Why is it that the U.S. National Weather Service, the federal agency most responsible for warning the public of threatening weather, drought and flooding, has not yet seen fit to warn the public about what everybody seems to be talking about these days: global warming? Why is it not advising the American public, through it's network of 5,000 local meterologists, what the American public might do to help stem what now appears imminent calamity of unthinkable proportions? One has to wonder who's calling the shots for the NWS anyway?

Is global warming happening? Most definitely! The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center reported on October 16, 2007 that temperatures last month broke 1,000 daily high records across the United States. It said the heat also helped spread the worsening drought to almost half of the contiguous U.S., with the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Tennessee Valley being the hardest hit, and with large parts of the Southwest also being dry. Pasadena, California experienced its driest water year since records began in 1878.

In the Midwest, the levels of all the Great Lakes have been in decline since the late 1990s, with Lakes Huron and Michigan about two feet below their long-term average levels. Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, fell to 20 inches below average last month, an all time recorded low water level. The primary suspected reason: consistent with increasing temperatures, the Great Lakes's period of ice coverage in winter has become shorter and shorter, resulting in increased evaporation from the surface of the lakes over the winter months.

The occurrance of more massive, deadly forest fires has increased dramatically in recent years. Foresters cite earlier springs and increasing drought, along with past forestry practices that eliminated fire from the forest ecosystem entirely.

Nowhere is the devastation of increased fire severity and occurrence been more evident than in southwestern California this week, where dry conditions brought about by warmer temperatures throughout the year along with stronger than usual Santa Anna winds has already caused the destruction of hundreds of homes and buildings, threatened and taken lives and created economic losses in the billions.

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/18/60minutes/main3380176.shtml

Temperatures in the Arctic have been rising much faster due to the increased loss of albedo (snow cover), resulting in more of the sun's rays not being reflected by snow cover and instead getting through to the surface and thus heating up the Arctic. The result has been that Arctic Sea ice in September this year was at its lowest recorded amount of extent since satellite measurements began in 1979, having declined by a whopping 23 percent (about 1 million square kilometers) in just the last two years.

Temperatures in Alaska have warmed more than 3 degrees in the past 50 years and residents are seeing the expensive consequences of melting permafrost, which causes soil erosion and some flooding.

All these kinds of extreme hydrologic and climatic events had been predicted by the models global warming scientists use to forecast the changing climate in response to rising greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, brought about mostly by burning coal for electricity generation in power plants and through burning of oil products in motor vehicles.

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/sep/seaice-2007-timeseries.gif

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/sep/map-land-sfc-mntp-200709-pg.gif

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/sep/glob-jan-sep-pg.gif

With this kind of global warming already going on, why is it that the U.S. National Weather Service, the federal agency most responsible for warning the public of threatening weather, drought and flooding, has not yet seen fit to warn the public about the changing climate and things that we could be doing to minimize the threat of global warming? Could it be that NWS bureaucrats have been ordered not to report the facts about global warming to the American public? Could it be that the NWS's network of 5,000 local meterologists are still being discouraged from saying anything about global warming in their reporting to the public? There is ample evidence of that dating back even before the Bush administration took office (see links below). So why is this still happening? Anyone?

Source of information: National Climatic Data Center:

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/sep/sep07.html



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* http://madison.indymedia.org/newswire/display/60076/index.php

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Comments

Re: National Weather Service Wrong in Not Warning the Public about Global Warming

by fed up

It was almost funny watching the Weather channel tell of the three thousand high temp records broken this summer and not utter the words 'global warming' or the dreaded phrase 'climate change'.

The same thing just this week by the so cal fire coverage on every station. They tip toe around the fact that they are in an unusually severe drought and an unusually severe Santa Anna wind event without discussing a possible cause for it when in Australia where they are in the longest and harshest drought ever recorded, global warming is all over the front pages.

Here in the US, the people in control don't want to worry the people with thoughts that may change their buying habits or get them off the couch and marching in the streets like they would be if they knew the truth.