Global Wind Day Quotes

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? E'en in Australia art thou still more hot Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May (Since that's your winter it don't mean a lot) Sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines And bushfires start through half of New South Wales Just so, when I do see thy bosom's lines A fire consumes me and my breathing fails But thine eternal summer shall not fade This is in no way due to global warming; Nay, from thy breasts shall verses fair be made So damn compulsive they are habit-forming So long as men can read and eyes can see So long lives this, thou 34DD (Based on an idea by William Shakespeare. I'm sure he'd agree that I've improved it)

[Hyun Song Shin] most accurately portrayed the state of the global economy. 'I'd like to tell you about the Millennium Bridge in London,' he began…'The bridge was opened by the queen on a sunny day in June,' Shin continued. 'The press was there in force, and many thousands of people turned up to savor the occasion. However, within moments of the bridge's opening, it began to shake violently.' The day it opened, the Millennium Bridge was closed. The engineers were initially mystified about what had gone wrong. Of course it would be a problem if a platoon of soldiers marched in lockstep across the bridge, creating sufficiently powerful vertical vibration to produce a swaying effect. The nearby Albert Bridge, built more than a century earlier, even features a sign directing marching soldiers to break step rather than stay together when crossing. But that's not what happened at the Millennium Bridge. 'What is the probability that a thousand people walking at random will end up walking exactly in step, and remain in lockstep thereafter?' Shin asked. 'It is tempting to say, 'Close to Zero' ' But that's exactly what happened. The bridge's designers had failed to account for how people react to their environment. When the bridge moved slightly under the feet of those opening-day pedestrians, each individual naturally adjusted his or her stance for balance, just a little bit—but at the same time and in the same direction as every other individual. That created enough lateral force to turn a slight movement into a significant one. 'In other words,' said Shin, 'the wobble of the bridge feeds on itself. The wobble will continue and get stronger even though the initial shock—say, a small gust of wind—had long passed…Stress testing on the computer that looks only at storms, earthquakes, and heavy loads on the bridge would regard the events on the opening day as a 'perfect storm.' But this is a perfect storm that is guaranteed to come every day.' In financial markets, as on the Millennium Bridge, each individual player—every bank and hedge fund and individual investor—reacts to what is happening around him or her in concert with other individuals. When the ground shifts under the world's investors, they all shift their stance. And when they all shift their stance in the same direction at the same time, it just reinforces the initial movement. Suddenly, the whole system is wobbling violently. Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King, Jean-Claude Trichet, and the other men and women at Jackson Hole listened politely and then went to their coffee break.

screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds, banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes. But though there was very little wind and the turbines made almost no electricity, they made billions in taxpayer-paid subsidies for energy companies and investment banks, some of which trickled down to their fully-owned politicians and “environmental” groups. As I’d learned in previous dealings with WindPower LLC, these turbines did absolutely nothing for global warming. Because wind is so erratic, wind projects must have fulltime fossil fuel plants to back them up, and the result is that wind projects often cause more coal-burning, not less. And the saddest thing is that these billions of dollars wasted on industrial wind projects could be spent on rooftop solar, substantially reducing CO2 generation and fossil fuel use. But the utilities hate rooftop solar, despite what they pretend, because it cuts their income, so they are avidly trying to curtail it.

Under the ties, I understood that I was no longer a carefree child. The real possibility that a person-any person-could leave, hit me for the first time. One day, sooner than I could have imagined, it would be my turn to go. Not like a gentle beach breeze, but like an east wind storm.

The Portuguese explorers, astronauts of another time, used these winds and some educated guesswork to push European dominion out of the Mediterranean and into the world beyond. For the mahrineros of Lisbon, it was simple work on most days to sail south to places like Madeira and the Canary Islands, the first non-European stepping-stones of Iberian conquest. Getting home was harder, until someone took a gamble and found that if a sailor put his back to the land and sailed off far enough to the northwest, he might eventually make his way up into westerly winds and back to Portugal before the food ran out. Known to sailors as the volta do mar (return from the sea), this discovery—rather like the splitting of the atom five centuries later—would have irreversible consequences for all that came afterwards. Christopher Columbus used an expanded version of the volta to get his fleet from Spain to America and home again, but credit for a bolder leap goes to Bartolomeu Dias, who tested the concept on a global scale.

2001 when they published a scientific paper that modelled the future collapse of the Cumbre Vieja and the passage of the resulting tsunamis across the Atlantic. Within two minutes of the landslide entering the sea, Ward and Day show that –for a worst case scenario involving the collapse of 500 cubic kilometres of rock –an initial dome of water an almost unbelievable 900 metres high will be generated, although its height will rapidly diminish. Over the next 45 minutes a series of gigantic waves up to 100 metres high will pound the shores of the Canary Islands, obliterating the densely inhabited coastal strips, before crashing onto the African mainland. As the waves head further north they will start to break down, but Spain and the UK will still be battered by tsunamis up to 7 metres high. Meanwhile, to the west of La Palma, a great train of prodigious waves will streak towards the Americas. Barely six hours after the landslide, waves tens of metres high will inundate the north coast of Brazil, and a few hours later pour across the low-lying islands of the Caribbean and impact all down the east coast of the United States. Focusing effects in bays, estuaries, and harbours may increase wave heights to 50 metres or more as Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Miami bear the full brunt of Vulcan and Neptune’s combined assault. The destructive power of these skyscraper-high waves cannot be underestimated. Unlike the wind-driven waves that crash every day onto beaches around the world, and which have wavelengths (wave crest to wave crest) of a few tens of metres, tsunamis have wavelengths that are typically hundreds of kilometres long. This means that once a tsunami hits the coast as a towering, solid wall of water, it just keeps coming –perhaps for ten or fifteen minutes or more –before taking the same length of time to withdraw. Under such a terrible onslaught all life and all but the most sturdily built structures are obliterated.