Tag Archives: South Pacific Ocean

Facebook Fiasco – and the Fishes

From Jennifer Marohasy

January 21, 2024 By jennifer 

We have been friends for some 20 years, she used to edit Online Opinion (and I used to write for it), when she lived in Brisbane – we both once lived in Brisbane, in Chelmer. Now Susan lives on Norfolk Island that is rather a long way to the East.

Norfolk Island is an Australian territory in the South Pacific Ocean, with pine trees, jagged cliffs, sandy beaches include Emily Bay, where Susan swims most days on the low tide.

Susan still provides writing, editing and proofreading services, and she also swims in Emily Bay, with the corals and fishes.

Over the last few years she hasn’t been selfish about this adventure, rather sharing photographs of the fishes, a pregnant eagle ray, and a growing problem with water quality with us via what had become a most wonderful resource and community Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/norfolkislandtime

Then last week, her Facebook was hacked, and while the site is still sitting there, Susan has lost control of it.

They were not interested in the fishes.

But rather that this page, her Facebook page, links to her writing page that links to PayPal.

The scam has apparently been going for three years at least what happened to Susan is exactly what was reported by Channel 9 as happening to other small businesses that long ago, with the same amount of money debited in the same way:

It took just 15 minutes for hackers to infiltrate Sydney single mum Sarah McTaggart’s Facebook page.

From there, they also took control of the account she uses to run her small business, wiping out 90 percent of the client base she has been building up for the past four years – almost in an instant.

Their target? The PayPal account she uses to buy Facebook ads for her business.

The professional IT advice that Susan has got is that this Facebook page is now lost to her control forever unless she can get the attention of Facebook administration.

It seems there is no way to get in touch with Facebook administration directly, so much for customer service. Susan had asked me to register a complaint from my Facebook account, but I can only report her page as ‘impersonating’ her, when what has happened is ‘identify theft’, that is not listed as an option.

I don’t want her Facebook account shut down, but rather handed back.

Susan has updated me:

I’m trying not to get too down about it. No help forthcoming yet apart from other scammers. I had an IT guy round here a few hours ago and he reckons it’s gone and without Facebook getting in touch with me regarding one of my reports I won’t be able to retrieve it.

I’ve reached out to anyone who I think is influential and may know someone who may be able to help, but no responses as yet.

No responses from Facebook either to any of the various reports that were submitted.

No phone number (well there is one, but they don’t answer it!).

No email address for Facebook.

And then I got a $320 charge from Meta (Facebook) via PayPal. It seems back in 2013 I linked PayPal to Facebook for some advertising for my Write-now business. So the hacker was able to make a charge.

PayPal say the charge is legitimate because it comes from my account (even though I don’t control it any longer!).

I’d already changed my bank passwords, and cancelled my card, so they won’t be able to do it again. I’ve also removed any linked cards from PayPal now, too.

As the IT guy said, it is now a case of pulling up the drawbridge! I’ve done a full computer scan and no trojans or whatever. So now I am filing fish photos, because at least that makes some sense!

One thing this has all brought home to me is how interconnected, interdependent, and beholden we are to the big IT companies like Facebook, PayPal etc etc.

Susan has emailed contact@9news.com.au, amongst others.

And she has explained to them:

My Messenger has also been taken over. As have my other linked pages (Write-now! is one). My deep concern is that those nearly 10,000 followers on Norfolk Island Time trust in my page and now they, too, are exposed to a hacker.

Fortunately, the fishes and the corals are unconnected, still under the waves at Emily Bay.

How many Facebook pages like Susan’s, replete with beautiful photographs of fishes, or something else, are now controlled by scammers – and what might they plan to do with a page like this into the future?

In the first instance this may be Susan’s worry. But if we truly care about community, it is all our problem, for sure.

2022 Hunga Tonga underwater volcanic eruption injected 165 million tons of water vapor & acidic gases into stratosphere & affected the ozone layer

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. 

