Slow Progress on New York Islands After Hurricane Sandy

source: Craig Peter Low

More Bodies Found on Devastated Staten Island

On Thursday the bodies of two young boys who were swept away from their mother’s grasp during the storm surge were recovered, NBC News reported. A missing husband and wife were also found dead Thursday, NBCNewYork.com reported.
That brought the toll on the island to 19, NBCNewYork.com reported. On Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Superstorm Sandy is responsible for the deaths of at least 37 New Yorkers.


Staten Island via maketodayadtr on tumblr
. . . Staten Island, which took a direct blow from Sandy, is a scene of immeasurable misery and utter devastation, with homes obliterated, others off their foundations in addition to widespread flooding.
"The city of New York right now is talking about getting water out of the Battery Tunnel and preparing for a marathon," U.S. Rep. Rep. Michael Grimm said. "We're pulling bodies out of the water. You see the disconnect here?"

NYPD officials have denied to NBC News that Staten Island’s working class neighborhoods have come after wealthier areas.
“We are heading into the area where there is major destruction now,” Red Cross spokeswoman Anne Marie Borrego told NBC News late Thursday.

Staten Island via maketodayadtr on tumblr
Chuck Schumer Vows to Restore Long Island Beaches

“We will get our beaches restored,” New York senior said outside a water treatment facility in Long Beach that has been inoperable since Monday, leaving residents without running water.

Schumer toured parts of Long Beach on foot Wednesday afternoon and surveyed Fire Island by helicopter. ”Much of the beach is gone,” he said. “And the beach is what Fire Island is.”

He said the beaches could be restored with the help of the Army Corp of Engineers, which could use sand from dredging projects to rebuild them. In Long Beach, he said FEMA would pay for the rebuilding of the boardwalk that had been twisted and torn up by the storm.

“The far bigger problem is global warming which is causing these storms to threaten our coastline,” Schumer said.

source: Craig Peter Low
Mayor Bloomberg Insists that NYC Marathon Will Happen on Sunday

Mayor Bloomberg today insisted the New York City Marathon should go on as scheduled, even as huge swaths of Gotham remain in ruins and with no electricity.
The famed five -borough race is set for Sunday, starting at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and ending in Central Park.
The mayor is banking on the restoration of electricity on several blocks of Manhattan, below 34th Street, thus relieving some police burden there.

“The marathon is not going to redirect any focus. Keep in mind by Sunday we’ll have electricity back downtown,” Bloomberg said. “That will free up an enormous number of police. Also, a lot of the transportation needs that we have during the week aren’t there on the weekends.”

Former Comptroller Bill Thompson said he appreciates the importance the marathon -- but believes there are too many other issues to address in New York right now.
"The New York City Marathon is one of our country’s quintessential events, but in the wake of the natural disaster that has struck our city and its residents we need to focus on more important priorities," Thompson wrote on his Facebook page tonight.

"New Yorkers are suffering. Lives have been lost, homes destroyed, seniors stranded in public housing with no electricity and entire neighborhoods are suffering with scant access to fresh water, food and electricity. While I understand the importance of this event and the fact that it draws people from all over the world to watch and participate, I believe this year’s race needs to be postponed to a later date."

Hurricane Sandy ~ Predictions Were Right and Science Saved Lives

Hindsight is always 20-20 especially when dealing with predicting the weather. But with Sandy, the forecasters got it all too right, even though many on Twitter and elsewhere made fun of the moniker "Frankenstorm," and CNN News supposedly banned the use of the name. Yet the hurricane really developed into the worst of the worst-case-scenarios and everyone's nightmare storm.

Luckily local officials listened to the scientists at NOAA and science saved lives.

Romney Dredges Up "Drill Baby Drill"

Good old Mitt Romney ~ as a hurricane moves into the Gulf threatening everything including the precarious Oil Industry, he brings up the idea of drilling offshore and in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge as a good thing.

Yeah, how did that work out for McCain/Palin?  And I know Mitt doesn't care to remember, but the Gulf suffered through the horrible Deepwater Horizon Spill since the last election. Good luck, Mitt. Even your toady, Bobby Jindal, might not back you on this one.

