Locals said the 20-minute storm hit the suburb about 4pm (AEDT) with hailstones the size of golf balls smashing windscreens, denting cars and damaging skylights. [...]

"There could be as many as 1,000 cars in the town that have been damaged," he said.

Mr Donohue said the storm was "totally bizarre". [...]

A State Emergency Service (SES) spokeswoman said they received more 30 calls for help, most of them in Lilydale.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Ward Ronney said reports of hail up to 3cm in diameter had been recorded, with the majority reported in Lilydale.

"When hail is that large it tends to be concentrated in one area," he said. [...]

At least two people were killed or swept away and French television said thousands of people were being moved from their homes by boat.

The southern city of Marseilles was among the worst hit, with 500 emergency calls for flood-related incidents and up to 1,000 people evacuated.

Many roads were flooded and schools closed for the day.

The two nuclear reactors were shut down at the Cruas-Meysse plant in the Ardeche region, where officials feared the flooded Rhone river could sweep branches and other obstructions into the cooling system.

The two 900-megawatt reactors are among four at the plant.

A spokeswoman for government nuclear safety authority ASN described the shutdown as a "preventative measure".

Storm victims:

One woman in her 50s was swept from a bridge in Virigneux in the central Loire region, reportedly as she tried to push her car to safety.

The other person who died is believed to have been found in a road tunnel in Marseilles.

In Charlieu, in the south-east France, flooding left 750 students with a day off after their school shut.

Seventeen of France's administrative departments have been placed on alert until Thursday amid forecasts that heavy rain will continue.

Officials are anxiously watching the situation in the Rhone Valley amid fears of further flooding.

The country is also battling a flu outbreak. Officials said two million cases were expected by the end of the week.

Some emergency departments in the Paris area have been filled to overflowing with flu victims, many of them children.

Flooding along the Rhone River from Lyon to Marseille was due to hit its peak during the day, while winds of up to 93 mph were expected to lash the Mediterranean coast, officials said. Two people were still missing in the floods.

Heavy rain moving west also set off flood alerts reaching as far as the Pyrenees Mountains.

"Today we're faced with what could be the floods of the century," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told Europe 1 radio. "We have to mobilize all our resources." [...]

Using modelling techniques, the Finnish team was able to extend data on solar activity back to 850 AD.

The researchers found that there has been a sharp increase in the number of sunspots since the beginning of the 20th century. They calculated that the average number was about 30 per year between 850 and 1900, and then increased to 60 between 1900 and 1944, and is now at its highest ever value of 76.

"We need to understand this unprecedented level of activity," Usoskin told PhysicsWeb. "Is it is a rare event that happens once a millennium - which means that the Sun will return to normal - or is it a new dynamic state that will keep solar activity levels high?" The Finnish-German team also speculates that increased solar activity may be having an effect on the Earth's climate, but more work is needed to clarify this. [...]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) --Zeb Hogan plunges into the muddy brown waters of the Tonle Sap River and grabs hold of a 321-pound silvery giant catfish that has just slid out of a blue tarp held by several Cambodian fisherman. [...]

The Mekong giant catfish -- whose Cambodian name means "the king of fish" -- is a rare find in these waters, a Mekong River tributary.

Its sharp fall in numbers -- only eight were reported caught last year, down from about 80 a decade ago -- led to its recent listing as critically endangered, and has researchers concerned about the health of the mighty Mekong. [...]

Corridor Resources of Halifax is an oil and gas exploration company. It has permission from the Offshore Petroleum Board to begin six days of undersea testing over 500 kilometres, starting as early as Dec. 4.

Just eight regions, down from 19 at the height of the flooding on Tuesday, were covered by storm warnings early today from the national weather service.

It forecast a "clear improvement in meteorological conditions" for later in the day. [...]

Flooding along the Rhone River from Lyons to Marseilles was due to reach its peak yesterday, as winds of up to 90mph were forecast to strike the Mediterranean coast.

Several towns along the river and its tributaries were evacuated and schools closed. When the Rhone reaches a depth of 5.5 metres, it triggers an alert. It is now at 6.42 metres, its highest recorded level.

Christian Fremont, the prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone department, said the authorities were on a "war footing" and braced for a long crisis. [...]

