IS THERE ANYTHING new to say about climate change? Anything beyond the now incontestable evidence of ice-cap melting and proliferating weather disasters that still fails to shift the Earth's most powerful economies? Tim Flannery's epic book deals remorselessly with these familiar signs of acute planetary stress, but adds something quite special.

In lucid and authoritative prose, he details what the implications of global heating will be for the intricacy of life on Earth. He sees a terrible unravelling of the links that have bound Earth's fabulously rich biosphere together, and in his exquisite delineation of their history and imminent endangerment his book becomes a hymn to life. Its destruction would, to him, be a kind of blasphemy.

Flannery is a distinguished Australian scientist, and the fact that, after a decade of sordid politicking, his home country has the world's highest per capita output of carbon dioxide, makes the political edge in his book sharp and rankling. But it's the poetic naturalist in him that is the true radical. Deploying palaeontology, ethics and cost-benefit analysis with equal facility, he weaves a narrative of allegorical power, from volcanic blow-outs 50 million years ago to the modern extinction of Costa Rica's golden toad, desiccated and then lost with the logged-out cloud forests. Climate change is as old as the Earth, but never has the planet seen it happen so fast, or had so much to lose.

It is the mechanisms of loss that are so telling, the reciprocities broken, the feedback loops stoked up. Plankton flourishes under sea-ice, and as the Antarctic ice sheet begins to disappear it is dying, robbing the great whales of their chief foodstuff, and the Earth of one of its major carbon "sinks". In New Guinea in 1997, drought and frosts killed vast areas of virgin montane oak forest. Firestorms followed, burning not just the dead trees but the ground, releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Pacific coral reefs are collapsing, robbed of sunlight by the vast cloud of toxic smog (the size of the US) that hung over South-East Asia in 2002, and poisoned by seaborne pollutants. They are another carbon sink, as well as one of the most beautiful ecosystems in the history of the Earth.

The changes are inexorable, the interdependence of the biosphere (what James Lovelock calls Gaia) ironically making calamity a shared thing in the same way that life is. And we are in the thick of it, as both culprit and victim. One of the revelations of climate-change research (itself a symbiotic, multi-faceted, almost Gaian business) is that the first phase of global warming, begun 10,000 years ago by the fires and soil disturbance of early farmers, was what provided climatic conditions benign enough for the evolution of human civilisation. It would be hard to imagine a circle more ironically vicious.

Yet Flannery remains an optimist, although he doesn't hold out much hope that governments and business will become the saviours of the planet. His closing sections on likely ways out of the crisis are a depressing catalogue of duplicity and self-interest (there is a powerful coalition between right-wing evangelists and the coal industry in the USA that argues that atmospheric carbon dioxide will "fertilise the Earth", and return us to Eden).

He remains convinced that a radical cutting of emissions is the only practical solution, and, as a believer in decentralised federalism both at a Gaian and a political level, that this is down to all of us. An immediate 70 per cent reduction would stabilise temperatures within about 50 years, just in time to prevent the worst-case scenarios kicking in.

Yet even with that, dramatic changes are inevitable: we are "physically committed" to them in researchers' jargon. The snow-cap of Mount Kilimanjaro will soon vanish into the heavens. Will the loss of that iconic image of the Earth's grandeur stir consciousnesses? Or will it take a Katrina-sized hurricane hitting Washington (not impossible) to do the trick?

The National Marine Fisheries Service is embarking on a status review to determine if the belugas need the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act.
A listing was rejected in 2000 because then it was believed that overharvesting was to blame. Seven years of strict limits on hunting have proved that theory wrong, said Lloyd Lowry, a professor of marine mammals with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"There is something else going on," he said this past week.
The status review will look at possible reasons for the decline. That includes changes in habitat, such as noise from shipping, recreational boating and pile driving. The noise could be interfering with the whales' ability to locate each other and find food.

Scientists also will look at development around the inlet, including the expansion of the Port of Anchorage. Waste discharges from the municipality will be considered, as well as the impact of oil and gas development.

"There are a lot of things we are looking at," said Brad Smith, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. But so far, he said, nothing jumps out as a likely cause.

