REAL, Philippines - Terrified survivors were fleeing the northeastern Philippines as a new storm bore down on the area where floods and landslides have killed more than 400 people and left nearly 200 missing.

Typhoon Nanmadol was early Friday expected to slam into the east coast of the main island of Luzon. Entire villages were washed away by a storm earlier this week and three towns were cut off and suffered heavy damage.

The new typhoon is packing winds of 175 kilometers (108.5 miles) per hour over the Pacific Ocean and is already bringing driving rain and strong winds to the devastated region, the government weather center said.

The worst-hit coastal towns of Real, Infanta and General Nakar suffered 364 dead and 139 missing, said the civil defense office in Manila. At least 48 people were killed and 38 missing elsewhere on Luzon. [...]

MIAMI - Everything about the Atlantic hurricane season was big -- lots of powerful storms that spawned hundreds of deadly tornadoes, many deaths, an unprecedented onslaught on Florida, a huge damage toll and millions evacuated.

As the six-month season drew to a close on Tuesday, it was just getting bigger. Tropical Storm Otto was born in the Atlantic Ocean and forecasters said they reclassified August's Tropical Storm Gaston to Hurricane Gaston.

By the numbers, the 2004 season has produced 15 storms, nine of them hurricanes. Six were "major" hurricanes with sustained winds of more than 110 mph.

"The amazing thing was only three of the storms did not have an impact on land," said U.S. National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield. Officials said 9.4 million people along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts came under evacuation orders this season.

Florida took the brunt of the damage in the United States, with hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne walloping the state within a six-week span, the first time a single state was hit by four hurricanes in one season since 1886, NHC officials said.

Damage from the four storms may exceed the $25 billion-plus toll of Hurricane Andrew, the killer 1992 storm against which all others in Florida are measured. "Future hurricanes will continue to bring higher and higher damages as long as we continue to develop the coastlines," Mayfield said.

CARIBBEAN LOSSES

In the Caribbean, Grenada, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic and Haiti sustained serious losses. Ivan damaged 90 percent of Grenada's housing stock, and Jeanne, as a tropical storm, spawned floods that killed about 3,000 people in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas.

Hurricane Ivan was a nightmare for the oil industry, thrashing through the Gulf of Mexico's most productive oil and gas fields and wrecking platforms and undersea pipelines.

Damage from the storm, which helped push oil prices to over $55 a barrel this fall, has so far cut more than 32 million barrels from an already tightly supplied market.

That is more than twice the impact on U.S. oil production caused by powerful hurricanes Isidore and Lili in 2002.

Producers have still not fully recovered their output, with about 10 percent of their normal production still shut.

Even as the official season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, waned, hurricane forecasters named the 15th storm. Otto was born on Tuesday about 810 miles east of Bermuda with 45 mph winds. It poses no threat to any land.

Study of Tropical Storm Gaston, which hit South Carolina three months ago, convinced experts that it had achieved the sustained 74 mph winds needed to be classified a hurricane, giving the 2004 season nine hurricanes.

The last decade brought more Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes than any 10-year period in history. That trend could continue for another two or three decades, officials said.

But for Florida, where thousands of residents are still struggling with cleanup, roof repairs and temporary housing from four hurricane strikes, a rerun of 2004 is highly unlikely.

"It's a very, very rare event," Mayfield said. "I wouldn't expect it again."

A bushfire could threaten properties at Gosford on the NSW central coast as the statewide heatwave continues today.

NSW Rural Fire Service media officer Cameron Wade said the fire was burning in the Rumbalara nature reserve, located in the middle of "a number" of properties.

The flames were not currently threatening properties but could if winds picked up, he said.

Nine firefighting units had been working to contain the blaze since 2am (AEDT) today.

The blaze was one of 20 small bushfires burning across the state, Mr Wade said. [...]

The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting a maximum of 35 degrees in Sydney and 38 in Penrith today, with hot to very hot north-west winds followed a gusty south-west change that could bring thunderstorms.

Temperatures in Sydney fell well short of the 42 degree scorcher predicted yesterday but the mercury soared in western NSW, with some parts of the state registering temperat

Why they are here at all has scientists baffled. Their arrival could, some speculate, be a genetic echo from a time when Australia's climate was very different.

Sydney is being visited by huge numbers of migrating caper white butterflies, so named because they lay their eggs on caper bushes that grow in Queensland and inland northern NSW.

About this time each year many of the butterflies, which live about two weeks, migrate south.

"They go all the way to Victoria. You even get stragglers going over into Tasmania," said David Britton, the entomology collections manager at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

But why fly away from the vital caper bushes that rarely grow in southern Australia?

"It's a real mystery," said Mr Britton, who suggested overbreeding might leave some with no choice but to seek "greener pastures".

So many caterpillars hatched that many caper bushes were "stripped back to twigs. They are eating themselves out of house and home, so they have to move out".

But "flying the wrong way ... there is no easy explanation", said Mr Britton, who added that, while most of the migrating butterflies flew to their deaths, a small number somehow survived to fly north again.

A CSIRO entomologist, Don Sands, agreed the behaviour seemed to defy nature's survival laws. "In nature, things just don't go and commit suicide," said Dr Sands, who speculated that the migration might be a genetic relic from hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the climate might have allowed caper bushes to grow in southern Australia.

"It's still unproven, but these butterflies may be genetically hard-wired to a climate we no longer have," he said. "But that is only a hypothesis." [...]

MARAGUNDON, Philippines (AP) - A powerful typhoon sliced through the Philippines on Friday, forcing more than 160,000 people to flee their homes to higher ground even as rescuers struggled to find the missing from an earlier storm that killed more than 420 people.

There was an unconfirmed report more than 1,000 were dead or unaccounted for from the typhoon that hit the Philippines earlier this week. Civil defence officials said at least 422 people were confirmed dead and another 177 missing. The military reported a toll of 479 dead and 560 missing but regional commander Maj.-Gen. Pedro Cabuay cautioned the figures were based on numbers provided by local officials that could not be immediately confirmed.

Mudslides and flash-floods caused by the earlier storm have turned entire provinces facing the Pacific Ocean into a sea of chocolate-brown mud littered with bodies, uprooted trees, collapsed homes and bridges.

Survivors sifted through piles of mud, which in some towns was ankle deep, for clothes and belongings. Soldiers, police and medical workers trekked with relief supplies across flood-ravaged roads and bare mountains to reach towns cut off by landslides.

In the town Infanta in Quezon province, east of the capital Manila, where at least 100 died, officials allowed residents to briefly leave evacuation centres to retrieve belongings from damaged homes but warned them to return because of the typhoon.

"We are not concerned so much about saving property. We just want to save lives," said Infanta Mayor Filipina America.

The latest storm, Typhoon Nanmadol, made landfall late Thursday along the northeastern coast with sustained winds of up to 185 kilometres an hour and gusts of up to 222 km/h, disrupting maritime rescue operations and partially grounding the Philippine air force. [...]

The BBC has made a disaster movie which predicts one billion people will be wiped off the earth by a "supervolcano".

The £3 million drama claims America's Yellowstone National Park is due an eruption of cataclysmic proportions.

If - or when - it does erupt, 100,000 Americans will be killed in minutes by a giant cloud of burning ash.

But the volcano will have such a profound effect on the global climate that up to one billion people will die as a result, the program will claim.

The doom-mongering drama is based on real life data, according to the BBC.

The Yellowstone volcano erupts every 600,000 years - and 640,000 years have passed since the last one.

Filmmakers worked with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handled the September 11 tragedy, the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey to make the drama.

Comment: Disinformation from the highest levels of the US government or cold hard facts? Remember the Pentagon Report on Climate Change? Time will tell what awaits us we suppose. But rest assured, if Yellowstone doesn't blow, don't worry, there are any number of impending cataclysms to choose from, just don't let them concern you. Ignorance is bliss after all, right?

Blisteringly hot summers similar to the one in 2003 when thousands of people in continental Europe died of heatstroke will become commonplace because of climate change, a study has found.

Scientists estimate global warming has already doubled the risk of similar hot summers, and if the climate continues to change, they will occur every couple of years.

It is estimated that between 22,000 and 35,000 people died heat-related deaths in Europe during the summer of 2003, when soaring temperatures and drought also caused widespread forest fires and crop failures in the Mediterranean area.

Until now it has not been possible to say with any accuracy how much of this extra heat was the result of man-made global warming and how much of it was the result of a naturally warm summer. But Peter Stott, of the Met Office's Hadley Centre, and Daithi Stone and Myles Allen, of Oxford University, have found a way of teasing apart the human and natural influences on the temperatures measured across Europe in 2003. Using a computer model of the climate, they found the extra heat that made the summer of 2003 the hottest for at least 500 years was largely the result of human influences, such as the burning of fossil fuel which exacerbates the planet's greenhouse effect.

Dr Stott said: "We simulated 2003 summer temperatures over Europe, with and without the effect of man's activities, and compared these with observations."

"We found that although the high temperature experienced was not impossible in a climate unaltered by man, it is very likely that greenhouse gases have at least doubled the risk.

"Our best estimate is that such a heatwave is now four times more likely as a result of human influence on climate."

The study, published in the journal Nature, calculates that human influence is to blame for 75 per cent of the increased risk.

At the rate at which the climate is changing, the scientists estimate that by the 2040s more than half of the summers will be warmer than that of 2003, and by the end of the century a summer similar to 2003 will be classed as unusually cold.

Global warming could lead to a big chill in the North Atlantic, at least if history is anything to go by, researchers reported.

Experts published evidence on Friday to support a popular theory that rising temperatures caused a big melt of polar ice 8200 years ago, causing a freshwater flood into the salty North Atlantic.

This would have changed the flow of the balmy Gulf Stream and, in just a few years, average temperatures plummeted, ushering in a deep freeze that lasted a century or more, researchers have proposed.

Writing in the 11 December issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Torbjorn Tornqvist, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says he has evidence that this happened.

"Few would argue it's the most dramatic climate change in the last 10,000 years," Tornqvist said. "We're now able to show the first sea-level record that corresponds to that event."

Bhubaneswar, : Climatic changes triggered by fossil fuel related carbon emission is one of the reasons for recurring natural calamities in Orissa that have claimed tens of thousands of lives, says a study.

This is the conclusion of Greenpeace, a global NGO campaigning against environmental degradation that sent teams to the coastal districts of Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpura and Puri between Oct 25 and Nov 6.

"The three districts are known for regular cyclones and sea surges," the energy campaigner of Greenpeace India, Srinivas Krishnaswamy, told IANS.

The team traced the damage caused by the super-cyclone followed by floods in 2001 and 2002. Villagers told the team that temperatures in their areas had been going up every year.

"Due to sand and saline ingress, there is an overall reduction in agricultural productivity and the bulk of the land is no longer fit for cultivation," Krishnaswamy said.

"As a result there is a change in the diet patterns of the residents and they now depend mainly on fish for food," he said.

Krishnaswamy said it has been estimated that Orissa's industries and coal-fired power plants would be emitting 164 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually by the year 2005.

This is the equivalent of about three percent of the projected growth in man-made greenhouse gases anticipated globally over the next decade.

In addition, industries would release toxic and potent global warming agents equivalent to eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

As these chemicals were long lasting, they would contribute to a "perpetual change" in the earth's atmosphere, he warned.

In one of the worst natural disasters in Orissa, more then 10,000 people died in a super cyclone in 1999.

FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) - Hurricane forecasters are predicting an above-average Atlantic hurricane season again next year after one of the most destructive seasons on record.

"We believe that 2005 will continue the trend of enhanced major hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin that we have seen over the past 10 years," Colorado State University forecaster William Gray said yesterday.

Gray's forecast team predicts there will be 11 named storms, with six reaching hurricane status. Of the six, three will likely develop into major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph (178 kph) or greater. There is a 69 per cent chance of at least one of the major hurricanes striking the US mainland, Gray said.

The long-term year average for storms is 9.6 per season, with six becoming hurricanes and 2.3 becoming intense hurricanes.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. This year, there were 15 named storms in the Atlantic region, including nine hurricanes, six of them major. Florida was hit by four hurricanes in August and September, a barrage unparalleled in history going back 130 years, forecasters said. [...]

JOHANNESBURG - A freak storm, described by some as a "a mini-tornado", caused havoc at Johannesburg International Airport last night.

Eight aircraft were sent slewing sideways across the apron tarmac when wind and heavy rain struck at 5.15pm.

Sapa reported minor injuries to crew and ground staff while aircraft belonging to SAA, Nationwide and Comair were rendered unserviceable.

Flight SA 479, a Boeing 737-800 weighing 55 tons, due to depart for East London at 5.50pm, was thrown 10 metres sideways by the wind, which was accompanied by torrential rain, lightning and hail that roared in across the runway from the East Rand.

The aircraft was being refuelled and the hose severed when the aircraft swung sideways. The passenger gangway was cast aside and smashed into the port engine.

No break in the drought gripping this region is expected through February, but the next three months are typically not the time of year when enough moisture falls to break a drought anyway, state climatologist Dennis Todey said.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center calls for drought conditions to persist through February in the northern Rockies region, including western South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, eastern Wyoming and most of Montana. Both the drier time of the year and recent below-normal snowpack are factors in the continued drought forecast, according to the NWS. [...]

(Australia) - THE drought across the Murray-Darling Basin is the worst since records began, with authorities characterising the effect on river communities and the environment as "unprecedented".

The conditions are more severe than the three previous big drys; the Federation drought from 1895-1903, in the 1940s and the mid-1960s.

Murray-Darling Basin Commission chief executive Wendy Craik said the past three years had the lowest inflows into Menindee Lakes on the lower Darling River in NSW on record.

"And when you consider the fact that water extractions now are higher than they were in those periods, the impact on communities, in irrigators and the environment, has obviously been greater," Dr Craik said.

She said the resulting downturn in farm production was flowing through the processing and infrastructure industries in communities along the river.

Salinity in Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert, near the mouth of the Murray in South Australia, had reached extreme levels and was expected to worsen.

The commission also found a widespread decline in the health of redgums lining the river from Euston to the Murray mouth and an increased incidence of dead fish, associated with low flows and drought. [...]

TOKYO — A rapidly expanding low-pressure system brought typhoon-class winds to the Japanese archipelago from Saturday night to Sunday night, causing blackouts, stranding ships and paralyzing some air and land traffic.

In Tokyo, winds of 144 kilometers per hour — the strongest ever in the capital — were recorded early Sunday morning. Elsewhere in the metropolitan area, they reached 172 kph in Chiba and 150 kph in Yokohama.

A tropical cyclone is racing towards the shores of Somalia and is expected to hit the coast on Monday at the latest, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) warned in a statement issued Saturday.

"The system is heading fast inland towards Somalia and will likely hit the neighbouring livelihood zones in Kenya and Ethiopia as well," the statement said. The three countries lie on and to the south of the Horn of Africa. [...]

JAKARTA, Dec. 5 (Xinhuanet)-- The death toll of the flood which took place in a number of districts in East Java province in Indonesia has increased to 11 up to Sunday, mainly residents of Blitar district.

Thousands of disaster-related victims from Blitar are now living in the location of refugees, according to the official Antara news agency.

