Lightning, and the Earth’s weakening magnetic field

Why lightning? Because, in articles found since July 1:

     Lightning Strikes 14 People In California

     Ball of lightning hospitalises woman and kills hundreds of pigs at farm in China

     Single lightning strike kills 45 head of Black Angus cattle on Montana ranch

     In Bashkortostan, lightning killed 101 sheep

     Two reports of lightning going inside homes and striking people down

     Family of four struck by one lightning bolt

     Second lightning strike fatality in two days at Colorado park, officials say

Four people were injured in Saturday’s strike, and eight were hurt on Friday, officials said in a news release.

For those interested, more headlines about increasingly fierce lightning since July 1 are at the bottom of this post.

From the Manifesto for this site:

This transition is not limited to things human. It reverberates through our entire energetic continuum: the Earth itself is having documented increases in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, changing weather patterns, and extreme weather events; energy is dancing from the Sun as we’ve never seen before; even the Earth’s magnetic poles are on the move in accelerating fashion.

This is yet another manifestation of the full-spectrum energetic change we are beginning to experience. Yes, lighting strikes occur millions of times a day across the planet. But in recent months, the power of some of these strikes has clearly escalated. Single bolts are striking multiple people and are able to kill a hundred animals at a time. This is not usual.

The cause? It could be from the general increase in the power of storms documented here in several past posts. But it could also be related to this, based on the latest readings from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) satellite array called Swarm:

     Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now

Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner…

Earth’s magnetic field acts like a giant invisible bubble that shields the planet from the dangerous cosmic radiation spewing from the sun in the form of solar winds.

So, yet another example of acceleration and energetic change. When one combines this with the idea of an electric universe–that is, one in which electricity is present everywhere, a view that is being proven by excellent work summarized at sites like the Thunderbolts Project–then as the magnetic field weakens, our environment is being stimulated in an increasing way by the emanations of the Sun. Researches such as Mitch Battros have for years been showing an extremely high correlation between geomagnetic storms that hit the Earth and an increase in earthquakes and storms in the 24 to 72 hours that follow, as he did again this weekend at his Earth Changes Media web site:

BREAKING NEWS: Friday’s Two M-Class Flares Accelerate Ocean and Jet Stream Currents

On August 1st, two M-class flares fired off from sunspot regions 2130 and 2127, both of which were located at the Sun’s central meridian producing direct hits to Earth.

Within 24 to 48 hours of these solar storms, four tropical storms; Genevieve, Bertha, Halong, Iselle – were either produced or elevated. Within an additional 24 hours, the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit near Lorengau, Papua New Guinea at 00:22:03 UTC, August 3rd 2014.

He could haven mentioned these earthquakes as well:

     Update: At least 367 killed in southern China after strong earthquake

     USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.1 – Federated States of Micronesia region

So, what’s the moral of the story?

1. If you are in the vicinity of a lightning storm, don’t mess with it. Ignoring the storm based on thoughts of the low probability of being struck by lightning may no longer be a wise approach.

2. Expect further acceleration in the trends documented at Thundering Heard: extreme weather, earthquakes, magnetic pole migration, and so forth, and take whatever measures, if any, you deem appropriate.

3. Expect an increasing effect from these energetic changes on society and on you, at all levels of your being.

Here are some additional lighting links gathered since July 1:

     3,400 lightning strikes in Central Oregon – dozens of wildfires erupt

     Spanish World Cup team plane struck by lightning on way back from Brazil

     Colorado man struck by lightning while filming storm

     Severe lightning storms tear through Chicago area

     Lightning knocks Atlanta-area man clean out of his ‘smoking’ boots

     Dramatic film of lightning strikes as July storms hit the UK

     UK storms cause further disruption after lightning

     UK freak lightning & hail plunge commuters into ‘Zombie Apocalypse’

     Spectacular lightning strike filmed in New York

     Lightning storm creates terrifying nuclear bomb-style mushroom cloud above Sardinia

     ‘Whistling’ Volcanic Lightning Heard Halfway Around the World

 

 

 

Unstable

Instability is accelerating in many spheres of life on Earth.