"There is no smoking gun," he said.

The fisheries service recently set a harvest limit of eight whales through 2009, alternating a harvest of one and two whales a year. Only Alaska Native subsistence hunters are allowed to kill the whales.

The harvest now is set so low that the population should be growing 2 percent to 4 percent a year, but it's not, Lowry said. "This population, according to pretty good survey data, is not growing at all," he said.

One cataclysmic event -- a large stranding in the inlet's 20-foot tides, perhaps, or an oil spill or tsunami -- could push the remaining whale population over the edge, said Lowry.

In contrast to the isolated belugas whales of Cook Inlet, belugas overall are thriving in Alaska, with at least 35,000 to 40,000 animals in four Arctic stocks.

Smith said the status review will be expanded this time. It will include a prediction at what point the inlet whales -- considered a genetically distinct population -- could go extinct.

"It certainly does not look encouraging," Smith said.


Copyright 2006 IndyStar.com.

Scientists say it probably started growing in 1997 and has been rising 1.4 inches a year since. The likely cause of the bulge is a pool of magma. Larry Chitwood, a geologist at Deschutes National Forest, told The Oregonian the pooling magma is under tremendous pressure causing the Earth's surface to expand and bulge.

The uplift could be anything from the early stages of a volcano, to a pooling of liquid rock. USGS geologists admit, they just don't know.

In March 2004, 350 small earthquakes indicated magma was moving underground, but the bulge has been quiet since.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International

FEMA officials are worried about how quickly they could enter the affected area because many roads, bridges, and approaches could not be expected to withstand a high-magnitude earthquake, he said.

"It will be a monumental challenge," Pawlowski said. "That's why we want as many partners as possible to address this."

FEMA, which was sharply criticized for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, began in earnest in December to prepare for the possibility of an earthquake along the New Madrid fault.

Pawlowski would not say whether the Katrina criticism had prompted the agency's interest in the 50-mile-wide New Madrid fault zone, centered near the southeast Missouri town of New Madrid, and which stretches from Alabama to Illinois.

Instead, he pointed to its potential, wide-ranging impact on the nation's economy, estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

He said a strong earthquake could disrupt the flow of commodities by underground pipeline, rail, barge and highway; halt the flow of food exports, fuel oil and coal outside the region; cripple FedEx's hub in Memphis, Tenn.; and block routes for emergency services.

Pawlowski said FEMA expects to have a regional response plan in place by June 2007.

A House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., and which oversees FEMA and emergency management, traveled to Los Angeles on Thursday and St. Louis on Friday to gauge how prepared local, state and federal governments would be in responding to a natural disaster, and avoid problems that emerged with Katrina.

Shuster served on a special committee that last week released the findings of its investigation into the government's response to Katrina. Shuster said Friday he is leaning toward introducing legislation that would separate FEMA from the Homeland Security Department.

That's in response to criticisms that FEMA's traditional role of dealing in natural disasters has gotten lost in Homeland Security's emphasis on fighting terrorism.

"Response was slow and key decisions were made late," Shuster said. "We can't afford to get it wrong again. Business as usual doesn't work in a catastrophic disaster."

Missouri emergency management director Ronald Reynolds said most federal emergency funds have been tied to terrorism and not available for natural disasters. "That's been changing since Katrina," he said. "It's about time."

Eugene Schweig of the U.S. Geological Survey testified Friday that the 1800s New Madrid earthquakes and its thousands of aftershocks upended land, made the river unnavigable, and created landslides in a multistate region.

Such an event today would rupture underground pipelines, burst levees, and wreak havoc in the Midwest and East.

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., have asked the federal government to conduct an emergency response exercise along the entire New Madrid fault zone to expose how response might be improved in the event of a devastating earthquake.

Researchers studied the Dec. 26, 2004, Sumatra-Andaman earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which accounted for last winter's devastating tsunami, and concluded that previous ideas about where giant earthquakes are likely to occur need to be revised. Based on their data, researchers determined that the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake had a magnitude of 9.15, making it the third-largest earthquake in the past 100 years.