The local officials in the province said the districts of Blitar and Kediri are the two worst areas hit by the flood which was caused by heavy rain in last days in East Java as tens of villages in the two districts are still submerged in a 40 to 50 cmdeep water.

BEIJING - The death toll from a landslide in southwest China's Guizhou Province has risen to 30.

Fourteen people are still missing after the disaster, which occurred early on Friday.

Rescue work is continuing, but officials say it is becoming more difficult to clear the site, with the increasing accumulation of rock and soil.

Officials have ruled out finding any of the buried victims alive after a huge mass of earth crashed down on the village in the early hours of Friday. Large excavating machines and more than 1,000 rescuers were trying to dig through the mud when the operation was suspended late Saturday. [...]

QUEBEC (CP) - Marine scientists are on high alert for a crab invasion in the St. Lawrence River.

A single Chinese mitten crab, one of the most invasive species in the world, was found in the river near Quebec City this fall. It is the first discovery of the crustacean in Canadian waters where conditions are right for it to thrive, according to some scientists.

The prolific crustacean plays havoc with shore-based fisheries by overwhelming nets. It also digs tunnels deep into fragile riverbanks, accelerating erosion.

Alarmed federal scientists are calling on fishermen and boaters to report any more sightings of the crab which has spread rapidly around the world from China.

"It is very invasive, it can reach incredible numbers in a very short, sudden population explosion," said Yves de Lafontaine, an aquatic ecosystems analyst with Environment Canada in Montreal.

The critter can travel more than 500 kilometres in its four-year lifetime, reaching as far as Cornwall, Ont., if it establishes a breeding population in the St. Lawrence.

Named for the dense patch of dark hair on some of the crabs' claws, mitten crabs live most of their lives in fresh water but breed in salt water, making the St. Lawrence River a potentially perfect home base.

Over several decades, the voracious crawler has moved to England, Germany and California. The crab often travels in the ballast of ships, but scientists in California believe it was intentionally released in the San Francisco Bay. [...]

REAL, Philippines - Relief agencies battled bad weather to deliver supplies into storm-ravaged areas of the Philippines as the toll of dead and missing from two storms in one week exceeded 1,400, officials said.

A tropical storm that hit the country on November 29 -- locally named "Winnie" -- left a total of 669 dead and 697 missing, most of them from the three northeastern coastal towns of Real, Infanta and General Nakar.

Colonel Jaime Buenaflor, the military commander in the storm-hit area, said there were 607 dead and 695 missing in the three towns according to figures from his soldiers who are helping in the relief effort.

The rest of the storm's victims were in other parts of the country as heavy rains caused flooding, landslides and other hazards such as fallen trees and power lines.

Typhoon Nanmadol, which hit on Thursday last week, has caused another 38 deaths and left another 33 people missing, the civil defense office said. [...]

ST. JOHN'S  —  A fierce winter storm closed schools, cancelled ferries, made roads treacherous and gave one Bay de Verde family an experience they'll never forget.

Much of Cathy Knapman's roof flew away at about 11:30 Monday morning.

"It's amazing – the wind is unbelievable," Knapman says.

Neighbours arrived with ropes to secure the rest of the Knapman's roof.

"There's nothing here to tie it onto, except a rock."

The storm has left much of her house exposed.

"That's the killer. Our whole house is exposed – if we have snow or rain tonight, everything in the house will be ruined," she says.

The family was not able to get a measurement of wind speed. Knapman said the family had been planning to buy a gauge for Christmas.

High winds, coupled with blizzard conditions, brought daily life to a standstill in different parts of the province.

For example, winds have been clocking well over 100 k/h in western Newfoundland, where most schools in the region are closed.

The family were walking close to Corfe Castle railway station
A grandmother was crushed to death by a falling branch in a tornado described by a coroner as "an act of God".

Pamela Hudson, 57, was walking with her husband and grandchild during a family holiday in Corfe Castle, Dorset, when a pine tree split and fell on her.

Firefighters pulled the boy free but Mrs Hudson, from Harpenden, Herts, was pronounced dead at the scene.

She was the first person in Britain to die in a tornado since 1913. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

Mrs Hudson's husband, Ian, suffered a fractured right hand in the accident.

He told the inquest in Bournemouth: "The most striking recollection I have is of a terrific rushing noise which was different to a noise I had ever heard before and then almost instantly I found myself surrounded by tree branches.

"I noticed my wife was trapped under what presumably was the trunk of the tree... but there were no signs of movement from her. From that moment on it was absolute mayhem."

Meteorologist Robert Doe, a member of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, said the freak tornado left a five-mile trail of damage in its wake with one farmer losing the roof of a barn and another tree left completely uprooted.

It started at Corfe Common and travelled as far as Wareham Channel.

Coroner Sheriff Payne said: "It was clearly an exceptional event. Something that no human steps could have prevented happening. "

LAKE BROWNWOOD (Texas) -- As tornadoes go, the one that hit the Thunderbird Bay area of Lake Brownwood Monday afternoon was a small, short-lived twister -- about 75 yards wide and 4 miles long, with wind speeds estimated at 70-80 mph, or an F1 on the Fujita Scale.

But even weak tornadoes can be dangerous, Hector Guerrero of the National Weather Service in San Angelo said.

"It's a weak tornado. Weak tornadoes kill people, too," Guerrero said. "Thank God we didn't have any injuries. We're just grateful nobody got hurt." [...]

(Jackson, MS) - Violent storms and tornados ripped through the state Tuesday morning leaving residents without electricity. In worse cases, some people lost parts of their homes.

Tree removal companies, Entergy trucks, insurance adjusters and residents worked together in the aftermath of Tuesday's storm.

Trey Proctor, an insurance adjustor with Farm Bureau surveyed the damage in Edwards. He said, "When I got here it kinda surprised me, I didn't know we had this much damage out here, this is the first house I've been to all day. " He had five more houses to visit in the area.

The Hinds County EOC said an F1 tornado hit a 14-mile radius around Edwards. It damaged two barns on Newman road. The owner said all of the animals were secured and no one was injured.

Just one street over on Puckett, a roof and yard was destroyed .

Lois Christian, the homeowner, describes the scene. "The sound was just crushing glass and roaring like a train, so we had no doubt it was a tornado." [...]

PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, December 8 (Itar-Tass) - A strong cyclone, accompanied by gale-force winds and snowfall, has hit southern Kamchatka, specialists from the local meteorological service told Itar-Tass on Wednesday. A storm warning has been issued in the region.

The cyclone has approached Kamchatka from the Khabarovsk region. According to specialists, its influence on the region won’t be long. The weather is expected to improve by Thursday morning, when the cyclone will move north. Snowdrifts and strong wind are expected in the north of the Kamchatka peninsula on Thursday.

Connie Clarke took about an hour to stop shaking Tuesday after a large locust tree in her front yard was uprooted and blew onto the top of her house in Kettering.

She and her husband, Steven, won't know the extent of the damage to their one-story, vinyl-sided house until the tree is cherry-picked from their roof today. They are simply happy no one was hurt.

One person in Bellbrook did suffer minor injuries during Tuesday's episode with winds that the National Weather Service in Wilmington said gusted from 45 to 57 mph.

A 47-year-old woman was taken to Miami Valley Hospital after a large limb from a dead tree blew into and through her windshield as she was driving in the 4400 block of Possum Run Road, Sugarcreek Twp. police reported. The woman, whose name was not released, lost control of her car and drove into another tree. The car ended up on its side. Police and firefighters were dispatched, police said.

Power lines were downed by snapping branches or pulled loose by the gales, representatives of Dayton Power and Light Co. and Cinergy said. [...]

An elderly couple have been swept away by swift floodwaters after their car became stranded in a swollen creek in central-west NSW.

The 75-year-old man and 64-year-old woman were reported missing about 10.30pm after their car was found in the middle of Caves Creek, about 15km from Orange.

The creek had been hit by a flash flood after heavy rain.

It was believed the couple got out of the car when it became stuck in the creek and were swept away, police said.

A search begun last night resumed this morning.

REAL, Philippines (AP) - At least four survivors were pulled Thursday from a building that collapsed in mudslides 10 days ago, while the death toll from devastating storms in the Philippines' northeast rose to at least 842. More than 750 people were missing.

The four survived by drinking "any kind of liquid that dripped" from the rubble that entrapped them, said Maria Tamares, 49, who was rescued along with her three-year-old granddaughter and two teenage boys in Real, about 65 kilometres east of Manila. Covered with blankets and lying on makeshift stretchers, they were flown in a military helicopter to a hospital in nearby Lucena city.

As rescue crews continued to pick their way through debris, the Office of Civil Defence raised the number of confirmed deaths from the storms by 102 to 842. It said 751 people were still missing.

Tamares and the others apparently had been trapped in the kitchen of the two-storey resort building, which was buried under piles of mud on Nov. 29, when the worst of two back-to-back storms that battered the region hit, witnesses said.

About 40 miners volunteering in the search heard voices in the rubble of the building and used sledgehammers, torches, hacksaws and bolt cutters to punch a hole through the thick concrete roof to reach the survivors. [...]

The water set creeks and streams higher throughout the Tennessee Valley region, where some areas had more than 7 inches of rain on Monday and Tuesday.

"It doesn't take a whole lot to make it worse because the ground was so saturated," said Dave Wilfing, a meteorologist with the weather service in Birmingham.

Walker County schools delayed opening as a strong band of storms move through, and Fayette County officials said they would dismiss classes early because of the threat of rising floodwaters covering roads.

The weather service issued tornado watches and warnings as the system moved across the state, but no serious damage was reported. [...]

The new dump of snow in the Cascade highlands that brought hope to the hearts of skiers could turn into a headache for people living near flood-prone rivers late this week.

Unseasonably warm weather and rain are expected to arrive today, dousing more than 2 feet of snow that fell on parts of the Cascade Mountains on Tuesday and yesterday. That sets up prime conditions for high rivers fueled by melting snow, said Cliff Mass, a University of Washington professor of atmospheric sciences.

The National Weather Service yesterday issued a flood watch through Saturday for eight Western Washington counties: King, Snohomish, Skagit, Whatcom, Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson and Mason. That means flooding is possible but not imminent.

Emergency-management officials in several counties said they were taking a wait-and-see attitude but were prepared in case things took a turn for the worse. In Skagit County, emergency-management director Tom Sheahan said the county is prepared to open the emergency-operations center tonight if the Skagit River reaches its flood stage in the town of Concrete.

"This could be an unusual storm," Sheahan said. [...]

European participants at a UN global climate conference in Argentina are leading discussions on ways to cut greenhouse emissions after 2012, looking beyond the time frame laid out to curb global warming set by the Kyoto Protocol.

Yvo de Boer, the chief EU negotiator, said Russia’s recent ratification of the Kyoto Protocol had inpired the nearly 200 nations at the conference to consider a post-Kyoto framework to curtail the gases blamed for Earth’s warming. [...]

The US and Australia are the biggest industrialised country to have rejected the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark agreement that takes effect in February and requires 30 of the world’s developed nations to reduce their output of heat-trapping gases produced by industry, automobiles and power plants.

Developing countries, facing possible emissions controls for the first time after 2012, have resisted opening talks about the "post-Kyoto" future. Under Kyoto, governments pledged new limits on emissions by industrial nations.

Russia last month ratified the accord in a major political boost that further highlighted the US opposition as one the biggest greenhouse gas polluters.

But the US stance, which has rankled European allies, hung over the annual UN gathering even as governments began discussing what comes after Kyoto.

"The main thing Russian ratification brought about is confirmation that the Kyoto Protocol is a global institution, and the US really is the odd one out," said Frederiks.

A US climate negotiator, Harlan Watson, said Tuesday that the United States should not be considered an environmental villain by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol, arguing the Bush administration plans to spend $5bn (€3.75bn) annually on research and technological development related to global warming.

The Marshall Islands has been warned of an approaching tropical storm, which threatens to turn into a cyclone.

Sara Prior of the Guam Meteorological office says there is a good chance it will develop by Monday.

"Guam residents are very familiar with the December typhoon and taking the Christmas lights down before Christmas," she said.

"So we're all going to be biting our nails."

Crews cleared boulders the size of refrigerators from Highway 36 near Triangle Lake on Thursday, allowing the road to reopen a day after heavy rains caused a mudslide carrying an estimated 100 yards of earth and rocks. Blachly schools were to remain closed today because of the slide.

"We're just going to err on the side of safety," said school secretary Linda Richardson. "Children are too valuable to risk."

Winter storms continued throughout Western Oregon on Thursday, bringing high surf and flood warnings to the coast and causing minor flooding, rockslides and other weather-related problems in the Southern Willamette Valley. [...]

(South Carolina) - The predawn silence turned violent Friday morning as thunder rumbled and winds tore through an area near the Calhoun-Orangeburg County line along U.S. Highway 601.

Orangeburg County Emergency Services Director John Smith said it is a miracle no one was killed or seriously hurt from what likely will be declared a tornado by the National Weather Service.

The destruction left in the path of the storm was extensive:

- Union Chapel Baptist Church near Jamison was totally destroyed.

- The building at Tri-County Electric Cooperative sustained damage.

- Two mobile homes were completely destroyed, with one family inside while the home was turning over. No one was seriously hurt.

- Nine other homes sustained damage.

DUSON, Louisiana - A tornado ripped a 50-foot path of damage across a five-mile area from Ridge to Scott just after 1 a.m. Thursday, leaving the homes of two families in ruins.

For Roland Thibodeaux, if there was any consolation it was that heís been through this before.

"It's not my first time starting over," he said, surveying what was his home before an early morning storm destroyed it. "We lost everything ... everything. It's all gone."

Thibodeaux said the tornado took one wall of his home in the middle of the night Thursday, then threw him from his bed, took the other wall and pushed it on top of him. Thankfully, he said, the wind took that wall off him, or "I'd still be under there."

The high winds took a glass double door from Thibodeauxís home and threw it into the home of Romero Odelon, about two doors down.
" I felt the walls shake a little bit and went to my son's room to wake him up, and the next thing I heard was - bam! - with the door coming through the bedroom," Odelon said.

"It's unbelievable. We had just recovered from the hurricane damage, and now this," he said. [...]

SHELBY, N.C. (AP) Torrential rain and wind pounded parts of North Carolina early Friday, killing at least one person when flash flooding washed out a bridge.

Two other people were rescued clinging to trees after their vehicles plunged into the rain-swollen creek in Cleveland County, west of Charlotte.

The remains of Joey Hoyle, 40, were found about three-quarters of a mile downstream from the Maple Springs Church Road bridge.

All three men apparently drove into the creek separately after floodwaters washed out the bridge, said state trooper Christopher McClelland, one of the first rescuers on the scene.

''This is a fairly unlit portion of the road,'' he said. ''The drivers were unaware the bridge was washed out, and they basically drove one after another into the swollen river.''

A resident who lived near the bridge called authorities around 3:15 a.m. to report the sounds of an apparent car crash, which may have been the bridge collapsing.

The storms caused wind gusts up to 40 mph. Fog was so thick overnight that rescuers had a hard time searching for other victims and had to call off efforts for several hours before resuming early Friday morning.

