NYC Hurricane Irene Live Stream
I’m here on the North Shore of Long Island, battening down the hatches, awaiting Hurricane Irene. It appears we can expect power outages starting tonight, so it may be awhile before AmpedStatus is updated again. Here’s a news roundup on the incoming hurricane. But before jumping into it, I would like to comment on the role of the BP oil spill in all of this. I find it shocking, although not surprising, that the spill is rarely ever mentioned when corporate news outlets cover all these extreme weather events.
Since the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the US has endured an unprecedented number of extreme weather events. This winter the North East experienced record amounts of snowfall. The South and Midwest have seen a record number of tornadoes and severe drought. Record breaking heat, flooding, fires and a record number of earthquakes have hit throughout the US. Now, on the East Coast, after just experiencing a 5.8 magnitude earthquake, we are confronted with an historically large and destructive hurricane heading up the coast. While scientists have been predicting an increase in intensive storms due to global climate change for the past 20 years, the BP oil spill is certainly a contributing factor in the increasing number and intensity of extreme weather events throughout the US over the past year.
Here’s why: the millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, much of which still sits on the bottom of the seafloor, have helped to increase water temperatures and have also helped to slow down and clog the Gulf jet stream, which creates our weather patterns.
Exactly how much the BP oil spill has contributed to these extreme weather events obviously needs to be researched more thoroughly. The fact that all of these record-breaking extreme weather events have occurred since the spill took place raises many red flags. Not surprisingly, the corporate media has not even touched on this subject. I will do further research on this soon, until then, here’s a roundup on Hurricane Irene and the latest barely covered news on the recent earthquake and the BP oil spill.
Hurricane Irene Live Blogs
Huffington Post CNN
Hurricane Irene threatens to plunge US east coast into major power blackout
…officials warned of widespread power black-outs – potentially lasting for days or even weeks in rural areas – because of high winds from the hurricane. [read full report]
Irene leaves 650,000 without power in US Southeast
Hurricane Irene left nearly 650,000 people without power in the U.S. Southeast on Saturday and energy firms braced for potentially much larger disruptions as the storm churns up the coast.
As the category 1 storm moved northward, utility firms warned of more blackouts ahead. Oil refineries, pipelines and fuel terminals limited operations to ensure safety, and the Coast Guard closely monitored energy shipping ports but kept the key hub at New York Harbor open for now. [read full report]
Washington’s Blog, which has done an amazing job over the past year covering the BP Gulf oil spill, has an ominous new report:
BP’s Gulf Oil Well Is Leaking Again
“Oil is once again fouling the Gulf of Mexico around the Deepwater Horizon well, which was capped a little over a year ago…. hundreds of small, circular patches of oily sheen dotted the surface within a mile of the wellhead…. Scientific analysis has confirmed that oil bubbling up above BP’s sealed Deepwater Horizon well in recent days is a chemical match for the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf last summer.” [read full report]
In regard to the recent East Coast earthquake:
Fracking could have caused East Coast earthquake
Experts are looking for a reason behind Tuesday afternoon’s unlikely 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook people up and down the East Coast, and some are saying that a recent rise in fracking could be the culprit.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the man-made splintering of underground rocks to expedite the exploiting of natural resources. It’s become a widespread phenomenon since its introduction in 2004, and though the practice can help increase supplies of oil and gas without reaching out internationally for imports, the result it can have on the geological make-up of the Earth can be ravaging. Now some experts say the rise in fracking could be to blame for yesterday’s quake.
The odds of a quake exceeding a magnitude of 5.5 occurring in central Virginia are so slim that Dominion Power determined only around six quakes of that size would occur in the area over the next 10,000 years. Dominion was looking at building a third nuclear reactor at their power plant in North Anna, VA, where facilities had to be taken offline yesterday as a result of the quake. Despite predicting that the site would be scarcely affected ever by a tremor, the quake’s epicenter was only mere miles from the nuclear facility. [read full report]
Human Activity Is Officially Acknowledged to Cause Earthquakes
Statement by the USGS:
“Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. In 1967, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 followed a series of smaller earthquakes. Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established.”
The conclusion here: it is increasingly difficult to extract natural resources. By having to drill deeper for oil, and the increasing reliance on fracking, we are causing significant harm to the environment and contributing to extreme weather risks.
15 Irrefutable Signs That Climate Change Is Real
… whether you believe in anthropogenic drivers, like fossil fuels from power plants and cars or not — the observed changes in climate are scientific facts that have grave implications for the future of natural and human systems…
Global temperature trends estimated by four different research groups all show a warming of the Earth over the past century, with particularly rapid increases over the past few decades.
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My recent coverage of extreme weather:
It’s Hot Outside! 2,676 Daily US Record High Temperatures Broken Or Tied In July, As 18% Of US Experiencing Drought, 41% Facing Abnormal Dryness Unprecedented Extreme Weather In First Half Of 2011 Leads To Record $265 Billion In Losses
Related posts:
- Extreme Weather Roundup: Severe Flooding To Hit Gulf Coast; Texas On Fire; Earthquakes Hit Alaska & Argentina; Vast Ice Island To Break Off; BP Deepwater Horizon Site Leaking Again Cross-posted from AmpedStatus.com Tropical storm Lee threatens severe flooding in...
- BP Deepwater Horizon Site Leaking Again, Quickly Becoming A Massive Oil Slick This is the section of the new AmpedStatus Extreme Weather...
- Hurricane Irene Aftermath: Vermont Devastated By Severe Flooding; 36+ Deaths; Up to $45 Billion of Damage; 5 Million People Lost Power, Outages Could Last Weeks (Videos) Thus far at least 36 people were killed by Hurricane...
