9 Die as Tornadoes Tear Apart Kansas Town

Storm chaser Lance Ferguson followed the system which begun in the Oklahoma panhandle. "What was just amazing is that the storm system just kept regenerating, it just kept recycling and kept doing its thing … Mother Nature's fury at its best," he told KWCH. "To see a tornado down on the ground for that long and to become that massive and that big, I haven’t seen anything like it before," he said. "It just kept getting wider and wider and wider."

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Powerful Tornadoes Devastate SW Kansas (CBS/AP)
9 Die as Tornadoes Tear Apart Kansas Town (NYT/AP)
NYT May 5, 2007 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GREENSBURG, Kan. (AP) -- Tornadoes killed at least nine people and leveled most of this southwest Kansas town, a state official said Saturday. Rescuers with dogs searched door to door for survivors.
The dead include six in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is located, and one in nearby Stafford County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General's Department.
The tornado that struck Greensburg late Friday damaged about 90 percent of the town about 110 miles west of Wichita, City Administrator Steve Hewitt said Saturday.
Dazed residents walked the streets, looking for loved ones and taking in the sight of crumbled buildings and smashed cars in the town of some 1,600 people.
Much of downtown was destroyed, along with City Hall, the high school and the junior high school, Hewitt said.
''I don't think we have a business left downtown,'' he said. A mandatory evacuation was ordered, he said.
Emergency personnel and search and rescue teams raced to Greensburg from throughout southwest Kansas. Trained dogs accompanied law enforcement officers who searched house to house for anyone trapped or injured.
''There is still a possibility we do not have all of the people accounted for in that town,'' Watson said. ''That is something we will be working feverishly to do over the next several hours.''
Hewitt said at least 50 people had been taken to hospitals, 16 in critical condition, but said exact numbers were impossible to come by. Rescuers pulled about 30 people from the basement of a partially collapsed hospital early Saturday, but most of them had minor injuries, Watson said.
A storm front spawned tornadoes along a line stretching northeast from Greensburg through central Kansas. Three small tornadoes also touched down Friday in rural southwestern Illinois, but officials said there were no reports of injury or damage. Two tornadoes struck in Oklahoma, damaging some structures but injuring no one, officials said.
Larry Ruthi, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Dodge City, said the storm system spawned at least three significant tornadoes, including the one that hit Greensburg. He said there were likely other smaller twisters.
The weather service described the tornado that struck Greensburg as a ''wedge,'' an especially broad and tall formation. Frederick Kruse of the weather service's Dodge City office said there were initial reports that the tornado was at least three-quarters of a mile wide on the ground.
Watson said the state fire marshal's office dispatched hazardous materials teams because railroad cars in Kiowa County had overturned. She said the National Guard was sending 40 troops to provide security around Greensburg.
Katie White said she was driving through town and pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store when she heard the warning. She said the store's owner pulled her and about 15 other people into the store's cooler. When they emerged, White said, the building around them had collapsed.
School buses lined up to take people to the nearby town of Haviland, where the Red Cross opened shelters at Haviland High School and Barclay College.
''We have more than 300 people in shelters in Haviland,'' Watson said. ''We have another 300 en route to take advantage of those shelters, and we anticipate that number to grow.''
At the high school, the Rev. Gene McIntosh described how he huddled with his family in the parsonage of Greensburg's United Methodist Church as the tornado roared overhead. McIntosh said sofa cushions protected his 11-year-old son and the boy's friend from falling debris.
''There was a lot of praying down there,'' McIntosh said.