Strong won the award because he displays international leadership on environmental concerns by linking scientific and technological resources, said academy spokeswoman Barbara Rice.

The medal has been issued since 1914.

Strong, a long-time confidant and adviser to incoming prime minister Paul Martin, first hired Martin as an executive assistant when Strong ran Montreal's Power Corp.

Strong has also headed Petro-Canada and Ontario Hydro.

The Manitoba-born environmentalist organized the first UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972 and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday that Strong, 74, will receive this year's Public Welfare Medal awarded annually since 1914 to people who best use science to advance public welfare.

Industrial emissions are a leading cause, they say -- contradicting critics, already in the minority, who argue that climate change could be caused by mostly natural forces. [...]

"The likely result is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts, e.g., wildfires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea-level rise," they added in a commentary to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Karl and Trenberth estimate that, between 1990 and 2100, there is a 90 percent probability that average global temperatures will rise by between 3.1 and 8.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 and 4.9 degrees Celsius) because of human influences on climate.

Such dramatic warming will further melt already crumbling glaciers, inundating coastal areas. Many other groups have already shown that ice in Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica is melting quickly.

Karl and Trenberth noted that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen by 31 percent since preindustrial times. [...]

A once-in-a-lifetime storm

Large areas of the city's north and east were under water after a spectacular electrical storm dumped more than 100 millimetres of rain - almost twice the entire December average - in just two hours.

Emergency services were overwhelmed with calls for help from people who woke in the middle of the night to find their homes awash and from motorists left stranded by floodwaters blocking major roads and freeways.

Among the worst-hit areas were Coburg, Northcote, Fitzroy and Fairfield in the city's inner north, and Doncaster in the east, where 107 millimetres of rain was recorded.

"In terms of the amount of rain that fell in a very short period of time, it's a one-in-a-100-year type of event," the Bureau of Meteorology's Jon Gill said. "For some people it's certainly the worst they are likely to experience in their lifetime."

With cheap flights to top ski destinations readily available, having a week on the slopes is a trend now common for winter vacationers across the world. Shame then, that one of the biggest contributors to climate change, aviation, could be shooting itself in the ski-clad foot, as hotter temperatures mean less snow, and the winter sports industry is likely to be hit hard by developing weather patterns, according to a UNEP report out this week.

The report predicts that a warmer climate could in the future present between 37-56% of ski destinations with such low levels of snow that places such as the Swiss resorts of Wildhaus and Unterwasser, will have acute difficulties in attracting tourists. [...]

Despite the recent rain, England and Wales has experienced one of the driest periods on record - the second driest since 1921 - putting water supplies under immense pressure and draining existing reserves. The Agency estimates that it will take another four weeks of persistent rainfall for river flows and groundwater levels to begin a sustained recovery. [...]

Earth is surrounded by a magnetic force field--a bubble in space called "the magnetosphere" tens of thousands of miles wide. Although many people don't know it exists, the magnetosphere is familiar. It's a far flung part of the same planetary magnetic field that deflects compass needles here on Earth's surface.

And it's important. The magnetosphere acts as a shield that protects us from solar storms.

According to new observations, however, from NASA's IMAGE spacecraft and the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cluster satellites, immense cracks sometimes develop in Earth's magnetosphere and remain open for hours. This allows the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather.

"We've discovered that our magnetic shield is drafty, like a house with a window stuck open during a storm," says Harald Frey of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author of a paper on this research published Dec. 4 in Nature. "The house deflects most of the storm, but the couch is ruined. Similarly, our magnetic shield takes the brunt of space storms, but some energy slips through its cracks, sometimes enough to cause problems with satellites, radio communication, and power systems."

"The new knowledge that the cracks are open for long periods can be incorporated into our space weather forecasting computer models to more accurately predict how our space weather is influenced by violent events on the Sun," adds Tai Phan, also of UC Berkeley, co-author of the Nature paper.

The solar wind is a fast-moving stream of electrically charged particles (electrons and ions) blown constantly from the Sun. The wind can get gusty during violent solar events, like coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which can shoot a billion tons of electrified gas into space at millions of miles per hour.

Earth's magnetosphere generally does a good job of deflecting the particles and snarled magnetic fields carried by CMEs. Even so, space storms and their vivid effects, like auroras which light up the sky over the polar regions with more than a hundred million watts of power, have long indicated that the shield was not impenetrable.

