Once again, records are being broken (see drought thread with record heat/dryness in Spain, Cuba, etc.). Something is slowly going very wrong in our environment perhaps...

More than 500 people have died in flooding and landslides after the heaviest monsoon rains ever recorded in India.
independent

CNN has death toll at 1000.
CNN

We had a tornado here in the UK this week. It hit some of the suburbs near Birmingham (middle england)

Wingfoot

Crazy, they had tornados in North Germany two weeks ago too.
Just found this article (related to topic in general) reading cnn.

Study: Hurricanes getting stronger
Is global warming making hurricanes more ferocious? New research suggests the answer is yes.
Scientists call the findings both surprising and "alarming" because they suggest global warming is influencing storms now -- rather than in the distant future.

hurricanes

Well guys, it soon might be a case of, to quote Bette Davies: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

Yeah, this season is kinda tough for the US as well. Hurricanes are really battering the coastlines down south, while we are getting record highs like everyday.

Major flooding hitting Switzerland, Austria, South Germany, Czech Rep, and most of all Rumania (worst hit with 28 deaths and 20.000 homes affected).

cnn

Interesting article in Spiegel:
Das ist ja erst der Anfang
and telling u.a. how the German Münchner Rück re-insurance giant registering 13 major weather catastrophes in 1950-59, rising to 74 from 1990-99.

Also: Swiss road & transport-system worst broken up in 100 years by flooding.

Bavaria badly-hit: :(
Allgäu
Regensburg

Mississippi declared a state of emergency last night and Louisiana prepared for evacuations as Hurricane Katrina appeared to gather force for a second devastating strike at the US coast.

After wreaking havoc across southern Florida on Friday, leaving seven dead, Katrina was picking up strength over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and could return as soon as tomorrow.

The storm was upgraded to a category three "major hurricane" in the course of the day, meaning it carried winds of more than 120mph. There are fears it could bounce back as a category four - a hurricane of potentially catastrophic intensity with winds of 130mph.

Alarmed residents have barely had time to clear up damage inflicted by Hurricane Dennis last month and Hurricane Ivan last September.

Four of Friday's victims were killed by flying trees when Katrina ripped across Florida's southern tip on Friday. Thousands of trees were uprooted and 50 homes were flooded.

Ending a week of extreme weather worldwide, the storm was expected to swing northwards on a course heading somewhere between the southern Florida Panhandle and the Louisiana coast. In the line of attack are the city of New Orleans and oil and gas installations. Some oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico have already been evacuated.

Florida has been pummelled by six powerful hurricanes since last August, in what forecasters describe as an "unusually active season". Environmental campaigners say the turbulence is a result of global warming disrupting world weather patterns.
Katrina is the 11th storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began on 1 June. That is seven more than are usually whipped up by this stage of the season in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, the US's National Hurricane Centre said. The season ends on 30 November.

Katrina's advance is being watched closely in Europe, which has been assaulted by weather extremes unknown for generations, from south-eastern Europe's tumultuous rainstorms, killing 43, to tinder-dry Portugal, where 11 new fires flared yesterday despite weeks of desperate firefighting.

Hardest hit was Romania, where 31 died, many of whom drowned when water engulfed their homes. Austria, Germany, Bulgaria and Switzerland reported 12 dead, with vast areas under water. Fears remain that floodwaters could cause the river Danube to burst its banks and present further hazards.

In the small Swiss town of Thun, the local football stadium was destroyed, a loss given international prominence by the club's qualification last week for the Champions League, in which it will take on Arsenal. Thun's players helped recovery efforts by handing out food parcels on the town's streets.

Experts seeking an explanation point to the irregularity of the jet stream, the wriggling ribbon of fast-moving wind that drives Europe's weather from the Atlantic. A convulsive kink last week whipped turbulence into Eastern Europe, and locked Iberia in its pocket of hot tranquillity.

"But the jet stream is a permanent feature, it always wanders around, that's nothing new," said Wayne Elliott, a weather forecaster from the Meteorological Office in Exeter.

"The jet stream moves north in summer, south in winter, and the important thing is that it didn't come as far south as was expected last autumn. That's why the rains failed in Iberia, and why northern Europe is unsettled.

"Such behaviour is consistent with predictions by scientists who argue the climate is changing. Global warming could be the key."

WWF goes further. "Global warming has started to exacerbate the frequency and intensity of meteorological catastrophes," a spokesman for the environmental group said on Friday. "Politicians must curb [carbon dioxide] emissions now."

independent

Weather goes in cycles larger than just yearly. What we're seeing now really isn't all that amazing, except that it's been quite a few years.

True and I´m fully aware of that, and in none of the above articles are the writers simply comparing 2003-2005 to 1997-1999 in an attempt to say, for example, "well the weather was better under Clinton than it is under Bush". And the few articles/incidents above also concern, apart from a number of all-time records, general + gradual increases (eg: the Münchner Re stats over 55 years).
Having said that, what concerns all-time highs is difficult to measure for the amount of years that measurements take place, the record dryness in Spain is also "record" because the serious measurements first began in the 1940s. Also, hurricanes having - according to the cnn info - a 40/60 year cycle would make rash judgements unwise. On the other hand, the "worst heat/floodings in 100 years" in areas as disparate as India and Switzerland does attract media attention and therefore ours too, whether explicable or not.
On the subject of weather catastophes as a method of getting media attention and scoring political points there is mention of this in a discourse here:
hot enough for you?

