Typhoon Bopha hits the Philippines at Cat 5 strength; at least 40 killed
Typhoon Bopha slammed ashore on the Philippine island of Mindanao at 4:45 am local time on Tuesday morning as a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds. Bopha is the third Category 5 typhoon to affect the Western Pacific this year, and the strongest typhoon ever recorded to hit Mindanao, which rarely sees strong typhoons due to its position close to the Equator. The death toll from the powerful storm already stands at 40, and is expected to rise. While passage over land has weakened Bopha to a Category 2 storm, the tropical cyclone is spreading torrential rains over a large portion of the southern Philippine Islands, and this will cause serious flooding problems today. The island of Mindanao is highly vulnerable to flood disasters from tropical cyclones; last year's Tropical Storm Washi, which hit Mindanao on December 16, 2011 with 60 mph winds and torrential rains, killed over 1500 people. Before hitting the Philippines, Typhoon Bopha brought a storm surge estimated at ten feet to the island nation of Palau, where near-total destruction is being reported in some coastal areas.
Figure 1. Super Typhoon Bopha as seen from the International Space Station on December 2, 2012. At the time, Bopha had top sustained winds of 150 - 155 mph. Image credit: NASA.
Bopha: the 2nd most southerly Category 5 typhoon on record
Bopha, a Cambodian word for flower or a girl, became a tropical depression unusually close to the Equator, at 3.6°N latitude. Tropical cyclones rarely form so close to the Equator, because they cannot leverage the Earth's rotation to get themselves spinning. Bopha became the second most southerly Category 5 typhoon on Monday at 7.4°N latitude. The record is held by Typhoon Louise of 1964, which was a Category 5 storm at 7.3°N.
Video 1. Scenes of wind damage and flooding from Typhoon Bopha's landfall in the Philippines yesterday.
Jeff Masters
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Sorghum harvest up nearly 20% from last year
Corn harvest down 13% from last year
Soybeans down 10% from last year
Wheat harvest up 13% from last year
Cotton up 12% from last year
Source usda
Green Bay NWS is talking about it, too. :)
I would love to see more trees and less concrete! In Houston it seems like we continually through up strip malls on every available piece of land ...they are ugly. Most of them stay empty too,
Some nice small parks would be appreciated.
I do....some GOOOOD chicken sandwiches.....and the boycott was stupid...regardless of what the guy said.
The company doesnt violate any laws in hiring or serving, nor do they show any bias.
I hope it becomes a good winter storm.
We need snow cover or else we are in trouble again next year.
I sincerely appreciate what you are saying and predicting.
The results of this drought, or it might turn into a climate change if it goes on for a very long time are that reality will eventually take precedence over materialism, when people start dying things will happen.
Last week Skyepony posted a picture of a massive pipeline being constructed, probably to do with oil transport. What you have to create is a grid type of water distribution similar to electricity distribution. At least this way water will get delivered. Maybe not enough for irrigation but enough for survival.
Mixed bag.
They don't actually report "good news" on television, so never realize that side of things.
Still, if the rivers get too low it won't matter what we produce, much of it won't make it to port.
That would require pumping. Water's heavy, and it takes a lot of energy to pump it. That would make it very expensive and the economics probably wouldn't stack up.
Here in New Mexico, we don't know if it is climate change or the multiseasonal droughts that have been recurring cyclically for as long as there have been people here. Nevertheless, we are in a drought and now expect wild fires every spring and summer.
atleast for 4 more yrs...
Agreed. Thanks.
Going to be Problems though.
On another tack....
The US is about to become independent of imported fuels to a large extent.
Thanks to LNG supplies from TarSands.
This will make fuel plenty cheaper for domestic use (especially manufacture/industry) and people are saying that in 20-30 years the manufacturing base of the US will once again be #1 Globally.
It will be cheaper to make goods in the US for the US market & export, than the Chinese/Indian/Korean/etc factories.
Successive US governments have been accused of "exporting" manufacture/jobs/technology overseas.
Government doesnt do that. The buying public does that by demanding cheap consumables.
Hopefully, the weather/climate allows the US to remain virtually independent in food.
If it does not, the US is back to square one, exchanging dependence on oil for dependence on food.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
We're bankrupt, never will happen. Anything like that will add to deficit, that's now the mindset now as well, we can't afford more debt. We're a few major natural disasters from imploding, that's how close we are. It's crazy to wrap your head around it, but it's the truth.
The Romans were able to do it without a single pump.
Just in case you didn't know (as I did not) about Les Stroud, here he is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Stroud
I am quite sure there are American equivalents, many of them, even if they don't make videos, or get their friends to chop their wood.
If 40% of Americans are obese, I don't know how that is connected to them not knowing where vegetables and beef come from. Are you conflating two separate ideas here?
Rome's a bit smaller than the US.
2nd of all... 1812 was a british victory bcause of british forces
Come on people Canada and the USA are allies and allies don't fight each other.... (this was for the last pages argument :P) ANYWAY...
The weather is great here in SE PA. It is in the mid 60's which hasnt happened since early October so its quite nice to have another taste of early fall!
I wonder how vulnerable China is to climate change. The U.S. always has had the Great Plains problem. It was labeled on maps as the Great American Desert before it was settled.
LOL?
Economics, he says.
Paper money is meaningless if people are starving or dying of thirst.
Which is more important? Your $200 iPhone (which costs you a minimum of $67 per month,) or the water needed to grow a crop or a livestock animal for food?
As vulnerable as everywhere else, I should think.
But it's pretty well accepted that some areas would become wetter and others drier. It HAS to rain somewhere.
I'm not sure how it all pans out of course.
