Low-Carbon Energy Investment Hit a Record $243 Billion in 2010, Bloomberg New Energy Finance Says
Global investment in low-carbon energy surged to a record $243 billion last year, boosted by a 30 percent spending increase in China and a burst in small-scale solar-power installations.
The figure eclipses the $186.5 billion spent in 2009 and is more than double the level in 2005, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said today in a statement. The investment came even as clean energy shares had a “lackluster performance” last year, the London-based research company said.
The investment “flies in the face of skepticism about the clean-energy sector among public market investors,” New Energy Finance Chief Executive Officer Michael Liebreich said. “We have been saying for some time that the world needs to reach a figure of $500 billion per annum investment in clean energy if we are to see carbon emissions peak by 2020. What we are seeing in these figures for the first time is that we are halfway there.”
Asset financing for utility-scale projects such as wind farms, solar parks and biofuel plants expanded 19 percent last year to $127.8 billion, more than half of expenditure, New Energy Finance said. Enel Green Power SpA’s initial share sale led $17.4 billion of investments from the public markets, while small-scale projects including rooftop solar panels surged 91 percent to $59.6 billion.
Investment in China expanded 30 percent to $51.1 billion, according to the study.
The figures cover technologies including wind and solar power, energy efficiency, smart-grid equipment, biofuels and carbon capture and storage. Mergers and acquisitions data aren’t included in the study, because they’re not considered new investment.
While the expansion of investment is “very good news,” it has been “in fairly direct response” to government incentives, ranging from cheap debt in China to feed-in tariffs — guaranteed above-market rate prices — for solar power in Europe, Liebreich said.
“The industry needs to continue to drive down its costs and reduce its reliance on this sort of support,” he said.
The report, from the American Superconductor Corporation, which makes wind machine components and licenses other companies to produce such components, said that China might have the largest installed base of wind turbines, about 40,000 megawatts.
The United States ended the third quarter of last year with about 36,700 megawatts of installed capacity, and with a year-end slowdown, may have ended the year with less than 40,000 megawatts.
In 2010 China installed about 16,000 megawatts, versus 5,000 in the United States; in 2009 it installed 13,000 megawatts versus 10,000 in the United States, according to American Superconductor.
The wind picture is part of a trend; China is also adding coal-fired power plants and nuclear plants very rapidly to meet a sharply increasing demand for electricity. The United States, with a more mature economy, a recession and growing energy efficiency, is thought to have seen modest growth in electricity demand last year by comparison with 2009, but remains significantly below its peak electric demand because of the recession.
Military v climate spending: How China outguns the US on clean energy
While China is already boasting “All aboard!” on a network of sleek passenger trains that zip 200 mph and beyond between major urban centres, the United States is still fussing about where to install a single high-speed rail line for a proposed California project.
That’s just a snapshot of how this country continues to lag behind its Asian competitor on the clean technology front.
Can America ever catch up? Yes, says Washington research fellow Miriam Pemberton. But it means taking a $100 billion-dollar bite out of the defense budget annually.
But prospects for that look dim. Many key leaders in a Republican-majority House have declared the Department of Defense off limits””even as they claim to be wielding hatchets for slicing away “waste” to lift the country out of economic doldrums.
An inside-the-Beltway defense contractor who asked to speak off the record told SolveClimate News in an interview that Congress won’t be lopping significant amounts from the defense budget any time soon. And even if it did, that money would not be redirected toward a clean technology deficit.
“The idea that we will whack the Department of Defense to make the Department of Energy robust is a fantasy,” he said. “DOD might be cut some. The question is, what happens to that money? I can’t see those resources going toward DOE. That shift will not occur.”
But Pemberton, who researches demilitarization issues for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Foreign Policy in Focus project, says Congress is missing the big picture.
If the effects of climate change are indeed so dire, she asks, then why shouldn’t defense dollars be redistributed toward DOE and other federal outlets such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that can play integral roles in avoiding these impending disasters?
The most important new message contained in the final report of the presidential commission investigating the gulf oil spill is aimed squarely at Congress: If lawmakers hope to win popular support for ramped-up oil drilling in America’s coastal waters then they must make sure that every possible precaution is taken to reduce the chances of another catastrophe like the spill.
Kerry calls for massive energy investments
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is calling on his fellow lawmakers to pass legislation to invest billions of dollars in transportation and energy technology.
