Cyclone Chapala dumps a decade worth of rain on Yemen causing major flooding

Posted on November 4, 2015 by The Extinction Protocol

November 2015 – YEMEN – The coast of Yemen, an area unaccustomed to dealing with the devastation of tropical systems, has taken a direct hit from the powerful and dangerous Cyclone Chapala. As Chapala made landfall Tuesday, it dumped enormous amounts of rainfall on the arid coast – as much as a decade’s worth, according to some forecasts. This caused major flooding and swamped entire towns. Relief Web reported Tuesday that the cyclone has already caused severe flooding in the country’s fifth-largest city, Mukalla, with 25 reported injuries. Initial reports suggest that more than 12,750 people have left their homes in coastal areas of Hadramaut governorate.  At least 90 homes have reportedly been damaged or destroyed.

“The wind knocked out power completely in the city and people were terrified. Some residents had to leave their homes and escape to higher areas where flooding was less; it was a difficult night but it passed off peacefully,” Mukalla resident Sabri Saleem told Reuters. There have been no confirmed injuries in Mukalla so far, the report added. Chapala weakened to a tropical storm late Tuesday night, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, in its routine monthly Desert Locust Bulletin issued Tuesday, said heavy rains from Cyclone Chapala “are likely to result in favorable ecological conditions” for the growth of desert locusts in the central part of the country. The bulletin warned those conditions “could last well into next spring.”

Before hitting the mainland, Chapala sideswiped the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sunday. At least three people were killed and more than 200 were injured on Socotra, according to Emirates 24/7. There was also a huge loss of property on the island, the report added. An estimated 20,000 people were reportedly evacuated from coastal areas and close to 400 houses were damaged or destroyed, Relief Web reported. “The damage is enormous and we fear human losses,” Socotra Island Minister of Fisheries Fahd Kafain told Emirates 24/7. Locals sought shelter in government buildings and schools, as high water levels flooded numerous streets in Hadibo. It is likely that a combination of heavy rainfall and storm surge caused the flooding. –Weather

Atlantic storm brings more flood misery to drenched Britain: heaviest rainfall in 250 years

Posted on February 14, 2014 by The Extinction Protocol

February 14, 2014 – BRITAIN – Princes William and Harry rolled up their sleeves Friday to help out with flood defense efforts as Britain braces for another hammering Friday from a major storm off the Atlantic. The princes showed up at 6 a.m. local time in the flood-hit village of Datchet, west of London. The community is one of several in Berkshire and Surrey to have been hit by flooding in recent days after the River Thames burst its banks. Nearly 6,000 homes have been inundated along the Thames Valley and elsewhere following England’s wettest January in 2½ centuries. A car dealership’s display model sits on a ramp above floodwaters in Datchet, England, on Monday, February 10. Britain has been hit by bad weather since early December, and swaths of southwestern England have been flooded in continuously stormy weather.  Some communities in low-lying areas of Somerset, in southwest England, have been under water since December. And there’s no letup in sight just yet. The Environment Agency has warned of more flooding along the Thames over the weekend as the river reaches its highest level in 60 years. A powerful Atlantic storm that is blowing in on Friday will add to people’s woes. It comes only two days after a storm blasted western Wales and northwest England, as well as parts of Ireland, with gale-force winds. Some 450,000 properties were affected by power outages as a result of Wednesday’s storm. Only 16,000, almost all of them in Wales, were still without power Friday morning, according to the Energy Networks Association, but high winds could cause new problems.

The severe weather has affected travel, with many trains delayed or canceled. A sea wall under one coastal section on the main rail line to the southwest collapsed after high seas pummeled it. There were 18 severe flood warnings, meaning a danger to life, in place Friday, most of them in southeast England. Warnings of high winds are also in place for parts of southern England. In the past few days, more than 1,000 homes have been flooded in well-heeled communities along the Thames Valley, including Maidenhead and Windsor, where Queen Elizabeth has a castle. The Environment Agency warned the area could expect “widespread flooding affecting significant numbers of properties and whole communities and significant disruption to travel” in the coming days. Central London has been protected from flooding by the Thames Barrier, which prevents high tides surging up the tidal river when it is already full. The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said the recent series of winter storms “has been exceptional in its duration, and has led to the wettest December to January period in the UK since records began.” But it’s not yet able to say whether climate change is a factor in the extreme weather, as some observers have suggested. “As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding. This is in part due to the highly variable nature of UK weather and climate,” it said. -CNN

http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/atlantic-storm-brings-more-flood-misery-to-drenched-britain-heaviest-rainfall-in-250-years/

The Future Doesn't Hurt. Yet

By MATTHIEU RICARD

Published: June 23, 2011

When, in the early morning, I sit in the little meadow in front of my hermitage on a quiet hilltop, two hours’ drive from Katmandu in Nepal, my eyes take in hundreds of miles of lofty Himalayan peaks glowing in the rising sun. The serenity of the scenery blends naturally and seamlessly with the peace within. It is a long way indeed from the frantic city life I once lived.