When you consider expense in the matter of millions of human lives and a large section of the national agricultural economy then the foundations of society must be in question.
If nothing is done or even planed to be done then the results probably will be catastrophic!
How many of us who are not directly affected are concerned?
Some countries have canals hundreds of miles long to bring water, you have built roads,railways and pipelines in the US for many years, its now time to build a national water grid and if necessary a power station to drive the pumps.
At the end of the day, the alternative does not bear thinking about.
1/3rd the size, same concept would still work
Good post.
That would be Italy.
The Romans did not redistribute massive floodwaters with aqueducts. They used them to bring fountains and running water to urban dwellings and then only where gravity provided favorable conditions to do it.
There's a big scale difference between making a cute fountain in your town square and moving hundreds of millions of acre-feet of water up and over a hydrologic divide.
I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations using stated costs of existing pipeline systems compared to volumetric estimates for floods/droughts. The numbers aren't even close. The Treasury couldn't print money fast enough to create a nationwide (or even regional) drought/flood relief network.
Wait, what? haha
I'm not advocating this, but couldn't you just build larger aqueducts if you needed more water?
In the U.S. West fields of all crop types (wheat, corn, barley, etc) are burned as a weed management strategy.
Actually the Roman Empire did not confine it's efforts to just the city of Rome..
The difference of course, is the price of the commodity.
If water was priced at US$100.00/bbl (like oil) it would be feasible/profitable/cost effective to move it around.
That's not going to happen of course.
Or will it ?
A national water grid is a fantasy. Water isn't electricity. If the cost of growing a ton of grain with expensive pumped water exceeds the cost of importng the same ton from Russia, then you'll be buying Russian grain.
This is an unsatisfatory situation, because it's not good to be dependent on others for food, oil, or whatever. But, it's economics, and you can't buck the market. Do you really think US bread makers are going to pay more for home grown wheat, rather than buy cheaper, imported wheat?
Leaving things on a trifle negative note, I'm going to cook supper and think about how to inject a few positive thoughts into the Mid West drought problem.
There was no comment on the European 9pm news about the cyclone, which I find very disturbing, everybody over here is moaning about debt and inflation. 5 million out of work now in Spain with a population of 40 million more or less. that's 26% of the active workforce.
Either the crop won't grow or by your water idea If I bought enough to grow my crops you could not afford them anyway.
So what is the difference?
It's dependent on the consumer, again.
If the consumer agrees to pay more for home-grown bread, then that's it.
Not happening, of course.
Ok, so 35%, beg pardon, I guestimated.
Obesity in the U.S.
Obesity in the United States has been increasingly cited as a major health issue in recent decades. While many industrialized countries have experienced similar increases, obesity rates in the United States are among the highest in the world.[3] Of all countries, the United States has the highest rate of obesity. From 13% obesity in 1962, estimates have steadily increased, reaching 19.4% in 1997, 24.5% in 2004[4] 26.6% in 2007,[5] and 33.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008.[6][7] In 2010, the CDC reported higher numbers once more, counting 35.7% of American adults as obese, and 17% of American children
Sure we would, just the way we all buy home manufactured goods rather than the cheaper imports.
Yes you could. But the size of the pipes/aqueducts you need to relieve regional floods/droughts are huge - MUCH larger than our current systems. And because we don't know where floods/droughts will occur, we'd need a network of tens of thousands of these massive pipeline/pump systems to cover every watershed. In other words, you'd need pipelines connecting every one of these little units:
And you'd need huge pumping stations to move water up and over the divides. And even in flood years many of these huge pipelines and pump stations would sit unused because they weren't in the right spot.
Never mind the NIMBY problem you'd face... who wants one of these running through their back yard?
And then there are the environmental impacts. Agricultural land along our river corridors is fertile in large part thanks to regular flooding (think deposition of nutrients and fresh topsoil). Riparian zones, estuary systems, etc. have all evolved to depend upon occasional flooding. How do we maintain these ecological systems if we deprive them of the floods they've gotten so used to?
Exactly. No difference.
Prepare for the worst. Hope for the best.
I am not overly optimistic.
LOL
It would be cheaper to annex Canada, actually. And Russia.
:):))
Land area of the Roman empire:- 2,750,000 km²
Roughly a third the land area of the lower United States.
Not a bad lump of land area to control and irrigate for about 800 years. Not all of it needed irrigating of course but Ive seen some pretty impressive aqueducts that are still in use 2000 years after they were built.
Supper time now!
You don't understand a basic truth, which is that "money" is not economics.
Money is a parasitic abstraction layer.
The Russians won't be able to make enough grain anyway, and neither will anyone else, so you'll be forced pay these costs to get water in order to grow food here, even if it costs 10 times more, because nobody else will have it anyway, as they don't have the land or infrastructure to grow it and ship it.
You can't buy your way out of a famine just because you have paper money, because the other nations only have so much, and they aren't going to sell everything to you and starve themselves in the process, just so they can get some of your paper money to look at.
Sure hope not.
Good point. Barring some miraculous technological advancement, the price of water is destined to rise at a rapid clip over the coming decades.
But of course the ecological and NIMBY issues remain. Plus our modern society has clearly lost its appetite for large engineering projects. Used to be these large projects were held up as evidence of a country's success. These days people just ask "how much will it cost?" and the conversation never makes it past the planning phase...
It would be cheaper to dump water on farmland with those planes that are used to fight forest fires.
"Annex", "go to war": as between Canada and the U.S.A., it's just words. However, you would still have the problem of moving water from north to south as well as across the divides, and the problem of monitoring the lines against espionage and terrorism -all of which you already knew. :)
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