Earthquakes have accelerated beyond the record-setting pace described in Rockin’ and Rollin’ with sixteen magnitude 6.0 quakes in the first sixteen days of May. So we’re running at the rate of one major quake per day. Here’s the list:

Date/Time Magnitude Place
2014-05-16T11:01:42 6 113km NE of Grande Anse, Guadeloupe
2014-05-15T10:16:41 6.2 50km WSW of Alim, Philippines
2014-05-15T08:16:34 6.6 96km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia
2014-05-14T20:56:13 6.1 99km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia
2014-05-13T06:35:24 6.5 108km SSE of Punta de Burica, Panama
2014-05-12T18:38:37 6.5 Southern East Pacific Rise
2014-05-10T07:36:01 6 11km W of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico
2014-05-08T17:00:17 6.4 15km N of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico
2014-05-07T04:20:33 6.1 96km SW of Panguna, Papua New Guinea
2014-05-06T20:52:26 6.1 West Chile Rise
2014-05-05T11:08:43 6 9km S of Mae Lao, Thailand
2014-05-04T20:18:24 6 23km ESE of Ito, Japan
2014-05-04T09:25:14 6.1 South of the Fiji Islands
2014-05-04T09:15:53 6.6 South of the Fiji Islands
2014-05-02T08:43:37 6 70km SSE of Namlea, Indonesia
2014-05-01T06:36:35 6.6 201km WNW of Ile Hunter, New Caledonia

And Oklahoma, famous for tornadoes but hardly for quakes, has seen an incredible increase in earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater, from about two per year from 1975-2008, to forty per year in recent years:

     What’s causing the huge spike in earthquakes in Oklahoma?

The US Geological Survey found that from 1975 to 2008, central Oklahoma experienced one to three 3.0-magnitude earthquakes a year, compared with an average of forty per year from 2009 to 2013. And it looks like that number is going to get bigger. It’s only February, and the state has already logged more than twenty-five quakes of 3.0-magnitude or larger this year, and more than 150 total quakes in the past week alone.

This instability isn’t just in the Earth’s crust. Check these real estate statistics that came out of China late last week:

  • 1st-tier cities sales fall 40% y/y (year over year)
  • 2nd-tier cities sales drop 65% y/y
  • 3rd-tier and 4th-tier cities sales decline 32% y/y

In a country where real estate development has played an outsized role in their long economic boom–and on a planet where Chinese economic growth has contributed greatly to the world not sliding off into total Depression–these dropoffs are shocking. The Chinese government has been well aware that they have a real estate bubble, and they’ve been trying to deflate it gradually, but those numbers don’t quite equate with “gradual.” Their solution to bring things back to life? What else? No money down!

     In China Homes Are Offered “Zero Money Down”

Since March, 20 property developers in Guangzhou have been offering “zero down-­payments” to attract buyers, in addition to large discounts and tax refund, the National Business Daily reported Monday.

I’m sure that will work out real well.

How big is the China real estate bubble? It turns out someone at a private business meeting surreptitiously recorded the comments on this very topic by the vice-chairman of China’s biggest property developer. He describes Chinese real estate as an epic bubble:

“In 1990, Tokyo’s total land value accounts for 63.3pc of US GDP, while Hong Kong reached 66.3pc in 1997. Now, the total land value in Beijing is 61.6pc of US GDP, a dangerous level,” said Mr Mao.

“Mr Mao said China’s house production per 1,000 head of population reached 35 in 2011. The figure is below 12 in most developed economies “even when the housing market is hot; no country has a figure of greater than 14”.

The Chinese have been so enamored of real estate that they’ve been buying lots of it in California as well:

Cash buyers reach record level of all home purchases at over 42 percent: 80 percent of all sales over past year in Irvine went to buyers from China?

In California, Chinese nationals and immigrants are “parking their cash in single-family homes,” said Meyers.

In Irvine, Calif., for example, 80% of sales over the past year were to Chinese buyers, he said.”

This is a massive amount of targeted home purchasing in one city. I’ve had a few contacts that sell homes in the Orange County market telling me that 7 out of 10 purchases were going to Chinese buyers, all with cash offers…Irvine is no small city with 230,000+ people living in the city.

These frenzies always work out so well in the long term. Sure. (Do I even need to say it to anyone considering buying residential real estate in California, where bidders now present PowerPoint presentations about their offers to the owners? Be careful out there!!!)

And speaking of China and instability, Japan and China have been rattling the war sabers, but most aren’t aware that they are in a no-holds-barred currency war, with each country struggling to take down the value of its own currency to try to make their exports cheaper in world markets. Currency wars don’t generally end well.

And China has territorial disputes not only with Japan, but with Viet Nam and the Philippines as well. We’ll cover those in a separate post on how the War Cycle is progressing.

