Innisfail police said they had been inundated with calls from terrified residents whose "homes are literally crumbling around them".

"We have roofs flying off in Fly Fish Point, Silkwood and in the city centre," an Innisfail police spokeswoman said. "And we have trees across roads."

Police had been unable to leave the station despite hundreds of calls for help, she said.

"We've had reports of some casualties at Cairns hospital, some 20 or so," weather bureau forecaster Jonty Hall said. "There's also some reports of a few people missing as well."

Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm's landfall late Sunday, opening the way for mandatory evacuations in several coastal areas, where tidal surges of up to two metres (6.6 feet) were expected.

Hundreds of people evacuated coastal towns in the area and major airlines cancelled all flights into Cairns and Townsville, the two biggest cities in the region.

The weather bureau describes a category five cyclone as "extremely dangerous with widespread destruction". It said Larry posed a very serious threat to life and property.

Forecaster Jonty Hall said conditions around Innisfail were "extremely dangerous".

"We're starting to see a very dangerous storm surge come to shore anywhere pretty south of Innisfail down towards Cardwell," he said. "It doesn't get much worse than this."

Local officials said on national radio that Larry's winds had knocked out power in some areas and was toppling trees.

Amanda Fitzpatrick, owner of the Barrier Reef Motel outside Innisfail, told ABC radio under the eye of the storm: "It was so terrifying, we were all crying.

"It's just like a bomb has gone off, like something went through and just bombed it."

Innisfail resident Wayne said: "Whatever trees aren't uprooted have snapped off or have no leaves on them. It's just unbelievable."

Garage roller doors had been "shredded, just shredded. It's really scary stuff".

Innisfail resident Des Hensler said the cyclone was the most frightening storm he had seen in the 35 to 40 years he had lived in far north Queensland.

He said he was sheltering alone in a church with water up to his ankles, "just standing in a place where I'm not going to get killed".

"A tree has just fallen on a house (and there's a) street light actually touching the ground, that's how strong the wind is," he told Seven Network television.

Reflecting the rough and tough attitude of many residents of Australia's tropical far north, he added: "It's just frightening. I don't get scared much but this is something to make any man tremble in his boots.

"There's a grey sheet of water, horizontal to the ground, and just taking everything in its path.

"And believe me, it's taking everything ... it is totally scary."

Rain and snow also fell across portions of the central Plains and mid-Mississippi Valley. In Texas, a few storms became severe, bringing lightning, strong winds, hail and heavy downpours. The rain caused flooding that prompted some evacuations, and a few people required rescue from high water, authorities said.

In the West, rain and snow fell across the Rockies. Helena, Mont., and Yellowstone National Park reported 4 inches of snow. Scattered rain also fell across portions of the Southwest. The remainder of the region enjoyed clear to partly cloudy skies and dry conditions.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states Sunday ranged from a low of minus 4 degrees at Cook, Minn., and Crane Lake, Minn., to a high of 88 degrees at Harlingen, Texas.

This has been known for a long time. What's new is that a variety of researchers are asking what cosmic rays do to our world and its weather.

Last year, the Proceedings of the Royal Society (a major science journal in Britain) published a theory that cosmic rays "unambiguously" form clouds and affect our climate.

Florida Tech and the University of Florida are jointly investigating whether cosmic rays are the trigger that makes a charged thundercloud let rip with lightning.

In 2003, scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas suggested that cosmic rays "influence cloud formation, can affect climate and harm live organisms directly via increase of radiation dose," an effect they claim to trace over millions of years of fossil history.

A native of Bratislava in Slovakia, Mr. Veizer left because Russian troops entered Czechoslovakia in 1968. He's been building up honours ever since in the field of geochemistry -- learning about Earth's past by the chemistry preserved in rocks and sediments.
The Royal Society of Canada called him "one of the most creative, innovative and productive geoscientists of our times," and added: "He has generated entirely new concepts that have proven key in our understanding the geochemical history of Earth."

He was the director of the Earth System Evolution Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He held a special research chair at the University of Ottawa.

He won the 1992 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, worth $2.2 million, and representing the German government's highest prize for research in any field. The judges said he "has in front of his eyes the overall picture of the Earth during its entire 4.5 billion years of evolution," and he is "one of the most creative ... geologists of his time."