But the peace I know is no escape from the world below — or the science I once studied. I work with the toughest problems of the real world in the 30 clinics and schools that Karuna-Shechen, the foundation I created with a few dedicated friends and benefactors, runs in Tibet, Nepal and India. And now, after 40 years among these majestic mountains, I have become acutely aware of the ravages of climate change in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau. From where I sit in my little meadow, it is especially sad to witness the Himalayan peaks becoming grayer and grayer as glaciers melt and snows recede.

The debate about climate change is mostly conducted by people who live in cities, where everything is artificial. They don’t actually experience the changes that are taking place in the real world. The vast majority of Tibetans, Nepalese and Bhutanese who live on both sides of the Himalayas have never heard of global warming, as they have little or no access to the news media. Yet they all say that the ice is not forming as thickly as before on lakes and rivers, that winter temperatures are getting warmer and the spring blossoms are coming earlier. What they may not know is that these are symptoms of far greater dangers.

In the beautiful kingdom of Bhutan, where I spent nine years, recent investigations by the only glaciologist in the country, Kharma Thoeb, have shown that a natural moraine dam that separates two glacial lakes in the Lunana area is today only 31 meters deep, in comparison to 74 meters in 2003. If this wall gives way, some 53 million cubic meters of water will rush down the valley of Punakha and Wangdi, causing immense damage and loss of life. Altogether there are 400 glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan that may break their natural dams and flood populated areas lower in the valleys. If these floods occur, the glaciers will increasingly shrink. This will cause drought, since the streams and rivers will not be fed by melting snow.

Chinese climatologists have called the Himalayan glaciers and other major mountains located in the Tibetan plateau the “third pole” of our ailing planet. There are 40,000 large and small glaciers on the Tibetan plateau and this area is melting at a rate three to four times faster than the North and South Poles. The melting is particularly accelerated in the Himalayas by the pollution that settles on the snow and darkens the glaciers, making them more absorbent to light.

According to international development agencies, about half of the populations of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Pakistan depend on the watershed from the rivers of the Tibetan plateau for their agriculture, general water supply, and, therefore, survival. The consequences of the drying up of these great rivers will be catastrophic.

When I was 20, I was hired as a researcher in the cellular genetics lab of François Jacob, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. There, I worked for six years toward my doctorate. Life was far from dull, but something essential was missing.

Everything changed in Darjeeling in northern India in 1967, when I met several remarkable human beings who, for me, exemplified what a fulfilled human life can be. These Tibetan masters, all of whom had just fled the Communist invasion of Tibet, radiated inner goodness, serenity and compassion. Returning from this first journey, I became aware that I’d found a reality that could inspire my whole life and give it direction and meaning. In 1972, I decided to move to Darjeeling, in the shadow of the Himalayas, to study with the great Tibetan masters Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

In India and then in Bhutan, I lived a beautiful and simple life. I came to understand that while some people may be naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete; that achieving durable happiness as a way of being requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing qualities like inner peace, mindfulness and altruistic love.

Then one day in 1979, shortly after our monastery in Nepal had been equipped with a phone line, someone called me from France to ask if I would like to engage in a dialogue with my father, the philosopher Jean-François Revel. I said “of course,” but thought that I would never hear from the person again, as I did not believe that my father, a renowned agnostic, would ever want to dialogue with a Buddhist monk, even one who was his son. But to my surprise, he readily accepted and we spent a wonderful 10 days in Nepal, discussing many issues about the meaning of life. That was the end of my quiet, anonymous life and the beginning of a different way of interacting with the world. The book that followed, The Monk and the Philosopher, became a bestseller in France and was translated into 21 languages.

It dawned on me that much more money than I had ever envisioned having would be coming my way. Since I could not see myself acquiring an estate in France or somewhere else, it seemed to me that the most natural thing to do would be to donate all the proceedings and rights of that and subsequent books to helping others. The foundation I created for that purpose is now called Karuna-Shechen, and it implements and maintains humanitarian and educational projects throughout Asia.