"This earthquake didn't just break all the records, it also broke some of the rules," said Kerry Sieh, a Caltech geology professor and one of the study's authors.

The earthquake occurred on the Sunda subduction megathrust, a giant earthquake fault. Previously, researchers believed megathrusts could only produce giant earthquakes if the oceanic plate was young and buoyant.

The oceanic crust at the site of the 2004 earthquake is old and dense, and the relative motion between the plates is slow. "For all these reasons, received wisdom said that the giant 2004 earthquake should not have occurred," said Jean-Philippe Avouac, a Caltech geology professor.

"But it did, so received wisdom must be wrong. It may be, for example, that a slow rate of motion between the plates simply causes the giant earthquakes to occur less often, so we didn't happen to have seen any in recent times -- until 2004," Avouac said.

Other subduction zones that were not previously considered to be a risk, but may need to be reassessed, include the Ryukyu Islands between Taiwan and Japan and the Caribbean from Trinidad to Barbados and Puerto Rico.

Better monitoring systems with continuously recording GPS stations should be installed in some subduction zones to assess their seismic potential, Sieh said.

The report will appear in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. - State and local wildlife experts are trying to figure out what led more than a thousand flounder, spot and pin fish to beach themselves at the Marine Corps' New River air base - and then swim away.

They believe it may be related to a popular phenomenon known in coastal Alabama as "jubilee."

The fish surfaced in shallow water Friday morning. They were lethargic, but alive.

"It's kind of strange," said Mike Sanderford, New River Riverkeeper. "It's a bunch of fish up here, but they're not dead. They're almost docile."

When he arrived, Sanderford said, the fish were lying in shallow water and allowed him to touch them before they swam away.

Representatives of the Division of Water Quality, N.C. Marine Fisheries and N.C. Marine Patrol checked on the fish along the air station's shoreline Friday morning. One expert estimated about 1,000 to 1,500 were crowded in the waterline.

But by afternoon, they were gone. The timing matched another oddity: the water's oxygen level, which veered from one extreme to the other.

"We measured the oxygen levels in the water this morning and they were very low," said Stephanie Garrett, environmental technician with DWQ. "Then two and a half hours later, they were high."

She said that might be a clue that the area saw a case of the "jubilee" phenomenon, in which thousands of live, healthy fish beach themselves.

Scientists know that a jubilee occurs when variety of factors deoxygenate the water, forcing fish to the shore.

Jubilees occur in a number of places, but nowhere as often and as regularly as on Mobile Bay's eastern shore. Jubilees usually occur during the summer, providing a free feast to locals who head to shore to gather the fish up.

"It's normal to them, they all know the conditions that are needed and go down with gigs to get the flounder," said Bianca Klein, biologist at the Air Station. "It's definitely a rarity here, though."

Only about 50 fish died, and that may not have been from natural causes.

"The flounder that were dead were the big ones," Sanderford said. "We're guessing someone came out here early this morning and started to pick out the biggest ones to take home for dinner, but wondered why they were beached and thought something might be wrong with them."

Underwater listening devices, used to pick up the normal playful squeals of the fun-loving dolphins, recorded squeals with a noticably different timbre, the researchers reported. "They sounded more terrified than playful", claimed Crystal Dearing, a graduate student working toward a degree in Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. "They sounded distressed and fearful".

The scientists, who perform their work aboard the research ship "Gaia's Revenge" were noticeably shaken by the observation of the dolphin pod's behavior. "We were performing our usual tasks -- photographing and communing with the pod -- when someone yelled, 'Oh my God! They are travelling directly northward!'. We were stunned at the obvious implications of this unusual behavior", related Ms. Dearing.

Dr. William Fishman, program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Sustainable Wildlife Division was also troubled by the news. Contacted by phone, Dr. Fishman said "this is exactly what we would expect for dolphin behavior... if you had hot water poured on you, you would flee, wouldn't you?"

The group plans to extend their two week research cruise by another week to see how far northward the dolphins migrate. Even though the researchers have been working in the same region off the Florida coast for ten years, the present pod has been studied for only three years. Tragically, another pod that had been closely followed for seven years was decimated by a great white shark in 2003.