And what about instability in the banking system. So far this year there have been sixteen high-profile banker deaths: murders by angry customers, suicides, and mystery deaths. By mystery deaths I mean deaths under very suspicious circumstances where the deceased gave no indication at all of wanting to commit suicide, for example, sending an e-mail to a spouse arranging that night’s dinner plans–just an hour before they jump out of a 30th floor window? Some of these people were involved in government investigations of their activities and so they may have known more than their employers wanted them to divulge. Or perhaps these employers–it turns out that the four largest US banks hold $680 Billion in life insurance on their individual employees–simply want to collect on some insurance policies. And trying to find out about this doesn’t work because the US regulators are calling this a “trade secret” of each of the banks:

     Suspicious Deaths Of Bankers Are Now Classified As “Trade Secrets” By Federal Regulator

Well, if anyone wants to verify any of this–though I don’t recommend it–here is a starting point:

     52 Year-Old French Banker Jumps To Her Death In Paris (After Questioning Her Superiors)

And here is the strange story of a guy who worked for the US Federal Reserve for 26 years threatening his boss, the head of a major US housing agency, with murder, apparently over a bad job review the boss gave him!?!

     Former San Fran Fed Employee Threatened To Murder Ex-FHFA Head Ed DeMarco

Stranger still is that the guy was easily released on bail.

So people seem just a bit testy in the banking and finance world. The question for the rest of us is: how much of our savings do we want in these people’s hands? You know my vote.

Instability has unexpected consequences. Some countries, such as Pakistan, are now so unstable that polio is making a comeback:

In February, the WHO found that polio had also returned to Iraq, where it spread from neighboring Syria. It is also circulating in Afghanistan (where it spread from Pakistan) and Equatorial Guinea (from neighboring Cameroon) as well as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

I guess those countries are on the Who’s Who list of instability.

This post could go on and on, but I’ll end with a high-quality video showing some of the earth changes and extreme weather in April:

     Signs Of Change The Past Month Or So 2014 (4) April/May

 

 

Rockin’ and Rollin’

Regarding earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater, the post Earth changes statistical update said:

These days, the planet has one of these potentially damaging earthquakes on average every two and a half days…

Well we’ve just had 27 of those magnitude 6.0+ earthquakes in the last 30 days! So now we’re up to almost one per day.

If we take the strength down to the magnitude 5.1 level that rattled the nerves of plenty in Los Angeles on March 28, there have been 183 of those in the last 30 days, so that’s six per day on the planet.

If you live in an earthquake zone and have been thinking that this acceleration is no big deal, all I can say is: please reconsider your position! Literally! Or, if you want to maintain your position, ask the US Government, they know everything, tell the truth about everything, and they are certain to tell you that there is nothing to see here, move along.

That same US government refuses to fund an earthquake early warning system for California. The US Geological Survey says they can implement one for $16 million. The US can’t afford that, of course, because they are too busy buying tanks that the US Army says it doesn’t want:

     U.S. Army to Congress: No New Tanks, Please

but 42 per year are purchased anyway at more than $6 million each. Clearly Congress thinks it’s better to blow people up than to save lives.

And you might be thinking that the early warning system wouldn’t work anyway. Well, there is already one in the world that works quite nicely. In Mexico. They built it 21 years ago–after thousands died in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. One set of system alarms is at the Mexican TV stations. Here’s a video of a Mexico City newscaster getting the warning (that siren in the background) 71 seconds before he feels the fuerte (strong) movement from yesterday’s magnitude 7.2 earthquake off the west coast of Mexico:

     Mexico Earthquake 2014 | Mexico LIVE TV News Anchor REACTION Full Footage Magnitude 7.2

For the record, California also refuses to fund that early warning system despite the fact that they are enjoying another brief budget surplus as they always do when the stock market bubbles over with Initial Public Offerings of companies that are losing money. Yes, 83% of these new stock offerings over the last three months are money-losing companies. Here’s the chart:

IPO_20140418_IPO

That almost equals the all-time record for such madness of 84% in the year 2000 during the internet/tech stock bubble. Everyone of course now agrees that that was a bubble. But of course they swore it wasn’t a bubble then. And they swear that what’s going on now in the stock market isn’t a bubble. This time it’s entirely rational. So money-losing entrepreneurs and insiders like Suckerberg are selling stock like crazy to the gullible public, filling California’s tax coffers and thus tipping the budget balance to briefly positive for the Golden State.

