No rain, no nuclear power; western Japan also has power shortfall

[mooncliff]

Whoa! Did not see this coming!

One of the driest spring seasons on record in northern Europe has sucked soils dry and sharply reduced river levels to the point that governments are starting to fear crop losses and France, in particular, is bracing for blackouts as its river-cooled nuclear power plants may be forced to shut down.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...us-crop-losses


Also, at first, western Japan seemed to have been relatively unaffected by the quake, but now so many nuclear power plants are shut down for inspection and upgrading, there is a 15% peak summer power shortfall there as well.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110610005996.htm

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-b...0110610n1.html

[Starving Steve]

Re: No rain, no nuclear power; western Japan also has power shortfall

Central California has been cooler and wetter than usual this spring. There has even been rainfall in June, normally a month that is rainless. The odd June does get rain, and those odd Junes that do get rain bring the June average for rainfall to a scant 0.20 inches or 0.30 inches at most climate stations. But this June, the rainfall has been 0.97 inches at San Francisco International Airport, almost a record, and June is only about half over...... The long-range weather forecast for SF in late June this year is bone dry, as usual. (No surprise with that forecast.)

But this is how climate is. The average at each climate station is average of daily weather, and observing daily weather is always like observing a drunk staggering around a lamp-post; the drunk never wanders very far away from the lamp-post, at least not for very long.

This year was the odd year necessary to raise the June rainfall average at San Francisco back up to its normal, about 0.2 inches.

If you want to observe the drunk staggering about the lamp-post in daily temperature at SF Int'l Airport, here he is at the bottom of the home page of the national weather service for the central California. The drunk has been staggering below average in temperature during much of this spring, but the drunk will likely go back to above average in some future months in order to nicely cancel away this spell of below normal temperature and bring the average temperature back to normal.

Your weather in the UK and in Western Europe has been in drought lately. But that drought is part of this weather pattern which has brought California a very wet spring. The drought in China has now been broken, and China is now enjoying very wet weather. Everything fits together into a pattern of offsets in weather; everything in weather always does.

Nothing is really changing in the Earth's climate. Every oddity of weather offsets some other oddity, either later-on or earlier. And every oddity of weather is offset by another oddity or quirk in weather somewhere else on the planet. This is the nature of the Earth's climate. The drunk never wanders far away from the lamp-post, and nothing is really changing with the climate on Earth.

So long as the Sun keeps radiating more or less the same amount of energy, 2 calories per square centimetre per minute onto a perpendicular surface at the top of the Earth's atmosphere, nothing can really change with the Earth's climate.

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mtr/

Google: National Weather Service, San Francisco Bay Area and Monterey