An air pollution alert was put in effect Monday for approximately the southern three-fourths of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities, Rochester, St. Cloud, Brainerd and Duluth.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency extended the alert through Wednesday.

The agency said levels of soot in the air are in the "orange'' category, meaning unhealthy for sensitive groups such as those with heart or lung disease, adults over 50, and healthy adults and children doing vigorous exercise outdoors.

However, the agency said the air pollution in the Twin Cities area is nearing the point where it's unhealthy for everyone.

A temperature inversion trapped fine particles in the air near the ground, and more particles have moved into Minnesota from the south.

British scientists have discovered a new threat to the world which may be a result of global warming. Researchers from the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that a massive Antarctic ice sheet previously assumed to be stable may be starting to disintegrate, a conference on climate change heard yesterday. Its collapse would raise sea levels around the earth by more than 16 feet.

BAS staff are carrying out urgent measurements of the remote points in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) where they have found ice to be flowing into the sea at the enormous rate of 250 cubic kilometres a year, a discharge alone that is raising global sea levels by a fifth of a millimetre a year.

Professor Chris Rapley, the BAS director, told the conference at the UK Meteorological Office in Exeter, which was attended by scientists from all over the world, that their discovery had reactivated worries about the ice sheet's collapse.

Only four years ago, in the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), worries that the ice sheet was disintegrating were firmly dismissed.

Professor Rapley said: "The last IPCC report characterised Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would say it is now an awakened giant. There is real concern."

He added: "The previous view was that WAIS would not collapse before the year 2100. We now have to revise that judgement. We cannot be so sanguine." Collapse of the WAIS would be a disaster, putting enormous chunks of low-lying, desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh under water - not to mention much of southern England.

The conference has been called by Tony Blair as part of Britain's efforts to increase the pace of international action on climate change, in a year when the UK is heading the G8 group of industrialised nations and the European Union.

Mr Blair has asked it to explore the question of how much climate change the world can take before the consequences are catastrophic for human society and ecosystems.

Yesterday, it heard several alarming new warnings of possible climate-related catastrophic events, including the failure of the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles warm, and the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland.

But it was the revelations of Professor Rapley, head of one of the world's most respected scientific bodies, which were the most dramatic, as they reopened a concern many scientists assumed had been laid to rest.

Antarctica as a whole is a land covered by very thick ice, but the ice sheet covering the eastern half of the continent is very stable as it sits on rocks that are well above sea level.

Worries about the ice covering the western half first surfaced more than 25 years ago when it was realised that the base rocks are actually well below the level of the sea.

In some circumstances, it was feared, such as a melting of the edge of the ice sheet from rising temperatures, sea water could get under it and eventually lead to its collapse.

Yet the 2001 IPCC report, the principal consensus view of the international community of climate scientists, thought that very unlikely, and said such a collapse was improbable before the end of the current century, or even for 1,000 years.

What puts a very big question mark over this, Professor Rapley said, was the recent discovery of the extremely rapid discharge of ice into the Amundsen sea from the WAIS at three remote ice streams, Pine Island, Thwaites, and another unnamed site.

"There is a very dramatic discharge from this region which, five years ago when the IPCC report was written, we just didn't know about," he said. "What we have found completely opens up the whole debate." It had only been recently discovered, he said, because the area was so remote. But BAS scientists, with US help, had established a base in the area to investigate. Professor Rapley said there was some evidence that the discharge was a relatively recent phenomenon and it might be caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, who opened the conference, added another ominous prediction when she said that major global warming impacts on the world in the next 20 to 30 years could not be avoided. Whatever we do, potentially disastrous world temperature rises will take place because they are already "built into the system," she said.

Her forecast that we are powerless to prevent major damage from climate change is accepted by scientists but it is rare for such a frank admission from a politician. It reflects the concern at a high level.

It was amplified by senior climate researchers, who said the amount of future warming to which the world is firmly committed, because of greenhouse gases that have already been put into the atmosphere, will be enough to threaten the survival of many ecosystems and wildlife species such as polar bears and penguins.

"I believe that most of the warming we are expecting over the next few decades is now virtually inevitable, and even in this time frame we may expect a significant impact," Mrs Beckett said.

Australia's eastern states have been battered by extreme weather conditions this week.

Heavy rain, lightning, strong winds and hail hit Sydney yesterday afternoon for the second day running.  

Sydney emergency workers had to rescue three people trapped in cars in rising floodwaters in Bexley North and almost 100,000 homes and businesses were left without power.

The winds of more than 90kph brought down trees and power lines and tore roofs off buildings, while the downpour flooded roads. 