So, the moral of the story is: Buy the stocks of money-losing companies! There’s no stock market bubble! And don’t worry about that pesky acceleration of earthquakes. Stay put right on those active faults. Your results should be at least as good as shown in this video. I’m sure the peace-loving US Congress guarantees it.

 

 

Earth changes statistical update

Just over a year ago, the post What is the Transition? Part 1 presented statistics and charts showing that there is an acceleration in extreme weather events and geologic changes. And there have been several posts with specifics, including these:

     The Weather Gets Even Wilder

     Weather Wildness Update

     Britain faces choice of saving town or country from floods

This is a statistical update showing that this exceedingly important trend continues.

For starters, here is a chart from the world of yet another industry whose original intent–a way to spread financial risk that could overwhelm an individual to a wider community–has been perverted to massive investment pools from which any payment is not celebrated as a victory but is called a loss. Thus the chart of “Loss events worldwide 1980-2013” from the largest re-insurance company in the world, Munich Re. I use it so that any reader who might still be mired in “it’s just better reporting because of the internet” delusion about accelerating Earth changes–I heard of a person who still claimed that recently, so there must be more–can put that aside. So, not from the woo-woo world, but from the Mr. Gradgrind hard-nosed no-nonsense actuary-driven world where all things are calculated in currency and where the business model depends in great part on frightening people into buying more insurance than they need:

MunichReWeatherAndEarthChangesLines2wTextI added the cone lines highlighting the expansion of damaging floods (the blue portion of each bar) and storms (the green portion) from around 250 per year in the 1980s to around 700 per year for the last eight years. That’s a mighty clear indication of trend as opposed to outlier.

The chart does not show all damaging floods and storms, just those that caused losses for the insurance industry. The chart shows a similar acceleration in damages from “extreme temperature, drought, forest fire” (the yellow part of each bar).

It shows a fairly constant set of losses from geologic events, but this chart does not tell the true story of geologic events because, worldwide, very few have earthquake or volcanic eruption insurance, so there are relatively few loss events from these for the insurance industry.

According to those who closely monitor volcanic eruptions, these set a new all time record in 2013, with 84 volcanoes erupting, beating the previous record of 82 in 2010. There were even volcanic eruption clusters:

     Seven Volcanoes In Six Different Countries All Start Erupting Within Hours Of Each Other

And then there was this “minor problem”:

     Scientists find new volcano rumbling under Antarctica ice: 1,370 tremors: “It may blow or it may not. We don’t know.”

And with 32 volcanoes having already erupted this year, 2014 is off to a thundering and deadly start. After this in Indonesia:

     Villagers run for their lives as Sinabung volcano kills 16 in Indonesia

there was this from the Jakarta Post:

     19 more volcanoes on alert

Jakartavolcanoefeb4.img_assist_custom-560x306

     Electric universe: Pyroclastic flow from Sinabung volcanic eruption last month produced string of ‘tornados’

Here is a video link to those tornadoes.

If I had all the data to chart volcanic eruptions, it would likely look very much like this chart of the 10-year average of earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater, updated with 2013 data:

EarthquakesMag6_2013

These days, the planet has one of these potentially damaging earthquakes on average every two and a half days, though more typically they come in clusters as well:

     Global outbreak of strong earthquakes on anniversary 9.0 Fukushima earthquake

quake_map

There were no significant tsunamis in 2013, so my previous comment from the end of 2012 still seems appropriate:

According to data at the NOAA Global Historical Tsunami Database, which has records going back to 2000 BC, there have been 34 tsunamis with a wave height greater than twenty feet over the last 400 years. Six of those, or 18%, have occurred since the year 2000…In the Twentieth Century, there was a tsunami with a twenty foot wave height about once every ten years. In this century, it has happened once every two years, resulting in the deaths of a quarter million people despite the fact that none of these tsunamis struck a major city.

Sinkholes have continued unabated, though in the rain-drenched UK, there have been multiple large land movements:

     Huge cracks appear in Jurassic Coast a third of a mile inland after landslide in UK

UKarticle_2570052_1BE7D39F000005

And given that the world saw a very strange outbreak of mid-Winter brush and forest fires:

     Despite hurricane and record flooding, fire crews dealing with large bog fire near Aberystwyth, Wales

     Winter wildfire weirdness continues: Firefighters tackle 100-acre grass fire near Shawnee, Oklahoma

     Wildfire in western Broward burns 350 acres, Florida

     Are ‘drought conditions’ really to blame for winter wildfire outbreak across U.S.? Wildfire breaks out in Florida marshland‏