Yet for years he held back on his climate doubts. "I was scared," he says.

He still is.

Questioning the fundamentals of climate change -- the theory that man-made gases such as carbon dioxide are building up and warming our climate -- is a fast way to start a nasty, personal fight in the science world. The weight of scientific opinion is overwhelmingly pro-greenhouse-gas, which means anti-Veizer. Doubters tend to be written off as paid mouthpieces for the oil industry.

Still, he has published his theory in Geoscience Canada, the journal of the Geological Association of Canada. The article is called "Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle."

In his paper, Mr. Veizer concludes: "Empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers."

The majority of climate scientists still firmly believe that greenhouse gases are to blame.

It's fine to use natural events to explain climates of the distant past, says Gordon McBean of the University of Western Ontario, but it falls apart in explaining the recent warming -- since 1970 or so.

"If you don't include the greenhouse gases, all these projections show that if anything we should have been cooling for the past few decades. But it's the greenhouse gas signal over the past 30 years that has made the difference."

This is reflected in a series of reports by the International Panel on Climate Change -- hundreds of scientists examining this single issue. Mr. McBean was one of them.

In 1990, the panel members weren't sure whether to blame human pollution, so they offered no opinion. In 1995, they said the balance of evidence "suggests" human-caused gases were responsible. In 2001, they made the case more strongly.

Mr. Veizer felt uncomfortable with the idea that high levels of carbon dioxide alone are causing hot spells. For one thing, he says, Earth would have needed vastly more carbon dioxide than today to change temperatures so much. For another, his reading of the graphs shows that some rises in carbon dioxide came after increases in temperature, not before. And in one case at least, we appear to have had very high carbon dioxide at a cold time -- an "icehouse," not greenhouse.

He wondered: What if something else makes the temperature go up and down?

The $2.2-million German prize ended up financing his research. The professor says he would never have found financial support any other way; the prize gave him "absolute freedom."

He looked to geology. As environmental conditions change, different "isotopes" of some chemicals form. These are slightly different forms of any element -- carbon or oxygen, or less common substances such as beryllium. And these remain frozen in time in ancient rocks, or lake and ocean sediments, or glaciers. (Samples drilled from Antarctic ice go back more than 700,000 years, layer by layer.)

For Mr. Veizer, the idea is that cosmic rays hit gas molecules in the atmosphere and form the nucleus of what becomes a water vapour droplet. These in turn form clouds, reflecting some of the sun's energy back to space and cooling the Earth. Yet the numbers of cosmic rays vary.

"The question is therefore, Where do we have lots of cosmic rays?"

Most rays come from younger stars, which are clustered at some regions in the galaxy through which our solar system has passed its its 4.5-billion-year history. As well, our own sun deflects some of these rays away, but the sun's activity grows stronger and weaker. All these factors can change the number of cosmic rays that hit us

About a dozen people were treated at regional hospitals for minor cuts and abrasions, said Jim Guthrie, a spokesman for the state of Queensland's health department. Many people had taken shelter before the storm, or hunkered down in their homes.

"This is far north Queensland and most people live with cyclones year in, year out. They do take precautions," he said. "We've come out of it extremely well."

Cyclone Larry crashed ashore about 60 miles south of Cairns as a Category 5 storm, packing winds of up to 180 mph.

Cairns is a popular jumping-off point for visits to the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral system which runs parallel to the coast for more than 1,400 miles. Authorities said it was too early to assess possible damage to the reef, visited by nearly two million tourists each year.

In Innisfail, a farming town of 8,500 that was hardest hit, Mayor Neil Clarke estimated that thousands were left homeless. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the airport was being cleared to house people in tents. More than 50,000 people were without power.

"It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place," he said.

The storm was so bad at its height overnight that police were unable to venture out and help terrified residents who called to say the winds had ripped roofs off buildings and destroyed their homes. As emergency services fanned out across the region later to assess the damage, they encountered scenes of devastation.

"The damage to dwellings is very extensive," Prime Minister John Howard told the Nine Network from Melbourne. "Thank heavens it does not appear as though there have been any very serious injuries."

