Climate Change, Extreme Weather Link Becoming More Apparent

OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are finding evidence that man-made climate change has raised the risks of individual weather events, such as floods or heatwaves, marking a big step towards pinpointing local costs and ways to adapt to freak conditions.

"We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change.

Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July.

But for some extremes, that is now changing.

A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way.

Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses.

"One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

"We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay."

Industrialized nations agree they should take the lead in cutting emissions since they have burnt fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases, since the Industrial Revolution. But they oppose the idea of liability for damage.

Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a new deal by the end of 2015 to combat climate change, after repeated setbacks. China, the United States and India are now the top national emitters of greenhouse gases.

Field, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at the University of Stanford, said that the goal was to carry out studies of extreme weather events almost immediately after they happen, helping expose the risks.

"Everybody who needs to make decisions about the future - things like building codes, infrastructure planning, insurance - can take advantage of the fact that the risks are changing but we have a lot of influence over what those risks are."

FLOODS

Another report last year indicated that floods 12 years ago in Britain - among the countries most easily studied because of it has long records - were made more likely by warming. And climate shifts also reduced the risks of flooding in 2001.

Previously, the European heatwave of 2003 that killed perhaps 70,000 people was the only extreme where scientists had discerned a human fingerprint. In 2004, they said that global warming had at least doubled the risks of such unusual heat.

The new statistical reviews are difficult because they have to tease out the impact of greenhouse gases from natural variations, such as periodic El Nino warmings of the Pacific, sun-dimming volcanic dust or shifts in the sun's output.

So far, extreme heat is the easiest to link to global warming after a research initiative led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office.

"Heatwaves are easier to attribute than heavy rainfall, and drought is very difficult given evidence for large droughts in the past," said Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists often liken climate change to loading dice to get more sixes, or a baseball player on steroids who hits more home runs. That is now going to the local from the global scale.

Field said climate science would always include doubt since weather is chaotic. It is not as certain as physics, where scientists could this month express 99.999 percent certainty they had detected the Higgs boson elementary particle.

"This new attribution science is showing the power of our understanding, but it also illustrates where the limits are," he said.

A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours.

But scientists warn against going too far in blaming climate change for extreme events.

Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed.

"We have to be a bit cautious about blaming it all on climate change," Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, said of extremes in 2012.

Taken together, many extremes are a sign of overall change.

"If you look all over the world, we have a great disastrous drought in North America ... you have the same situation in the Mediterranean... If you look at all the extremes together you can say that these are indicators of global warming," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengabe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Northern & Eastern Power Grid Blackout

India hit by second day of power cuts

A massive power breakdown has hit India for a second day running, leaving more than half the country without power.

Officials said the northern and eastern grids had both collapsed. All Delhi metro services have been halted and staffs are trying to evacuate trains.

Monday's power failure caused severe disruption and travel chaos across northern India.

It was unclear why the grid collapsed but reports said some states may have been using more power than authorized.

Power officials managed to restore the northern grid by Monday evening, but at 01:05pm (0735 GMT) on Tuesday, the grid collapsed again.

The eastern grid failed around the same time, officials said.

"Both the northern and eastern grids have collapsed. Please allow us to address the problem," AFP news agency quoted VK Agrawal, the general manager of the northern grid, as saying.

The two grids together serve more than half of India's 1.2bn people.

The breakdown has hit a large swathe of the country including Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan states in the north and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east.

An official in Orissa said the blackout in the eastern grid had been triggered by a fault and could take several hours to resolve.

Correspondents say India faces a chronic power deficit and unless there is a huge investment in the power sector, the country will see many more power failures.

India’s worst power-grid failure in a decade exposed the urgency behind Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bid to attract $400 billion in investment and ease an electricity deficit that is holding back economic growth.

Seven states that are home to more than 360 million people were plunged into darkness early yesterday as power networks collapsed, possibly after too many provinces simultaneously purchased electricity beyond their scheduled allowance, Power Grid Corp.

(PWGR) of India Chairman R.N. Nayak told reporters. It took about 15 hours for 80 percent of services to be resumed.

The blackout “was a fairly large breakdown that exposed major technical faults in India’s grid system,” Subhranshu Patnaik, a Gurgaon-based senior director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt., said yesterday. “If this were a simple demand-supply problem, the grid operator would have intervened to strike a balance. Something went terribly wrong which caused the backup safety systems to fail.”

Businesses and households across much of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Rajasthan states had to turn to generators, while services on New Delhi’s metro and Indian railways were suspended for several hours.

Traffic signals failed, jamming roads for morning commuters.

“Power supply has been restored to all states and the situation is near normal now,” Power Grid’s projects director, I.S. Jha, said by phone yesterday. “We will have complete normalcy once thermal plants resume complete generation.” Jha said Power Grid, the world’s largest transmission utility by capacity, had brought electricity from the eastern and western regions to reconnect services.

$400 Billion

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is seeking to secure $400 billion of investment in the power industry in the next five years as he targets an additional 76,000 megawatts in generation by 2017. India has missed every annual target to add electricity production capacity since 1951.