     Another wildfire in Norway: Fire on Norwegian coast destroys 140 buildings

     Fire devours historic Norwegian village, 90 people hospitalized

     Many Tibetan monasteries and famous sites destroyed this winter by mysterious ‘wildfires’

     Take cover! Meteor fireballs rain down across U.S. – Outbreaks of wildfires reported

it seems I would be remiss in not mentioning that meteor fireball sightings have been increasing dramatically in recent years. Confirmed sightings doubled from 2011 to 2013:

FireballsEnglish_Version_2014_6

Do I report all this to frighten? Not at all. I report it because it is the reality in which we are living; because I have learned the hard way that standing firm in the face of nasty powerful trends is very high risk behavior and usually turns out poorly; and because I want those who read Thundering Heard–who are presumably open to the idea that the accelerating changes we are seeing in most fields of life are related and are very important for humanity and for each of us–to stay alive so that, after the collapse of the financial system, they are ready to help rebuild society based on principles that include wisdom, creative intelligence, and compassion rather than the rampant and self-defeating materialism that is disintegrating our precarious “civilization.” (The quotes around civilization refer to Gandhi’s remark: “What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.”)

So as I say to my younger cats when they bound out the door at night to face the local wildlife: Be careful out there.

What is the Transition? Part 1

I have made reference to “the Transition.” Before trying to describe its essence, it will be useful to first review aspects of the Transition, in other words, some of its identifiable characteristics. One aspect that runs through all of the others is acceleration, as you will see.

EARTH CHANGES

EARTHQUAKES

Below is a chart of how much shaking the planet has experienced from strong earthquakes for the last 30 years. This chart sums up the Richter values for all earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater for each year. The earthquakes are summed rather than simply counted so that larger earthquakes have slightly greater weight on the chart. To show the trend, the column for each year shows the 10-year average of all that shaking. The trend is unmistakable—things started to really scale up in the early 1990’s:

EarthquakeTrend

The data for this chart was assembled from a straightforward query of the USGS (US Geological Survey) database at their Global Earthquake Search page.

After the massive Japan earthquake and aftershocks of 2011 (it is worth watching this video graphical display of the world’s 2011 earthquakes, especially if you live in the Ring of Fire), there were fewer earthquakes in 2012. However, 2013 is off to a very fast start, as shown in part in this link from Feb 2:

Earth reeling from eight major earthquakes striking in 5 days

And since that post on Feb 2, there have been an 8.0, a 7.0, a 6.4, and a 6.3 in the Solomon Islands, a 6.9 in Japan, and a 6.9 in Columbia.

TSUNAMIS

Earth doesn’t typically see a lot of large tsunamis, but their occurrence has ramped up fivefold in recent years. According to data at the NOAA Global Historical Tsunami Database, which has records going back to 2000 BC, there have been 34 tsunamis with a wave height greater than twenty feet over the last 400 years. Six of those, or 18%, have occurred since the year 2000:

Year Location Water Height Deaths
2000 GREENLAND 50.0
2004 INDONESIA 50.9   226,898
2006 INDONESIA 20.9         802
2009 SAMOA 22.4         192
2010 CHILE 29.0         156
2011 JAPAN 38.9    15,854

In the Twentieth Century, there was a tsunami with a twenty foot wave height about once every ten years. In this century, it has happened once every two years, resulting in the deaths of a quarter million people despite the fact that none of these tsunamis struck a major city. The NOAA’s database shows that even a tsunami less than five feet in height can kill thousands. With 23% of the world’s people living in what is called the “near coastal zone,” tsunamis are likely the single most life-threatening Earth-change phenomenon on the planet.

VOLCANISM

Due to the great behavioral variations of active volcanoes, the tracking of volcanism is not as mathematically rigorous as that for earthquakes and tsunamis. There is a site jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian and the USGS that reports on volcanic activity in the latest week. Here is their list for the week of 30 January–5 February 2013:

New Activity/Unrest:

  • Colima, México
  • Etna, Sicily (Italy)
  • Paluweh, Lesser Sunda Islands (Indonesia)
  • Rabaul, New Britain
  • Reventador, Ecuador
  • White Island, New Zealand

Ongoing Activity:

  • Batu Tara, Komba Island (Indonesia)
  • Chirpoi, Kuril Islands (Russia)
  • Copahue, Central Chile-Argentina border
  • Karymsky, Eastern Kamchatka (Russia)
  • Kilauea, Hawaii (USA)
  • Kizimen, Eastern Kamchatka (Russia)
  • Lokon-Empung, Sulawesi
  • Sakura-jima, Kyushu
  • Santa María, Guatemala
  • Shiveluch, Central Kamchatka (Russia)
  • Tolbachik, Central Kamchatka (Russia)

So, their list is all from the Pacific Rim and Italy. According to some who track this carefully, after a total of 77 volcanic eruptive events for all of the year 2012, there were 44 volcanic eruptive events recorded just in the month of January 2013.