- Unprecedented Extreme Weather In First Half Of 2011 Leads To Record $265 Billion In Losses Insurance company Munich Re has a new report on the...
- Federal Reserve Policy + Extreme Weather = Revolution + World War III Federal Reserve Policy Mixed With Extreme Weather Has Put The...
Amped Status does a GREAT job educating the public and I even heard Dave Degraw on WBAI the other day (w/Gary Null).
Let’s ALL chip in a few bucks to keep it up and running!
Twitted by junerenner // Aug 27, 2011 at 11:19 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by junerenner [...]
David, Oil Spills have nothing to do with earthquakes and it is doubtfull if oil laying on the bottom of the Gulf is warming the Ocean even marginallly and it is doubtful that oil caugth up in the Gulf Stream has any impact on its flow. What BP Oil does do when it is consumed in automobiles, powerplants and factories is produce Carbon Dioxide that does increase the temperature of the armosphere. This does lead to record snowfall, record tornadoes, and record heat waves. But again you are mis-stepping because Hurricane Irene is barely a catagory one hurricane and is not unuaual on the Atlantic seaboard. By making these staements you are undermining you entire publication and leaving yourself open to attach from just about anyone that pay fleeting attention to the scientific record. If Irene ramped up to a catagory 4 hurricane and maintained that intensity all the way to the Jersey Shore, then that would have been a shocker. But it didn’t. Like I said please do your homework.
By throwing earthquakes into the mix of climate change you come across as desparate to make your point about BP which make BP look more credible.
Come on, we sent you what ever we could to keep you going, please do your homework before shooting off your mouth.
I agree with Timothy. Let us dial back the hyperbole.
“oil spill is certainly a contributing factor” is true in the sense that everything is connected to everything but otherwise you’re way over the top without any evidence.
“clog the Gulf jet stream” – There is a Gulf stream in the Atlantic Ocean and there is a jet stream in the upper atmosphere but there is no such thing as a Gulf jet stream.
Please don’t devalue your important work.
Perhaps Tropical Depression 12 will become that Hurricane that shocks the American Conscience. Vermot got hit so badly because of the path of Irene which was forcast to trun out to sea originally ran right over the middle of the State. The Global Warming element that comes in to play here was described by Bill McKibben and that was the fact that the waters off South Carolina, North Carolina and the Jersey Coast are at record temperatures allowing Irene to pick up more water vapor than usuall. I would watch for a Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico this year because the Gulf Water temperature is also at a record highs and anything that forms there will have the poetnetial to ramp up to a catagory 5 very easily. But there is always the roll of the dice factor that comes into play here and even though conditions are ripe for a monster Hurricane, it may never come to pass this year.
One other thing you may want to watch is the minum extents of the Artic Ice Cap this year because it is flriting with breaking the record set in 2007.
One other thing is would you be interested in hosting “Remember Building 7″, the 10th aniversary mini-documentary narated by Ed Asner that makes another public appeal to get a real investigation into who and what brough down hte world trade center on 9/11/01. Please go to http://911expertsspeakout.org/
Tropical depression 12 is now tropical storm Katia with sustainted winds of 60 mph with gusts to 70 mph.
Fracking can have an effect on shallow geology but would not be the cause of a major earthquake unless it was used in a location where there was already an enormous amount of stress built up on a fault line like in Southern California and the fault was ready to slip in the first place. What Fracking does do is inject enormous amounts of Fracking fluid into the aquifers that pollutes our drinking water and the water table. It also releases more methane into the atmosphere which has optical absorption bands right where the combined absorption bands of H20 and C02 have transmission bands, plugging the last available infra-red transmission hole through which the daytime heat can escape into space at night. Also consider that the depth of the crust in the area of Virginia is 110 miles thick, drilling one to 1 ½ miles down to where the oil and gas deposits are would seem to be a mere scratch on the surface and would hardly effect the seismicity of the area considering that the average earthquake occurs at depth of around 35 miles down. But on the earth coast they range from 0 to 42 miles down and this recent earth quake occurred at only 3.7 miles down and 5.8 is probably a maximum Richter reading for an earthquake at this depth. But the fact that Fracking is occurring at between 1 and 1 ½ miles down, it would not be surprising to find out that this process is in fact lubricating shallow fault lines that lead to these seismic events. The problem with Fracking contributing to seismic activity is that is very hard to prove and would require a multimillion dollar research program to come to definitive conclusions and it takes away from the easily provable environmental devastation it causes with regard to ground water contamination.
The leaking and spilling oil from BP wells is killing the fish and their habitat on the ocean bottom and along our shores, and we depend those fish for food. Here again by making the claim that crude oil laying on the bottom of the Gulf is heating the ocean thus causing bigger and more frequent hurricanes is hard to prove. What is easier to prove is that global warming caused by the emission of CO2 and Methane from the oil and gas industry is trapping more heat that is warming the oceans that leads to bigger and more frequent hurricanes. I don’t doubt that by killing the plant life that absorbs solar radiation might contribute marginally to the temperature increases, but even that is hard to prove; here again it is the killing off of the sea life on the bottom of the Gulf and on the shoreline that makes this disaster particularly despicable and delving into whether or not it also leads to increased water temperatures detracts from the already proven devastation to sea life and water quality.
Climate change is real and it is relentless and it is caused by the increase of water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane gasses in the atmosphere and the paving of huge tracks of land for transportation, there is no doubt here and this driven by people driving their automobiles, factories producing manufactured goods, power plants making electricity and agriculture producing billions of tons of methane.