Powerful Tornadoes Devastate SW Kansas
GREENSBURG, Kan., May 5, 2007
(CBS/AP) Tornadoes killed at least seven people and leveled most of this southwest Kansas town, a state official said Saturday. The dead include six in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is located, and one in nearby Stafford County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General's Department. More than 70 people have been taken to area hospitals. Rescuers pulled about 30 people from a badly damaged hospital early Saturday and searched with dogs for others believed trapped in crumbled buildings after a massive tornado turned much of this community — located in Kiowa County about 110 miles west of Wichita — into rubble. Those rescued from the hospital basement had mostly minor injuries, said Sharon Watson, spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General's Department. The tornado struck at 9:45 p.m. Friday. The City Hall was destroyed along with the high school, junior high school, water tower and most of the commercial district. "I don't think we have a business left downtown," city administrator Steve Hewitt said. "It's much more likely that you would see damaged buildings than anything that has not been impacted," Watson said. "Seventy-five percent is a minimum amount of damage that the city sustained." One woman told CBS affiliate KWCH that her house took a direct hit but was still standing for the most part. "The houses around us are flat," she said. "The West is there and the East is there, and it's flattened through the middle." "What went through out minds is, how do you rebuild? All of Main Street's gone, both of our schools are gone. Where do we go from here?" Paul Harden, who lives in the region and volunteered to help out with the cleanup, described the devastation he saw to CBS News Radio: "The Northwest part of town is completely devastated — there are no houses left there in several blocks. In the Southwest part of town it took roofs off, destroyed some houses. All of them will not be worth fixing in the Southwest part of town, it looks like." Storm chaser Lance Ferguson followed the system which begun in the Oklahoma panhandle. "What was just amazing is that the storm system just kept regenerating, it just kept recycling and kept doing its thing … Mother Nature's fury at its best," he told KWCH. "To see a tornado down on the ground for that long and to become that massive and that big, I haven’t seen anything like it before," he said. "It just kept getting wider and wider and wider." Dazed residents later walked the streets, looking for loved ones and taking in the sight of crumbled buildings and smashed cars. Emergency medical crews, law enforcement personnel and search and rescue teams from throughout western Kansas and as far east as Wichita raced toward Greensburg after the twister struck. The Kansas National Guard sent 40 troops to assist with security. Power and communications in the town of about 1,600 people were knocked out by the tornado. Watson said the state transportation department sent its Communications on Wheels mobile unit to restore 911 service. Roads into and out of Greensburg, including U.S. 54, were closed for several hours to allow emergency vehicles to maneuver. Some streets were left impassable by tangles of fallen cable. Ambulances took the injured to hospitals as far away as Dodge City, where Western Plains Medical Complex confirmed receiving one fatality, and nearby Pratt, where Pratt Regional Medical Center admitted about 50 people by 3 a.m. Three patients were sent on to Wichita's Wesley Medical Center, including two in critical condition. Search dogs accompanied some of the law enforcement officers who went house to house looking for anyone trapped or injured. School buses lined up to take people to the nearby town of Haviland, where the American Red Cross opened shelters at Haviland High School and Barclay College. The National Weather Service described the twister as a "wedge" tornado, an especially broad and tall formation. Precise measurements awaited daylight observation of the tornado's destructive trail, but Frederick Kruse of the NWS office in Dodge City said there were initial reports that the twister was at least three-quarters of a mile wide on the ground. At the high school, the Rev. Gene McIntosh described huddling with his family in the parsonage of Greensburg's United Methodist Church as the tornado roared overhead. McIntosh said sofa cushions protected his 11-year-old son and the boy's friend from debris and insulation that fell from the basement ceiling. "There was a lot of praying down there," McIntosh said. The parsonage was wrecked beyond repair, he said, but damage to the church remained to be assessed. Another group of survivors rode out the tornado in the cooler of a convenience store. Katie White was among that group. White said she had been driving through Greensburg on the way to her hometown southwest of the city and pulled into the store's lot when she heard the warning. The store's owner pulled White and about 15 other people into the cooler. When they emerged, White said, the building around them had collapsed. A farmer living about a mile away said the awning from the store's gasoline pumps landed on his property. Several other tornadoes were reported Friday night and early Saturday in Kansas, most of them developing along a line that stretched northeastward from Greensburg through or near Macksville, St. John, Great Bend and Ellsworth. Damage from those storms ranged from broken trees and power lines to roofs ripped from buildings, according to early reports.

Climate Panel Reaches Consensus on the Need to Reduce Harmful Emissions

"have to be a century-long transition to energy sources that have no impact on the climate" A century long???

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With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (Hardcover)