Here are some volcano-related headlines shown on the SOTT.NET Earth Changes page in just the last couple of weeks:

The Great Awakening? Ten volcanoes awaken in one week

Indonesia’s Mount Lokon volcano shaken by double eruptions

Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano erupts in Chile

Tavurvur volcano erupts in Papua New Guinea, ash cloud diverts flights

Hawaii’s Mount Kilauea lava lake hits new record high

Manam volcano (Papua New Guinea): Large explosive eruption sending ash plume to 45,000 ft altitude

Campi Flegrei supervolcano raising anxiety among Italian residents

WEATHER EXTREMES (Storms, Floods, Heat Waves, etc.)

Does anyone on the planet need to be told that storms are ramping up in size, intensity, and frequency, resulting in unprecedented flooding? And that heat waves have taken on new intensities and duration? Is there anyone still claiming, “It’s just the internet, nothing has changed, we just have better reporting.”? Anyone making such claims would be well-advised to review the recent history of the global insurance industry. The venerable Lloyd’s of London almost went bankrupt in the mid-1990’s after 350 years of annual profits. They said they had to completely revamp their weather catastrophe calculations because the actuarial data on which they had relied for 300 years (!) was no longer applicable.

Below are some quotes from September 2010 on the web site of Munich Reinsurance, the largest re-insurance company in the world.  Reinsurers sell insurance to other insurance companies to cover catastrophic losses:

Munich Re’s natural catastrophe database, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally there has been a more than threefold increase in loss-related floods since 1980 and more than double the number of windstorm natural catastrophes…

Prof. Peter Höppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Centre: “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear.”

Heavy rain and flash floods are affecting not only people living close to rivers but also those who live well away from traditionally flood-prone areas.

And then things accelerated further. By October 2012, Munich Re reported that the numbers were even larger. They reported that weather-related loss events in North America had grown fivefold over the past three decades, and that there was “an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe, and 1.5 in South America.”

There are literally thousands of headlines available to demonstrate this idea further, here are just a few:

Cyclone frequency in Indonesia increases 28-fold since 2002

Global warming – or something much worse? Australia adds new colour to temperature maps

The temperature forecast for next Monday by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is so unprecedented – over 52C – that it has had to add a new colour to the top of its scale, a suitably incandescent purple.

Aus_New_Color

Tornado slams into Italian steel plant – video

To give you an idea how rare tornadoes are in Italy, four tornadoes in total were recorded in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, three were recorded in the 20th century and four were recorded since 2008 alone, with two of those coming in 2012.

And the damage is not limited to single instances, it is cumulative in many areas, for example, the US East Coast:

Former USGS scientist: Coastal cities are ‘sitting ducks’ for next big storm

“We have left our coasts sitting ducks, and Sandy destroyed these natural protections,” she said.

In the space of a few hours, Sandy blew through the sand dunes that had served as natural protections for communities up and down the Atlantic coast.

“Basically these dunes build up over geologic time, and yet the superstorm wore them down over a couple of days, and it is going to take geologic time again to build them back up,” McNutt said.

For those who are more video oriented, this youtube poster does a good job of grabbing news video of weather extremes and earth changes from around the world each month. These can be useful to watch since they can remind just how quickly, under the tremendous distraction of daily life, we forget what’s been happening:

Extreme Weather Events and Earth Changes DECEMBER 2012

The November installment includes Superstorm Sandy. Since the news media typically won’t cover a weather story unless there is a body count to report, few are aware that Lower Manhattan in New York City is still seriously impaired, with skyscrapers running from emergency generators on the street because their basements are still flooded.

RISING TIDES – WITH PERPLEXITY THE SEA AND WAVES ROARING NOVEMBER 2012

FIRE AND ICE – EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS AND EARTH CHANGES JANUARY 2013

(While I applaud SOTT.NET and the maker of the youtubes above, fidockave213, for their excellent work at collecting earth change information, I am not aligned with their editorial views.)

Part 2 describes a huge weather shift taking place on the planet that almost no one is talking about!