How this part of the country is unique:

Until an outbreak of tornadoes in the past week, this year had been a relatively quiet one for twisters in the Midwest and Plains states.

The reason, weather experts said, had much to do with a weather phenomenon that also caused much of the East Coast to shiver through colder-than-normal temperatures this spring: the high-altitude winds known as the jet stream brought Arctic air farther south, and for longer, than in a typical year. In the central United States, that prevented warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico -- a key ingredient in the formation of tornadoes -- from moving north.

"The jet stream was stuck in place," said Jeffrey Masters, director of meteorology for the Web site Weather Underground. "It kept funneling cold air down."

The jet stream finally started shifting north this month. "The pattern broke, and then wham," Dr. Masters said.

Wham! is right...wow.

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Tags: jet stream, Moore, Oklahoma, tornado alley

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This should scare everyone who's been paying attention:

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years. Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million -- just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

It's the first time in 3 million years we've had readings above 400ppm. But there's nothing to worry about, right?

"It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem," said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. "It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds," he said.

Dr. Keeling's father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million -- meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

We can probably kiss our chances goodbye of turning this Titanic ship that we're on in time to save the near-certain devastation coming our way. Has our time passed?

"If you're looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don't believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away," said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. "I feel like the time to do something was yesterday."

Considering that when (only back in August 2006) we posted about this issue, we were at 380ppm, in 15 years we'll surpass the 450ppm level.

We really have no idea what we've done, have we?

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Tags: 350.org, 400ppm, carbon dioxide, climate change, parts per million

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