Soaked: Flood waters are still rising in New South Wales. (ABC TV)

Floodwaters are still rising in northern New South Wales.

The country town of Wee Waa is bracing itself for rising floodwaters and a disaster recovery centre has been established at Narrabri.

The weather bureau is warning of moderate to major flooding at Narrabri and downstream.

Ken McKenzie from the SES says helicopters are on standby for food drops and evacuations.

Meanwhile the north-west division of the SES says rainfall has eased around the Moree area.

However it is still expecting moderate to major flooding at Moree, Pallamallawa, Yarraman and Gravesend.

In South Australia it took SES crews several hours and 800 sandbags to get things back in order after homes were flooded in Murray Bridge.
Mount Gambier was also badly hit.
The Queensland SES received around 20 calls for help after minor flooding on the Gold Coast.
And severe thunderstorms caused flash flooding in country areas in central and western Victoria.
Senior forecaster Richard Carline says Geelong, the Little Desert and around Horsham in the state's west bore the brunt of the storm activity in Victoria overnight.
Melbourne did not experience forecast storms.

The risk of flooding in the Thames estuary is now greater because of climate change, the Government warned today.

The forecast, from an MPs’ committee report on the problem, underlines the fact that the Thames Barrier was designed in the 1970s with “conservative allowances” for climate change and other factors.

Allowing for rising sea levels, it was thought that by 2030 there was only a one in 1,000 chance of a flood severe enough to breach these defences.

But the Government has now said that “taking account of current estimates of climate change, this standard is likely to be exceeded.

“In addition, it should be noted that the original design allowed for some adaptation to cope with additional sea level rise, and it is part of a relatively flexible control system, whose effectiveness could be further enhanced by developments such as improved real-time surge and river-flow modelling.”

The Government was responding to a report by the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee into climate change, water security and flooding. The MPs said that a Foresight report on future flooding has alerted them to the possible magnitude of future flood risk. [...]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - A Nepalese sherpa fears his mountain valley will be flooded by melting glacier runoff high in the Himalayas. A Fiji islander frets about rising sea levels while Indians cope with the destruction of mangrove swamps in northeastern India.

As scientists debate whether global warming is affecting Earth, "climate witnesses" told a U.N. environmental conference Friday they are already feeling the heat, worried about changing weather patterns they say are drastically affecting life from the Himalayas to the South Pacific.

"In the past we just accepted it was the will of God," said Penina Moce, a housewife from Udu, a fishing village in eastern Fiji. "But now we believe there could be other reasons."

Moce spoke as delegates from nearly 200 countries sat down in Buenos Aires for an annual gathering by government officials, scientists, and environmentalists aimed at trying to cut down on "greenhouse" emissions believed by many to be causing a rise in Earth's temperatures.

The 44-year-year-old mother of five said many on her South Pacific island of some 400 people are alarmed by recent signs of altering climate: shortened rainy seasons, eroding coastlines and dwindling fish stocks. Water, already in short supply, has become even harder to come by, she said.

"When it rains, everyone will leave whatever they're doing and rush outside to try and save as much water as possible," she said. "We are lucky if it rains for two days straight."

Environmentalists say her testimony exemplifies what is occurring in some areas affected by global warming and climate change _ issues the world has tried to address through the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark agreement requiring initial cuts in "greenhouse gas" emissions by 2012 that comes into force in February.

With only a few months remaining before Kyoto takes effect, the science over global warming remains divided. The United States _ the largest industrialized country along with Australia not to join the treaty _ has cited scientific uncertainties as one of the reasons.

Debate has dragged on for decades over the causes of climate change and whether it is already being felt.

Many scientists believe carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases _ released by factories, vehicles and coal-burning power plants _ seriously threaten life on Earth by causing a gradual rise in the planet's temperature. Global warming has been blamed for more violent storms, rising sea levels and shrinking animal habitats.
Caspar Ammann, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said changes are apparent all around the world.

"You see the massive changes in the mountain ranges around the world, where you see the glaciers disappearing very rapidly, you see changes in vegetation and changes in the whole seasonal cycles. The sea ice that is going back ... these are indications."

A study by Ammann's colleague Tom Wigley at NCAR and Sarah Raper of the Climatic Research Unit in Britain found a 90 percent probability global temperatures will rise by 1.7 to 4.9 degrees centigrade (3.1 to 8.9 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1990 and 2100 as a result of human influences if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked.

Other experts, however, disagree, saying Earth's temperatures have varied greatly over long periods of time, and little is known about how the atmosphere copes with temperature change.

"If you look at the long term records of temperatures, you will see periods warmer than today and periods colder than today," said John Cristy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"We don't see the same warming in the deep atmosphere," he continued. "If it were man-made that's where you would see the warming."

But Anil Krishna Mistry, a 37-year-old rice farmer and former poacher living in tiger-infested mangrove swamps along India's border with Bangladesh, said he is worried by what he sees as changing climate patterns.

He said his region of Bali Island is under constant threat of flooding from heavy rains and that rising sea levels have washed away huge tracts of land and made other areas too salty for rice growing.

"There were 64 types of mangrove plants in the region but now half of those species are now dying out," said Krishna Mistry, speaking through an interpreter. "The mangrove stands act as a barrier against high tides from the oceans. But due to rising sea levels, high tides are entering into the mainlands and making the land and freshwater areas salty."

He said village subsistence farmers are losing rice paddies and freshwater drinking supplies to the rising saltwater tides and that many try to survive by poaching and by overfishing in the 104 islands in the region.

"We are surrounded by water but don't have a single drop to drink," said the Indian. "The changes in monsoon patterns are leading to more unpredictable weather. Many people are living on the edge with no other place to go."

Norbu Sherpa, an expedition guide in the Himalayas mountains, also warned of a changing landscape in the Everest region.

"In the years that I have worked a trekking expedition guide, I have seen snow lines and glaciers go back higher and higher, he said. "Meanwhile, new lakes are forming, others are growing larger and larger."

He is most famous for his far-fetched tale of how dinosaurs could be brought to life with DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber. Now the bestselling author Michael Crichton has written a thriller about ecoterrorism that the critics say is equally fantastic in its refusal to accept that global warming is a clear and present danger.

With two million copies of State of Fear hitting bookshops across the world, Crichton's thesis that the "interminable yammering of fearmongers" about climate change is being used to keep ordinary people perpetually anxious will reach a huge audience.

As diplomats and scientists gathered at the 10th international convention on climate change in Buenos Aires on Friday to discuss where to go from Kyoto, the 62-year-old author of Jurassic Park and Rising Sun arrived in Britain to promote his 600-page "techno thriller".

The story of a South Pacific island that launches a multimillion-pound lawsuit against the United States, and green terrorists who plot to manufacture a series of earthquakes, underwater landslides and tsunamis to prove that global warming is happening, has an unusual denouement: a 14-page bibliography and a five-page authorial note explaining his extreme scepticism about global warming.

Crichton fills his latest with graphs and "facts" against global warming. Rather than warning readers about the dangers of dinosaurs, nanotechnology or rising Japanese power, he bolsters his argument by citing the work of prominent climate-change sceptics, including the political scientist Bjorn Lomberg.

"The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism," he concludes. [...]

The violent electrical storms that break as a volcano erupts mystify scientists. David Adam reports on a new explanation for the explosive phenomena - and the surprising amount of water in magma

It must be the greatest light show on Earth. The most vivid demonstration of power, beauty and mystery the natural world has to offer. And it must be terrifying to witness at close quarters. In fact, the greatest mystery about the phenomenon of volcanic lightning is how, with every instinct urging them to run like the clappers in the opposite direction, anybody hangs around long enough to see it.

There are now more than 150 recorded cases of vicious electrical storms breaking out directly above craters of erupting volcanos, dating back several centuries. The 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state, one of the most studied eruptions in recent times, produced a lightning bolt every second. The electrical activity does not pose the same hazard as a volcano's boiling lava, choking dust clouds and drowning mud slides - though there are reports of people and animals being struck as they fled - but it sets a spectacular seal on mother nature's most awesome display of destruction.

Awesome, but not really understood. Exactly what causes volcanic lightning is still hidden in the clouds spewed from the crater. Most volcanologists seem happy with the vague notion that ash particles thrown into the air rub against each other and generate enough static charge to trigger sparks. It's the boiling lava, choking dust clouds and drowning mud slides that really concern them - particularly if they are close to the action.

There is more to the lightning than shock and awe. A better understanding of processes that cause it deep within eruption debris could help predict how the giant clouds will behave. Airlines have long feared the way volcanos can suddenly fill the sky with hazardous vertical smoke columns several miles high that rise at speeds up to 400 metres per second.

Now, an intriguing new idea that could explain volcanic lightning has emerged. Earle Williams of MIT and Stephen McNutt at the University of Alaska, say it might simply be caused by a build up of ice. Because thunder and lightning in conventional storms are down to ice and water, the two claim that large volcanic eruptions are nothing more than dirty thunderstorms. [...]

KUALA LUMPUR: More than 4,500 people have been evacuated and at least four people drowned in the worst floods in 40 years on the east coast of peninsula Malaysia, reports and police said Sunday.

A number of roads in the eastern states of Terengganu, Kelantan and Pahang have been closed after being submerged following continuous heavy rainfall during the monsoon season while rail services were partly disrupted by landslides, police said.

Three people - a 37-year-old man, a three-year-old boy and another aged six - drowned in floods Saturday.

Terengganu police chief Hussin Ismail said the body of a 16-year-old boy was found early Sunday.

Hussin said rescuers were still searching for a 30-year-old woman trapped inside a car that was swept away by a river.

Some 4,346 people have been evacuated in the state as floods spread to six districts, he said.

Hundreds more people were evacuated in the other two states Sunday, after water levels in 11 rivers in Kelantan breached the danger level, officials said.

Most government buildings, including the police headquarters and federal administrative centre, as well as shops in Kelantan had to close as the state capital Kota Baharu remained under one to two metres (three to six feet) of water, reports said.

Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mustapa Mohamed was quoted by Bernama news agency as saying some areas of Kelantan were experiencing the worst floods in 40 years.

He said part of the east-west highway may have to be closed to traffic if the rain persisted, but pledged the government would ensure adequate food and other supplies for flood victims moved to make-shift centres in government schools.

PEKANBARU, Riau (Indonesia): While waters are down in the Rokan Hilir, Siak and Indragiri Hulu regions, new floods hit the Palalawang area on Saturday, officials say.

No injuries have yet been reported and the fate of many residents was not known on Saturday night.

The Riau Social Welfare Office said the floods began on Friday, submerging hundreds of homes, schools and other public buildings in 10 villages in the area.

Floodwaters reached up to 1.5 meters high in several parts of Palalawang, forcing some schools to close.

The flood also damaged roads and swept away bridges, including one that linked Ukui village to neighboring areas.

BEIJING -- A flood at a mine in southern China trapped 36 workers on Sunday, the government said, the latest in a recent string of disasters in the country's perilous coal mines.

The accident occurred around 12:30 p.m. (11:30 p.m. EST), when 80 miners were working in the Tianchi Colliery in Sinan, a county in Guizhou province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Rescuers saved 44 workers and another 36 were missing, it said.

The cause of the flood was under investigation.

China's coal mines are the world's deadliest, accounting for 80 percent of all coal mining-related deaths worldwide last year, according to the government.

More than 4,500 Chinese miners were reported killed this year in fires, floods and other disasters.

Last month, a blast in a central China mine killed 166 miners - the nation's deadliest mining accident in years.

On Friday, a gas explosion at a coal mine in northern China killed 33 people.

HAKHANSUR, Afghanistan - The Afghan farmers, coated in dust, some of them barefoot, wielded their hoes, not in the fields they are accustomed to, which lay barren, but at the bottom of a dried canal.

"For the last seven years there is no work, no water," said one old man, Muhammad Azam, after scrambling up a steep bank of crumbly soil to tell his lament. "I am 70 years old. I did not eat at all this morning. We would die if it weren't for this work."

The work is a canal-clearing project run by the United Nations World Food Program, and the farmers employed are among 6.4 million Afghan people who the agency estimates do not have enough to eat this year.

Afghanistan remains in the grip of the most debilitating drought in living memory, now in its seventh year. Government and foreign aid officials warn that despite the outside help and a good harvest last year, the country is living on the brink, with nearly 40 percent of the population below subsistence levels.

The World Food Program, which had hoped to reduce assistance, put out an appeal to donor countries in September to help Afghanistan through the winter until the harvest of 2005. The agency reports that districts in 17 provinces are in urgent need of help and that 37 percent of the population is unable to meet its basic needs.

"You have a recurring drought in Afghanistan, particularly because of deforestation and soil degradation," said Susana Rico, head of Word Food Program in Afghanistan. "There is significant underlying poverty, and a significant portion of the population that are not able to feed themselves. Any shock will push more under the threshold."

The shock this year was simply the lack of rain. Crops failed, farm laborers were left without work and food prices rose sharply, by 50 percent in some places. Wells, rivers and canals have gone dry. The World Food Program estimates that three quarters of a million people in the country are in "severe distress" because of an acute shortage of drinking water.

At least 4,000 families - 20,000 people - have abandoned their homes in search of water and jobs, said the minister of rural rehabilitation and development, Hanif Atmar. "These 4,000 families are known, but the real figure may be higher," he said.

This province, Nimruz, in the far southwestern corner of Afghanistan, bordering Iran and Pakistan, is probably the worst affected area. The World Food Program estimates that 92 percent of the Nimruz's population - 130,000 people - needs food aid or other assistance.

The great Helmand River, which descends from the Hindu Kush and, along with other rivers, feeds the traditional wetlands of the Sistan Basin, has run dry in Nimruz. A new bridge spanning the Helmand at Zaranj, at the border with Iran - built by the Iranian government and officially opened in November - crosses a dry river bed.

"For the last four or five years we have not had a drop in the river," said Hajji Qesim Khedri, the mayor of the provincial capital, Zaranj, as he stood on the bridge. "We used to use boats, now we drive our cars in it."

The province, once a cultural and rich agricultural center, is fed by the rivers that descend from the snowfields in Afghanistan's central highlands but the snow caps have shrunk to half their size and the rivers no longer reach the river basin in Nimruz. Annual rainfall, always low, was about 2 to 2.3 inches in Nimruz before the drought, but for the past three years it has been a little over a tenth of an inch, said Muhammad Akbar Sharifi, head of the government's Agriculture Department in Zaranj.

Nearly all the wells in the province are salty. The desert is advancing and huge sand dunes have smothered up to 100 villages, many fields and orchards, and even parts of Zaranj. More than 90 percent of the animals have died or been slaughtered, Mr. Sharifi said. "People are emigrating, the district bazaars are empty," he said.

The 100 men, old and young, cleaning and deepening the canal at a section in Chakhansur, about 25 miles east of Zaranj, said they had not harvested their fields for seven years, and most families are surviving on bread. For the past two months, 500 men have been employed to clean the canal. Each family gets to work one eight-day stint a month and is paid with a bag of wheat weighing about 110 pounds, which can last a small family one month.