“Now is the moment for America to reach for the brass energy ring “” to go for the moon here on earth by building our new energy future,” Kerry said in remarks at the Center for American Progress Tuesday. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue; but instead of coming together to meet the defining test of a new energy economy and our future, we’re now leaving a political season in which too many candidates promised not to work with the other party.”
Kerry worked for months last year to pass climate legislation in the Senate, but his efforts ultimately failed. He has said he plans to work with other key lawmakers to pass a narrow energy bill this year, though he has recognized that it will be nearly impossible to pass a climate bill.
Alexander Bolton has the full story on Kerry’s speech here.
Much-Touted Cellulosic Ethanol Is Late in Making Mandated Appearance
A projected shortfall in the production of an important green energy alternative could hurt U.S. efforts to move away from fossil fuels, a ClimateWire analysis has found.
U.S. EPA figures indicate that in the second half of 2010, not a drop of cellulosic ethanol — a much-touted fuel that taps the sugars from farm wastes and other non-food sources of biomass — was commercially blended with gasoline.
William Brown, an analyst with the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Office of Oil, Gas and Biofuels Analysis, said that the “curious string of zeros” sends up red flags for that year’s total production. Overall, he said, the outlook appears grim.
There was definitely some [cellulosic ethanol] produced, but I’d estimate far less than even 1 million gallons,” said Brown.
The federally mandated renewable fuel standard (RFS), however, called for production of 5 million gallons in 2010 — and that was after EPA took stock of the nascent industry’s capabilities and lowered the bar from the earlier congressional target of 100 million gallons.
The goal of the RFS is to help the nation wean itself off of fossil fuels with a diverse group of renewable fuels and to slash greenhouse gases. But to date, there have been few other options at the pump. The only large-scale alternative that is homegrown in the United States has been corn ethanol, and the RFS caps that fuel’s contribution to the total 2022 RFS goals at 15 billion gallons. That year’s target calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel.
India Farmer Suicides Linked To Crop Failure, Climate Change
Loss of government subsidies, international competition and recently erratic climate patterns are all being blamed for a staggering number of Indian farmers who are resorting to suicide, Al-Jazeera is reporting.
More than 17,368 Indian farmers reportedly killed themselves in 2009, the worst figure for farm suicides in six years and an increase of 1,172 from the previous year’s figure, data from the National Crime Records Bureau indicate. Nearly all of the bereaved families of those who have committed suicide reportedly had problems with debt and land loss due to failing crops.
“Poverty has assaulted rural India,” journalist Palagummi Sainath, an expert on rural poverty in India, told The Independent, before noting that most of the suicides are taking place in the region known as the nation’s cotton belt. The price of cotton in real terms, he says, is roughly a twelfth of what it was 30 years ago. “Farmers who used to be able to send their children to college now can’t send them to school.”
In Oil Drilling Reform, A Call For Science And Safety
The federal oil spill commission’s final report contains many recommendations for the nation’s offshore oil and gas industry. Some recommendations call on the industry to change its ways; others call on the government to press beyond its current reforms. But one recurring theme is that everyone involved in this hazardous business needs to apply more brainpower.
It’s true that no amount of planning and clear thinking can reduce the risk of an accident to zero, but at Tuesday’s news conference unveiling the commission’s final recommendations, co-chairman Bob Graham said there’s no doubt the United States can do better.
“It’s not asking too much that our approach in the United States be at least equivalent of the best practices in the world,” he said. “They are not that today, and sadly the United States has one of the lesser records in terms of the safety of its offshore drilling practices.”
The commission found one reason for that is federal regulators have been focused on checking off boxes on regulatory lists instead of applying the kind of brainpower they should have been applying.
“Science has not been given a sufficient seat at the table. Actually I think that is a considerable understatement “” it has been virtually shut out,” Graham said.
The question is whether the newly constituted Congress is in a mood to listen. What the commission is asking for are tough new rules and money to strengthen federal oversight at a time when the House is controlled by politicians who broadly oppose new spending and seem hostile to regulation of any sort.
Yet Congress must act, and President Obama should use some of what leverage he has in this new political alignment to see that it does. As the commission co-chairman, Bob Graham, noted, without dramatic action another deep-water disaster will inevitably occur, leaving the public to “wonder why Congress, the administration and industry stood by and did nothing.”