In 1961, Jim Dungey of the Imperial College, United Kingdom, predicted that cracks might form in the magnetic shield when the solar wind contained a magnetic field that was oriented in the opposite direction to a portion of the Earth's field. In these regions, the two magnetic fields would interconnect through a process known as "magnetic reconnection," forming a crack in the shield through which the electrically charged particles of the solar wind could flow.

In 1979, Goetz Paschmann of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany detected the cracks using the International Sun Earth Explorer (ISEE) spacecraft. However, since this spacecraft only briefly passed through the cracks during its orbit, it was unknown if the cracks were temporary features or if they were stable for long periods.

In the new observations, the Imager for Magnetopause to Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite revealed an area almost the size of California in the arctic upper atmosphere where a 75-megawatt "proton aurora" flared for hours. A proton aurora is a form of Northern Lights caused by heavy solar ions striking Earth's upper atmosphere, causing it to emit ultraviolet light--invisible to the human eye but detectable by the Far Ultraviolet Imager on IMAGE. While this aurora was being recorded by IMAGE, the 4-satellite Cluster constellation flew far above IMAGE, directly through the crack, and detected solar wind ions streaming through it.

This stream of solar wind ions bombarded our atmosphere in precisely the same region where IMAGE saw the proton aurora. The fact that IMAGE was able to view the proton aurora for more than 9 hours implies that the crack remained continuously open. Researchers estimate that the crack was twice the size of Earth at the boundary of our magnetic shield--about 38,000 miles (60,000 km) above the planet's surface. Since the magnetic field converges as it enters the Earth in the polar regions, the crack narrowed to about the size of California down near the upper atmosphere.

Fortunately, these cracks don't expose Earth's surface to the solar wind. Our atmosphere protects us, even when our magnetic field doesn't. The effects of solar storms are felt mainly in the high upper atmosphere and the region of space around Earth where satellites orbit.

Meteorologists said 12 inches of snow could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend with winds of 50 mph, according to Reuters.

"For early December, it's a heck of a storm," Joe Bastardi, meteorologist with AccuWeather, told Reuters. "This is a major nor'easter," he said.

"This could be the worst storm since December of 1981 when we had 10 to 20 inches of snowfall whipped by high winds." [...]

Forecasters said the system could hit even harder over the weekend, with total snow accumulations of up to two feet in Massachusetts and near-blizzard conditions in parts of Maine and New Hampshire. [...]

A motorist was killed near Joenkoeping, 204 miles south-west of Stockholm, when a tree fell on his car, Swedish media reported.

Heavy winds knocked out power to 100,000 people as the storm swept across the central and southern parts of the Scandinavian country.

Hundreds of utility workers were dispatched to repair lines, but power companies said electricity was not likely to be fully restored until Sunday.

In neighbouring Norway, thousands were without power and train traffic came to a standstill in the southern part of the country, the Norwegian news agency NTB reported.

The birds are northern fulmars (a smaller cousin of the Albatross) and beachgoers in Lincoln County have counted more than 400 dead ones this fall. [...]

And experts don't know why. Some worry that man-made causes, such as plastic or toxins are to blame. Others dismiss the die-off as cyclical.

But this year's death toll dwarfs any other on record in Oregon. [...]

The turtles, almost all under 6 years old, are immobilized by cold waters that on Wednesday dipped to 28 degrees near shore in Orleans. Unable to paddle their flippers or even to feed, they are at the mercy of ocean currents and wash up on shore when a strong wind blows, as it has in recent weeks. [...]

Before the 1970s, reports of turtles washing up on Cape beaches were rare. Scientists believed that the handful of turtles they found, particularly the Kemp's ridleys, were "lost waifs" that got caught in the Gulf Stream.

But since the 1970s, when Prescott began organizing volunteers to walk the beaches, the numbers have steadily risen, hitting an all-time high of 281 strandings in 1999. Numbers have dipped slightly since then, but still remain high. [...]

At least eight deaths were blamed on the storm, and police urged people to just stay home. [...]

Snow fell at a rate of about an inch an hour at Binghamton, N.Y., and the National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of Maine, Connecticut, southeastern New York and New Jersey. Stiff wind blew the snow sideways in places and whipped up rough surf along the coast. [...]