"This is not enough for us," a farmer named Malang, 46, said. "The population is large and everyone is trying to get this job."

Another man, Lashkaran, 60, a father of 10, said: "We don't have pomegranates or vegetables, or water. We used to grow wheat, melons, vegetables. Without food, we will have to think of moving."

The district center still has sweet water in its wells, but in the outlying villages, well water has turned brackish. Lashkaran said a cow he owned had gone blind from drinking the well water.

BANGKOK, Dec. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- Two provinces in Thailand's southernmost region has been swept by flood with one people drowned in deep water, local press said on Monday.

In Than To district of Yala province, floods and mud slide has claimed the life of a 44-year-old woman. Her body was discovered by local officials after being washed away in a strong current on Saturday.

On Sunday, heavy rain also led to flash-floods in 13 district of Narathiwat province with some 2,000 households affected.

Local official said inter-district roads were submerged under waters as high as two meters in some areas. Many sections of road were swept away by the flood.

More than 10 local school, along with 5,000 rai of plantation and 250 other locations including bridges and roads were hit by the seasonal flood.

Meanwhile, the weather bureau in Songkhlar province forecasted heavy downpour in several more southern provinces over the next one or two days and warned residents to be on alert.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- High winds on Sunday toppled a 25-foot Christmas tree in the front yard of the Minnesota governor's mansion, uprooted other trees and knocked down power lines in that state and Iowa.

Heavy sustained winds and gusts of up to 65 mph led the National Weather Service to issue wind warnings or advisories for much of both states.

The Christmas tree fell Sunday morning after one of the cables holding it up snapped, according to State Patrol Trooper Patrick Gibbs, who was on duty at the mansion.

Workers initially tried to put the tree back up, but "it's just too windy," Gibbs said. "They decided it was dangerous, so they're going to do it tomorrow morning."

Wind also knocked down a 20-foot-high contruction scaffolding onto five cars in Minneapolis, flattening their front ends.

Xcel Energy said at least 59,000 Twin Cities area customers lost power, at least temporarily. Xcel spokeswoman Mary Sandok said some customers might not get electricity back until Monday.

In Ames, Iowa, a huge fabric bubble on the grounds of the National Animal Disease Center was ripped apart. The air-supported, 12-story-tall dome was built to shelter a work area for a new high-containment, large-animal research building; no people or animals were hurt. [...]

CHICAGO -- Wind gusting to 50 m.p.h. combined with bad weather to cause flight delays and at least two minor injuries in Wheaton Sunday when a tree fell on a vehicle.

Two people were treated at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield and released after they were injured in the afternoon when wind knocked a tree onto their vehicle at County Farm Road and Williams Street, said Sue Rummery, a representative for the Wheaton Police Department.

Meanwhile, the wind caused delays of two hours or more at O'Hare International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said. The FAA reported delays of only 15 minutes or less for arrivals and departures at Midway International Airport.

The National Weather Service issued a wind advisory that will stay in effect until 10 a.m. Monday, when meteorologists expect wind speed to taper off. Forecasters expect northwest winds to blow into the Chicago area at 25 to 30 m.p.h., with gusts to 50.

The weather service expects hazardous travel conditions on Lake Michigan near the Chicago shore. Waves closer to shore were forecast to crest at 10 to 20 feet. It also advised motorists to watch out for crosswinds.

LEGASPI : Eight people were killed and another was missing early Monday after a landslide buried a village in the eastern Philippines, police said.

The avalanche hit Hubo village near the coastal town of Tinambac in the Bicol peninsula after days of heavy rain which had loosened the earth from nearby slopes, Tinambac police chief Inspector Amado Montana said.

Rescuers pulled eight corpses from the mud, said military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Buenaventura Pascual.

One child was also pulled out alive, according to volunteer rescue workers in the area.

Pascual said an army rescue unit had reached the area and was searching for one more missing person.

He said the landslide injured six other residents.

Widespread floods and landslides unleashed by two storms left about 1,600 people dead or missing in the Philippines two weeks ago.

Scientists at the Met Office's Hadley Centre say the 2003 European heatwave, the hottest ever recorded, could within just 60 years pass as "unusually cool".

They cannot yet reliably estimate the risk of a Gulf Stream collapse, but say it would mean "significant" cooling.

The researchers say 2003 was the third warmest year on record, about 0.8C hotter than just over a century ago.

The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research is one of the world's leading scientific groups studying what a warming world will be like.

Into the heat

Its report, Uncertainty, Risk And Dangerous Climate Change, is published as the countries which have signed the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate treaty, meet in Argentina.

The report says last year's European heatwave, the most intense since records began, caused more than 15,000 extra deaths.

The authors say they estimate man-made climate change has already doubled the risk of such heatwaves.

They investigate one scenario prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which envisages medium to high emissions of greenhouse gases.

On that basis, they predict that by the 2040s more than half of all European summers are likely to be warmer than 2003's. They add: "By the 2060s, a 2003-type summer would be unusually cool."

European chill

But the report says things could turn out very differently: "While climate is expected to change gradually over the course of the century, there are some components of the climate system which could change abruptly.

"There are also concerns that some processes may have a trigger point which, once exceeded, will make the changes inevitable, no matter how much we reduce the emissions subsequently."

It looks at the thermohaline circulation, the system of ocean currents that carries heat from the tropics to higher latitudes to keep them warmer than they would otherwise be.

If this circulation, which influences a largely wind-driven North Atlantic surface current known as the Gulf Stream, shuts down, the report says, the whole of the northern hemisphere is predicted to cool, "leading to large impacts".

It says there is "a significant possibility" that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could be triggered in the next few centuries.

The report adds that there is concern that the ice might never return to its present volume, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were reduced to pre-industrial levels.

The authors say 2003's global average surface temperature was nearly 0.8C above that at the end of the 19th Century, making it the third warmest since instrumental records began 143 years ago.

They write: "The 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990, including each year since 1997. Since 1975, the land has warmed at approximately twice the rate of the oceans."

Space effects

In a separate study, UK and US astronomers have again raised the possibility that the Sun's indirect effects may have had a bigger impact on the Earth's climate than is generally recognised.

Solar activity is very directly correlated to this cosmic ray flux, and some scientists suspect the impacts can somehow seed clouds, altering the Earth's ability to either reflect or retain the Sun's radiation (although the actual mechanism is not known).

The UK-US team tell the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics that a simple model constructed to investigate the cloud and cosmic ray link could "explain a significant part of the global warming over the past century, but not all".

It is a controversial idea, with many climate scientists arguing that greenhouse gases have been by far the dominant force pushing the Earth on to a sharp warming trend over the past 150 years.

Enric Pallé, John Butler and Keran O'Brien say emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide may be responsible for the significant warming for which their model cannot account.

ITHACA, N.Y. - As the first signs of winter push into the Northeast, researchers have some good news for fair weather fans — spring is coming earlier than it used to.

The lilacs say so.

In one of the most comprehensive studies that plants in the Northeast are responding to the global warming trend, Cornell scientists and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin found lilacs are blooming about four days earlier than they did in 1965.

David Wolfe, a plant ecology professor at Cornell whose research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biometeorology, said nature's calendar is changing due to an increase in greenhouse gases.

"It's not just the weather data telling us there is a warming trend going on. We are now seeing the living world responding to the climate change as well," Wolfe said Tuesday. [...]

Morning sunshine over Johannesburg yesterday gave way to tumultuous afternoon rain - and another person was swept away by another flash flood on the Jukskei River.

Yesterday afternoon, hours after the funerals of three young boys who were swept away by the flooding of the Jukskei in Bertrams last week, Jennifer Manale, 36, and her sons Lethabo, 7, and Tumi, 15, headed off on foot to visit the children's grandmother, Maggie Kenosi, 56, in Parkhurst.

Manale was to have left her sons in her mother's care for the school holidays - but tragedy was about to strike as they tried to cross the Jukskei.

According to police, Manale and her two children had walked along a footpath and were using stepping stones to cross the Braamfontein Spruit, close to the intersections of Danya Road and Zonda Avenue, at 2.30pm when they were hit by a wall of water.

Within an instant the spruit, which is normally only a trickle, had been transformed into a deep, fast-moving torrent.

"The stream normally is just inches deep, now as you see it's probably metres deep," said Mark Levy, a local resident observing the search-and-rescue operation. [...]

COLOMBO : A policeman and a child have been killed and some 625,000 people forced from their homes as severe annual monsoon floods swept eastern and northern Sri Lanka.

The constable was washed away in floodwaters that inundated Kalmunai in the island's east where a child also drowned Tuesday, with officials saying that relief supplies were being rushed by boat to affected areas.

"About 125,000 families, or 625,000 individuals have moved out of their homes due to flooding or the threat of flooding," a social services department spokesman said Wednesday.

He said roofs of over 150 houses had been blown away in heavy wind that accompanied torrential rain in the past two days in the eastern coastal district of Ampara. [...]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - The year 2004, punctuated by four powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and deadly typhoons lashing Asia, was the fourth-hottest year on record, extending a trend that has seen the 10 warmest years beginning in the 1990s, a UN weather agency said Wednesday.

The World Meteorological Organization said it expects Earth's surface temperature to rise 0.4 degrees Celsius higher than the normal 14 degrees Celsius, adding 2004 to a recent warming trend that saw the hottest year registered in 1998 and the top three hottest since then.
The month of October also registered as the warmest October ever since accurate readings were first started in 1861, said the agency, responsible for assembling data from meteorologists and climatologists worldwide.

"This was a very warm year," said Michel Jarraud, the WMO secretary general. He noted that it was also marked by an unusual number of hurricanes and tropical storms that hit the Caribbean, the United States and Asia.

The report's release comes as environmental ministers from some 80 countries gathered in Buenos Aires for a UN conference on climate change, looking at ways to cut down on greenhouse gases that some have blamed for Earth's warming.

This summer, heat waves in southern Europe pushed temperatures to near-record highs in southern Spain, Portugal and Romania, where thermostats peaked at 40 degrees, while the rest of Europe sweltered through above-average temperatures.

Jarraud said the warming and increased storm activity could not be attributed to any particular cause, but was part of a global warming trend that was likely to continue.

Scientists have reported that global temperatures rose an average of 0.6 degrees over the past century with the rate of change since 1976 at roughly three times that over the past 100 years.

This year, the hurricane season in the Caribbean spawned four hurricanes that reached Category 4 or 5 strength - capable of causing extreme and catastrophic damage. It was only the fourth time in recent history that so many strong storms were recorded. They caused more than $53 billion Cdn in damages.

The stormy season in the Caribbean inflicted the most damage on Haiti, killing as many as 1,900 people from flooding and mudslides caused by tropical storm Jeanne in September.

Japan and the Philippines also saw increased extreme tropical weather, with deadly typhoons hitting both islands. Japan registered a record number of typhoons making landfall this year with 10, while back-to-back storms in the Philippines killed at least 740 people in what was the wettest year since 2000, the UN agency said.

UN environmental officials released new findings that 2004 also was the most expensive year for the insurance industry as a result of hurricanes, typhoons and other weather-related natural disasters.

Statistics released at the climate change conference showed that natural disasters in the first 10 months of the year cost the insurance industry just over $43 billion, up from $19 billion in 2003.

Munich Re, one of the world's biggest insurance companies, said the United States tallied the highest losses at more than $32 billion, while small developing nations such as the Caribbean islands of Grenada and Grand Cayman also were hit hard.

Other parts of the world also saw extreme weather, with droughts hitting the western United States, parts of Africa, Afghanistan, Australia and India. Jarraud, of the UN weather agency, said the droughts were part of what appears to be a surge over the last decade.

The prolonged rising temperatures and deadly storms were also matched by harsh winters in other regions.

Peru, Chile, and southern Argentina all experienced severe cold and snow in June and July.

Still, Jarraud said the high temperatures like those seen in parts of Europe this year were expected to inch up in the coming years.

Citing recent studies by European climatologists, Jarraud said heat waves in Europe "could over the next 50 years become four or five times as frequent as they are now."

WASHINGTON - About 10 percent of all bird species face extinction by the end of the century and 15 percent more are on the brink, according to researchers who say such extinctions would have a widespread impact on the environment, agriculture and human society.

"Important ecosystem processes, particularly decomposition, pollination and seed dispersal, will likely decline as a result" of the loss of bird species, said Cagan H. Sekercioglu of the Stanford University Center for Conservation Biology.

The forecast of Sekercioglu and colleagues, published online Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, comes a month after the World Conservation Union reported a continuing loss of species, including an estimate that 12 percent of birds are threatened with extinction.

The Stanford estimate was based on a year of study and a computer calculation of three possible scenarios.

The result was a forecast that between 6 and 14 percent of all bird species will be extinct by 2100 and 700 to 2,500 species will be critically endangered or extinct in the wild.

"Given the momentum of climate change, widespread habitat loss and increasing numbers of invasive species, avian declines and extinctions are predicted to continue unabated in the near future," Sekercioglu said. [...]

Inuit leaders are seeking a ruling from an international court that the U.S. government's position on global warming is threatening their existence as a people.

The Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.

The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system. The commission is an investigative arm of the Organization of American States and has no enforcement powers. But a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the foundation for an eventual lawsuit, either against the United States in an international court or against American companies in federal court.

Last month, an assessment of Arctic climate change by 300 scientists for the eight countries with Arctic territory, including the United States, concluded that "human influences" are now the dominant factor.

COLOMBO: Flood-hit Sri Lanka evacuated more than 2,000 people on Wednesday to drain a centuries-old reservoir as 250,000 others stranded by monsoon rains sheltered in schools and community centres.

Heavy rains across north-central and eastern Sri Lanka this week have killed one person, submerged vast tracts of farmland and flooded roads, hampering efforts to truck in food. Power and telephone lines were cut in some areas. The north-central province of Polonnaruwa, which borders territory controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels and has some of Sri Lanka's finest ancient ruins, was worst affected.

"We issued a warning on Wednesday to residents living near Kaudulla tank in Polonnaruwa to evacuate immediately as the tank is on the verge of overflowing," said National Disaster Management Centre Director N.D. Hettiarachchi, referring to the reservoir.

The Meteorology Department has forecast more rains over the next few days, but said the worst appeared to be over.

FORT MYERS - Cold weather and low humidity levels are helping dry out Southwest Florida - bad news in what is already expected to be a dangerous fire season.

The last significant rainfall in Southwest Florida was almost three weeks ago. The ground is very dry and there's plenty of vegetation to fuel a fire.

Forestry officials say areas like Pine Island, Sanibel and Captiva are there greatest areas of concern this year because of all the hurricane debris that hasn't been cleaned up.

"This is a factor we didn't have the past several years. Now all of a sudden we add brush, large amounts of timber which will make our fires more frequent and much more intense," said Gerry Lacavera of the Division of Forestry. [...]

Tony Blair's push for US engagement on climate change suffered a fresh set-back today when an international conference ended without agreement on future action.

The prime minister has said global warming will be Britain's priority during next year's presidency of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations.

President George Bush has made it clear America will not sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon dioxide emissions blamed for rising temperatures.

The UK, along with fellow EU members, wanted US agreement on examining how to proceed once that protocol runs out in 2010 at the climate change conference in Argentina.