The commission’s 380-page report is the most exhaustive accounting so far of what happened on the Deepwater Horizon. As it forecast in a preliminary summary, the commission blames the accident largely on poor decisions and other “management failures” by three companies involved: BP, Transocean and Halliburton.
It also strongly reinforces its earlier indictments of industry for failing to prepare adequate response plans and of government regulators for allowing themselves to be captured by an industry they were meant to oversee.
What’s new are the recommendations. All are sound, and most will require Congressional help.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Very warm temperatures continue the floods all over Europe, and now in the emerging denier capital of England:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8463887.stm
Major flooding in a January that was forecast by deniers to be among the top 3 coldest? That seems weird. Seems that the favorite forecaster of the denialiati, Mr. Piers Corbyn missed pretty spectacularly. This guy is the favorite forecaster of the (clueless) mayor of London. That is confidence inspiring for the folks in that fine city
At the beginning of the month, this character wrote that only “warmists” predicted Europe to get back to normal temps in January, while he predicted continuing “cruel” temperatures:
It was written:
“Apart from certain charlatans who copy-cat our long range forecasts most standard meteorology holds, as always, that the weather should get back to ‘normal’ very soon and the warmist idealogues declare that cold means warm. In the face of this I say:
1. Our forecast for an exceptionally cold and also snowy January in Britain & West Europe stands”
It was further written:
“The CAUSE OF THIS IS PHYSICS which enables us to predict how solar-lunar effects change the jet stream for example and is nothing whatsoever to do with CO2 from man or nature.”
Remarkably how this solar-lunar physics (or should we say astrology) just failed:
http://www.euronews.net/2011/01/10/winter-thaw-floods-german-rivers/
Should enormous amounts of snow really melt in an “exceptionally cold and also snowy January in Britain & West Europe”.
Should we trust this guy when he tells us that emitting CO2 is not a problem, and that we are in for global cooling instead of warming?
Heck, he can’t even get a two week forecast right.
Speaking of carbon sequestration, I ran across this little gem today. It seems an experimental CCS operation isn’t working so well in Manitoba, Canada…
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/greenpage/environment/carbon-injected-underground-now-leaking-saskatchewan-farmers-study-says-113276449.html
Private weather network will monitor greenhouse gases
Updated 17m ago
A private company announced Wednesday that it’s launching its own greenhouse gas measuring network to supplement governmental and academic efforts that have tracked greenhouse emissions for decades.
Carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas deemed most responsible for global warming — has been continuously measured in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1958. The measurements have been overseen by the federal government’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The new sensor network will be overseen in a joint venture between Washington, D.C.-based Earth Networks, formerly AWS Convergence Technologies, and Scripps. Earth Networks is parent company of the popular WeatherBug weather network and computer application used by consumers, schools, government agencies and TV stations.
“We have the largest network of weather sensors in the world,” says Robert Marshall, CEO and founder of Earth Networks. Marshall says the new sensors will piggyback on some of the company’s existing 8,000 weather sensors.
The greenhouse gas sensors will be networked directly into the weather sensor network, Earth Networks says. Because the EarthNetworks infrastructure is already deployed, the greenhouse sensors can be deployed quickly.
Marshall says the network will be devoted to measuring carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Over the next two years, it will consist of 100 sensors worldwide: 50 in the USA, 25 in western Europe and 25 in the rest of the world.
The company will invest $25 million over the next five years to deploy and operate the network. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/environment/2011-01-12-greenhouse-gas-monitors_N.htm
Isn’t this heroic? It takes private investments today, to inform the society about the most important aspects of climate indicators.
“… why shouldn’t defense dollars be redistributed toward DOE and other federal outlets such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that can play integral roles in avoiding these impending disasters?”
Yes, why not do something which actually makes sense and would contribute to the so called advancement of humanity or also known as common sense? Btw. this also would bring a lot of beneficial returns on a daily base for almost everybody at one point or another.
Incredible Breaking News! Pass this on to the rest of the human race, or what is left of it.
Scientists see climate change link to Australian floods
(Reuters) – Climate change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.
But while scientists say a warmer world is predicted to lead to more intense droughts and floods, it wasn’t yet possible to say if climate change would trigger stronger La Nina and El Nino weather patterns that can cause weather chaos across the globe. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70B1XF20110112
EPA delays climate rules for biomass industry
By Juliet Eilperin
In another sign that the Environmental Protection Agency is moderating its climate policy, it announced Wednesday it would exempt the biomass industry from limits on greenhouse gas emissions for three years.