Agreed, I remember well the 2001 flooding in Germany (was living there at the time) and was surprized to see the same happening in 2002 and now in 2005 yet again. Of course it may also be possible for statistics to make the raison d´etre for this thread null and void, we´ll see.

Actually LP, saying that whats been going on for the last few years isn't out the normal is rather like saying gobal warming isn't around, "Its just the sweater that you're wearing.".

Alot of things have been happening on a much more regualar basis for quite some time now. Heck, even the hurricane right now down in New Orleans is a huge event. If it makes as huge swells as they are prediciting, we can plan to see New Orleans turn into the hugest flood disaster this country has ever seen.

Oh, and it is (or was when it first made landfall) a class 5 hurricane, the strongest to ever hit the United States.

Not at all, global warming is part of the reality of our times. I'm not saying it shouldn't be a concern, that it can't cause massive and painful changes in our environment; I'm just saying that it's really not all that "weird", stuff like this has happened before, it will happen again.

Started reading an interesting book a while ago, Collapse by Jared Diamond (same guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of the best books ever). It's an analysis of how human civilizations have dealt with their environment (and how the environment has, in turn, dealt with human civilizations). The fact that there are cycles of weather which happen over periods of time longer than a human lifespan has caused massive damage to societies before, simply because we assume that environmental conditions will continue to be like what we're used to, with only the seasonal cycles changing.

Anyway, it's interesting to look at historical weather data. I remember one time I got in an argument with a Global Warming guy, and part of his evidence was a graph showing world temperature over the course of several million years. We're complaining about a relatively small shift in global temperatures thus far (less than 10 degrees), while there have been far far larger changes in the Earth's average temperature before.

Strong winds have been an issue lately.

Accounts of straight winds reaching 100+ miles per hour is hard to imagine. We had straight-line winds at around 70 and the amount of damage was pretty noticeable. Parts of Europe were the victims. The point about global warming and changing weather patterns does make sense. It would likely change the behaviour of different high and low pressure zones which cause the weather disturbances.

Was slightly amused when the Weather Channel was reporting winds of 30 mph in Hawaii, with gusts of up to 15-20 mph more. Guess maybe on islands you have to account for waves and wind chill from the coastal waters.

I live in Gulfport, Mississippi. I witnessed Katrina firsthand. It hit my town directly and also first. New Orleans was hardly touched by the actual storm. They only got the damage that they did from a broken levee and flood waters. (Who builds a city below sea level to begin with?)

Anyways, pretty much every single report of strange weather in the last few years can be almost directly tied to global warming. It's not that strange. We are committing unintentionally committing suicide as a race. It will not be reversed and we will all die from it. In fact, many scientists believe that it is already to late and that the pollution is increasing so exponentially that if we stopped doing everything now and converted to a perfect energy source and whatnot, we would still not save ourselves.

I, personally, will probably drown to death as I live on the southern coast of the United States. Most people in the mainland will experience intense earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, flash floods, and all that. If they can survive that, they will not survive the intense heat.

It's going to be a fish fry.

Well, they did get a lot of damage from both, and I would say the broken levees where a direct cause of the storm. And yeah, to be fair, it was the French that built it there. ;)

Hmm, I would have to disagree with you on that one. This year's messed up weather is a result of El Niño. Its a pretty common happening in 1986-1987, 1991-1992, 1993, 1994, 1997-1998, 2002-2003, and 2006-2007, recently.

Global warming is a threat, but people over-blow it to a proportion that makes it rather unbelievable, which makes it so I really can't blame people for not buying it. Doesn't make them any less blind to the fact that there is a serious pending environmental threat in global warming, just makes it more understandable as to why they'd be turned off by forecasts of the ten plagues of Egypt are a'coming.

You're probably right. The fact that we pump 5 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere daily is probably a little overstated.

And this site is probably grossly misrepresenting information. About how 6 pounds of gasoline (roughly a gallon) ends up pumping 19 pounds of CO2 into the air.
http://www.letsgreenthiscity.com/node/289

P.S. And while your at it, maybe questionr how many hotel rooms we'd have to tie up to contain the volume of only this?

The effects and urgency of the problem it is causing probably is, yes.

What ever happened to the problem with 'Global Cooling' back in the '70s?

Also I'd like to know how global warming can cause an earthquake?

Global Warming wouldn't cause an earthquake directly. The melting of the polar ice caps would, however. Go check out An Inconvenient Truth, seriously. They should have it at your local Blockbuster. Gore describes everything fairly well.

I think you put too much of a dogmatic faith into that movie. I maintain that Global Warming is a nice little buzzword that everyone has picked up to use as an explanation of any environmental change.

Edit: Beautiful Kevin, beautiful.

I don't think I'll be getting my information from a politician anytime soon, but thanks anyway.

How about some scientific journals?

All I know pesonally is I'm not worried about global warming. Until I directly see the effects of it, it doesn't bother me. That doesn't mean I'll go around spraying arisol cans for fun, but I just find it hard to believe that every natural disaster is a result of global warming, seeing as how the same natural disasters have been occurring since Earth was developed. We have unpredictable weather on this planet sometimes, doesn't mean I'm going to get on some shit bus every day, even if it did make a difference. I'm honestly more worried about the next ice age than global warming.

I have directly seen the effects of it and I do every year now.

I lived through Hurricane Katrina and we've had more hurricanes in the past two years than I have experience in my lifetime. I've lived down here my whole life. Also, the temperature has been reaching record highs during the winter the past few years.