However, America rejected proposals for a series of talks next year in favour of a single meeting held over several days.

Environment secretary Margaret Beckett said: "What they don't want is for people to make some great leap into the unknown and start setting very concrete parameters for the future."

Mrs Beckett told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It has not been particularly euphoric or celebratory. But on the other hand it has certainly been different from any previous conference of this kind I have been to.

"What has been different about it is the greater degree of openness about the future beyond the Kyoto Protocol.

"I think certainly for the last year, 18 months, maybe a bit more, not knowing quite where we were on ratification, whether the Protocol was going to come into force, has been a dampener."

Mrs Beckett acknowledged that Mr Blair has "stuck his neck out" on the issue.

"It may be that there are players around ... the American administration who wish that Britain was not making this a top priority in its G8 Presidency. We are," she added.

Shadow environment secretary Tim Yeo said Britain "must get it own house in order" on climate change. "We are certainly having rising CO2 emissions in Britain and we need urgently to change policy," he told Today.

"Once we do that we will have a lot more credibility in international talks that are so important."

PARIS (AP) -- A powerful storm packing hurricane-force winds lashed northern France on Friday, killing two people and forcing officials to close down the Eiffel Tower and the famed parks of Paris.

A 61-year-old Parisian woman died when her car was crushed by a tree and a suburbanite was decapitated by flying sheet metal, officials said.

Rescue workers in Paris closed the famed Sainte-Chapelle monument, renowned for its stained glass windows, because a stone angel on its roof risked being toppled by the gusts. Paris City Hall then ordered the Eiffel Tower closed, as well as Paris parks and outdoor ice skating rinks.

Three people were reported missing in the western city of Brest, in Brittany, LCI television reported.

Traffic on the TGV fast train between Paris and Lille was interrupted, rescue officials in the Pas-de-Calais said.

Winds clocked at up to 80 miles per hour pounded the country's north, prompting authorities to raise the nation's weather alert to orange -- the second highest of four levels.

In western France, the Normandy Bridge, a suspension bridge near the port of Le Havre, was closed, RTL radio reported.

Officials warned drivers to take care and pedestrians to watch for flying branches and roof tiles.

MANILA : The Philippine government has come down hard on illegal loggers in the country, blaming them for causing much of the damage from the recent typhoons.

Armed forces raided warehouses where illegally cut logs were found secretly stashed and filed criminal charges against the owners.

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo may declare an immediate ban on logging throughout the country.

A proposal has even been tabled in Parliament to implement a total ban for at least 25 years.

The move comes immediately after illegal logging operations were blamed for causing much of the flash floods and landslides, following typhoons which lashed across Luzon island over a two-week period.

But environmentalists remained sceptical the bill will ever be passed. [...]

GENEVA - Natural and manmade disasters this year claimed more than 21,000 lives worldwide and economic losses of US$105 billion (€78.46 billion), Swiss Reinsurance Co. said Thursday.

Property insurance companies face record claims of US$42 billion (€31.38 billion), with the largest losses resulting from hurricanes in Florida and typhoons in Japan, according to a preliminary study by the Zurich-based Swiss Re, the world's second-largest reinsurer. A full report is expected next year.

Europe had fewer natural catastrophes than in previous years, Swiss Re said, but cited the 191 people killed and more than 2,000 injured in March following a terrorist attack on Madrid train stations.

Some 95 percent of the insurance claims were for natural catastrophes, with the rest attributed to manmade disasters, it said. [...]

Aura will also collect data on holes in ozone
Data will help study interplay with climate

LOS ANGELES—A NASA spacecraft has begun the first-ever daily tracking of how air pollution moves across the globe, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says.

The data from the Aura satellite's four instruments will offer scientists their best look yet at the interplay between pockets of pollution and weather patterns, principal scientist Reinhard Beer said.

Beer said there was no political agenda linked to the project, which comes as U.S. President George W. Bush is under international pressure to rejoin efforts laid out in the Kyoto protocol to fight climate change by cutting greenhouse gases. Bush withdrew from the agreement in 2001.

"What people do with the information is not something we can get involved in," Beer said.

The data will show how industrial pollutants move through Earth's troposphere, the region that begins at the ground and rises about 18 kilometres.

The $970 million, five-year mission was expected to help scientists predict where pollution pockets accumulate and how they travel so that "chemical forecasts" can one day be possible, Beer said.

Launched on July 15, the bus-sized spacecraft makes a complete survey of Earth every 16 days, sending back infrared images of concentrations of five of six major pollutants identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"We are also trying to work backward to pinpoint the source regions," Beer said. "The best we could hope to do is say (a region) is a major source of a certain type of pollution."

All but one of Aura's instruments are functioning normally. Engineers were trying to remove material that was blocking the lens of a device measuring temperature and concentrations of pollutants, a NASA official said.

The science team expects to present its first major conclusions in about a year, Beer said.

Aura also will collect data on "holes" detected in the protective ozone layer at the poles. International treaties ban most uses of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, but Aura should show whether any earlier damage is being reversed.

Aura now trails Aqua and Terra, its NASA sister ships studying the interaction among Earth's air, water and land. Four more U.S. and French satellites are expected to be launched over the next several years and take their places between the Aqua and Aura.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Volcanic landslides that generate huge and devastating tsunamis tend to occur during historically warmer times on Earth, a new study suggests. Scientists don't know exactly why, but since the global climate is warming as you read this, the apparent connection was tossed out this week as a reason for scientists to be concerned about the threat now.

Tsunamis are waves that race across the ocean without much fanfare but grow to frightening proportions when they reach land. The waves are deep, and while they may appear just a few inches or feet tall on the open ocean, they can soar to the height of a multi-story building as they are forced upward near the shore.

A tsunami can be generated by the sudden uplift of the seafloor in an earthquake, or by the paddle-like effect of a landslide crashing into the sea from, say, an island volcano. Yet while quake-generated tsunamis have been observed from their genesis to the disastrous end, scientists have never witnessed a significant open-ocean tsunami generated by a landslide.

Evidence exists at various locations around the world for megatsunamis, as scientists call the largest of these events. They seem to occur every 100,000 years or so, said Gary McMurtry of the University of Hawaii.

These monsters can be hundreds of feet tall and, depending on local topography, race miles inland.

One controversial event, about 110,000 years ago, appeared to create a 1,600-foot wave in Hawaii. Yes, you read that right: Nearly one-third of a mile, or about half a kilometer.

But the evidence -- marine fossils way up there where there's no sea -- is controversial. Perhaps the islands have been rising and carried the fossils up, critics suggest.

McMurtry's team looked at marine fossils at the Kohala volcano on the main island of Hawaii, which is known to be sinking about an inch per decade. The fossils simply could not have started at a lower elevation, McMurtry said Monday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union held here. A submarine landslide from the giant Mauna Loa volcano has been dated to the same time and, the thinking goes, caused the tsunami.

McMurtry and his colleagues also re-examined evidence for a tsunami that may have struck Bermuda and other locations in the Atlantic 420,000 years ago.

Scientists agree that submarine landslides caused by the collapse of island volcanoes -- think of the destruction of Mount St. Helens -- could generate these megatsunamis. Evidence for such landslides can be found in topography scans of seafloors around various island volcanoes, McMurtry points out.

"These giant landslides seem to occur during periods of higher than normal sea level -- like we have now," he said.

High sea levels tend to correspond with wetter climates, he said. What this has to do with landslides is not known. But perhaps, McMurtry figures, excess rainfall can serve as a trigger for the cleaving of a volcano-in-waiting. [...]

Eskimos and scientists report a strange "lightness at noon" that is turning the usual all-day darkness of the high Canadian Arctic into twilight, apparently in defiance of natural laws. Canadian government officials say it may be the result of an unusual atmospheric phenomenon caused by global warming.

Inuit hunters are telling the government's weather station at Resolute Bay - Canada's second most northerly village, 1,000 miles from the North Pole - of a new light in the sky.

And Wayne Davidson, the Canadian government official who runs the station, says he believes it it caused by climate change.

For the past five years, Mr Davidson says, there has been a growing light along the horizon in the middle of the day in winter. "The entire horizon is raised like magic, like the hand of God is bringing it up," he says.

But Mr Davidson's investigations, backed by other scientists, suggest a more prosaic explanation. Warmer air, from global warming, is overlaying the cold air of the Arctic and the interface between the two creates a kind of "mirror in the sky" which reflects the sun's rays from further south.

The interior ministry declared a state of alert in 23 departments, including Paris, triggering stepped-up efforts to locate homeless people and take them into shelter.

Temperatures are predicted to fall to below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of northern France Sunday night, with the freeze spreading southwards. However a thaw is due mid-week.

Meanwhile technicians were working to reconnect around 9,000 homes that remained without electricity Sunday after the freak storm that swept across northern France on Friday, killing six people.

During the same time period, glaciers in Alaska, in Patagonia and Antarctica proceeded steadily at well-established rates. The polar ice cap that lay over most of the Arctic Ocean during winter remained essentially unbroken. Snowcaps atop mountain ranges such as Europe's Alps and even Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro stood solid and predictable.

No more. In all these cases, things have begun changing and scientists are becoming more and more worried.

Global warming, despite mounting evidence, remains a contentious political issue, but this is one warming-related phenomenon that has become incontrovertible.

In some instances, the rate of glacial creep has increased up to eightfold. More worrisome, the change has occurred in a breathtakingly short time - since 2000.

This is phenomenal, said Waleed Abdalati, a senior research at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Abdalati and colleagues briefed reporters about their new findings at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting.

Jakobshavn already was the world's fastest-moving glacier when its pace, during the last half of the 20th century, as about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per year. Now, latest satellite and airborne laser data show its flow has increased - over the last four years - to 10 miles (13 kilometers) per year.

Though less dramatic, similar significant changes have occurred in glaciers all over the world.

The ice-cap situation parallels the changes in the glaciers.

During the late 1990s, for three years in a row the perennial Arctic ice cover dropped to its lowest volumes in recorded history, according to Josefino Comiso, also a senior researcher at Goddard.

The phenomenon is worrisome because it is the type that can fall into a feedback mechanism. As more and more open water appears in the Arctic Ocean, it absorbs more solar heat, which carries over into the winter, leading to an earlier melt the following year and thinner ice during the winter.

In addition, most of the warming is taking place in the western Arctic, Comiso said.

For hundreds of years, explorers and entrepreneurs alike have dreamed about the advantages of a Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean that would allow a much-faster passage between Europe and Asia.

Even as recently as the late 1960s, the only possibility of making that passage - even during summer - was by using massive icebreaking ships.

Exxon even experimented with the Manhattan, an icebreaking supertanker that was supposed to carry oil from Alaska's North Slope to U.S. East Coast ports. After one voyage, the company mothballed the idea as uneconomical and potentially too dangerous.

Comiso said the Northwest Passage soon may be a reality during the summer.

The summer of 1998 was almost ice free, he said.

Perhaps the biggest source of worry is the western Antarctic, however.

There, according to Theodore Scambos, with the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, a major portion of the western Antarctic ice shelf is showing signs of collapsing.

The shelf is already dumping about 60 cubic miles (250 cubic kilometers) of ice into the ocean each year, with only about 40 percent of that volume replaced by snow. Right now, Scambos said, along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, the glaciers are moving at rates three times to eight times faster than normal.

This acceleration - the phrase creeping at a glacial pace might have to be abandoned - is particularly disturbing.

When Arctic ice melts, it affects sea level only in a limited way because the ice already is floating in the ocean. There is some elevation because warmer temperatures cause the water's volume to expand slightly, but generally sea level remains stable regardless of what happens to Arctic sea ice.

Ice dumped into the oceans from glaciers is another story. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that sea-level rise in this century would average between 0.2 millimeters and 0.4 millimeters per year due to melting.

Over the past four years, however, the glacial acceleration is causing ocean levels to elevate by up to 2 millimeters per year - already several times greater than the IPCC estimate.

Abdalati noted the glaciers have been melting at this relatively furious pace for only a few years, so at this point it is not possible to predict what will happen. He cautioned, however, that where the data on the melting can be compared with long-term climate data, all of these changes seem to be accelerating.

Chief among such correlations, he said, are the links between ice-sheet melting and sea-level rise.

It is happening quicker than we thought - in some cases the responses have been within months, Abdalati said. The data clearly indicate previous estimates (of sea-level rise) are being outpaced.

The aim now, he said, is to increase understanding of the phenomena as quickly as possible and to place a high priority on the research.

Toward that end, he added, we'll hopefully refine (the estimates) in the coming years, but we've got a lot of people working on it.

VLADIVOSTOK, - A powerful cyclone, originating in the Yellow Sea, hit Russia’s Maritime region on Sunday night. Heavy snowfalls were accompanied on the coast by gale-force winds.

Streets of Vladivostok are covered with a 50-centimeter-thick layer of snow, which has paralyzed transport in the regional center. The cyclone has also grounded planes, and the airport is expected to open no earlier than at 9 am, Moscow time.

Vladivostok authorities have cancelled classes at schools. Snowploughs fail to cope with piles of snow. This has been the second strong snowfall in Vladivostok this winter. Late in November, heavy snowfalls paralyzed traffic in the city for almost ten days.

Specialists at the local meteorological service told Tass that the snowfall in Vladivostok on Sunday night was the strongest in the past 80 years. A double norm of snow for December fell in the city overnight.

The cyclone continues influencing the weather in the Maritime region. Snowfalls will continue in the eastern and northern parts of the region for another 24 hours.

Meanwhile, the cyclone is now shifting towards Sakhalin, where a storm warning has been issued.

At least 34 people were killed and 43 others wounded on Sunday in flash floods caused by heavy rains in southern Iran, the Iranian Red Crescent Society said in a statement today.

The flood wrecked at least 380 houses in southern Bushehr province, leaving 4,000 people without shelter, the statement said.

The organization, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross, set up tents for those who lost their homes in the flood, and sent about 480 aid workers to the province to aide the victims.

Lake Michigan and cold Canadian winds merged into a two-headed monster Sunday, dropping temperatures in the Chicago area to their lowest this season and blasting parts of Indiana and Michigan with up to 22 inches of snow.

The lake-effect snowstorm hit LaPorte County, Ind., the hardest, forcing officials to declare a state of emergency and state police to close all lanes of Interstate Highway 94 around Michigan City, 60 miles east of Chicago, because the plows could not keep up with the snowfall, police said. State workers and National Guardsmen were deployed to help stranded highway travelers.

County officials pulled the plows off the roads because of whiteout conditions Sunday afternoon. [...]

Gale slams man into abandoned church

EDMONTON - A 46-year-old man was killed Sunday afternoon when winds topping 100 kilometres an hour picked up his snow kiteboard and slammed him into an abandoned church in Alberta Beach.

The accident happened just after noon on Lac St. Anne, a popular spot for kiteboarding enthusiasts year-round.

Louie St. Laurent didn't see the accident, but he saw the wind that precipitated it.

"I was actually out on the boat launch, overlooking a dark sky," he said.

"All of a sudden, I looked out on the lake, and could see kind of a rolling wall. It looked like water, but it was actually the wind."