More than two dozen lawmakers had urged EPA to hold off on applying new rules aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from large emitters to facilities that burn wood and farm waste.
“We are working to find a way forward that is scientifically sound and manageable for both producers and consumers of biomass energy. In the coming years we will develop a commonsense approach that protects our environment and encourages the use of clean energy,” EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement. “Renewable, homegrown power sources are essential to our energy future, and an important step to cutting the pollution responsible for climate change.”
The move prompted praise from both some lawmakers and renewable energy proponents, along with criticism from several environmentalists.
The Renewable Fuels Association said that subjecting the biomass industry to greenhouse gas limits would “have been unnecessarily costly and burdensome for our industry,” while Rep. Greg Walden, (R-Ore.) issued a statement saying, “The EPA was precariously close to enforcing new job-killing regulations, and with the urging of a bipartisan congressional effort, made the right decision in reversing course.”
Some groups, like the Clean Air Task Force, tried to seek middle ground by praising the agency for conducting a more detailed scientific review of the matter.
“The science today, however, tells us that all biomass does not provide immediate greenhouse gas mitigation, and in fact some may have greater climate impacts than fossil fuels,” said Ann Weeks, the group’s senior counsel. “A precautionary approach to biomass in greenhouse gas permitting therefore is the only approach that makes sense, legally and technically, pending the outcome of the scientific review.”
But Clean Air Watch’s Frank O’Donnell said the decision to delay regulation “is another concession by EPA to its critics in Congress. Still unknown: will this reduce congressional attacks on EPA, or merely be blood in the water?”
By Juliet Eilperin | January 12, 2011; 5:07 PM ET http://voices.washingtonpost.com/post-carbon/2011/01/epa_delays_climate_rules_for_b.html
Climate Disasters: How People Respond http://bit.ly/ex2YXH
What is it: The fossil fuel industry has something like $10 trillion to $30 trillion invested in super tankers, extraction, heavy machinery refineries, etc., etc. not willing to write off ahead of schedule to move on to a new civilization the acknowledges the climate change crisis and deal with it in a rational way?
Since they are holding civilization hostage there must be much costlt ways — even in the short term — that a transition can be crafted so that we can move ahead at wartime speed with mitigation and remediation efforts.
On Our Radar: A Climate-Change Fingerprint in Australia?
Climate change may be partly responsible for the intensity of the floods inundating the eastern Australian city of Brisbane, scientists say. [Reuters]
Some recommendations from the presidential oil spill commission, like raising the cost of regulating risky oil leases, could take effect though an executive order, an option that President Obama has shown interest in, a panel member says. [Politico]
The United Nations calls on Nigeria to clean up villages polluted by illegal gold mining operations, which have contaminated water supplies and caused the deaths of hundreds of children from mass acute lead poisoning last year. [United Nations]
Six rare frogs not seen for nearly 15 years are spotted in the dwindling cloud forests of Haiti. The frogs were found in the Massif de la Hotte, one of the country’s last intact stands of tropical forest. [CBC] http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/on-our-radar-a-climate-change-fingerprint-in-australia/?partner=rss&emc=rss
7# fj3 said “Climate Disasters: How People Respond”
Interesting, but the study assumes that people can rebuild. I mean at one point people will have situation that are so severe and devastating that there is no infrastructure or system to provide the commodities, to build upon. Maybe even money and gold becomes worthless, when people start to fight for the last water or food. Or for example a place becomes inundated for a long period of time and the communication with the civilization is cut.
Brisbane Wakes to Devastation, Death as Flood Peaks
“There is some relief, but people are waking up to unbearable agony,” Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh said on Sky News today. “What I’m seeing looks more like a war zone. This is a reconstruction effort of post-war proportions. We need to have a steely determination to match the effort that’s needed.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-12/brisbane-floods-worsen-as-death-toll-reaches-23-in-queensland-67-missing.html
An area bigger than Texas and California making up more than 75 percent of Queensland state has been declared a disaster zone.
A La Nina weather event has brought record rainfall to the coal- and sugar-producing state and is expected to last into Australia’s autumn, the Bureau of Meteorology’s Head of Climate Monitoring and Prediction David Jones said yesterday by phone from Melbourne.