Howard said he would visit the stricken region in coming days and the government would provide aid to homeless families. He said he was confident the cyclone would not cause the kind of chaos seen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina last year.

"Australians are very good at responding to these things because everybody pitches in without restraint," he told reporters.

The main street of Innisfail was littered with the mangled remains of corrugated tin and iron roofs and shredded fronds from beach side palm trees. Queensland state leader Peter Beattie said more than half the homes in the town were damaged.

"Some have been flattened, roofs have been taken off," he told Macquarie Radio. "The property damage has been immense."

The storm also devastated banana and sugar cane plantations, the region's economic mainstay. Officials said damage would run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Des Hensler, an Innisfail resident, took shelter by himself in a church, with water up to his ankles. "I don't get scared much, but this is something to make any man tremble in his boots," he told the Seven television network.

Australia's military said it would send a medical team to the region. Helicopters would conduct low-level damage assessment flights.

State Disaster Coordination Center spokesman Peter Rekers warned residents to stay on their guard for deadly animals stirred up by the storm.

"Most of the casualties and deaths resulting from cyclones happen after the storm has passed," he warned. "Keep your kids away from flooded drains, be aware of snakes and crocodiles. Those guys will have had a bad night too."

The storm was the most powerful to hit Australia since Christmas Eve in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy destroyed the northern city of Darwin, killing 65 people.

The eruption in one of Raoul Island's three main craters-the first there since 1964-threw rocks and boulders into the air and buried the area around the lake in mud and ash up to 16 feet deep.

A rescue team was expected to set sail from New Zealand on Sunday to inspect the remote island and assess prospects for recovering the missing worker, who was part of a small team monitoring the nature reserve. By opting for a three-day sea trip, rather than flying, officials virtually ruled out finding the worker alive.

"He was at the exact epicenter of the massive destruction,'' said Conservation Minister Chris Carter after speaking to a rescue worker who had witnessed the devastation.

Carter said the rescuer estimated the worker, who left an hour before the eruption for the crater lake for a routine check of the water temperature, had only a "1 to 2 percent chance'' of surviving.

Two of the five surviving conservationists went in search of their missing colleague but could not get past a twisted mess of trees and mud and the erupting volcano forced them back. All five-three men and two women-were evacuated by helicopter to Auckland.

"They were very traumatized as one would expect. There has been only the six of them on the island since last October,'' Carter said. "They are like family members.''

A member of the helicopter rescue mission said the group was distraught at leaving their workmate behind.

"They are clearly upset. The guy is a good friend and they're a fairly close group,'' senior Constable Barry Shepherd, a search and rescue expert, told reporters. The conservation workers did not immediately speak to the media.

An aerial search for the missing man, in his early 30s, was hampered by fading light and clouds of steam and ash. The man's name was not released.

John Funnel, the helicopter pilot who flew the rescue mission, said the eruption ripped up trees and dumped ash over half the 72-acre island. He said the dense clouds of ash would have brought the helicopter down if he had flown into them.

The rescue team would have had to "get right into the vent of the volcano which was still active in order to search for the missing party,'' he said. "Hovering in a crater lake when it has just been erupting is not where you want to be unless you absolutely have to.''

A group of police, conservation officials and one vulcanologist was likely to set sail Sunday, but will only land if they decide it is safe based on visual checks and updates on seismic activity, said Rolien Elliot, the Conservation Department's area manager.

The volcano spewed steam and ash hundreds of yards into the air on Friday, and moderate earthquakes of magnitude 3 to 4 shook the island, but no lava or molten rock was reported flowing from the vent.

Vulcanologist Michael Rosenberg said the eruption was of a "moderate size'' and looked similar to the one in 1964.

Friday's explosion "seems to have occurred with no immediate warning,'' New Zealand's main geological group, GNS Science said in a statement.

On Saturday, there were only clusters of small earthquakes and no obvious volcanic activity on the partly bush-covered island, GNS Science reported.

The last known eruption on Raoul Island, about 625 miles northeast of the New Zealand city of Auckland, was on Nov. 21, 1964, from a vent close to Green Lake. There were no casualties.