Power cuts are common across swathes of India as the country battles an average 9 percent shortfall in meeting peak power demand that the government says shaves about 1.2 percentage points off annual economic growth. The affected states are responsible for about 37 percent of electricity consumption, according to the Central Electricity Authority.

“This again highlights how poor infrastructure remains the biggest drag on the Indian economy,” said D.H. Pai Panandiker, president of RPG Foundation, an economic policy group based in New Delhi. “The power sector remains too over-regulated. Unless private companies are allowed greater involvement, the problems are going to remain.”

Inflation Driver

Improving infrastructure, which the World Economic Forum says is a major obstacle to doing business in India, is among the toughest challenges facing Singh as he bids to revive expansion in Asia’s third-largest economy that slid to a nine- year low of 5.3 percent in the first quarter.

Tussles over policy making with allies in the ruling coalition, corruption allegations and defeats in regional elections have weakened Singh’s government since late 2010.

The Reserve Bank of India has blamed infrastructure bottlenecks for contributing to the nation’s price pressures. Most analysts forecast the central bank will refrain from cutting rates in today’s monetary policy decision. Indian consumer-price inflation was 10.02 percent in June, the fastest among the Group of 20 major economies, while the benchmark wholesale-price measure is more than 7 percent.

The grid failure occurred at 2:32 a.m. local time yesterday, Nayak told reporters. Nayak will lead a government committee to investigate the cause of the disruption and will report in 15 days, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said.

Trains Halted

The failure is “a prime example of India’s infrastructure not being up to the mark,” said Mumbai-based analyst Rohit Singh at IDBI Capital Markets Services Ltd. “India needs to get to the point where one failure to the grid doesn’t take down an entire region. That should be the goal.”

About 150 trains were delayed across northern India, according to Neeraj Sharma, spokesman for the region. New Delhi’s airport didn’t have to cancel any flights as it switched to back-up power supplies, spokesman Kapil Sabharwal said.

Yesterday’s outage was India’s biggest power failure since 2001 when the same northern grid collapsed leaving homes and businesses without electricity for 12 hours. The Confederation of Indian Industry, the country’s largest association of companies, estimated that blackout cost companies $107.5 million.

Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. (IOCL)’s refineries in north India were unaffected by the outage as they have their own power stations and distribution lines, refineries director R.K. Ghosh said by telephone. Indian Oil, the nation’s biggest refiner, has crude processing plants in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states in north India.

Reactors Trip

Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd.’s five units in Rajasthan tripped this morning after the outage, G. Nageswara Rao, director of operations, said.

It will take up to 36 hours to restore the units, Rao said in a phone interview from Gujarat, adding that the company’s two units in Narora in Uttar Pradesh were working after they faced some disturbance earlier.

“We need to find out exactly what happened so that we can make India’s grid safer and more secure,” Gopal Saxena, chief executive officer at BSES Rajdhani Power Ltd., a unit of Reliance Infrastructure Ltd. (RELI) that supplies western and southern parts of the capital with electricity, said in an interview.

“When one or two states draw too much power at the same time, the grid breaches its transaction frequency, which is what may have happened,” said Power Grid’s Nayak.

BACK TO SCHOOL

PLEASE HELP US THROUGH YOUR PRAYERS TO BLESS A HUNDRED SCHOOL GOING TRIBAL CHILDREN TO HAVE THEIR NEW SCHOOL BAGS THROUGH THE BURNING ROCKS AS GIFT FROM YOU.

THIS JUNE WE ARE PLANNING TO HELP THE POOR TRIBAL CHILDREN IN THE REMOTE AREAS OF ADDATEEGALA, RAMPACHODAVARAM VILLAGES OF RAJAHMUNDRY, ANDHRA PRADESH, SOUTH INDIA WITH SOME BASIC NEED FOR THE SCHOOL, LIKE SOME STATIONARY, SCHOOL BAGS AND WITH UNIFORMS AND SHOES.

I REQUEST ALL THOSE WHO READ THIS POST TO PRAY FOR THE 100 SCHOOL CHILDREN TO BLESSED. AND YOU ALL TO BE BLESSED ABUNDANTLY.

AND IF ANY OF YOU ARE INSPIRED YOU ARE WELCOME TO OUR PLACE TO DONATE YOUR VALUABLE DONATION FORM YOUR BLESSED HANDS.

(each 200 Rupees Approximately 4.00 USD.)

GOD BLESS YOU

The Burning Rocks

FOR ANY FURTHER CORRESPONDENCE PLEASE CONTACT US AT THEBURNINGROCKS@GMAIL.COM OR CALL +91 9030996009, +91 9700734669

Mass Chipping.................... DFID, VERICHIP, 666

THE TRUTH WE SHOULD KNOW,

THE NEW WORLD ORDER IS COMING SOON

AND NATIONS ARE PREPARING A WAY TO THE END

A SMALL CHIP TO CONTROL EVERYTHING

AND

ONE LEADER (BEAST)

TO CONTROL

ALL NATIONS OF THE WORLD

REMEMBER WE DO NOT HAVE MUCH TIME AS WE ARE THINKING,

THE TIME IS VERY VERY SHORT

PREPARE YOURSELF,

IF NOT I CANNOT SEE YOU NOW OR AGAIN

BECAUSE I AM NOT GOING TO HELL TO MEET YOU THERE.

