http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/

I think global warming is just Mother Nature's way of saying "Guys! Take a hint!"

US scientists, looking at satelite imagery, have determined this to be a hurricane.

Brazillian scientists, who are actually in Brazil, say it's not.

Obviously the US is correct. If the Brailians do not come clean about their WMD - weather of mass destruction - then they might have to face a wrath worse than any Mother Nature could dish out. <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Ed

*If* Significant or even Sweeping World Climate Shifts may Occur in the Next Years or Decades, -Well Have to Make the Appropriate Adjustments in our Global Climatic / Survival Preparations!

This is Something that Many to Most of us Well Know, (Though All may Not Agree to the Actual Phenonomon Coming About, or to it's Extent), -But Now can Serve as a Good Time for a Reminder.

Desert Survival will Still be Desert Survival. Jungle Survival will Still be Jungle Survival! Few if Any Real Changes there! Mainly Things like the Different Geographical Terrain, Altitude Effects, Different Daylight Lengths for Different Latitudes, The Prescence or Abscence of any amount of Rain Shadow Effect over what there was of it Beforehand, Etc, Etc. Those Sorts of Things.

For many a Given Climate too!, Could be Moving to a Different Part of the World!, -Not Only Plants, Animals, and a Given Number of us Humans.

But Keeping the Applicability of such Foregoing Factors in Mind, on a Case by Case Basis, -Deserts will Still be Deserts, Jungles will Still be Jungles! Much to Entirely as they are Today!

Only Many of their Locations will Change! At least Some Will, -in such a Scenario. Others will at One and the Same Time, -Stay Put Right Where they Are. Perhaps with Only a Change in Extent or Intensity, -Upward or Downward. Some may even Stay the Same as they Are, in these Regards as well.

Climates will at least Largely be our Same Familiar World Climates, -just Transposed Off to a New World Location.

People are Gonna Move Around too! And some Prepared Survivors like Us, -Will be just a Small Subset of Such.

Animals and Plants will in One Way or Another, Move About too! There will be some Notable Species Shifts. There will be an Adjustment Period. And this Process can Take Some Time. This could have Important Implications as to What you Grow and Gather, in such an Area and Time!

I Suggest in any event, that we Bone Up on Things like Gardening, Soils, and Seeds!, and Actively Save, Preserve, and Gather various Seeds. (Preferably Not All Limited to your Own Climate or Area of the World, -though This Aspect can be Easier Said than Done! Seed Catalogs, however, can Make a Lot of That Easier!)

Go to the Plants / Botany / Gardening / Greenhouse / and Other Horticultural Books and Resources! Some Aspects of our Survival and Preparedness, Can of course Best and Better Be Served!, -By Dipping into *Other* Spheres, Pools, and Fields! Of course Some Such Fields, -Hunting, Fishing, Firearms, First Aid, and Many Others, -*Are* Closely "Within our Orbit". But Ones such as at least a Basic Familiarity with Foreign Languages and Cultures, and Good Ole Plants and Gardening, -Often are Not so Readily so! But Often Can be Just as Important! Of course we Cannot Dip in Depth into Every Important, Accompanying Survivi-Prep Pool of Life. But we Can certainly Dip Into, or at least Get a Nodding, Working Familiarity, -With at Least Some! I'll someday Post a Basic List, Towards Getting People Off on a Good Starting Point. Let me again Suggest now, that Plants, Soils, Seeds, and Gardening!, -is Certainly an Important Such One! This can and Shud Be an Entire Subset of our Survivi-Prep World, -"Survival Gardening"! Look at What a Great Food Resource This is!, -Here in Good Old American or Other Worldwide Gardening, and Life! If we in an Emergency or Survival Situation, -Can also Apply That to Survival and Life!,....What a Boon!, What a Difference!, that can Make or Be!!!

The Art and Science of Digging, -Hand Digging, -is Another Very Important and Applicable Matter! And on How to Most Effectively and Easily Do That! I Have some Concrete Ideas on This as well. That will be the Topic of an Upcoming Post.

(One Advance Word, of which Many of us Know Anyway. Which is to Wet your Soil, Especially various Harder Soils, Before Digging It, to the Extent Water Availability may Make this Possible! Wetted Soil is Substantially Easier to Dig, than Hard, Compacted, Dry Soil!)

