Newfie wrote:... ran out of oil Thursday night. It took the oil company until 5pm to get someone there. They sent a technician who apparently put in 5 gallons and left. That didn’t make it until midnight.
The oil company service desk is swamped, half hour on hold to talk to someone. And all she can do is take messages because no one in the company will talk to her. This is a big oil delivery company. She can tell me just about nothing. Apparently the supervisors are all out running delivery trucks.
The point, yes this is extreme cold, but not some major shift in the climate. People can’t deal with even minor changes. The system is very fragile and marginal. I could find no news of oil delivery problems on google. Yet my building manager and the oil company are telling me many, many, many households are without heat.
I’m starting to wonder if the oil companies are having difficulty obtaining oil?
How would we react if there was some truely significant shift in the climate?
Pennsylvania: ... .Heating oil demand has jumped in recent days with some desperate to fill empty tanks, said Jennifer D. Goldbach, vice president of business development for Rhoads Energy in Lancaster, whose companies deliver in Berks, Lancaster, Chester, Lebanon and Montgomery counties.
The company averaged 874 calls per day the past two weeks but received 3,816 calls on Tuesday, a sign of how many people were scrambling to heat their homes, she said.
"Over the first two working days of the year (Tuesday and Wednesday), our total volume of gallons of heating oil and propane delivered was up almost 30 percent over the same two days in 2017," Goldbach said.
Many customers sign up for automatic delivery, so the companies track when they'll need oil and deliver it accordingly, she said.
Those on the "will call" list typically can get a delivery in a day or two after ordering it, but now with demand so high might have to wait four or five days, she said, making it important that they not wait until their tanks are empty to call.
Employees are working long hours to keep up, and workers from other departments are answering the phones, which are ringing off the hooks, but the companies still can't bring oil and propane immediately to those in need.
"We're doing out best, but that's a problem," Goldbach said. "The volume of fuel we're delivering is just unbelievable."
... POTTSVILLE — The phones are ringing constantly.
“We are so overwhelmed,” Denise Stoyer, a dispatcher at Jack Rich Inc., Frackville, said Tuesday, the busiest day she can remember in her 12 years with the oil delivery company. Temperatures have been below freezing in Schuylkill County for days, increasing the demand for fuel.
The cold spell isn’t going to let up anytime soon. The National Weather Service, State College, said the high for today will be 24 degrees. Thursday’s predicted to be 20 degrees with evening temperatures as low as zero, and Friday and Saturday will struggle to get above 10. Sunday’s high is forecast for 21 degrees.
Heating companies said they are pressed with a high demand for oil and only have so much time and resources to devote to the effort because of constraints such as time, drivers and customers they have to service before providing services to others..
“We have all our trucks on the road,” Stoyer said.
She said the phones started ringing at 8 a.m. Tuesday when they opened for the day. She said the drivers have been averaging 35 to 40 stops a day. There were also several online orders over the weekend. Other companies were even calling because they could not meet the demand of their own customers.
The Australian city of Sydney has experienced its hottest weather in 79 years with temperatures in the region hitting as high as 47.3C (117F).
Newfie wrote:They finally got oil and heat back on.
No one died.
(Dam it)
2017 achieved a temperature of 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit (0.84 degrees Celsius), above the average temperature seen in the 20th century, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
NASA found that 2017 was 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (.9 degrees Celsius) above the average temperature from 1951 through 1980. 2016 was .99 degrees Celsius higher, and 2015 just .86 degrees Celsius higher, according toe the agency.
The two government agencies use different methodologies to calculate global temperatures, but by either standard, the 2017 results make the past four years the hottest period in their 138-year archive.
In another striking analysis of 2017’s heat, NOAA’s Arndt pointed out that according to his agency, the amount of heat being stored in the upper layer of the global ocean, between the surface and about 700 meters depth, was at its highest on record last year.
Deadly storms driven by 90-mph wind gusts threw transportation across much of northern Europe into chaos Thursday, canceling hundreds of flights, shutting down rail lines and bringing havoc to roads and highways.
In honor of Earth Month: Peter D. Ward, Ph.D., is a paleontologist and professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington. Ward specializes in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs), the Permian-Triassic extinction event, and mass extinctions in general. He was elected as a fellow of the California Academy of Science in 1984 and has been nominated for the Schuchert Medal, an award of the Paleontological Society. Ward has written many books including Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future and The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps.