Woolworths Ltd., Australia’s biggest retailer, said it’s running “very low” on fresh food including milk, bread, eggs and meat in Queensland as suppliers are closed off by flood waters and staff can’t make it to stores. Electricity supplier Energex Ltd. said on its website more than 114,000 customers in the southeast of the state are without power because of the floods sweeping through the area.
SRI LANKA: Record rains increase urgency of climate change adaptation
COLOMBO, 12 January 2011 (IRIN) – Ongoing storms have dumped more rain in one eastern district of Sri Lanka than witnessed in a century, according to the country’s Disaster Management Centre (DMC). Nationwide, storms have hit some two million people in the past seven months and hastened climate adaptation plans already under way, according to the government.
National climate scientist WL Sumathipala said recent storm activity had sped up the timetable to help residents cope with changing weather. “We have looked at weather patterns for a long period of time and it is only now that we are ready to make scientifically supported statements about climate change.”
Continuous rains since 26 December have caused rock slides and displacement, mostly in northern and eastern parts of the country, and closed schools. As of 11 January, about 33,330 families have been displaced to 351 relocation centres.
A top official in the Ministry of Agriculture, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IRIN that experimentation had been under way to find highly resilient crop species, especially rice. “We are reverting to traditional knowledge. Sri Lanka has some 2,000 traditional rice varieties and [some] have a special capacity to withstand extreme weather.” But production is slow and will take several years to bear results, he added.
Since the 2004 tsunami, the Colombo-based office of the NGO Practical Action has trained farmers in how to cultivate four weather-resistant traditional rice strains.
“Priority was given to varieties which are popular and already have a market,” said Hemantha Abeywardena, a facilitator with an organic agriculture project at Practical Action.
“A key factor was to avert impending food crises. With the climatic change and overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, salinity in the fields has increased,” said Abeywardena.
The government’s meteorology department has reported that heavy rains will continue until at least through 12 January across the north and north-central sections of the country, particularly the provinces of Eastern and Uva (south of Eastern) and the country’s southernmost district, Hambantota.
The government, with the UN, conducted an assessment in all affected districts in the east, north and central provinces on 11 January, with results expected soon. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91611
USDA Announces Grants to Study Climate Change Mitigation and Bioenergy Development
Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188
DAVIS, Calif., Jan. 12, 2011 – Roger Beachy, director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) announced today two Coordinated Agricultural Project (CAP) awards to the University of California-Davis that have implications for both climate variability and the development of a promising new sustainable bioenergy source.
“I am pleased to formally announce two significant investments by USDA in science that will impact agriculture. In one of these exciting projects, a team of researchers will tease out the impacts of changes in climate on crop yields and identify genetic loci that can be incorporated in breeding of barley and wheat to tolerate changes that accompany change in climate. The second research team will generate and use genomics information to provide an understanding of genes and genetics in conifers to help in developing new bioenergy sources,” Beachy said. “Each of these projects feature transdisciplinary, regional, integrated teams, including scientists from institutions that represent underserved populations – an approach that represents a new paradigm in how USDA science can best solve critical issues facing agriculture today.” http://www.csrees.usda.gov/newsroom/news/2011news/01121_afri_davis.html
Yes let’s understand Genetics in 2 Years!
BBC ever page … In a time of climate chaos and the hottest year on record, not one single headline abut global warming.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/
Thanks to a Super Material, Your Future Phone May Be an All-Glass Wonder
http://www.fastcompany.com/1716513/new-material-means-your-future-phone-will-be-a-glass-wonder
Two from MIT’s Technology Review:
LEDs Are Getting Ready for the Spotlight
Businesses could soon find that they can quickly recoup the higher up-front cost of high-tech lighting.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011, by Josie Garthwaite
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/27003/
Volt’s Battery Capacity Could Double
GM licenses technology that could also make the batteries much cheaper.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011, by Kevin Bullis
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/27049/
We should not forget that we had the hottest 12 month period around sep 2010.
Indeed this is why we have seen the most extreme year yet.
There is a direct correlation!
Flooded Australian city in shock, fresh rains feared
(Reuters) – Flood water in Australia’s third-biggest city peaked below feared catastrophic levels on Thursday but Brisbane and other devastated regions faced years of rebuilding, while fresh flood threats loom with a cyclone forecast off the coast. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BU09620110113
ANNA BLIGH: The worst natural disaster in our history and possibly in the history of our nation.
