11th November - Today's News

This could make for an interesting insurance claim: mystery holes in Grovedale roof could be meteorites. Elsewhere in Australia it's rain that's been coming down as the heaviest falls in months hit central Queensland.

Rain claims 29 more lives in Nilgris whilst Cyclone Phyan threatens Mumbai

Landslides kills at least 1, injures 20 others in Italy

Blizzard hits north China - but was it manmade? Playing with weather stirs debate in China. Even without weather modification, the Chinese are predicting extreme weather forecast for Yangtze over next 50 years.

Ida weakens to a depression, heads east to Fla.

Following on from the announcement that areas of Antarctica where glaciers had melted were now absorbing more CO2 as a consequence, comes controversial new climate change data: is Earth's capacity to absorb CO2 much greater than expected?

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

I also note that:

Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published in early November in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.

Which does not mean we shouldn't worry so much about deforestation since it's the affect that loss of trees has on the evotranspiration cycle and of course the increase in mudslides and flooding in deforested regions that in my opinion are the biggest concerns.

All this suggests though that our obsession with CO2 might be a little misplaced .....