Areas of the coastal ocean where oxygen is low or absent in bottom waters, so-called dead zones, are expanding worldwide (Diaz and Rosenberg, 2008). Increased inputs of nutrients from land are enhancing algal blooms, and the sinking of this organic matter to the seafloor and subsequent decay leads to a high oxygen demand in bottom waters. Depending on the physical characteristics of the coastal system, this may initiate periodic or permanent water column anoxia and euxinia, with the latter term implying the presence of free sulfide (Kemp et al., 2009). Global warming is expected to exacerbate the situation, through its effects on oxygen solubility and water column stratification. In many modern coastal systems, anthropogenic changes are superimposed on natural variation and lack of knowledge of such variation makes the prediction of future changes in water column oxygen challenging (e.g., Grantham et al., 2004). That natural drivers alone can be the cause of widespread coastal anoxia is evident from studies of greenhouse periods in Earth’s past, including the oceanic anoxic events of the Cretaceous and Toarcian (Jenkyns, 2010).
Sediment proxy records are essential to any reconstruction of variations in anoxia and euxinia on time scales beyond several decades to a century. A variety of biological and geochemical indicators can be used for this purpose, such as the presence of the remains of benthic and pelagic organisms, laminations, biomarkers for eukaryotes or prokaryotes, and inorganic geochemical and mineralogical signatures in the sediment, and ideally, these methods are combined. Sediments that are deposited below a euxinic water column are, for example, typically enriched in organic carbon, sulfur, iron, and trace metals such as rhenium and molybdenum (Gooday et al., 2009). Recent additions to this paleo-redox toolbox are the isotope systems of Fe and Mo (Lyons et al., 2009). Reconstruction of the temporal changes in the oxic-anoxic interface (chemocline) in the water column forms a key step in the identification of the external drivers and internal feedbacks that contribute to anoxia and euxinia in a given system. In their study of sediments from the Black Sea, Eckert et al. (2013, p. 431 in this issue of Geology), make this step by providing, for the first time, a basin-wide reconstruction of the evolution of the chemocline in this silled coastal basin over the Holocene.
The history of Belgium predates the founding of the modern state of that name in 1830. Belgium's history is intertwined with those of its neighbours: the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. For most of its history, what is now Belgium was either a part of a larger territory, such as the Carolingian Empire, or divided into a number of smaller states, prominent among them being the Duchy of Brabant, the County of Flanders, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège and County of Luxembourg. Due to its strategic location and the many armies fighting on its soil, since the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), Belgium has often been called the "battlefield of Europe" or the "cockpit of Europe".[1] It is also remarkable as a European nation which contains, and is divided by, a language boundary between Latin-derived French and Germanic Dutch.
Belgium's formation, like that of its Benelux neighbours, can be traced back to the "Seventeen Provinces" within the Burgundian Netherlands. These were brought together under the House of Valois-Burgundy, and eventually declared independent of both France and Germany by their descendant Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in his Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) led to the split between a northern Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands from which Belgium and Luxembourg developed. This southern territory continued to be ruled by the Habsburg descendants of the Burgundian house, at first as the "Spanish Netherlands". Invasions from France under Louis XIV led to the loss of what is now Nord-Pas-de-Calais to France, while the remainder finally became the "Austrian Netherlands". The French Revolutionary wars led to Belgium becoming part of France in 1795, bringing the end of the semi-independence of areas which had belonged to the Catholic church. After the defeat of the French in 1814, a new United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created, which eventually split one more time during the Belgian Revolution of 1830–1839, giving three modern nations, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
In two languages, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius started the countdown Tuesday to climate change disaster, speaking in Washington before a meeting with American counterpart Secretary of State John Kerry.
Secretary of State John Kerry listens as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius speaks prior to their meeting at the State Department in Washington, Tuesday, May 13, 2014. (AP Photo/Molly Riley)
“We have 500 days to avoid the climate chaos,” Fabius said in French.
Kerry added, “Thank you very much. Do you want to say anything? He speaks perfect English. Do you want to say anything?”
Speaking then in English, Fabius touched on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, but then quickly returned to climate change.
“And very important issues, issue of climate change, climate chaos,” the foreign minister said. “And we have – as I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos, and I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success on this very important matter.”
Fabius and Kerry went into a meeting that morning. Later on Tuesday, Fabius spoke at the French embassy in Washington where he was critical of the Obama administration over its Syrian policy.
A reporter brought up Fabius’ comment to White House press secretary Jay Carney, drawing laughter in the press room when
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