ANNIE GUEST: Meanwhile, there’s concern about rising water in the southern inland town of Goondiwindi.
The weather bureau’s hydrologist, Jesse Carey says the water there will go higher than it’s ever reached before.
ANNIE GUEST: To the north, in Bundaberg, residents are also bracing for more flooding in the devastated city. http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3112389.htm
Goondiwindi (pronounced /ɡʌndəˈwɪndi/)[1] is an Australian town of approximately 5,023 people (Census 2004)
Farming
Goondiwindi is also a major centre for agricultural production with the district producing and growing a diverse range of crops and fibres. The mainstays of the local economy are anything from wool and beef production through to the growing of cotton, sorghum and corn in the summer period. The winter crop growing season sees the planting of wheat, barley and chickpeas. Average rainfall for this region is 525 millimetres (20.7 in) per annum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goondiwindi,_Queensland
Queensland has received so much rain in the past two months the ground is fully waterlogged and dams are full, meaning any more heavy rain will further swell already flooded rivers.
The deluge has been blamed on a La Nina weather pattern in
the Pacific. Last year was Australia’s third wettest on record, and weather officials forecast an above average cyclone season.
“This is a very eerie flood for us because we’ve had no rain,” said Goondiwindi Mayor Graeme Scheu.
South of Brisbane, neighboring New South Wales state has also been hit by flooding, prompting evacuations of many small residential areas, while in the southeast Victoria state has experienced flash floods and landslides.
Further north, in Queensland’s coal mining heartland, one of the nation’s biggest export earning regions showed signs of recovery, with coal-freight operator QR National saying its worst-hit rail network could reopen in a week. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BU09620110113?pageNumber=3
So how much rain exactly? And great to not mention climate change … stupid.
Earth must prepare for close encounter with aliens, say scientists
UN should co-ordinate plans for dealing with extraterrestrials – and we can’t guarantee that aliens will be friendly http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jan/10/earth-close-encounter-aliens-extraterrestrials
In any case, aliens know what’s going on with our climate and that we are about to boot the planet. Maybe the colonization ships are already on the way and when they arrive nothing is left of the humans.
Friendly aliens will have to understand that humans love to make an autopsy …
TERESOPOLIS, Brazil — Driving rains sent tons of rusty red earth sliding into Brazilian mountain towns, killing at least 287 people and leaving dozens more missing – lives rescuers hoped to save as they resumed searches Thursday.
In the hardest-hit town of Teresopolis, where the local civil defense agency said at least 146 people died, hundreds of family members crowded around the town’s morgue waiting to identify bodies. More corpses were laid out on a street in front to the police station, covered by blankets. Rains hit the town overnight, though no new mudslides were reported.
Rescuers used heavy machinery, shovels and bare hands in attempts to find survivors. How many were saved was not known – at least 50 were still missing and one neighborhood hit by slides in Teresopolis had not been reached yet by authorities. In a neighboring town, firefighters rescued a 25-year-old man who held his 6-month-old son for 15 hours until they were both pulled out alive. The man’s wife and mother-in-law were feared dead.
Heavy rains and mudslides kill hundreds of people across Brazil each year, especially during the South American summer. The worst hit are the poor, whose rickety homes are often built on steep slopes with weak or no foundations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/13/AR2011011300792.html
Heavy rains and mudslides kill hundreds of people across Brazil each year …
Oh Really, nothing new, nothing maybe has todo with the climate?
The mayor of Teresopolis, Jorge Mario Sedlacek, decreed a state of emergency, calling the calamity “the worst to hit the town.” “This is the largest catastrophe in the history of this town,” Sedlacek said in an interview with Globo TV.
Paulm #15
Well what can we expect from an organ with Richard Black as Environment Correspondent who writes rot like this in Ice-cold reality of warming projections:
Never heard of Ice Cores Richard? Doh! Another Homer Simpson award!
#10. Prokaryotes
Yeah, just see what happens in the likes of NYC’s recent relatively minor blizzard and subsequent mistakes in a normally well-run city.
Catastrophes usually occur when a confluence of things go wrong or are negligent as is the blatantly-bad situation we currently are in; also the Sci-Fi film genesis of the countdowns and disaster-preventive system checks for rocket launches.