No end seen to refugees fleeing drought in East Africa

This isn't about left or right. The fact you specifically mention that along with your defense of the oil companies only shows your true agenda. And as usual your total disregard for the situation this has made shows your agenda as well. This isn't the first time you have entered a thread with total apathy and disregard for what these disasters are doing to the people who are there, which many of these posts also discuss. But considering your demeanor is one of a nose in the air looking down at all snob it isn't surprising. This also isn't just about one event, it is about events taking place with more frequency, severity and scope in many places around the world which even the people living in these places know are different and not normal. No wonder you come in this one to refute the reality. Now I know what this is really about to some of these elitist deniers... they won't admit the reality of this because it is affecting poor and brownskinned people, and well, they just don't care about them.

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/experts-demystify-link-between-extreme-weathe...

"The paper puts it like this: if the norm used to be one hurricane per year and then after global warming started, there were two hurricanes per year, scientists cannot determine which was caused by climate change because the two are indistinguishable. The effect of climate change is the increase in the average number of hurricanes.

“The upshot is that one event doesn’t actually have information about climate change and vice versa,” Gulledge said. “So it becomes this question that people focus on that science fundamentally has no answer for.”

But that does not mean extreme weather events in the recent past are not, at least partially, the product of global warming.

WEATHER EQUIVALENT OF SPEEDING

The Pew Center report refers to the barrage of weather disasters that plagued the world last year. 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year globally since 1880, with 19 countries reaching their highest temperatures ever, the largest number of new records in a single year.

Parts of Pakistan endured Asia’s hottest temperatures in history; Russia lost 56,000 people to an unprecedented heat wave; and China’s Yunan province saw its worst drought in 100 years. It was also the wettest year since 1990, bringing deadly floods to Pakistan, Brazil, Australia, and many areas of the United States.

Yet while climate change did not directly cause these events, it is responsible for their elevated frequency and heightened intensity, according to the report.

“Just as speeding increases the risk of a deadly auto accident, but cannot be conclusively assigned as the cause of an accident, a particular heat wave is not directly caused by global warming, but has a higher risk of occurrence and of being intense because of global warming," the analysis states.

Floods and droughts occurred long before any human-induced changes to the surface temperature of the earth. But recent large-scale shifts - over the past 50 years, total rainfall has risen by 7 percent and temperatures continue to reach new highs - have made extreme weather events in general more common and more dangerous.

“What matters is that there is a statistical record of these events occurring with increasing frequency and/or intensity over time, that this trend is consistent with expectations from global warming, and that our understanding of climate physics indicates that this trend should continue into the future as the world continues to warm," the report says.

Rather than trying to predict the details of specific catastrophic events, policymakers should collaborate with scientists to understand these evolving trends in weather patterns, which will undoubtedly play a role in future disasters as global warming continues, the researchers recommend.

“The signal of climate change is emerging from the noise of immense variability of weather,” Scientific American’s Carey said. “If you look at an individual event, it wasn’t caused by climate change, but the intensity, the size, whatever, was caused by climate change.”
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You can stop with the broken record red herring only "La Nina" B s now.

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=5438&cat=field-news

How do we do it? How do we sit so silently in the face of such adversity in this world? I find it harder and harder to understand this.

"Extremely High Malnutrition Rates

At the beginning of June 2011, a new reception center was established in Dagahaley, to be managed by the Kenyan authorities and the United Nations’s agency for refugees (UNHCR), with the aim of improving assistance for new arrivals.

Every day, an MSF team assessed the health of people arriving at the center. Teams carried out systematic nutritional screenings of children five years of age and younger with the use of the MUAC, a tool that measures a child’s middle upper arm circumference. The team found alarming malnutrition rates, so decided to conduct a rapid nutritional assessment in the area in mid-June. The results of the assessment exceeded the team’s worst fears.

A mixture of extreme heat, a lack of water and sanitation, and delays in the registration of new arrivals—which in turn delays the provision of food rations—have resulted in extremely difficult living conditions for new arrivals. During the three-day rapid nutritional assessment, the MSF team measured and weighed some 500 children between six months and five years old. As many as 37.7 percent of the children were suffering from global acute malnutrition; of these, 17.5 percent were severely malnourished and at high risk of death. Children up to 10 years old were also showing elevated rates of malnutrition.

“There is a high level of malnutrition. We are extremely concerned," said Monica Rull, head of MSF projects in Kenya and Somalia.

"I expected to find a difficult situation, but not a catastrophic one," said Anita Sackl, coordinator of the nutritional assessment. "The majority of new arrivals actually fled [Somalia] because they had nothing to eat—not just because their country has been at war for decades.”

Because of these worrying results, MSF is now including children older than five in their nutritional programs in Dagahaley camp.

Humanitarian Aid Too Slow

The ongoing delay in providing humanitarian aid is deeply problematic. The refugees must wait 40 days before being officially registered by the UNHCR and receiving a card entitling them to the regular food distributions. During those 40 days, they received intermittent food rations and a five-liter plastic container for water."
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WAIT 40 DAYS to get a card for regular food distributions while people die.