"What we're seeing now is the tip of the iceberg," meteorologist Roger Hill of Worcester, Vt., said Saturday morning. "The beast is going to be here shortly." [...]

At least three people were reported to have died in weather-related accidents and hundreds of flights were cancelled.

Up to two feet (0.6m) of snow is expected to fall over several states - including Massachusetts and Vermont - on Sunday, forecasters have warned.

The National Weather Service said heavy snow and strong winds would continue until the storm headed out to sea.

'Worse to come'

Massachusetts saw some of the heaviest snow fall and Boston's Logan Airport was forced to cancel hundreds of flights.

"We've gone through the hors d'oeuvres of this storm but the main course is still to come," public affairs officer for Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency Peter Judge told Reuters news agency.

"The ugly part will get us tonight."

"We could get a heavy snowstorm of up to 30 centimetres in many parts of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I.," said Environment Canada meteorologist Doug Steeves.

Odette was expected to see up to 15 inches of rain falling on parts of the Dominican Republic and neighbouring Haiti. [...]

More than 10,000 people were evacuated from low-lying south-western areas, said Julian Pena, governor of Barahona province.

It was the second time in less than a month that heavy rains have forced Dominicans from their homes.

Three weeks ago, rainstorms soaked the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, overflowing rivers banks and creating landslides and flash floods that killed seven people and forced thousands to leave.

The report, by a German government body, says that even if it is fully implemented, the protocol will only have a "marginal attenuating effect" on the climate change. But last week even this was thrown into doubt amid contradictory signals from the Russian government as to whether it will allow the treaty to come into effect. [...]

If the ice cap in Greenland and the Arctic continues to melt at its current rate, Europe's temperatures would take a sharp dip after five or more decades of increasingly warm weather. That turnaround could spell trouble for regions that by then will have adapted to more tropical conditions, the experts told reporters Friday at a U.N. climate change conference here. [...]

Bamber also said that in the next five years, Europe could expect increasingly hazardous conditions in the Alps. Last summer was the first ever that the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc were closed for fear of rocks loosened by melted ice and snow.

And during Europe's record heat wave this summer, 10 percent of the "permanent" ice in the Italian Alps melted away, said Damiano Di Simine, president of the Italian chapter of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps.

He told reporters that 53 billion cubic feet of fresh water had been lost, a resource critical to northern Italy's water-intensive crops, like rice.

"But every year we lose large quotas of water, between 5 and 10 percent of the Alpine ice, so within about 20 or 30 years, well lose it all," he said.

Earlier this week, the United Nations Environment Program issued a report saying that global warming was threatening the world's ski resorts, with melting snow at lower altitudes forcing the sport to move higher and higher up mountains, and threatening to make downhill skiing disappear altogether at some resorts. [...]

"The hardest and most fundamental problem to be overcome is the U.S. at present," Hare said. "And unless and until the U.S. starts to move, everyone else will be that much slower."

New Brunswick bore the brunt of the storm. In some places, a half metre of snow blanketed streets and buried cars. No major accidents were reported, despite whiteout conditions on many highways.

About 3,000 people lost their power, mostly in the Bouctouche to Shediac area. It'll likely be Monday before everyone gets their electricity back, NB Power said.

Environment Canada said by the time the snow tapers off in Moncton Monday, the city could receive between 60 and 70 centimetres of snow.

Winds of up to 100 km/hr whipped southern New Brunswick. Gusts of 85 km/hr were reported in Prince Edward Island, strong enough to prompt Northumberland ferries to suspend their runs for the day.

Boston's Logan Airport closed temporarily after a snowstorm clogged runways and caused major delays, but reopened after 10:00 am (1500 GMT). Flight delays and cancellations were reported Saturday at the three New York-area airports.

New York and other major northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland, received a significant amount of snowfall. [...]

Although waters had receded in many of the southern and southeastern regions inundated since Monday, operations were continuing in the town of Arles, between Marseille and Montpellier, to evacuate residents, and rain-swelled rivers endangered towns in the centre of the country. [...]

We knew that summer 2003 was remarkable: Britain experienced its record high temperature and continental Europe saw forest fires raging out of control, great rivers drying to a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how remarkable is only now becoming clear.