The SES received about 1,350 calls for help while the Ambulance Service responded to almost 170 triple-0 calls.

Further north, towers of red dust swept through western Queensland and northern New South Wales forcing the closure of 20 regional airports in Queensland.

Longreach Mayor Pat Tanks described the dust storm as the worst seen in a decade.

At the same time, Melbourne recorded its coldest February day on record with 13.5 degrees. It also had the heaviest February rainfall in over a decade.

Strong winds hit northern Tasmania  last night, ripping roofs from buildings in Launceston and downing trees and powerlines, Tasmania Police said.

The extreme conditions were all caused by the same thing, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

"It's all associated with the same general system," said Andrew Haigh, a severe weather forecaster with the bureau.

"You've got a very strong cold front and a low-pressure system combining. There's very cold air in the upper atmosphere over southern NSW and Victoria."

The storms that struck Sydney today had preceded a cold front which extended into Queensland and had been moving east, bringing strong winds and rain, Mr Haigh said.

The State Emergency Service (SES) received more than 2,500 calls for help overnight as heavy rain and winds flooded houses and brought down trees, with further calls expected as the wild weather continues today.

"It has certainly been a very busy night with every suburb of Melbourne, parts of eastern Victoria, and the Geelong/Bellarine Peninsula areas being affected," SES spokesman Peter Cocks said.

"This is shaping as one of our busiest storm operations ever as the rain and wind continues to lash Melbourne.

"The number of calls has stretched resources to the limit and I ask people to be patient as many volunteers have been on the go all night."

More than 50 SES teams from all 31 Melbourne metropolitan SES units worked overnight, supported by Metropolitan Fire Brigade and Country Fire Authority crews, Mr Cocks said.

Mr Cocks said flash flooding was widespread and warned motorists to take care.

"The extreme weather is expected to continue over the next few hours and the SES expects to receive a further increase in calls as people awaken to find storm damage not yet detected," Mr Cocks said.

THE road into Melbourne Airport has been flooded and flights have been diverted after wild storms lashed Melbourne.

Traffic banked up on the Tullamarine Freeway today because of the flooding, and frustrated travellers were forced to sit in their cars as their flights took off without them.

Melbourne Airport spokeswoman Brooke Lord said the two lanes that ran into the airport from the Tullamarine Freeway were flooded by the heaviest rainfall on record and access to the airport had been completely blocked.

"The rains have actually flooded the entrance to the airport which was completely closed with traffic banked up," she said. [...]

LARGE areas of Western Australia's north-west are suffering severe heat, in contrast to the unseasonal storms and hail affecting the nation's eastern seaboard.

Searing temperatures in the north west have dominated weather news in recent weeks, with centres such as Nyang Station and Marble Bar averaging 44.8C and 44.6C respectively throughout the month of January – an all-time record.

Perth averaged a comparatively mild 30C during the first month of the year.

However, the city's 1.4 million residents are expected to swelter in the next 48 hours with the mercury tipped to reach 38C today and 37C tomorrow.

The weather bureau reported today serious to severe rainfall deficiencies in the interior and north of WA, with large regions experiencing its driest July-January period on record.

The south-west tip of WA is also in drought, with the bureau noting serious rainfall deficiencies after a dry winter.

IQALUIT - A group of European scientists is predicting a potential record loss of ozone over the Arctic this year.

Temperatures in the stratosphere in the last two months have been much colder than usual, and Cambridge University chemist Neil Harris says that's creating clouds in the upper atmosphere that contribute to ozone depletion.

Harris says if those low temperatures continue until spring it could lead to the biggest loss of ozone in more than 50 years.

"That's the big 'if' here," he says. "But if it stays cold – and there's no sign of it warming up in our 10 day forecasts – then these large losses are very likely to happen. At particular altitudes it would be 50, 60, 70 per cent, and in the total column, 25 to 30 per cent."

Harris says the greatest loss in ozone would be above the 65th parallel.

A thinner ozone layer leads to more ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth, which has been linked to a rise in some types of skin cancer.

Uitenhage, South Africa - Five people were critically injured and at least 20 hurt when a tornado whipped through the town of Klipplaat near Jansenville in the Eastern Cape on Wednesday evening.

The five were taken to Port Elizabeth hospital. Between 20 and 25 people were taken to Jansenville hospital with minor injuries, Iqwezi municipality councillor Mannetjie Blouw said.

"You couldn't see, you could only hear the wind and the rain. People were screaming and running around trying to figure out what was happening," said Amos Dyasi, a unit manager at the Ikwezi municipality.

