The money quote:
“With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change…”
Maybe next week Nature will notice La Nina:
Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish
Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon.
Anna Petherick
With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.
Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.
“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”
With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.
The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers’ banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.
The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.
Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.
Hugo Mamani, head of forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia’s national weather centre, confirms that the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.
…
Read the entire story at Nature News
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Didn’t GISS have a big Red spot over the area where all these animals froze to death?
The World before AGW.
I wonder why they didn’t mention the hundreds of homo sapiens killed by the cold?
REPLY: Apparently they are considered an undesirable species. -A
Penguins killed by cold weather? That would be unusual. Maybe Polar Bears are next.
Anthony, obviously this happens every time there’s a La Nina – not.
Jeez, any more of this global warming and we’ll all freeze.
Have they noticed the unusually cool northern California summer yet? Usually I can’t even ride my bike early in the morning during July/August because it is too unpleasant. This year I’ve had to wear a light jacket a few times.
Meh, mentioned people as an afterthought.
This Climate Change verbage, it encompasses so much as to be virtually meaningless.
“The cold is warm the warm is cold” so sayeth the Sexpo.er, Profit.
A recent statement by a warmist co-worker of mine….
Ok he didn’t refer to Sexpoodle….
He did say that Algore predicted this sort of thing.
Cold and windy August day here in NE Oregon. Snow predicted in the
high country from NWS Pendelton, Or.:
Statement as of 5:28 AM PDT on August 28, 2010
… Unseasonably cool this weekend…
A low pressure system moving south from British Columbia and
across the Pacific northwest will bring much cooler temperatures
over eastern Washington and eastern Oregon this weekend. Afternoon
temperatures will be in the 60s to lower 70s and overnight lows will
be in the mid 30s to mid 40s over most of the region. Isolated to
scattered mountain showers can also be expected. The high
elevations of The Eagle cap mountains, Elkhorn Mountains, and the
Strawberry Mountain Wilderness may see light snow accumulations.
Hikers, campers, and other outdoor enthusiasts should be prepared
for the unseasonably cool weather and bring extra clothing if
spending time in the mountains.
Nice start to the Bow hunt…-no kidding..
What irritates me most about scare stories on severe weather events is that such events are inevitable. In some years we have none, in others we have a few, it is just the way things are.
In any big engineering construction program, it is necessary to have a contingency plan to allow for a once in a 100 or 200 year weather event – in some extreme cases, it is for a 5oo year event.
So, a couple of these 100 year events happened in 2010 – a hot one around Moscow and a cold one in parts of South America.
We all instinctively knew the AGW fanatics would blame these two events on global warming; this is what these people do: blame any kind of weather aberration on ‘global warming’.
“air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.”
“it is unprecedented in recorded history.”
On another note, Anthony posted a while back about phytoplankton levels in the oceans dropping. No phyto, no fish food, right? Keeping with the doom and gloom, we’re all going to die………..
B.C. sockeye salmon returns best in nearly a century
VANCOUVER — B.C. is reaping the biggest sockeye salmon return in nearly a century, just a year after one of the smallest returns on record.
Fishery officials estimated Tuesday that more than 25 million sockeye salmon will return to the Fraser River this year, the largest number since 1913. Last year’s return was 1.7 million — the lowest in more than 50 years.
And the estimate could yet go higher as Tuesday’s test catch was the largest all year, said Barry Rosenberger, area director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
http://www.vancouversun.com/Record+number+sockeye+salmon+return/3437979/story.html
I use to love watching the Discovery/Nat Geo channels. The subjects were interesting and the presentation very good. But lately, everything from foot corns to dog mange is being blamed on AGW. it is tiring. I guess the message is “do not watch” if you want to stay informed. At least intelligently informed.
I still watch the Battle 360 series. At least they have not started blaming past wars on AGW – yet.
Wait a minute, something doesn’t compute here.
“Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.”
And yet we learn
“Hugo Mamani, head of forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia’s national weather centre, confirms that the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.”
