happening”

• Deadly flash flood hits Australia after six inches of rain fell in just 30 minutes:  Scientists see climate change link to Australian floods
• The year of living dangerously. Masters: “The stunning extremes we witnessed gives me concern that our climate is showing the early signs of instability”; Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”
• Hansen:  Would recent extreme “events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” The “appropriate answer” is “almost certainly not.”
• Australia to cut, delay $500 million of clean-energy funding after record warming-driven floods. Seriously!

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From Climate Progress... and why America has been "tightening" its borders against immigrants. We want immigrants... we got immigrants coming. Get out the welcome mat or the M1s

Energy and global warming news for February 22: Some fifty million environmental refugees by 2020 fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 12:44 PM PST

50 million ‘environmental refugees’ by 2020, experts say

Fifty million “environmental refugees” will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday.

“In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees,” University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate,” she continued, outlining with the other speakers how climate change is impacting both food security and food safety, or the amount of food available and the healthfulness of that food.

Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa, many of whom risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain from Morocco or sail in makeshift vessels to Italy from Libya and Tunisia.

The flow recently grew to a flood after a month of protests in Tunisia, set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment and poverty, brought down the government of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said Michigan State University professor Ewen Todd, who predicted there will be more of the same.

“What we saw in Tunisia — a change in government and suddenly there are a whole lot of people going to Italy — this is going to be the pattern,” Todd told AFP.

“Already, Africans are going in small droves up to Spain, Germany and wherever from different countries in the Mediterranean region, but we’re going to see many, many more trying to go north when food stress comes in. And it was food shortages that put the people of Tunisia and Egypt over the top.

“In many Middle Eastern and North African countries,” he continued, “you have a cocktail of politics, religion and other things, but often it’s just poor people saying ‘I’ve got to survive, I’ve got to eat, I’ve got to feed my family’ that ignites things.”

Environmental refugees were described in 2001 by Norman Myers of Oxford University as “a new phenomenon” created by climate change.

“These are people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems, together with the associated problems of population pressures and profound poverty,” Myers wrote in a journal of Britain’s Royal Society in 2001.

“In their desperation, these people feel they have no alternative but to seek sanctuary elsewhere, however hazardous the attempt.”

Monday’s panel cited ways in which climate change has impacted food security and safety.

Warmer winters allow pests that carry plant diseases to survive over the cold months and attack crops in the spring, soil physicist Ray Knighton of the US Department of Agriculture said.

Increased rainfall — another result of climate change — when coupled with more fungal pathogens can “dramatically impact crop yield and quality,” said Knighton, adding that greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants have changed plant structures and reduced crops’ defenses to pests and pathogens.

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