This looping video shows an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. The GOES-17 satellite captured the series of images that also show crescent-shaped shock waves and lightning strikes. u003cstrongu003eCredits: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using GOES imagery courtesy of NOAA and NESDISu003c/strongu003e

From ClimateDepot

By Marc Morano

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-hunga-tonga-hunga-haapai-eruption-depleted-ozone.html

New study shows Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai eruption depleted ozone layer

A large team of atmospheric specialists has found that when the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano erupted last year, it took part of the ozone layer with it. Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Prior research has shown that the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai eruption was one of the more powerful explosions ever recorded. It was also unique in that instead of spewing just volcanic material, dirt and rocks, it also sent a very large amount of ocean water into the atmosphere. In this new effort, the research team have found that all that saltwater reacting with other chemicals in the atmosphere, resulted in breaking down O3 in the ozone layer.

To learn more about the impact of the eruption, the researchers sent balloons with sensors into the atmosphere from nearby Réunion Island just five days after the volcano erupted. In studying the data from the sensors, the researchers found that ozone levels in the plume were approximately 30% below normal levels.

As the balloons continued to monitor the plume as it floated across the Indian and then Pacific Ocean, they found depletion totals of approximately 5%. The depletion, they found was due to ocean water reacting with molecules in the atmosphere that contained chlorine, leading to a breakdown of ozone—in amounts that had never been seen before in such a short time.

The research team from Université de La Réunion, working with colleagues from the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, the University of Colorado, St. Edward’s University, the University of Houston, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and California Institute of Technology, notes that a 5% reduction in the ozone layer is not alarming both because it was localized and because in real-world terms, it was not that much. They note that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica sees a 60% depletion toward the end of every year.

Hunga Tonga & Its Role In Rising Global Temperatures

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Cunningham

Amidst all of the hysteria about the rise in global temperatures this year and claims of hottest months, there has been remarkably little discussion of the role played by the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano last year:

The huge amount of water vapor hurled into the atmosphere, as detected by NASA’s Microwave Limb Sounder, could end up temporarily warming Earth’s surface.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.

Millán analyzed data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument on NASA’s Aura satellite, which measures atmospheric gases, including water vapor and ozone. After the Tonga volcano erupted, the MLS team started seeing water vapor readings that were off the charts. “We had to carefully inspect all the measurements in the plume to make sure they were trustworthy,” said Millán.

Volcanic eruptions rarely inject much water into the stratosphere. In the 18 years that NASA has been taking measurements, only two other eruptions – the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile – sent appreciable amounts of water vapor to such high altitudes. But those were mere blips compared to the Tonga event, and the water vapor from both previous eruptions dissipated quickly. The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano, on the other hand, could remain in the stratosphere for several years.

This extra water vapor could influence atmospheric chemistry, boosting certain chemical reactions that could temporarily worsen depletion of the ozone layer. It could also influence surface temperatures. Massive volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo typically cool Earth’s surface by ejecting gases, dust, and ash that reflect sunlight back into space. In contrast, the Tonga volcano didn’t inject large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, and the huge amounts of water vapor from the eruption may have a small, temporary warming effect, since water vapor traps heat. The effect would dissipate when the extra water vapor cycles out of the stratosphere and would not be enough to noticeably exacerbate climate change effects.

The sheer amount of water injected into the stratosphere was likely only possible because the underwater volcano’s caldera – a basin-shaped depression usually formed after magma erupts or drains from a shallow chamber beneath the volcano – was at just the right depth in the ocean: about 490 feet (150 meters) down. Any shallower, and there wouldn’t have been enough seawater superheated by the erupting magma to account for the stratospheric water vapor values Millán and his colleagues saw. Any deeper, and the immense pressures in the ocean’s depths could have muted the eruption.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere

By any account, this eruption was off the charts when compared with any other eruption since we began studying these things.

According to the Millan paper, the radiative forcing from this plume of water vapour was about two thirds of the CO2 growth between 1996 and 2005.

Water vapour is of course the primary GHG, and there can be no question that the eruption has increased global temperatures, and will continue to do for some years to come, as the plume is expected to only slowly dissipate.

Questions have been raised as to why we are only seeing the effect a year after the eruption. There are two very good reasons for this:

1) La Nina last year helped to offset any temperature rise from Hunga Tonga.