At first, St. Laurent saw the kiteboarder moving slowly across the frozen lake, about 60 kilometres west of Edmonton.

"I thought, geez, I wonder if he'll be all right," he said.

St. Laurent and his two children didn't see the accident. They were forced inside for cover. From there, they watched signs, stray shingles and other debris fly past the window.

"It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen," he said. [...]

INNSBRUCK, Austria -- Avalanches killed two skiers and seriously injured another Monday, and experts warned that recent storms have created unstable conditions ripe for more snow slides in Austria's Alps.

A 41-year-old American and a 39-year-old German died in an avalanche in Lech am Arlberg in the southwestern province of Vorarlberg that also critically injured the American's wife, also 41, the Austria Press Agency reported. [...]

NEW DELHI: Dense fog wrought havoc among travellers across parts of northern India with accidents claiming 17 lives and putting air and rail travel schedules in disarray, officials said on Sunday.

At least 14 people were killed and 25 injured when a bus travelling from Nepal to the eastern Indian state of Bihar fell off a bridge into a ditch due to fog overnight, a local police official said.

Poor visibility was hampering rescue work at the site, he said.
In the Indian capital New Delhi, many international and domestic flights were delayed as dense fog enveloped the city and some other parts of northern India, a weather office official said.

“The fog blanketed New Delhi just past midnight (Saturday), affecting air and also train services,” the official said. [...]

Fierce winds, some gusting to nearly 100 miles per hour, pounded the Front Range on Monday, ripping up roofs, snapping trees and disrupting power.

"It sounds like there's a WWF (World Wrestling Federation) match happening on the roof," said Angela Crooks, who works in the Wells Fargo Building in Lakewood.

Crooks said she felt her building swaying and watched as the blinds smacked the windows.

The National Weather service issued a high-wind warning for areas around the foothills and adjacent plains. Wind gusts were clocked at close to 98 miles per hour at Carter Lake in Larimer County and from 79 to 95 miles per hour in parts of Boulder County, meteorologist Frank Cooper said. [...]

(New Zealand) - The approach of Christmas Day usually brings thoughts of sunshine, sunshine and more sunshine.

But yesterday, on the longest day of the year, Auckland was hit by a mini tornado, Christchurch had floods and sea temperatures remained 3C below the average for the 11th day in a row.

Elsewhere, thunder, lightning and hail storms caused chaos, and holidaymakers reconsidered plans to get away to the beach.

It was hardly summer. The temperature in Auckland ranged from 13C to 19C, in Wellington it was 10C to 18C, and in Christchurch it got down to 8C before rising to a balmy 17C.

MetService forecaster Geoff Sanders said the weather was "quite bizarre" but the mini-tornado reported in Auckland was in keeping with the lightning and thunder occurring around the country.

The tornado started with strong winds that hit Penrose businesses with such force at 8.10am that windows were broken. Spandex operations and logistics manager Les Balderston said he was sitting in his office when the door blew open and papers went flying.

The wind travelled through the office before exploding out of the side of the building.

"I though I saw a piece of cardboard flying past the window but it was actually a piece of aluminium joinery," he said. "Then the glass blew out. That's when all hell broke loose."

In Mt Wellington, the wind blew the contents of recycling and wheelie bins all over the roads.

At Ruawai Rd, it picked up roof tiles, ripped off letter boxes, knocked over trees and collapsed fences.

Lorraine Cooper, who is visiting from Australia's Gold Coast for Christmas, was on her daughter's deck when she looked up to see a "mini tornado".

"It was just like a path of wind about 50m wide with heaps of leaves gathered up there, swirling about 20m in the air above my head."

Within seconds the tornado moved to the next street, damaging about six properties.

The last reports of damage were at Coldmaster Products, on the corner of Carbine Rd and the South Eastern Highway, where a garage was thrown from one section to another and a truck moved across a yard.

Manager Brian Parr said polystyrene blocks, weighing about 100kgs each, were picked up and snapped in half. Some landed on the nearby motorway.

Heavy hailstorms this week damaged fruit in Tasman, Canterbury, Hawkes Bay and parts of Auckland. [...]

- A winter storm battered U.S. states from the Plains through the Midwest on Wednesday, sending travellers slipping and sliding over icy roads, dumping a 30 centimetres of snow over some areas and pushing temperatures to bitter-cold levels.

What may guarantee a white Christmas for some was a pre-Christmas nightmare for others. "There's snow on the highway and people are sliding off the highways, rolling over and 18-wheelers are jackknifing," said a Texas Department of Public Safety operator in Abilene, who counted 17 accidents by 8 a.m. local time in an eight-county area in West Texas.

"People don't know to stay home."

Snow - or an icy mix of snow and sleet - fell from New Mexico, where some schools were closed, to the lower Great Lakes. The storm marked the leading edge of bitterly cold air flowing southward.

Highs only in the minus teens Celsius were forecast Wednesday in the northern Texas Panhandle, where wind chills Thursday could be as low as -26 degrees, the U.S. National Weather Service said.

At the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, several flights were cancelled and others were delayed up to two hours on average as workers de-iced about 200 planes an hour, airport spokesman Ken Capps said. In Ohio, airport delays were blamed mostly on planes arriving from other storm-battered locations.

There were at least three weather-related traffic deaths: one each in New Mexico, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Nine people were hurt, none seriously, in a series of accidents on a snowy interstate in Wyoming just north of the Colorado state line. In Tennessee, a hiker who collapsed along the snow-covered Appalachian Trail was rescued; he'd called for help from his cell phone Tuesday.

The bad weather prompted some to step up travel plans to avoid worse problems closer to Christmas.

"I'm leaving a day earlier than I planned and I'm afraid I still may not make it," said Greyhound bus traveller Susie Brown, 32, of Cincinnati.
In Louisville, Ky., ditches were littered with vehicles that slid off icy roads.

"Right now we have ice on the bottom and snow on the top," said Linda Utley, an employee at a truck stop along the Pennyrile Parkway in western Kentucky.

The precipitation started as rain through Kentucky then turned to snow as temperatures dropped; the heaviest snowfall was expected in western and north-central Kentucky, where accumulations could reach 30 centimetrest after another round of snow Thursday night, forecasters said.

Ice was forecast to blanket western Kentucky.

"We're looking for a terrible ice storm overnight," said Robin Smith, a meteorologist in Paducah, Ky.

Parts of Arkansas looked forward to only the ninth white Christmas in 120 years as the storm barrelled across the state, closing businesses, shuttering restaurants and snarling traffic.

An interstate in eastern Oklahoma near Checotah was closed for about an hour Wednesday after ice formed on a hill and vehicles couldn't negotiate the stretch of road, which links Oklahoma to Arkansas.

In Lawton, Okla., a tractor-trailer hauling goats overturned on an interstate bridge, state police reported. Many of the animals were trapped in the trailer and died; some escaped and a couple apparently jumped off the 12-metre-high bridge and survived.

More than 25 centimetres of snow in parts of Indiana snarled travel; more was expected along with cold temperatures.

Portions of Missouri dug out Wednesday from one snow storm - and readied for the next.

"The first full day of winter was a doozy and it's not done yet," said Dan Spaeth, another meteorologist in Paducah, Ky.

"We're looking at potentially another half-foot of snow this evening in pretty much all of southeast Missouri. We're gonna have a white Christmas - if we can move." [...]

German scientists have found a significant piece of evidence linking cosmic rays to climate change.

They have detected charged particle clusters in the lower atmosphere that were probably caused by the space radiation.

They say the clusters can lead to the condensed nuclei which form into dense clouds.

Clouds play a major, but as yet not fully understood, role in the dynamics of the climate, with some types acting to cool the planet and others warming it up.

The amount of cosmic rays reaching Earth is largely controlled by the Sun, and many solar scientists believe the star's indirect influence on Earth's global climate has been underestimated.

Some think a significant part of the global warming recorded in 20th Century may in fact have its origin in changes in solar activity - not just in the increase in fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gases.

First evidence found

The German team, from the Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, used a large ion mass spectrometer mounted on an aircraft.

They say their measurements "have for the first time detected in the upper troposphere large positive ions with mass numbers up to 2500".

They conclude: "Our observations provide strong evidence for the ion-mediated formation and growth of aerosol particles in the upper troposphere."

The scientists report their findings in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

They support the theory that cosmic rays can influence climate change and affect cloud albedo - the ability of clouds to reflect light.

In and out

The importance of clouds in the climate system is described by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, at the UK's University of East Anglia (UEA). It says: "Clouds strongly influence the passage of radiation through the Earth's atmosphere.

"They reflect some incoming short-wave solar radiation back into space and absorb some outgoing long-wave terrestrial radiation: producing cooling and warming effects, respectively."

And UEA's Climatic Research Unit spells out the complexity of clouds' role in climate change. It says: "The cloud feedback may be large, yet not even its sign is known.

"Low clouds tend to cool, high clouds tend to warm. High clouds tend to have lower albedo and reflect less sunlight back to space than low clouds.

Confusion confounded

"Clouds are generally good absorbers of infrared, but high clouds have colder tops than low clouds, so they emit less infrared spacewards.

"To further complicate matters, cloud properties may change with a changing climate, and human-made aerosols may confound the effect of greenhouse gas forcing on clouds.

"Depending on whether and how cloud cover changes, the cloud feedback could almost halve or almost double the warming."

Many scientists agree that the Earth's surface appears to be warming, while low atmosphere temperatures remain unchanged.

Missing link

Research published last August suggested the rays might cause changes in cloud cover which could explain the temperature conundrum.

The discrepancy in temperatures has led some scientists to argue that the case for human-induced climate change is weak, because our influence should presumably show a uniform temperature rise from the surface up through the atmosphere.

Although researchers have proposed that changes in cloud cover could help to explain the discrepancy, none had been able to account for the varying heat profiles.

But the study suggested that cosmic rays, tiny charged particles which bombard all planets with varying frequency depending on solar wind intensity, could be the missing link.

Comment:

Feb 27 1997:

A: Climate is being influenced by three factors, and soon a fourth.
Q: (L) All right, I'll take the bait; give me the three factors, and also
the fourth!.
A: 1) Wave approach. 2) Chlorofluorocarbon increase in
atmosphere, thus affecting ozone layer. 3) Change in the planet's
axis rotation orientation. 4) Artificial tampering by 3rd and 4th
density STS forces in a number of different ways.

An increasingly panicked global effort is now underway by the worlds top scientists to understand an unprecedented series of ‘blasts’, energy surges, which the planet has been taking from as an yet unknown source which has been bombarding Antarctica with cosmic rays and disrupting Northern Hemisphere weather systems on a global scale.

The first of these cosmic ray blasts occurred nearly 5 years ago and have been increasing in their frequency and intensity since the end of November. The once normally darkened skies of the Northern Hemispheres Arctic regions are now in twilight due to these blasts. Wayne Davidson, from the Canadian Government's weather station at Resolute Bay, located in the Arctic Circle, says about this mysterious lighting, "The entire horizon is raised like magic, like the hand of God is bringing it up.”

On December 1, 2004 the largest recorded blast sent not only shockwaves through the world scientific community but also through the Northern Hemisphere resulting in one of the largest weather events in recorded human history when 86,800 square miles of China was shrouded in fog, bringing transportation systems (especially air travel) to a virtual standstill throughout the country.

As reported by the BBC in this article from October, 2002 (see previous article), “German scientists have found a significant piece of evidence linking cosmic rays to climate change. They have detected charged particle clusters in the lower atmosphere that were probably caused by the space radiation. They say the clusters can lead to the condensed nuclei which form into dense clouds.”

These German scientists from the from the Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg go on to say that their measurements "have for the first time detected in the upper troposphere large positive ions with mass numbers up to 2500", and "Our observations provide strong evidence for the ion-mediated formation and growth of aerosol particles in the upper troposphere."

What they hadn’t expected to happen though has been the large scale occurrences of this over the past few weeks, to include China on December 2nd and 14th and then India on the 21st, which is due to both China’s and India’s reliance on fossil fuels and the continuing degradation of their air quality.

The effects of these blasts have also been felt throughout the rest of the Northern Hemisphere resulting in such freak occurrences as, hurricane force winds in Paris , Germany, Canada, Russia, England and the United States on an almost simultaneous basis. Accompanying these hurricane force winter winds have been the massive cold fronts following them dropping normal winter lows to record lows throughout the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Though not yet at a point to acknowledge this publicly, some of the world’s top scientists are beginning to see an astrophysical correlation between these cosmic ray blasts to our planet and an ever increasing number of global events relating to atmospheric explosions of inbound meteors, such as those in Indonesia, where a meteorite was picked up by their Air Forces radar, China, where a meteorite explosion turned ‘night into day’ and Washington D.C. where one police official stated, "It looked like a ball of fire falling out of the sky." (Ed: See our Signs Metoerite Supplement for the true extent of the phenomenon)

The world’s top scientists have begun coordinating with Dr. Eun-Suk Seo from the United States University of Maryland, and her team, in a ‘search’ for answers to the origin of these cosmic ray blasts directed from an unknown origin in space towards the South Pole and disrupting our global weather systems.

Under Dr. Eun-Suk Seo her and her international team’s direction NASA launched a stratospheric balloon on December 20th from Antarctica’s McMurdo base and have stated, “The balloon, following circulation of winds high, will sail around the ice continent for about three weeks. During this time, data of great scientific interest will be gathered. These data concern flows of charged particles of highest energy (cosmic rays) coming from Space.”

But as one Russian scientist said to us, and who wished to remain anonymous, “Why this game? We all know what’s happening.” an apparent reference to the fact though these events are well known to both world governments and the scientific establishments they are beyond the understanding of the general public at large.

Whatever the end results these experiments reveal for these scientists, it remains an undisputed fact that this world of ours is facing a type of global cataclysmic event buried in our common geological past, and maybe, as some social scientists report, in our common ancestral memory also.

(South Africa) - The drought-ravaged southern Cape was battered by thunderstorms yesterday, flooding towns, cutting power supplies and washing away roads.

Last night the weather bureau issued a storm alert for southern KwaZulu-Natal, with heavy rains forecast for today.

The bureau said a "big cold system" which had brought the rains to the Cape was moving along the east coast.

"The very heavy rains are moving east and by the morning, southern KwaZulu-Natal could get a great deal of rainfall," said a forecaster. "There are likely to be some thunderstorms on Friday, but it will clear quickly. [...]

Eskimos and scientists report a strange "lightness at noon" that is turning the usual all-day darkness of the high Canadian Arctic into twilight, apparently in defiance of natural laws. Canadian government officials say it may be the result of an unusual atmospheric phenomenon caused by global warming. 

Inuit hunters are telling the government's weather station at Resolute Bay - Canada's second most northerly village, 1,000 miles from the North Pole - of a new light in the sky. 

And Wayne Davidson, the Canadian government official who runs the station, says he believes it it caused by climate change. 

For the past five years, Mr Davidson says, there has been a growing light along the horizon in the middle of the day in winter. "The entire horizon is raised like magic, like the hand of God is bringing it up," he says. 

But Mr Davidson's investigations, backed by other scientists, suggest a more prosaic explanation. Warmer air, from global warming, is overlaying the cold air of the Arctic and the interface between the two creates a kind of "mirror in the sky" which reflects the sun's rays from further south. 