NYT May 4, 2007
Climate Panel Reaches Consensus on the Need to Reduce Harmful Emissions
By ANDREW C. REVKIN and SETH MYDANS
BANGKOK, May 4 — The world’s established and emerging powers will need to divert substantially from today’s main energy sources within a few decades, to limit centuries of rising temperatures and seas driven by the buildup of heat-trapping emissions in the air, the top body studying climate change has concluded.
In an all-night session capping four days of talks, economists, scientists, and government officials from more than 100 countries agreed in Bangkok early today on the last sections of a report outlining ways to limit such emissions, led by carbon dioxide, an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal and oil.
The final report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said prompt slowing of emissions could set the stage later in the century for stabilization of the concentration of carbon dioxide. Now at about 380 parts per million, the concentration has risen by more than one-third since the start of the industrial revolution, and could easily double from pre-industrial level within decades.
The report concluded that significant progress could be made toward halting the increase in the next 25 years using known technologies and policy changes, setting the stage for what would have to be a century-long transition to energy sources that have no impact on the climate.
Several authors said its message was clear.
“We can no longer make the excuse that we need to wait for more science, or the excuse that we need to wait for more technologies and policy knowledge,” said Adil Najam, an author of one chapter and an associate professor of international negotiation at Tufts University. “To me,” he said, “the big message is that we now have both, and we do not need to wait any longer.”
Speaking to reporters at the close of the conference, the chairman of the climate-change panel, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said he hoped the report would spur governments to act.
“I don’t think you can ignore what the world is coming to understand as the implications of inaction,” he said.
The report also made clear the risks of delay, noting that emissions of greenhouse gases have risen 70 percent just since 1970, and could rise another 90 percent by 2030 if nothing is done.
Carbon dioxide is particularly important, not only because so much is produced each year — about 25 billion tons — but because much of it persists in the atmosphere, building like unpaid credit-card debt.
To stop the rise, the report’s authors said, countries would need to expand adoption of existing policies that can cut emissions — like a fuel tax or the binding limits set by the Kyoto Protocol — while also encouraging a shift to natural gas and other less-polluting fuels and stepping up the search for new large-scale energy options. This work would include pushing for advances in solar and nuclear power.
The meeting ended just after dawn today, with several authors of the report saying there had been relatively little last-minute fighting with government officials over details. Governments had the power to demand changes in some of the report’s language.
China, the United States, Saudi Arabia and some European countries had been tussling over various sections. Countries whose economic prospects are tied to fossil fuels were eager to play down language calling for swift moves away from such energy sources.
United States officials also complained that the report did not adequately describe the need for major advances in energy technology, no matter what is achieved in the short term by a carbon tax or cap.
Some European officials and scientists pressed the authors to amplify suggestions that the costs of aggressive emissions cuts would be modest.
Bill Hare, a Greenpeace adviser and a co-author of the report, said he was pleased with the way the delegations worked together to seek a consensus.
“Nearly everything was constructive, as were China, India, Brazil, as were the Eurpoean countries,” he said. “So in spite of the fact that China had some quite worrying positions, they showed a great deal of flexibility and courage in terms of putting aside those concerns that they had in order to achieve a better outcome for the whole.”
The report estimates that to bring global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 back down to levels measured in 2000 would cost about $50 to $100 for each ton of released carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to a tax of 50 cents to $1.00 on a gallon of gasoline.
The report projects that this shift might cause a small blunting of global economic activity, resulting in an overall reduction of perhaps one tenth of a percentage point each year through 2100 in the world’s total economic output, the authors said.
Some of the experts and government officials involved in the final discussions said in interviews and e-mail messages that the costs could be substantially greater than those estimates, adding that the report used some very rosy assumptions.
The economic studies cited in the report, for example, assumed that a universal international policy would be adopted, that capital would flow immediately into developing and disseminating new, cleaner technology, and that consumers will not resist change, according to several experts and officials involved with the climate panel.
Other experts said the report underplayed the importance of an aggressively intensified research quest to make alternatives to coal and oil much cheaper.
Richard Richels, an author of the report and an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, said a tax or cap on carbon dioxide emissions that was politically feasible would not be strict enough to propel research seeking big innovations.
“A carbon policy without an R. and D. policy is bankrupt,” he said.
In a telephone news conference today, one lead author of the climate report, Dennis Tirpak, said that sections of it did emphasize that point.
“We call attention to the fact that investments in R. and D. have gone down during the last few decades,” he said. “Ministers come together and they often say we’ve got to do more about R. and D., and they go home and they don’t do it.”
This is the third report this year from the climate panel, which was formed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1988 to brief nations periodically on the risks from human and natural changes in climate and on the options for limiting the danger.
In February, one team of experts concluded with near-certainty that most warming since 1950 has been driven by the rising concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
A second working group reported last month that the warming trend was already measurably shifting weather, water and ecological patterns, and that hundreds of millions of people faced risks by mid-century ranging from lost water supplies to inundated coasts if the trends persist.
The latest report focuses on strategies and costs for cutting emissions of the warming gases.
William Moomaw, a lead author of a chapter on energy options and a professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, said he sees evidence, both in the United States and overseas, that big cuts can happen.
He cited the actions by American states to require that utilities derive growing amounts of power from wind or other renewable sources, to rapid improvements in energy efficiency for new homes and large buildings, to Europe’s recent commitment to cutting emissions beyond existing targets, and to some promising statements from China about policy shifts.
“Here, in early years of the 21st century, we’re looking for an energy revolution that’s as comprehensive as the one that occurred at beginning of the 20th century, when we went from gaslight and horse-drawn carriages to light bulbs and automobiles,” Dr. Moomaw said. “In 1905, only 3 percent of homes had electricity. Right now, 3 percent is about the same range as the amount of renewable energy we have today. None of us can predict the future, any more than we could in 1905, but that suggests to me it may not be impossible to make that kind of revolution again.”
European officials have said the climate panel’s reports will be stressed when climate policy comes up at the next meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized powers, which takes place next month.
The panel’s report on emissions options is also expected to play a role in shaping the next round of talks seeking new binding emissions restrictions after those set under the Kyoto treaty end in 2012. Those talks are scheduled to take place in Bali in December.