And the World Soils Situation wuold Need Some Time to "Catch Up"!, as Well, -in any Major or Substantial Global Climate Changes / Shifts. A Desert may Appear in a New Area, -But it Will Still be of it's Old Soil! For a While Anyway! It Won' Outright Start Out!, as a Desert Soil! Sure, Because of the New Desert Conditions, You Mightent be Able to Grow Much of Anything in it!, -Not Without Irrigation anyway, -a Whole Nother Matter! But you Won't, at least at the Start, have Desert Soils to Work With! This will be Another Major Difference Between Earlier and Later Areas and Times! A Former *NON*-Desert Area may then be like the Sonoran, -But Still have the Soil of say a Grassland. Soils will Somewhat Lag too! And Be Something of a Different Matter!, -Within a Larger Desert Similarity! Prepare for This as Well! In this Case anyway, at least your Soil will often be Better for you!, -than in a Typical Desert! But Changes and "Things Remaining the Sames", -Will Not Always be for the Better!

A New Desert may also Occupy a Larger or Smaller Land Area. (If, for Example, an Alaska Like Projection Went Out Westward from Morocco and Mauritania, into the Atlantic, -That would be Desert too! And the Sahara would be Even Larger! Thats Hypothetically Speaking. But if Such were So, It would Serve as an "As Real as Real Gets!", Kind of Situation. The New Abutment would be an Additional Part of tha Already Large Sahara. As the Area Taken Up by such Imaginary Land Abutment, -Now *Actually* Stands, -It is an "Oceanic Desert". Were you Sailing There, It would be an Extension of the Sahara Desert!, -Only with a Water Surface!) So Depending Where New Climatic Areas Form!, -of How Much They Do or Do Not Form over the World's Waters, -We could Have Larger or Smaller Actual Areas of Such Climate Shifts!, Over What Climes we have Now!

Also, We may be either Blessed, or Disadvantaged, by the Presence or Abscence of Rivers, (and Sizeable Lakes, Etc), -Flowing Thru such a New Climatic Area! Much as the World Deserts are Now Blessed by Rivers like the Nile, Niger, Indus, Okovango, Colorado, and Amu and Syr Daryas Flowing Thru Them! Also, there will be the Matter of Climatic Shifts in such a River's Source Area, -for Better or Worse, -to Consider here too!

*If* such Sizeable Climatic Shifts and Changes Come About!, -We Will Have To also Shift, in our Lifestyles and Preparations too! Deserts will Still be Deserts, and Jungles Jungles! So Much as Now Exists as Standard to These!, -Will Remain! Just it's Given Area of the World!, May be Quite Different!

Major Parts of the Antarctic Icesheet may Break Off, to Melt and Merge with the World's Oceans, Seriously and Significantly Raising World Sea Levels! Havoc and Disruptions Galore would Follow! As would Both Advantages and Disadvantages, -Depending on the Given Area of the World you're Talking About! / So Affected.

I'm Going by the Well Known, Oft Quoted, Rise in Over 200 Feet in World Sea Levels!, -Were All of the Antarctic Icecap ( 90 % of the World's Ice!) to Melt! I Do Not Neccessarily Feel or Say that it will Involve All of it's Icecap! But if even a Sizeable Part shud Break Off, Melt, and so Raise World Sea Levels!....Mega Rises can Still be in Order!!

And we Distinctly Could Have!, -The Mother of All Volcanic Eruptions Upon U.S.! As Well as Much of Adjacent Canada. If Yellowstone Shud Blow!, -Megablow! As the Volcanic and Earth Sciences Community KNOW to be Distinctly Possible and Likely! And Sooner or Later, -To Become a Surety! Every 600,000 Years or So, -Yellowstone *Does*! And we're Now Right About on it's Next, 600,000 Year "Due Mark"! America, or at Least Much of it, can be "Pinatuboed"!, as the Phillipines U.S. Clark Air Force Base was!

And Our Enemies and Others from Without, Would be Glad to Come in and Fill some New American Voids! "Nature Abhors a Vacuum!" Especially Power Vacuums.

Between our Holding our various Number of Balls in the Air!, Including such a Newest Mega-Volcano One on our Own Soil!, -Will we Have Strength, Resources, and Will Enuff Left Over to Meet!?, -Such Comers In from Without!?