The three months of June, July and August were the warmest ever recorded in western and central Europe, with record national highs in Portugal, Germany and Switzerland as well as in Britain. And they were the warmest by a very long way.

Over a great rectangular block of the earth stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in Switzerland and southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months was 3.78C above the long-term norm, said the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which is one of the world's leading institutions for the monitoring and analysis of temperature records.

That excess might not seem a lot until you are aware of the context - but then you realise it is enormous. There is nothing like this in previous data, anywhere.

It is considered so exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director, is prepared to say openly - in a way few scientists have done before - that the 2003 extreme may be directly attributed, not to natural climate variability, but to global warming caused by human actions. Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high temperatures are "consistent with predictions" of climate change. [...]

Over a large swath of the western part of the European continent, records were broken in all three months, not just monthly averages, but for daily extremes and the lengths of spells above thresholds. New national records were set in at least four countries. Britain experienced its record high on 10 August when the mercury registered 38.5 C(101.3F) at Faversham in Kent - the first time the British Isles had recorded a three-figure Fahrenheit temperature.

Germany had a new record of 40.8C (105.4), Switzerland one of 41.5C (106.7F) - Swiss data show the summer as the hottest since at least 1500 - and Portugal a quite astonishing 47.3C (117.1F).

Although France did not see a new national record - that still stands at the 44C (111.2F) registered at Toulouse on 8 August 1923 - the country suffered severely from La Canicule, the heat wave, which was headline news for most of the late summer. In southern and eastern France, according to Professor Jones, 29 sites recorded temperatures exceeding 40C (104F) during August, with the record being 42.6C (108.7F) at Orange in the Rhone valley. [...]

Continental Europe in summer 2003 had a taste of what global warming will really be like: unpleasant and dangerous.

[...] First, let us remind ourselves of the magnitude of the threat. Global warming is already well under way: even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, we would see a rise in planetary temperatures of 1.1 degrees C, twice the warming experienced over the past century, and enough to wipe out most of the world's tropical coral reefs as well as a good proportion of mountain glaciers. Bad as that is, it is still an unrealistically optimistic scenario. It is projected that greenhouse gas emissions will go on rising for decades; the IPCC predicts a global temperature rise of between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees by 2100. At the lower end of this scale, large areas of agriculturally productive land will be destroyed; entire countries will disappear through rapid sea-level rise; and entire regions in the arid subtropics will become uninhabitable. [...]

Yet as if in a parallel universe, plans continue to be made for business as usual, with rapid economic growth projected to continue unabated, still largely driven by fossil-fuel energy: oil consumption will increase by 50 per cent over the next two decades. Some calculations show emissions of countries from the south alone breaking through the safe "corridor" (within which we could avoid major climate impacts) in as little as a decade.

These dangerous trends continue almost unchallenged. Why? Because we appear to be experiencing a disastrous form of collective denial, more typically found among societies suffering major institutional human rights abuses - such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany - where individuals may understand the reality of the problems, but refuse to accept the implications. In his book States of Denial, the sociologist Stanley Cohen terms this condition "implicatory denial" and identifies it as a natural defence that humans tend to adopt when faced with a morally unthinkable situation. It has resulted in, to borrow another term from psychology, "cognitive dissonance" among opinion-formers and the public. Nearly everyone professes to care about global warming while simultaneously continuing with set patterns of behaviour that make the problem worse. [...]

Dry-season shortages have forced the 130 elephants from Ang Lue Nai wildlife sanctuary, which sprawls over five provinces, to seek food and water in nearby settlements, the sanctuary's chief Yoo Senatham told the Bangkok Post.

Yoo said the elephants had learned to pick up sugarcane dropped by drivers who took pity on them, but that the practice had taught them dangerous new habits.

He told the daily of incidents where the leader of the herd had stood in the road to block the vehicle while the others unloaded the produce with their trunks. [...]

The storm late yesterday also brought down powerlines and caused the evacuation of a big shopping centre in the central Queensland industrial city.

The district manager of the counter disaster rescue service, Brad Lutton, said he understood it was the worst storm in a decade to hit the city, but at this stage the extent of damage was not known. [...]

Welcome to the future.

Fires that charred nearly three-quarters of a million acres could presage increasingly severe fire danger as global warming weakens more forests through disease and drought, experts warn.