So this Christmas Santa may be able to ignore Rudolph's red-nose and rely on pollution from the world's chimneys to find his way down them.

LVOV, - A hurricane with a wind speed reaching 30 metres per second disrupted electricity supply in 34 populated localities of the Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk Regions of Ukraine on Thursday night, a representative of the Ukrainian emergencies ministry told Itar-Tass on Friday.

Teams of the Lvovenergo Company are restoring electricity supply, working in an emergency regime, in order to complete the repair operation by the beginning of the repeat voting within the framework of the second round of presidential elections, which is scheduled for December 26.

CHICAGO, Dec. 23 - Snow, ice and high winds extended from the Great Lakes to the Texas Panhandle on Thursday, tying up traffic, delaying flights and disrupting holiday travel plans for thousands of people.

At least 13 people were killed in weather-related traffic accidents in Illinois, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.

As much as two feet of snow fell, and drivers like Joe Bartlett of Alexandria, Ky., was clutching his steering wheel. It took Mr. Bartlett five hours on Wednesday night to drive home from Lexington, usually an hourlong trip.

"I saw a car off the road about every 200 feet," he said. "So it was white knuckles for me."

More than 300,000 homes in Kentucky and Ohio were without power.

Records for snowfall were broken in cities like Paducah, Ky., with 14 inches, and Dayton, Ohio, with 16 inches. As many motorists took off for the long weekend, icy roads and poor visibility caused traffic accidents and congestion. Hundreds were stranded on major roadways, and parts of Interstates were closed in several states.

An inch of snow and poor visibility contributed to a 22-car pileup near Cheyenne, Wyo., on Wednesday that sent nine people to the hospital. Amarillo, Tex., with almost eight inches of snow in two days, reported at least 100 weather-related crashes.

In Indiana, 40 counties declared local emergencies. Gov. Joseph E. Kernan declared disaster emergencies in some regions and closed state offices in 44 counties. He urged travelers to stay off the roads.

Along Interstate 64, which was closed eastbound from the Illinois line to Evansville, Ind., the state sent helicopters, and National Guard troops searched for stranded motorists. The Red Cross provided emergency assistance and set up shelters. Travelers were taken to National Guard armories in Evansville and Salem, Ind., and to shelters in at least three cities.

More than a foot of snow covered the Interstate when tractor-trailers overturned on Wednesday night. When temperatures fell into the teens, travelers worried about warmth and food. They abandoned their vehicles as they were rescued, leaving behind presents and luggage.

Mr. Kernan later closed sections of Interstates 64, 65 and 74.
Greyhound closed three bus stations and canceled service on 12 routes between Tennessee and Ohio. Stranded riders bedded down in the coaches, whose engines were left running to provide heat. The company said that it gave riders vouchers for food and that Red Cross delivered food and other supplies for mothers and babies.

Airplane passengers were also affected. Flights involving Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia and Washington were among the many that suffered delays of up to two hours.

More than 200 flights were canceled on Wednesday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A spokesman for the airport, David Magana, said conditions improved on Thursday.

"We're hopeful," Mr. Magana said, "everything will work out and everyone will get to grandma's house."

Many communities in Southeast Texas woke up to a white Christmas this morning with large snowfalls that shattered previous records for one-day snow totals.

Despite the unusually high snowfalls, area public safety officials said they did not have reports of serious car accidents related to snow or ice. The highest area snowfall reported this morning was 13 inches in Brazoria, according to the National Weather Service. [...]

Winter hit southern Ontario with a vengeance Thursday, covering Windsor with a record-breaking snowy blanket of about 25 cm just in time for Christmas.

Portions of roads, including Highway 401, were closed in the city and Essex County due to accidents, but police reported no serious injuries.

Thursday's storm was a Dec. 23 record for Windsor -- the most we've ever received on that day was 13 cm in 1990. [...]

(Alaska) - Dozens of holiday travelers were rescued Friday after being stranded on a remote stretch of the Richardson Highway blanketed by snowdrifts as high as 7 feet.

About 30 people were picked up by Department of Transportation crews on the highway between Delta Junction and Paxson, about 150 miles south of Fairbanks, DOT spokeswoman Shannon McCarthy said.
Some motorists had been stranded in the subzero temperatures for 18 to 20 hours, she said.

"We had to dig them out," she said. "We were fortunate that people came prepared."

Everybody who was traveling that stretch of the highway is believed to be accounted for, according to Alaska State Troopers. There were no injuries. [...]

Saudi Arabia announced that it had approved the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty on climate change which President Bush has been trying to kill. And Australia, while still rejecting it, parted company from the United States by saying that it was prepared to negotiate its successor.

The moves follow a tense international negotiating session in Buenos Aires where, as The Independent on Sunday reported last week, the US brought the talks to the brink of collapse by obstructing even anodyne proposals. This breached an assurance given by President Bush in 2001, when he pulled out of the protocol, that America would not try to stop other countries reaching agreement.

New negotiations are due to begin next year on a successor to Kyoto, which will come into force in February, following Russia's decision to ratify it last autumn. Tony Blair regards progress on climate change as one of the top priorities of Britain's presidency of the G8 group of the world's most powerful nations.

US opposition endangers both initiatives, but Mr Bush suffered a blow on Tuesday when the Saudi cabinet approved the treaty. A royal decree is being prepared to endorse it officially. The decision is significant, since the Saudis worked closely with the US in Buenos Aires, but the Australian initiative is more important, as it has so far marched in step with the US to try to kill negotiations.

Ian Campbell, Australia's environment minister, said it would be prepared to enter an agreement to combat global warming. He warned that unless it was reached, the world would be "in jeopardy", adding: "The difference between the US and Australia is that we are prepared to engage in a new agreement, so long as it is comprehensive."

Meanwhile, the official European Environment Agency has announced that the EU nations were on track to exceed the pollution cuts they have promised under Kyoto, so long as they implement all their policies and measures.

The year 2004, punctuated by four powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and deadly typhoons in Asia, was the fourth hottest year on record a UN weather agency said.

The World Meteorological Organisation said on Wednesday it expects Earth's surface temperature to rise 0.4 degrees Celsius higher than the normal 14 degrees Celsius adding 2004 to a recent warming trend that saw the hottest year registered in 1998 and the top three hottest since then.

The month of October also registered as the warmest October ever since accurate readings were first started in 1861, the agency responsible for assembling data from meteorologists and climatologists worldwide, said.

"This was a very warm year," Michel Jarraud, the WMO
secretary-general, said. He noted that it was also marked by an unusual number of hurricanes and tropical storms that hit the Caribbean, the United States and Asia.

Greenhouse gases

The report's release comes as environmental ministers from 80 countries gathered in Buenos Aires for a UN conference on climate change, looking at ways to cut greenhouse gases that some have blamed for Earth's warming.

This summer, heat waves in southern Europe pushed temperatures to near-record highs in southern Spain, Portugal and Romania, where thermostats peaked at 40 degrees Celsius while the rest of Europe sweltered through above average temperatures.

Jarraud said the warming and increased storm activity could not be attributed to any particular cause, but was part of a global warming trend that was likely to continue.

Scientists have reported that global temperatures rose an average of 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past century with the rate of change since 1976 at roughly three times that over the past 100 years.

Strong storms

This year, the hurricane season in the Caribbean spawned four hurricanes that reached Category 4 or 5 strength capable of causing extreme and catastrophic damage. It was only the fourth time in recent history that so many strong storms were recorded. They caused more than $43 billion in damages.

The stormy season in the Caribbean inflicted the most damage on Haiti, killing as many as 1900 people from flooding and mudslides caused by tropical storm Jeanne in September.

Japan and the Philippines also saw increased extreme tropical weather, with deadly typhoons hitting both islands. Japan registered a record number of typhoons making landfall this year with 10, while back-to-back storms in the Philippines killed at least 740 people in what was the wettest year since 2000, the UN agency said.

UN environmental officials released new findings that 2004 also was the most expensive year for the insurance industry as a result of hurricanes, typhoons and other weather-related natural disasters.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Snow, sleet and freezing rain pelted the Carolinas on Sunday, knocking out power to thousands and causing hundreds of accidents on one of the busiest travel and shopping days of the year. At least two people were killed.

Portions of eastern North Carolina received more than 20 centimetres of snow, surprising residents who often go an entire winter without seeing snow. About 10,000 people were without power. Further south, freezing rain coated trees and power lines with ice, knocking out power to more than 25,000 homes and businesses in central and northeastern South Carolina.

State troopers responded to hundreds of calls of accidents on the icy roads throughout the day. Two people were killed in North Carolina.

Police said thousands of people were on their way home from the Christmas holidays when the storm struck. It came after parts of the Carolinas received several centimetres of snow last week.

"We knew that this would be an unusual event," said Gail Hartfield, a weather service meteorologist. "It is unusual, but it's not completely unprecedented." [...]

HALIFAX - Most parts of Atlantic Canada were hit with an intense blizzard on Monday. Now that same storm is on its way to Newfoundland.

A low pressure system off Nova Scotia began dumping snow throughout the region Sunday night . Parts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island got as much as 50 cm of snow along with winds gusting to 95 km/h.

Shoppers in Halifax brave white-out conditions Monday.

The storm led to power outages around the Maritimes, as well as flights being canceled or delayed, road closures and other traffic problems.

Even snowplows had to be pulled off the roads in some regions.

Chuck Bernard, who lives in Bouctouche, on the east coast of New Brunswick, says people are keeping an eye on rising water levels because of a possible storm surge.

The rising water has already reached some property lines.

"It's very rough," Bernard said. "The wind is a little bit down from this morning, at least we can see across the street. But the ice has moved off the bay, the fishermen's huts were all on there, the fishermen's fishing nets for the smelt are all gone. It's very scary, very rough and rugged."

The storm will move off towards Newfoundland overnight, where the western half of the island can expect blizzard-like conditions.

Environment Canada says the Port-aux-Basques area should expect winds gusting to 130 km/h, and is warning of heavy snowfalls.

The snow is expected to change over to heavy rain by the time it reaches eastern Newfoundland.

A strong Pacific storm system is making its way down the coast, bringing plenty of rain.

The National Weather Service is issuing a flash flood watch from 6 tonight until noon tomorrow. Affected areas include Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

A similar flood watch is being issued for Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties for tomorrow through Wednesday night.

Forecasters expect heavy rainfall that could reach up to ten inches in some areas. They're warning of possible mudslides in and below burn areas

LOS ANGELES - A massive storm hammered California on Monday, causing deadly collisions on slick highways, delaying flights and flooding low-lying areas.

Snow, rain, lightning, strong wind gusts and waterspouts were forecast as the storm moved down the California coast and tapped into a tropical flow, spinning moisture into the region. The roughest weather was forecast for Tuesday.

San Francisco was hit by 3.08 inches as of 5 p.m., according to the National Weather Service, leading to some flight delays at San Francisco International Airport.

Street flooding in San Francisco brought Vince Barr out to direct traffic in hopes of keeping the water out of his business.

"We're trying to slow the traffic down so the waves don't come into our business because the water is at the door's edge right now," Barr told KGO-TV. "You have to do what you have to do to save the business. This is not the first time this has happened."

Rainfall was even heavier in Kentfield in Marin County receiving 6.01 inches of rain and Santa Rosa getting 3.92. Half Moon Bay, in Santa Clara County, was hit by 3.95 inches.

The storm pushed its way into Southern California late Monday. A trucker was killed when his big-rig went over the side of northbound Interstate 5 in the Tejon Pass near Pyramid Lake.

Treacherous conditions were forecast for travelers.

The National Weather Service posted a winter storm watch for mountains above 6,500 feet for most of Tuesday and Wednesday. More than a foot of snow could fall in the San Bernardino Mountains with the snow level dropping to 5,500 feet in some areas.

High wind warnings Tuesday through Wednesday could bring gusts to 70 mph and visibilities could be reduced dramatically in the mountains because of blowing and drifting snow.

Forecasters expect unstable, wet weather through next week - with rain possible for the Rose Parade on New Year's Day. It hasn't rained on the Rose Parade since 1955.

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN OXNARD HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
SOUTHWESTERN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IN SOUTHWEST CALIFORNIA
INCLUDING PALOS VERDES...SAN PERDO...ROLLING HILLS...
TORRANCE AND CARSON

* UNTIL 1130 PM PST

* AT 1026 PM PST...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A TORNADO 22 MILES SOUTH
OF PALOS VERDES ESTATES...OR ABOUT 26 MILES SOUTHWEST OF LONG
BEACH...MOVING NORTH AT 45 MPH.

* THE TORNADO IS EXPECTED TO BE NEAR...
PALOS VERDES ESTATES BY 1055 PM PST
TORRANCE AND REDONDO BEACH BY 1100 PM PST
MANHATTAN BEACH AND 8 MILES WEST OF COMPTON BY 1105 PM PST
INGLEWOOD BY 1110 PM PST

There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.

An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.

The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years.

The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.

More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.

Geologist Michael J. Benton lays out the scientific evidence for this epochal tragedy in a recent book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. As with the PETM, greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from increased volcanic activity, warmed the earth and seas enough to release massive amounts of methane from these sensitive clathrates, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect.

The cause of all this havoc?

In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an area rich in these unstable clathrates.

If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there's no turning back. No do-overs. Once it starts, it's likely to play out all the way.

Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii's Kilauea.

And that is the time bomb the Arctic Council ignored.

How likely is it that humans will cause methane burps by burning fossil fuels? No one knows. But it is somewhere between possible and likely at this point, and it becomes more likely with each passing year that we fail to act.

So forget rising sea levels, melting ice caps, more intense storms, more floods, destruction of habitats and the extinction of polar bears. Forget warnings that global warming might turn some of the world's major agricultural areas into deserts and increase the range of tropical diseases, even though this is the stuff we're pretty sure will happen.

Instead, let's just get with the Bush administration's policy of pre-emption. We can't afford to have the first sign of a failed energy policy be the mass extinction of life on Earth. We have to act now.

John Atcheson, a geologist, has held a variety of policy positions in several federal government agencies.

A powerful storm pounded California for a second day, flooding freeways and desert roads, tossing boats ashore and triggering a rockslide that blocked the central coast highway.

Two deaths were linked to the storm that roared down from the Gulf of Alaska and into the nationís most populous state on Monday.

One victim was apparently killed as he tried to surf big waves at Montara State Beach south of San Francisco. A lorry driver died in a crash on an interstate north of Los Angeles.

Downtown Los Angeles got a record 3.98 inches of rain by last night, topping the 2.09 inches set on December 28, 1931.

More heavy weather was on its way, according to forecasters. A potentially stronger system was due to enter northern California tonight, bringing heavy snow and high winds to the Sierra Nevada and eastern parts of the state through Friday.

Flash-flood warnings were posted in south-eastern California for parts of San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties. Authorities reported flooding along highways near Joshua Tree National Park, and warned motorists to be alert crossing washes and driving near creeks.

Residents were ordered to evacuate about 50 homes in the San Bernardino County town of Devore, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. A flash flood on Christmas Day 2003 killed 16 people near there. [...]