Via San Francisco Chronicle

HOBBS, N.M. (AP) — Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney promised on Thursday to aggressively expand off-shore oil drilling along Virginia, North Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico, changing the subject from social issues like abortion and Medicare that have dominated the debate in the days before the critical Republican National Convention.

Speaking to voters in the heart of New Mexico's oil and gas industry, Romney declared that his energy plans — which include drilling for oil in a federal Alaskan wildlife reserve — would create 3 million jobs and more than $1 trillion in new revenue. And he predicted complete "North American energy independence by 2020, a never-realized goal claimed by presidential candidates for decades."

"That means we produce all the energy we use in North America," Romney said, emphasizing an expansion of oil and gas over wind and solar production. "This is not some pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. This is a real achievable objective."

 

Climate Crisis

Lots of news about extreme weather conditions that are eventually going to affect all of us.

Governor Quinn of Illinois: We are All Tom Joad

Who can forget the profound desperation in Tom Joad’s heart as he and his family leave Oklahoma’s drought-stricken farms in John Steinbeck’s classic "The Grapes of Wrath?"


That dusty image — of flattened fields and beaten-down farmers — can be seen today in most counties in my state and others due to the persistent, unprecedented drought now suffocating America’s breadbasket.
The facts are stark.
In Illinois, we’ve experienced the sixth-driest growing season on record. Of 102 counties, 100 are disaster areas. The latest corn conditions show 74 percent of this year’s crop is “poor” or “very poor”, so the cost of corn products ranging from ethanol to tortillas will soar. Barren grazing pastures are forcing livestock farmers to purchase hay at inflated prices. The drought also affects fisheries, wildlife, water levels in navigable waterways and the entire food chain.

Reuters: UN Warns Extreme Weather Affects Food Supply

"It has not been properly recognised yet that we are dealing with a food system here. There is a whole chain that is also going to be affected by climate change," Professor Dr John Porter of the University of Copenhagen said.

"It is more than just the fact that there are droughts in the United States that will reduce yields," he said. Like the other experts, he said was giving personal opinions, not those of the U.N. panel.

After harvest, floods could wash away roads or bridges, for instance, between fields and factories processing the crop. Or warehouses storing food could be damaged by more powerful storms. Such factors were likely to hit poor nations hardest.

"There are reasons to expect more frequent (price) spikes, given that it will be more common to see conditions that are considered extreme," said David Lobell, an assistant professor at Stanford University in California.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Western Wildfires Threaten Homes

Not only are more wildfires flaring up in the West this year than last, but the nation's fires have gotten bigger, said Jennifer Smith, of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. As of Thursday, more than 43,000 wildfires had been reported in the U.S. this season, burning a total of nearly 6.4 million acres, or 10,000 square miles, the center said. The 10-year average for the period is 52,535 fires, but covering only 5 million acres, Smith said.

    Guardian UK: Arctic Sea Ice Disappearing

Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly. But the new measurements indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time. For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six metres in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three metres. "Preliminary analysis of our data indicates that the rate of loss of sea ice volume in summer in the Arctic may be far larger than we had previously suspected," said Dr Seymour Laxon, of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), where CryoSat-2 data is being analysed.

"Very soon we may experience the iconic moment when, one day in the summer, we look at satellite images and see no sea ice coverage in the Arctic, just open water." The consequences of losing the Arctic's ice coverage, even for only part of the year, could be profound. Without the cap's white brilliance to reflect sunlight back into space, the region will heat up even more than at present. As a result, ocean temperatures will rise and methane deposits on the ocean floor could melt, evaporate and bubble into the atmosphere. Scientists have recently reported evidence that methane plumes are now appearing in many areas. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas and rising levels of it in the atmosphere are only likely to accelerate global warming.

Happy Place Diversion: Shark Story

This is so much fun ~ an ordinary day in Myrtle Beach, SC, then wham! If it wasn't caught on film, no one would believe this fish story. Enjoy!