Evidence of global warming is mounting: The last decade was the warmest in a century, 1998 went down as the hottest year in recorded memory and the trend continues. Scientists estimate that the globe's average temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

"It's very difficult to link each single event and each single variable with actions carried out by human society," said Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "But I think the scientific basis is strong enough for us to take action."

Melting glaciers, rising oceans

The melting of glacial ice would be one result of warmer temperatures. It's already happening: Alaskan glaciers melted twice as fast during the past five to seven years as before, according to the environmental organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Scientists are also alarmed by the situation in the European alps. There, glacial ice has shrunk by 10 to 20 percent during the last two decades.

"We're talking about disappearing glaciers," said Jennifer Morgan, WWF's climate director, adding that according to her organization's estimates, glaciers would be a thing of the past should temperatures rise by another 4 degrees Celsius. "That's significant," Morgan said. "I don't think that the politicians here have yet come to grasps with what that means."

According to recent scientific studies, many humans alive today will witness the melting of glaciers in their lifetime unless climate change can be stopped. IPCC scientists predict that temperatures will have risen by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

Large parts of Tokyo could be submerged under water should temperatures continue to rise, scientists say. Should this happen, "dangerous climatic changes" will become "highly probable," according to a recent report by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. The West Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice cap would begin melting and eventually lead to a rise in sea levels of up to nine meters (30 feet). London, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo, among others, would be largely submerged as a result, according to the government body's report.

Developing countries hit first and hardest

Coral reefs would die as a result of the rising water temperatures, numerous species would become extinct because they could not move to cooler areas quickly enough. Heat waves, droughts and floods would occur more frequently. Tropical diseases such as malaria, West Nile Virus and dengue fever would appear in regions where they have not been known so far.

Northern and Central Europe will remain relatively untouched by all of this -- at least in the beginning. Poor countries in Africa and Asia will have to bear the brunt of the change.

Developing countries will be hit first and hardest by climate change. "There is an equity issue that is involved over here," Pachauri said. "The bulk of the problem in increased concentration of greenhouse gases has come from the past patterns of development of the developed countries and unfortunately the worst impacts are likely to be felt by the developing countries."

But if fertility levels in the developing world remain at today's levels, the global population would reach 244 billion in 2150 and 134 trillion in 2300, according to the report, "World Population in 2300". At present, there are 6.3 billion people.

The report released on Tuesday forecast that the Japanese would live to the age of 108. Africa's population would explode while the Europeans could turn into a dwindling species, it said.

"It's like the Titanic with an iceberg ahead," said Joseph Chamie, director of the population division. "You sink because the rates are so low or you simply grow too rapidly because the rates are too high. Either way you have to change course."

The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call "megacryometeors" -- or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.

"I'm not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head," said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. "I'm worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn't exist."

Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people's heads.

Incidents like those may be just the beginning, according to Dr. David Travis, who chairs the department of geography and geology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

"If megacryometeor formation is linked to global warming, as we suspect, then it is fair to assume that these events may increase in the future," Travis said.

Martinez-Frias pioneered research on megacryometeors in January 2000, after ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds rained on Spain for 10 days.

At first, scientists thought the phenomenon was unique to Spain. During the past three years, however, they've accumulated strong evidence that megacryometeors are falling all around the globe.

More than 50 falls have been confirmed, and researchers believe that's a small fraction of the actual number, since others may hit unoccupied areas or melt before discovery.

Travis said most megacrymeteor falls occur in January, February and March.

Researchers were able to analyze ice samples from the 2000 incidents, thanks to witnesses who kept the material cold. Martinez's team quickly ruled out obvious explanations.

The ice balls, for instance, were not frozen water from toilets flushed on jetliners. The ice contained no human waste and none of the blue disinfectant used in airplane toilets. Air traffic control records showed that no planes flew over the areas near the ice falls, so the ice had not been shed from aircraft wings.

Chunks of debris from a comet? Again, lab tests showed that ice in megacryometeors had the distinctive chemical signature of ice in ordinary terrestrial hailstones.

Hail forms in the updrafts and downdrafts of thunderstorms. The updrafts carry droplets of super-cooled water, which freeze. More droplets hit the frozen particles as winds toss them around. The water freezes instantly and the hailstone grows, layer by layer.