The chain to which it belongs-New Zealand's Kermadec Islands-was formed by a string of volcanoes that rose up to 26,000 feet from the ocean floor.

An alarming trend

In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.

Other factors less important

The researchers used statistical models and techniques from a field of mathematics called information theory to determine factors contributing to hurricane strength from 1970 to 2004 in six of the world's ocean basins, including the North Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

They looked at four factors that are known to affect hurricane intensity:

* Humidity in the troposphere-the part of the atmosphere stretching from surface of the Earth to about 6 miles up
* Wind shear that can throttle storm formation
* Rising sea-surface temperatures
* Large-scale air circulation patterns known as "zonal stretching deformations"

Of these factors, only rising sea surface temperatures was found to influence hurricane intensity in a statistically significant way over a long-term basis. The other factors affected hurricane activity on short time scales only.

"We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear," said study team member Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of year to year variability but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean."

An answer for the critics

The new study potentially addresses one major criticism leveled by scientists skeptical of any strong link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane strength, said Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study.

Last year, Emanuel published a study correlating the documented increase in hurricane duration and intensity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the 1970s to rises in sea surface temperatures over the same time period.

"We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis," Emanuel said in an email. "[We didn't do so] because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point."

Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), believes the new study's main finding is accurate but thinks the effects of some of the environmental factors on hurricane intensity might have been underestimated.

"The reason is they're covering a period from 1970 to 2004. 1979 is the year when satellites were introduced into the [NCEP/NCAR] Reanalysis. The quality of the analysis prior to 1979 is simply nowhere near as good," said Trenberth, who also was not involved in the study.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis is the database the researchers drew upon for information about the effects of troposphere humidity, wind shear and zonal stretching deformation on hurricane intensity; sea surface temperature data came from a different database.

Curry acknowledged that reanalysis data prior to 1979 is of slightly lower quality than more recent data but believes this doesn't substantially change the study's main finding. Trenberth agreed: "I suspect they may well have gotten the right answer anyway," he told LiveScience.

Natural cycles?

Some scientists have explained the rising strength of hurricanes as being part of natural weather cycles in the world's oceans.

In the North Atlantic, this cycle is called the Atlantic multi-decadal mode. Every 20 to 40 years, Atlantic Ocean and atmospheric conditions conspire to produce just the right conditions to cause increased storm and hurricane activity.

The Atlantic Ocean is currently going through an active period of hurricane activity that began in 1995 and which has continued to the present. The previous active cycle lasted from the late 1920's to 1970, and peaked around 1950.

These cycles definitely do influence hurricane intensity, but they can't be the whole story, Curry said.

While scientists expect stronger hurricanes based on natural cycles alone, the researchers suspect other contributing factors, since current hurricanes are even stronger than natural cycles predict.

"We're not even at the peak of current cycle, we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950," Curry said.

Some scientists still think it's too premature to make any definitive links between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity.

"We simply don't have enough data yet," said Thomas Huntington in of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Category 5 hurricanes don't come around very often, so you need the benefit of a much longer time series to look back and say 'Yup, there has been an increase.'"

Huntington is the author of a recent review of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies showing that although many aspects of the global water cycle-including precipitation, evaporation and sea surface temperatures-have increased or risen, the trend cannot be consistently correlated with increases in the frequency or intensity of storms or floods over the past century. Huntington's study was announced this week and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Hydrology.

Brace yourselves

Whatever the underlying cause, most scientists agree that people will need to brace themselves for stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the coming years and decades.

However, most regions around the world will not experience more storms. The only exception to this is the North Atlantic, where hurricanes have become both more numerous and longer-lasting in recent years, especially since 1995. The reasons for this regional disparity are still unclear.

The team's findings are controversial because they draw a connection between stronger hurricanes and rising sea surface temperatures-a phenomenon that has itself already been linked to human-induced global warming.

The study by Curry and her colleagues therefore raises the frightening possibility that humans have inadvertently boosted the destructive power of one of Nature's most devastating and feared storms.

"If humans are increasing sea surface temperatures and if you buy this link between increases rising sea surface temperatures and increases in hurricane intensity, that's the conclusion you come to," Curry said.