The Yellowstone Hot Spot may Well *Not* Yet Blow, in our Lifetimes! But Then Again, -It Just as Likely May! We Simply Don't Know When it Shall Do so, for Sure! But that it WILL Do so!, -We *Do* Know for Sure!

Natural Disasters and Catastrophes are the Great Wild Card!, in Some of the Affairs of Society and Man! Something like Yellowstone Occurring, or Sizeable Parts of the Antarctic Icecap Breaking Off!, -Could Again be One of Them!

Just Look at Vesuvius Rome! Or Thera / Santorini! Or Minoan Crete! Or the 1816 "Year Without a Summer"! -Thanks to a Massive but Distant and Obscure, Indonesian Volcano! (Tambora). Or our Own Great Plains Dustbowl, which was at least Exacerbated by Us! Disease Outbreaks such as Europe's Plague! And of Major Decisive Battles Being Cut Off Midway!,-Because of an Unexpected Eclipse! The List can Go On and On! So Look also to Plain Old Science, Weather, and Nature!, -Not Only to the Socio-Political Affairs of Man! For Some of the Scoop of What May be Happening in the Affairs of Man!

Any such Climatic Shifts will also Shift our Survival Preparations Accordingly! Keep Abreast of any Gathering Developments as *May* Occur, -And to the Extent Any of These Do Come About, -Be Ready for Them!
[color:"black"] [/color] [email]aardwolfe[/email]

Its all a bit depressing, especially when our polititions seem to be working for big business and lining thier own pockets, rather than looking after the world we live in.
As well as global warming and the climate change that will bring, we also face mass extinctions, and a possible reversal of the Earths magnetic field. See the links below.
http://tinyurl.com/z9jf

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/

The older I get I try to live a more enviromentally friendly exsistance - recycling, solar energy, walking and cycling instead of taking the car. However it is debatable what use our survival skills might have if we don't have an ozone layer to protect us or a sustainable biosphere around us.
As someone once said - it never rains, it pours.

Many Quarters are Bad Enuf, or Have the Distinct Potential to Become Environmentally Bad Enuf! But it's Not All so Bad! There *are* Still Very Many Pristine, Empty, and Wild Areas Left in and Across our World!

This may Seem At Odds with What I say in another Reply within this Thread. But it is Not. And there Isn't any such Contradiction. There and Here, I Address some Bad Side Climatic Effects which Reasonably Can be Coming About. But Also, especially here, -I Address How Much Still remains Good and Wild! And as Such, -On How Everything's Not Environmentally or Entirely All so Bad! Notwithstanding As Bad or perhaps to Become Bad, as Some Aspects Are / Will Possibly Be!

There are, however, Some Real and Existing / Potential Enviro-Climatic Concerns!, on Man's Environmental Plate right now! Some of which you Mention!

Everything is Far from Entirely Good! But Far from Everything is Entirely Bad either! There is Both Much that is Good!, and a Good Deal that is (variously) Bad!, -on the All Round Environmental Scene of Today!

I Hope you've Had a Nice Holiday! As I can be Pretty Sure you Have. (Worry Not about not having yet Gooten Back to me, as we were speaking of! Those Sort of Things Happen!) [color:"black"] [/color] [email]joblot[/email]

You've evidently not done much excavation work...the job shuts down when it rains, makes for a sticky, sloppy mess. Digging in dry earth is always preferable to digging in mud.

When you're talking disruptions on that scale... sorry, but all the trinkets and knowledge in the world aren't going to matter...give me a good bottle of wine and a front row seat to the fireworks, might as well go out with a bang and a flourish.

Your right - I'm also getting a bit gloomy in my old age!
I'll try and be more optimistic in the future.
Cheers
Martin

I did Think of Much of your Down Side of Digging in the Rain and Mud! It certainly is Sticky and Slippery at such times!

What I Really was Getting At, was Things like Hard, Dry Ground, on a Dryish, Non-Rainy Day. Here you would Want to "Lubricate" the Ground with Water. In these sorts of Conditions, it shud Make the Digging Easier! At Least a Lot of the Time. ( Individual Situations and Conditions can Often Vary somewhat)

But Sure, When it's Much Wetter Out!, -You're at the Other End of the Spectrum, -and Would Want some Drier Ground to Work in!

Thanks for your Comment and Criticism. [color:"black"] [/color] [email]wildcard163[/email]