2) For the months following the eruption, the cooling effect of aerosols tended to offset the warming effect of the water vapour. Gradually however these aerosols have since dropped out of the atmosphere, and now there is nothing to offset the water vapour effect. Remember that global temperatures fell by about 0.5C following Pinatubo.

The aerosol effect of Hunga Tonga would not have been as great as Pinatubo’s, but it is still likely to have been significant. By definition then, the water vapour effect must be equally significant.

It is perfectly likely that the rise in temperatures this year can all be explained by a combination of Hunga Tonga and El Nino.

What I find remarkable about this, if unsurprising, is how there has been virtually no public discussion of this, as far as I can see anyway. Instead climate scientists seem to want to brush it under the carpet, and blame rising temperatures on “climate change”.

What NASA and Science Admit but the Media are Failing to Report About Our Current Heat Wave

From ClimateRealism

Editor’s note: last week, Climate Realism also covered this event in a guest post from Ryan Maue, Ph.D., who also wrote about the effect of the eruption on Earth’s atmosphere. This essay and the scientific study cited by it, further reinforce the likelihood that this event has contributed to recent, sustained, above average temperatures.

Guest essay by Thomas Lifson  Originally published in American Thinker.

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I – probably along with you — had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA (and please do follow the link to see time lapse satellite imagery of the underwater eruption and subsequent plume of gasses and water injected into the atmosphere):

Himawari-8 satellite images of the 15 January 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

Geophysical-Research-Letters-2022-Mill-n-1Herunterladen

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere. [emphases added]

NASA published the above in August 2022. Half a year later, a newer study increased the estimate of the water vapor addition to the atmosphere by 30%. From the European Space Agency:

In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of scientists showed the unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% (relative to climatological levels) and a five-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in the last three decades.

Using a combination of satellite data, including data from ESA’s Aeolus satellite, and ground-based observations, the team found that due to the extreme altitude, the volcanic plume circumnavigated the Earth in just one week and dispersed nearly pole-to-pole in three months. [emphasis added]

Another scientific paper explains the “net warming of the climate system” on a delayed basis.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory further explains:

Volcanic eruptions rarely inject much water into the stratosphere. In the 18 years that NASA has been taking measurements, only two other eruptions – the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile – sent appreciable amounts of water vapor to such high altitudes. But those were mere blips compared to the Tonga event, and the water vapor from both previous eruptions dissipated quickly. The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano, on the other hand, could remain in the stratosphere for several years.

This extra water vapor could influence atmospheric chemistry, boosting certain chemical reactions that could temporarily worsen depletion of the ozone layer. It could also influence surface temperatures. Massive volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo typically cool Earth’s surface by ejecting gases, dust, and ash that reflect sunlight back into space. In contrast, the Tonga volcano didn’t inject large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, and the huge amounts of water vapor from the eruption may have a small, temporary warming effect, since water vapor traps heat. The effect would dissipate when the extra water vapor cycles out of the stratosphere [Emphases added]

So there you have it: we are in for extra atmospheric heat “for several years” until the extra water vapor injected by this largest-ever-recorded underwater volcano eruption dissipates.

Jeff Childers, who brought this scientific data to my notice, writes:

Here’s why corporate media is ignoring the most dramatic climate even[t] in modern history: because you can’t legislate underwater volcanoes. You can try, but they won’t listen. So what’s the fun in that? Corporate media only exists to further political ends. Since volcanoes aren’t subject to politics, why bother?

He brings up the work of Ethical Skeptic:

Ethical is suggesting that the water is heating the air — instead of the other way around. And the Earth’s core is heating the water.  It’s a theory that explains everything.

Meanwhile, “science” is baffled. From just a month ago, in mid-June:

See? But though scientists are baffled, corporate media and its repulsive allies are busily blaming ocean warming on carbon dioxide — a ludicrous notion.

I am the first to admit that none of this – not the atmospheric CO2 theory of global warming, nor the effect of the largest ever known undersea volcanic eruption – is scientifically proven. But before we impoverish ourselves trying to reduce CO2 emissions (while watching China dramatically increase them), let’s practice real science and not jump to conclusions based on an imaginary “consensus.”