BOSTON - A storm spread sleet, freezing rain and more than a foot of snow along the Eastern Seaboard, knocking out power to thousands in the Carolinas and New England, stranding hundreds of motorists along icy highways and causing airport delays.

At least two traffic deaths were blamed on the weather in North Carolina.

Fourteen inches of snow had fallen Monday in Virginia and 18 inches fell in eastern Massachusetts as the storm skimmed the coast on a northeasterly track. Up to 20 inches of snow was possible in southeastern Massachusetts, the National Weather Service said. Just over 8 inches fell on the eastern tip of New York's Long Island.

Boston's Logan International Airport was operating a single runway Monday morning, and substantial delays were expected, airport spokesman Phil Orlandella said. Rhode Island got up to 10 inches and T.F. Green Airport in Warwick had flight delays Monday after shutting down late Sunday night so crews could clear runways. [...]

Slates were ripped off roofs and a lamppost was uprooted when a mini tornado hit just a handful of streets, it emerged today.

Firefighters were called to repair wind damage to several houses in Haverfordwest, South Wales, late last night.

Properties in the Priory Estate area were damaged and in Geralds Way a lamppost was blown over in the high winds.

But neighbouring streets escaped the effects of the freak weather. [...]

ìIíve spoken to neighbours and it took all of 15 minutes. People in unaffected streets didnít even hear anything.î

A spokesman for the Met Office said that it was possible for a tornado to rip through one street while neighbouring areas did not experience any wind at all.

He said: ìThey could be so localised they affect one or two streets. The ones that happen in the US are on a much larger scale than the ones which happen in the UK. But we do have a few reports of tornados in Wales and the South West of England each year.î

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Thousands of baby sea turtles were smothered by excess sand or drowned after a series of tropical storms hit the beaches of Cape Island this year, biologists say.

Despite efforts to protect the loggerhead turtles, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that just 62 percent of the eggs hatched at the undeveloped barrier island north of Charleston. In a normal year, about 80 percent of the island's eggs would hatch, the service said.

Cape Island, in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, is one of the most important sea turtle nesting sites in South Carolina. About one-third of the nests established in the state are built in the sand dunes of Cape Island.

The loggerhead is the only sea turtle to nest regularly on South Carolina beaches. The reptile, which can live 75 years and weigh 350 pounds, is listed by the federal government as a threatened species.

For more than two decades, loggerhead populations have declined as a result of pollution, overdevelopment of beaches and commercial fishing. [...]

An ongoing drought in Vietnam has caused water shortage for nearly 300,000 hectares of crops and over 500,000 local residents nationwide, local newspaper Pioneer reported Tuesday.

Out of 262,700 hectares of crops affected by the drought, 142, 300 hectares, mainly rice, maize, sugarcane, cotton and coffee, have already been destroyed. Over 500,000 people now lack water for domestic use, while around 44,000 others suffer from hunger.

The drought is predicted to last in the coming weeks, causing total losses of more than 5 trillion Vietnamese dong (US$318.5 million).

More than 400 of 669 Chinese cities are facing water shortages, among which the situation in 110 cities was described as "serious", said Xinhua news agency, quoting Wang Shucheng, Minister of Water Resources.

Some 20 million hectares (49 million acres) of farmland were affected by drought, reducing grain production by 28 million tons, Wang told the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.

Severe water pollution in China made water shortages even worse and threatened the safety of drinking water.

"China's water pollution is very serious," Wang said, adding that just 38.1 percent of China's river water was drinkable.

China pumped out 68 billion tons of sewage in 2003, double the amount in 1980, Xinhua said.

In some regions, high levels of metal and organic pollutants caused cancer and deformity in humans, Wang was quoted as saying.

According to an earlier Xinhua report last week, more than 70 percent of China's rivers and lakes were polluted to different degrees.

"Currently, 300 million Chinese people are drinking unsafe water", Wang said in the report. [...]

London ó LIKE two bookends of calamity, earthquakes at Bam in Iran and off Sumatra in Indonesia have delineated a year of unusual seismic ferocity - a year, one might say, of living dangerously. Twelve months, almost to the very hour, before Sunday's extraordinary release of stress at the India-Burma tectonic plate boundary, a similar jolt at the boundary of the Arabian and the Eurasian Plates devastated one of the most celebrated of Persian caravan cities. The televised images of Bam's collapsed citadel and the sight of thousands of bodies being carried from the desert ruins haunted the world then just as the images of the drowned around the shores of the Bay of Bengal do today.

But that has not been the half of it. True, these two disasters were, in terms of their numbers of casualties, by far the most lethal. But in the 12 months that separated them, there have been many other ruinous and seismically ominous events, occurring in places that seem at first blush to be entirely disconnected.

This year just ending - which the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us has been that of the Monkey, and so generally much prone to terrestrial mischief - has seen killer earthquakes in Morocco in February and Japan's main island of Honshu in October. The Japan temblor left us with one widely published image - of a bullet-train, derailed and lying on its side - that was, in its own way, an augury of a very considerable power: no such locomotive had ever been brought low before, and the Japanese were properly vexed by its melancholy symbolism.

In America, too, this year there have been some peculiar signs. Not only has Mount St. Helens been acting up in the most serious fashion since its devastating eruption of May 1980, but on one bright mid-autumn day in California this year the great San Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plates rub alongside one another, ruptured. It was on Sept. 28, early in the morning, near the town of Parkfield - where, by chance, a deep hole was being drilled directly down into the fault by geologists to try to discern the fault's inner mysteries.

The rupture produced a quake of magnitude 6.0 - and though it did not kill anyone, it frightened millions, not least the government scientists who have the fault in their care. They had expected this particular quake to have occurred years beforehand - and had thought a seismic event so unlikely at the time that most were at a conference in Chicago when it happened. They rushed home, fascinated to examine their instruments, but eager also to allay fears that their drilling had anything to do with the tremors.

As every American schoolchild knows, the most notorious rupture of this same fault occurred nearly a century ago, at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906 - an occurrence now known around the world as the great San Francisco Earthquake. An entire city, a monument to the hopes and dreams of America's westward expansion, was destroyed by a mere 40 seconds of shaking. It was an occurrence possessed of a historical significance that may well be matched by the tragedy now unfolding on the far side of the world.

But, curiously, it turns out that there were many other equally momentous seismic events taking place elsewhere in the world in 1906 as well. Ten weeks before the San Francisco quake there was one of magnitude 8.2 on the frontier between Colombia and Ecuador; then on Feb. 16 there was a violent rupture under the Caribbean island of St. Lucia;then on March 1, 200 people were killed by an earthquake on Formosa; and then, to pile Pelion upon Ossa, Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted, killing hundreds.

But even then it wasn't over. The grand finale of the year's seismic upheaval took place in Chile in August, a quake that all but destroyed the port of Valparaiso. Twenty thousand people were killed. Small wonder that the Chinese, who invented the seismograph and who tend to take the long view of all historical happenings, note in their writings that 1906 was a highly unusual Year of the Fire Horse, when devastating consequences are wont to abound, worldwide.

"We know that earthquakes of this type occur right off of our coast", research scientist John Cassidy of the Geological Survey of Canada told Canadian Television Wednesday.

"What we are trying to understand is how the ground will shake in Vancouver and Victoria during our future earthquake," he said.

Under the water off the west coast of North America, massive pressure is building up in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The release causes earthquakes. Eventually, British Columbia will be hit by the big one.

Bob Bugslag, director of British Columnbia's Provincial Emergency Program, told the Canadian Press that communities in the coastal areas in the province are at risk from tsunamis. If a major earthquake happened off the coast, coastal communities would have about 3 hours warning.

"We are on the Pacific Rim and the entire area is very vulnerable to tsunamis," said Bugslag. The earthquake in Alaska had a devastating impact on B.C. The Vancouver Island community of Port Alberni was swamped by a tsunami triggered by the powerful quake. The tidal wave destroyed everything in its path. Amazingly, no one was killed or even seriously injured. That quake and the one is south Asia this week were remarkably similar and provide scientists with a rare opportunity to understand their power, Canadian scientists say.

OTTAWA - The July storm system that sent hail and rain pounding down on Edmonton and flooded homes in Peterborough , Ont., leads the list of the Top 10 weather stories of 2004, released Wednesday by Environment Canada.

In fact, that weather system took two spots on the annual list prepared by senior climatologist David Phillips.

Phillips chose the July 11 Edmonton deluge as the top weather event of 2004 because of its intensity and drama.

Hailstones the size of golf balls briefly gave the city a Christmas-like appearance, and 15 cm of rain caused flooding and forced the evacuation of the West Edmonton Mall.

The Peterborough flooding triggered by the same continent-wide weather system ranked fourth on Phillips's list.

About 24 cm of rain drenched the Ont ario town on July 15, leading to widespread damage.

The "White Juan" blizzard that paralysed parts of the Maritimes on Feb. 19 and left Halifax buried under a metre of snow took the No. 2 spot on the list.

The storm was accompanied by winds of up to 124 km/h, which qualify as hurricane force.

"Our reputation as a winter people has been maintained," Phillips told one interviewer.

In third place was the unusually cool, wet summer that much of the country experienced.

Phillips credited that chill with giving Canada the only "good-news" weather event on his list: a halt in the spread of West Nile disease, which took the No. 10 spot.

The disease is spread by mosquitoes , but insect numbers were way down because of the cold temperatures, Phillips said.

Other weather events on the list:

• Fires and hot weather plaguing British Columbia and the Yukon, in fifth place.
• A nationwide deep freeze in January, during which Key Lake, Sask., was officially the coldest place on Earth one night with a temperature of ñ52.6 C, in sixth place.
• The Aug. 20 frost that destroyed $1-billion worth of crops in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in seventh place.
• An early winter storm that buried the Maritimes in up to 62 cm of snow on Nov. 13-14, in eighth place.
• Spring snow on the Prairies that left some places covered with almost 50 cm on May 11, in ninth place.

LOS ANGELES — A slow-rolling series of storms that battered the West this week brought snowfall and high wind Thursday to parts of California, where weather-weary residents have already endured lashing rain, heavy snowfall and a destructive tornado.

Since the wild weather began slogging ashore Monday, five deaths in California and two in Colorado have been blamed on storms. Searchers on Thursday recovered what they believed were the bodies of two missing college students who had vanished after their canoe capsized in a flooded Arizona creek.

Up to a foot of snow fell on Colorado mountains, and northern Nevada was expecting as much as 6 feet on top of the 3-4 feet that already had fallen.

In Arizona, residents of Sedona — a tourist community known for its stunning red rock formations — began cleaning up after a heavy storm bloated a creek from a trickling stream to a rushing river of mud. Residents in an area including three resorts, an RV and mobile home park, and 40 homes had been urged to evacuate after the flooding Wednesday.

California has taken brunt of the Pacific barrage, first in Southern California then in the north.

Heavy rain, wind and blizzard conditions struck Northern California early Thursday, snarling traffic, cutting power to thousands in the San Francisco Bay Area, while temporarily closing major routes across the Sierra Nevada.

Forecasters expect the area to receive several more storms over the next few days that will continue to make travel difficult.

"They've got blizzard conditions up there right now and there's no reason to think anything is going to get any better tonight," California Highway Patrol spokesman Steve Kohler said of the shutdown of Highway 80 in the Sierras.

Inland, a winter storm warning was posted around Lake Tahoe on the Northern California-Nevada line. A combination of heavy snow and wind gusting to 100 mph pummeled the area.

In Southern California, two days of downpours have brought up to 12 inches of rain and scores of highway accidents.

As the storm moved east, three Colorado highways were closed, one from accidents and two by avalanches.

The two storm victims in Colorado died when their pickup truck hit a jackknifed trailer Wednesday night. The victims, Tom Thorne and Beth Williams, were a husband-and-wife team of wildlife veterinarians who were nationally prominent experts on chronic wasting disease and brucellosis.

Elsewhere, freezing rain put an icy layer on roads in the northern Plains early Thursday, sending vehicles into ditches.

"At 7:30 this morning, the entire town was a sheet of ice," said Dennis Walaker, public works director in Fargo, N.D.

REGINA - A blizzard is blowing its way across the southern Prairies, with snow and freezing rain making travel difficult for drivers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and delaying flights at the Regina airport.

Motorists are reporting zero visibility and heavy snow, and police are advising drivers to stay off the roads.

Driving was so treacherous on southern highways in Manitoba that provincial transportation officials pulled snowplows off the roads.

Provincial officials also closed several major highways late Thursday afternoon.

Most of southern Manitoba had already received five to 10 cm of heavy snow, as well as freezing rain and ice pellets. An additional 10 to 25 cm was expected overnight and early Friday.

Weather conditions prompted the Saskatchewan Highways Department to advise motorists to stay off highways in a number of regions.

It was predicted the eastward-moving storm system would dump as much as much as 20 centimetres of snow on some communities. Freezing rain was also a possibility for some parts.

Wind chill is expected to bring the temperature down to as low as –34 C in Regina and –29 C in Winnipeg.

DUBAI - Snow has fallen over the United Arab Emirates for the first time ever, leaving a white blanket over the mountains of Ras al-Khaimah as the desert country experienced a cold spell and above-average rainfall.

Dubai airport's meteorology department told AFP that snow fell over the Al-Jees mountain range in Ras al-Khaimah, which is the most northerly member of the UAE federation.

The English-language Gulf News reported that the mountain cluster, 5,700 feet (1,737 metres) above sea level, "had heavy night-time snowfall for the past two days as a result of temperatures dropping to as low as minus five Celsius (23 Fahrenheit)" and stunning the emirate's residents.

On Monday, 12.6 millimetres (half an inch) of rain fell on the desert emirate of Dubai, where it hardly ever rains, as police reported 500 accidents on its roads in 24 hours, including one fatality, as a result of a three-day downpour.

A cold spell has hit the country this week, with the mercury plunging to 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 Fahrenheit) in Dubai on Wednesday night.

The meteorology department, however, said the chilly weather in Dubai, where summer temperatures reach 50 Celcius (122 Fahrenheit), will probably end by next week.

There is now an active programme of permafrost monitoring
In parts of Fairbanks, Alaska, houses and buildings lean at odd angles.

Some slump as if sliding downhill. Windows and doors inch closer and closer to the ground.

It is an architectural landscape that is becoming more familiar as the world's ice-rich permafrost gives way to thaw.

Water replaces ice and the ground subsides, taking the structures on top along with it.

Alaska is not the only region in a slump. The permafrost melt is accelerating throughout the world's cold regions, scientists reported at the recent Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

In addition to northern Alaska, the permafrost zone includes most other Arctic land, such as northern Canada and much of Siberia, as well as the higher reaches of mountainous regions such as the Alps and Tibet. All report permafrost thaw. [...]

Sink to source

In steep mountainous regions, permafrost thaw can lead to slope failure and rock falls.

In these areas, the permafrost ice is in hard rock. Where rocks are jointed, the ice serves as a kind of cement holding them together.

When it melts, the rock loses its strength and falls. A dramatic example of this occurred during the European heatwave of 2003 when a huge block of the Matterhorn broke off suddenly, leaving Alpine climbers stranded.