Most hailstones weigh a fraction of an ounce, with 27 ounces the U. S. record.

Megacryometeors show the telltale onionskin layering seen in hailstones. They also contain dust particles and air pockets found in hail. But they are formed in cloudless skies, a notion that defies research on hail formation.

"Scientists are naturally reluctant to say something never can happen," said Charles Knight, a hail expert at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "But oh, dear. I would be tempted to say 'never' on this."

Knight has reviewed scientific papers on megacryometeors, and thinks the explanation that cites unusual atmospheric conditions possibly linked to global warming, is probably wrong, although he doesn't have a better one.

Global warming involves higher temperatures on Earth's surface, but creates colder conditions in the stratosphere, the uppermost layer of the atmosphere, according to Travis.

He has linked megacryometeor events to unusual conditions in the "tropopause," the boundary between the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) and the stratosphere. Located 5 to 9 miles above the surface, the tropopause marks the limit of clouds and is important in the development of storms.

Global warming may be making the tropopause colder, moister and more turbulent, Travis said, creating conditions in which ice crystals grow like ordinary hailstones in thunderclouds.

After one of the hottest summers in recorded history, Germany's forests have barely had time to recover before more bad news follows. The recently published Federal Forest Report states that only one third of all trees in Germany's woods are healthy, around 31 percent of the country's forestation, down from 35 percent 2002. High temperatures, long persistent dryness of soil and increasing ozone levels have particularly hit the nation's oak trees with a reported 83 percent falling ill, an increase of 10 percent on 2002.

The report ominously states that although things look bleak now the full extent of the damage will only be known in the next few years with tree damaging parasites boosted by this year's weather conditions increasing in numbers.

Scientists have known for some time that the magnetic field is in fact collapsing, at a rate faster than it would if flows of molten iron in the core had stopped completely.

And while the consequences would be nowhere near as catastrophic as those in the movie, geophysicists increasingly wonder whether the magnetic field has begun one of its occasional reversals that in the next few thousand years might lead to compasses pointing south instead of north.

At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here on Thursday, scientists presented research investigating the cause of the decline, its possible effects on the planet and what might be learned from geological records of earlier reversals.

The decline, as measured by magnetometers on Earth's surface, is 10 percent in the last 150 years. "We're seeing it's actually decreasing at a fairly impressive rate," said Dr. John A. Tarduno, a professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester. [...]

More than 2,500 people have been evacuated from Costa Rica's Caribbean zone as four days of persistent rains wiped out bridges and roads and left at least one person dead and another missing, officials said Saturday. [...]

Police reported at least 100 road accidents in the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg amid transport chaos caused by snow and ice. [...]

Every year from March to May strong cold winds from Siberia blow up huge volumes of yellow dust from the Gobi desert in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and north China, sending it as far as the Korean peninsula and Japan.

The storms, which hit capitals like Beijing and Seoul, can be so severe that they disrupt air flights and force schools to cancel classes while clinics are often crowded with people complaining of eye and respiratory illnesses. [...]

Chinese statistics show that dust storms have got worse in recent years due to continuous droughts in northwest China and Mongolia. In 2000, the storms hit 12 times, surging to 32 in 2001. [...]

[...] Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. [...]

At least 13 people have been confirmed dead and over 80 others reported missing and feared buried alive in landslides in the towns of Liloan and San Francisco in the island province of Southern Leyte since late Friday, officials of the National Disaster Coordinating Council said.

A PLAGUE of "killer" wasps could strike Victoria in the next few weeks. [...]

Authorities blamed illegal logging for the disaster, which was triggered by six days of pounding rains in provinces near the Pacific Ocean late Friday to early Saturday. The deforestation has led to soil erosion on nearby slopes. [...]

NOTRE-DAME-DE-MONTAUBAN, QUE. - Quebec civil security officials were closely watching floodwaters in the Mauricie region, where about three dozen families were forced out of their homes on the weekend.

Water levels on the Batiscan River, which had stabilized late Saturday, suddenly rose by more than 13 centimetres by Sunday. [...]

Another person is still missing after severe floods hit nine provinces cutting off several villages and burying sleeping people alive.

An official said tens of thousands houses were submerged and over 3,000 collapsed or were completely destroyed.