BE STRONG AND SOUND IN FAITH AND HIS LOVE

One Chip to Control Many

one more Proof to say that we are in the end times............!

Arm's latest processors aim to stretch internet's reach

Arm Holdings has unveiled what it describes as the "world's most energy-efficient microprocessor" design.

The firm says that microcontrollers based on the "Flycatcher" architecture will pave the way for the "internet of things" - the spread of the net to a wider range of devices.

It suggests that fridges and other white goods, medical equipment, energy meters, and home and office lighting will all benefit from the innovation.

Two firms have licensed the technology.

They are NXP Semiconductors and Freescale.

"It opens up all devices to the potential of being connected all the time," Freescale's Geoff Lees told the BBC.

"It's allowing us to provide connectivity everywhere. So anything from consumer appliances, MP3-music audio docks, kitchen equipment with displays right through to remote sensors in rain monitoring equipment or personal medical devices - an area where ultra-long battery life allied to high performance and safety is becoming more and more important."

Smarter energy appliances

The Cortex -M0+ architecture is designed to provide chip-makers with the means to build microcontrollers that require "ultra low power" but are capable of 32-bit processing.

Arm says it went back to the drawing board to create the new processor cores which measure 1mm by 1mm in size.

It says the microcontrollers should draw around a third less energy than their predecessors, which only offered 8 and 16-bit capabilities.

It adds that its design has been created to be a low leakage part - meaning it consumes almost no power when it is in sleep mode. The firm says that means devices can offer wireless connectivity when paired with modern bluetooth or radio equipment, offering years of life from a single battery-pack rather than months.

Arm's director of embedded marketing Gary Atkinson says it could herald a new generation of smart energy systems.

"Every developed nation country has a graph showing electricity demand is going to outstrip supply at some point in the next 20 years unless we do something different," he said.

"What we need to do is something called design response - where all the devices on the network can make a decision as to whether or not to come on in order to smooth out peaks and troughs in electricity demand.

"So you should add connectivity to things like fridges, washing machines, freezers and dishwashers. If the wider electricity network is being very heavily used and if the element in your dishwasher could go off for two or three minutes to alleviate that - well then that would make a big difference."

US Competition

Arm says it expects the microcontrollers will sell for around 13-20 pence per device - and it will charge its clients about a 1-2% royalty fee from that price on top of a licence charge.

Although the sums may appear small, the firm notes that Ericsson recently forecast there would be 50 billion connected devices by 2020compared to 10-15 billion at present.

Arm says much of that growth will come from types of equipment that are not connected to the net at present - presenting the firm and its customers with a huge growth opportunity.

However the Cambridge-based company does not have the market to itself.

Arizona-headquartered Microchip Technology designs and builds a rival range of 32-bit "Pic" microcontroller, while California-based Atmel offers 32-bit "Avr" products.

THIS CHRISTMAS....................................?

PLEASE PRAY FOR THE UPPALAPADU TRIBAL VILLAGE

People have to cross this lake to reach the village

Man smoking and making ropes out of used plastic cement bags at his hut.

Parents of the village children are praying for their kids future to turn good.

But because of no school, no hospital , no bus no train, no education, no safe drinking water, no proper hygiene, even to buy a single Paracetamol Tablet which costs a single rupee, they need to travel 15 Kilo meters by walk.

Pastor Yesudas crossing the lake to reach the other side of the their world

School Bags distributed

By the Grace of our Lord GOD,

We thank the dear loving lord at the outset ............ for showering his abundant grace to let Our dream took its shape......... yes you can have a glance below......... Our hearts were overwhelmed with joy to see the cheer on the faces of little poor children when they received school bags from the hands of the anointed Dr.Thomas, founder and director and Mrs.Sheeba Thomas of Dahinchu Agni International ministries, in the Sunday Healing prayer.




Dr.Thomas, speaking about The Burning Rocks and its activities, and witnessing our labor, and efforts towards the Lord's Ministry., At our Sunday Healing Service, Rajahmundry, East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh, South INDIA.

Children were quite enthusiastic and rushing to receive the gifts........

Mrs.Sheeba Thomas, Mrs.Arun &Ms.Shirley

Thank you all for extending your fervent prayers.

Ramdasupeta

Some Bags have been distributed among poor children whose parents work at stone crushing and gain living.




School Bags were Distributed from the Annointed Hands of +Bishop Babji Ponnamati, Director & President, JESUS GOSPEL MISSION, Saint Thomas Church, Ramdaspet, Rajahmundry, East Godavari District Andhra Pradesh.

Ramvaram village

The Burning Rocks gifted some school bags at Ramvaram village, near Kothapalli, Gokavaram Mandal, Rajahmundry.

Bayyannapalli, Ramvaram

Sudhakar Gella, Founder & Director, United Christian Ministry, Kodad, gifted school bags to the hands Bro.Yosepu, who is leading a church in Bayyannapalli near Ramavaram.

Tribal man bringing wood from a faraway place to his home for cooking purpose.

GOD BLESS YOU