So there were lower temperatures over 50 years ago-so hardly unprecedented. Mind you the Bolivian weather records don’t seem to go that far back anyway and as Chiefio remarked;
“We originally saw this picture, and this problem, in this posting:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/ghcn-south-america-andes-what-andes/
One Small Problem with the anomally map. There has not been any thermometer data for Bolivia in GHCN since 1990.
None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nothing. Empty Set.
So just how can it be so Hot Hot Hot! in Bolivia if there is NO data from the last 20 years?
Easy. GIStemp “makes it up” from “nearby” thermometers up to 1200 km away. So what is within 1200 km of Bolivia? The beaches of Chili, Peru and the Amazon Jungle.
Not exactly the same as snow capped peaks and high cold desert, but hey, you gotta make do with what you have, you know? (The official excuse given is that the data acceptance window closes on one day of the month and Bolivia does not report until after that date. Oh, and they never ever would want to go back and add date into the past after a close date. Yet they are happy to fiddle with, adjust, modify, and wholesale change and delete old data as they change their adjustment methods…)”
‘ So for Chiefios comments about how can it be so hot hot hot substitute the words cold cold cold.
Poor records, nothing of any age, nothing unprecedented. Move along, nothing to ese here.
Tonyb
If only some technological means of combining the Siberian heat wave with the South American cold snap could be devised to produce something a bit more, well, ya know, average, we could all be saved.
When I first saw the link on Drudge I thought it was a new disaster hitting S. America. Upon following the link I discovered it was an old (and mostly ignored) story being regurgitated by one of the AGW house organs (Nature) with the correct party line.
Just picture in your mind the scene that would have unfolded were we all to be living in harmony with nature, with large numbers of mass graves for the human death toll suffered as a consequence. A trickle of aid might arrive at the disaster area — in a month or two — just in time to begin the process of digging mass graves … with hand-held shovels.
Looks like Global Warming will open the doors to lots of green jobs making woolly underwear.
Maybe Nature hired somebody who left New Scientist and that person was the carrier of the disease that brought New Scientist down?
Then again, maybe Mother Nature is sentient.
Having evolved an intelligent species that could solve the Permian disaster, that species now includes so many ecomonsters that say that life-promoting temperatures are bad and the key life-promoting gas is a poison and advocating some truly dangerous things to “heal” those blessings–well, she decides it better get cold fast. It will hurt a lot of life, but some people will wake up.
If Mother Nature is sentient, she must sense that although we are making adolescent mistakes, we also have great promise. After our inital blunders we WILL solve these catastrophes and make life on Planet Earth much more secure.
Esther Cook
View from the Solent said on August 28, 2010 at 11:13 am
*ahem*
Have homo sapiens stopped being people? PETA thinks cows, dogs, cats, and hamsters are people so homo sapiens should qualify.
More fun:
Do the proofreaders have a checklist of words that must be in any
weatherclimate related story, with “unprecedented” at the top of the list?Why, there has not been such animal death from cold since the last ice age! It must be our reliance on fossil fuels! What else could it be?
Maxwell’s Demon has been very active. And Nature’s Editors are delusional.
Note that they (the writers, the publicists, the enviro’s making their money from CAGW hype and hysteria) decry the bird kills, the fish kills, and the fruit and tree damages.
No mention of the humans killed each year by excessive cold temperatures.
When they say this die-off is the first in recorded history, how far back are they talking? They always act like climate/weather started when the measurements started.
“Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.”
Maybe we can get Kerry Emmanuel to give these “scientists” a briefing on the difference between “climate” and”weather”.
DonK31 says:
August 28, 2010 at 11:08 am
Was nice, I offer another one from before AGW:
“protocol of a catrastrophe” – Winter 78/79 in Northern Germany.
Unfortunately, speech is german, nevertheless the pictures do tell.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5616993840761940811#
Pictures and expiriences from – then Western and Eastern Germany-
when they were still apart – but suffered same.
Here is a plot of the average annual temperature anomaly averaging the six 5×5 grids covering most of Bolivia from the Hadley CRUTEM3 database
A long-term cooling trend is observed.