Arctic melt faster than forecast

What part of systems theory, energy interactions, and stagnant energy science is still not understood? What part of freedom inextricably interwoven with evolution, survival, wisdom, understanding and quality of life is still NOT understood on the energy front? Another physicist responds - Evolution Freedom Survival

Arctic melt faster than forecast
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Arctic ice is melting faster than computer models of climate calculate, according to a group of US researchers.
Since 1979, the Arctic has been losing summer ice at about 9% per decade, but models on average produce a melting rate less than half that figure.
The scientists suggest forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be too cautious.
The latest observations indicate that Arctic summers could be ice-free by the middle of the century.
"Somewhere in the second half of the century, it would happen," said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado.

The fact that all models show ice loss over the observed period and all project large ice losses into the future is a very strong message Marika Holland
"Some computer models show periods of great sensitivity where the Arctic ice system collapses suddenly, and that trend may occur a bit earlier; that's the best guess, but exactly when it's hard to say," he told the BBC News website.
Dr Scambos co-authored the latest study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with other scientists from NSIDC and from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), also in Boulder, Colorado.
They also calculate that about half, if not more, of the warming observed since 1979 originates in humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases.
Model perfection
There are measurements dating back about a century on the extent of Arctic ice, but satellite observations from 1979 onwards are generally thought to provide the most accurate dataset.
The new research involved analysing two periods, 1953-2006 and 1979-2006.
Records show a shrinkage over the longer period of 7.8% per decade. When only the more recent period is analysed, the rate rises to 9.1% per decade.
For comparison, the researchers looked at a collection of 18 computer models used by the IPCC and other institutions for making projections of future climates.
Models are always verified against real-world data from the recent past to see how well their output mimics reality.
The collection scrutinised here calculated an average decline of only 2.5% per decade for 1953-2006, and 4.3% per decade since 1979 - both well short of the real-world observations.
"There are lessons here for the climate modelling community," acknowledged NCAR's Marika Holland.
"The rate of ice loss, and the location of ice loss - these are things that the models need to improve, and there are physical processes such as the release of methane from melting permafrost that the models don't include."
Constant picture
This is the third time in the last few months that studies have suggested the IPCC's latest major global climate analysis, the Fourth Assessment Report, is too conservative.
In December, a German team published research suggesting that sea levels could rise by 50-140cm over the coming century. The IPCC, in February, gave a range of 28-43cm.
Then, also in February, came an analysis showing that temperature and sea level rises had been rising at or above the top end of IPCC projections since the panel's previous major assessment in 2001.
This is the opposite view from that put forward by many "climate sceptics", who view the whole field of computer modelling as deeply flawed, and the IPCC as an alarmist organisation.
Because of the way it works, the IPCC is bound to be conservative, as it assesses in considerable depth research already in the public domain. This process takes time, and means the panel's conclusions will always lag behind the latest publications.
Nevertheless, Marika Holland believes there is agreement on the major questions regarding Arctic ice; it is receding, and greenhouse gases of human origin are largely responsible.
"The fact that all models show ice loss over the observed period and all project large ice losses into the future is a very strong message," she said.
mailto:Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6610125.stmPublished: 2007/04/30 22:37:09 GMT© BBC MMVII