Humanitarian projects have since become a central focus of my life and, with a few dedicated volunteer friends and generous benefactors, and under the inspiration of the abbot of my monastery, Rabjam Rinpoche, we have built and run clinics and schools in Tibet, Nepal and India where we treat about 100,000 patients a year and provide education to nearly 10,000 children. We have managed to do this spending barely 4 percent of our budget on overhead expenses.

My life has definitely become more hectic, but I have also discovered over the years that trying to transform oneself to better transform the world brings lasting fulfillment and, above all, the irreplaceable boon of altruism and compassion.

Imagine a ship that is sinking and needs all the available power to run the pumps to drain out the rising waters. The first class passengers refuse to cooperate because they feel hot and want to use the air-conditioner and other electrical appliances. The second-class passengers spend all their time trying to be upgraded to first-class status. The boat sinks and the passengers all drown. That is where the present approach to climate change is leading.

Whether people realize it or not, their actions can have disastrous effects — as the environmental changes in the Himalayas, the Arctic circle and many other places are showing us. The unbridled consumerism of our planet’s richest 5 percent is the greatest contributor to the climate change that will bring the greatest suffering to the most destitute 25 percent, who will face the worst consequences. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, on average an Afghan produces 0.02 tons of CO2 per year, a Nepalese and a Tanzanian 0.1, a Briton 10 tons, an American 19 and a Qatari 51 tons, which is 2,500 times more than an Afghan.

Unchecked consumerism operates on the premise that others are only instruments to be used and that the environment is a commodity. This attitude fosters unhappiness, selfishness and contempt upon other living beings and upon our environment. People are rarely motivated to change on behalf of something for their future and that of the next generation. They imagine, “Well, we’ll deal with that when it comes.” They resist the idea of giving up what they enjoy just for the sake of avoiding disastrous long-term effects. The future doesn’t hurt — yet.

An altruistic society is one in which we do not care only for ourselves and our close relatives, but for the quality of life of all present members of society, while being mindfully concerned as well by the fate of coming generations.

In particular, we need to make significant progress concerning the way we treat animals, as objects of consumption and industrial products, not as living beings who strive for well-being and want to avoid suffering. Every year, more than 150 billion land animals are killed in the world for human consumption, as well as some 1.5 trillion sea animals. In rich countries, 99 percent of these land animals are raised and killed in industrial farms and live only a fraction of their life expectancy. In addition, according to United Nations and FAO reports on climate change, livestock production is responsible for a greater proportion of emissions (18 percent) of greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector. One solution may be to eat less meat!

As the Dalai Lama has often pointed out, interdependence is a central Buddhist idea that leads to a profound understanding of the nature of reality and to an awareness of global responsibility. Since all beings are interrelated and all, without exception, want to avoid suffering and achieve happiness, this understanding becomes the basis for altruism and compassion. This in turn naturally leads to the attitude and practice of nonviolence toward human beings and animals — and toward the environment.

 Matthieu Ricard was a scientist in cell genetics 40 years ago when he decided to live in the Himalayas and become a Buddhist monk. He is a photographer and the author of several books, including “Happiness: How to Cultivate Life’s Most Important Skill.” He lives in Nepal and has been involved in more than 100 humanitarian projects.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/global/24iht-june24-ihtmag-ricard-30.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

‘Apocalyptic’ torrential rains wreak havoc on Italian island of Sardinia, killing 18

November 19, 2013 – SARDINIA, Italy - A storm has killed at least 16 people on the Italian island of Sardinia, with two people unaccounted for and fears the death toll will rise, officials say. Confirming the deaths to CNN affiliate Sky TG24, Regional President Ugo Cappellacci described the situation as ‘dramatic and critical.’ Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta held a Cabinet meeting to declare a state of emergency in Sardinia. He told reporters the government has allocated 20 million euros ($27 million) in immediate aid to the Mediterranean island. The money will be used to help save lives, assist the displaced and repair roads, he said. Italian President Giorgio Napolitano issued a statement expressing solidarity with the affected communities. Olbia Mayor Gianni Giovannelli said the city had been destroyed by the “apocalyptic” storm, with bridges felled and water levels reaching 10 feet (3.5 m) in some places. He described the ferocity of the storm’s rains as a “water bomb.”Civil Protection Agency spokeswoman Francesca Maffini said that the two missing people were a farmer and a woman who lived alone.

 http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/apocalyptic-torrential-rains-wreak-havoc-on-italian-island-of-sardinia-killing-18/

There’s Something In This Peaceful Picture That You Don’t Realize. When You See It…OMG.

It's not snow.... it's spiders

http://www.viralnova.com/spider-fields/