Dyasi said the tornado struck at 6.20pm and lasted about 15 minutes, although Blouw said it lasted 30 minutes.

The roof of the municipal building was torn off and at least 35 houses were damaged. Trees and telephone poles were uprooted and electric cables torn down.

"The town looks like Baghdad. It's dead. There was wind, rain, hail coming from all four corners," Blouw said.

He estimated that in the town with a population of between 3 000 and 4 000 people and an unemployment rate of 85%, 280 houses were affected and 60 of those were flattened by the storm.

ATHENS - A 90 year-old man and his 91 year-old wife have been found dead in their village home in northern Greece amid freezing temperatures, emergency services said Thursday.

Low temperatures and heavy snowfall have caused serious disruption to Greek rail and air traffic, and ships have been confined to port because of gales, officials said.

According to weather forecasts, temperatures were expected Friday to stay below three 3 degrees Celsius (37 Fahrenheit) in the north of the country.

PANAMA CITY, Panama - NASA has installed a climate-observation system at a former U.S. military base bordering the Panama Canal that will allow scientists to monitor forest fires, earthquakes and tropical storms.

The installation, which officials of the U.S. space agency were inaugurating on Thursday, will collect data as part of a larger network headquartered at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

The "Regional Mesoamerican Visualization and Monitoring System" is based at The Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean, a division of UNESCO at the former Fort Clayton and near the Pacific opening of the canal. The base was reopened as the U.N. headquarters in Panama in October.

In addition to detecting and measuring such events as seismic movements, tropical storms and forest fires, the center's modern technology will provide high-resolution images of the phenomena, said Water Center director Emilio Sempris. The center also will predict weather patterns, Sempris said.

Environmentalists, engineers and other experts will be able to access the satellite-collected data on a Web page, a tool that could help in disaster prevention, a news release from the center added.

EXETER, England : Scientists at a global warming conference say they see potential triggers for runaway climate change but admit that when and how these notional doomsdays may be unleashed are debatable or quite unknown.

The theoretical triggers are the apocalyptic side to global warming, giving the lie to the common perception of it as an incremental threat that will rise predictably, like a straight line on a graph.

A widespread view of climate change is that the Earth's surface temperature will gently rise as more and more carbon gas is spewed out by fossil fuels, trapping heat from the Sun.

The change would be progressive, which means humans would have enough time to respond to the crisis and plants and animals have a better chance of adapting to its effects.

But scientists at a conference here on global warming say there is also the risk of sudden, catastrophic, irreversible and uncontrollable climate change that could be triggered in as-yet unknown conditions.

"There's still a great deal we don't know about these rapid non-linear events," British scientist Sir John Houghton, a leading member of the UN's top panel on global warming, said on Tuesday.

One scenario centres on the future of the Gulf Stream, the current that brings warm water to the northeastern Atlantic from the tropics and gives Western Europe a climate that is balmy for its northern latitude.

What would happen to this oceanic conveyor belt if cold fresh water were dumped on it from melting polar ice and changed rainfall patterns, the result of warm weather?

When this idea was first put forward in the late 1990s, some doomsters predicted the Gulf Stream would stop, pitching Britain, Ireland and much of coastal western Europe back into an Ice Age.

But two computer models, put forward Tuesday, show how far scientists fail to agree on the probability of this event and on its likely impact.

University of Illinois professor Mike Schlesinger told AFP that he had modelled a "business as usual" simulation in which the world continued with uncontrolled emissions of the carbon gases that cause global warming.

"I was surprised to find out that it's 70-percent likely that there will be a shutdown in this circulation over a 200-year timeline," he said.

"Over Europe, the shutdown would cause a cooling of perhaps one or two degrees [C, 2-4 F], superposed on [several degrees of] warming," he said.

"So what you get is a smaller warming in Europe, you don't get an Ice Age out of that."

Just as remarkable was this discovery: the shutdown caused such a disruption in global weather patterns that Alaska became a lot warmer in winter.

"This is serious news for the permafrost," he said.

In contrast, Richard Wood, of Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Centre and Research, was far more cautious.

"Little can currently be said about the probability, except that it is subjectively considered low during the 21st century," Wood's study said.

His simulation -- entirely hypothetical -- of the Gulf Stream shutdown suggests that parts of Britain would be far colder than the so-called Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries, when winter "Frost Fairs" were held on the frozen River Thames.

Worst hit would not be Alaska, but central America, where farm production would fall by 106 percent, according to this calculation.

Another doomsday worry is about the future of carbon which is already stored in the soil in the form of decayed leaves and rotting vegetation, and in the capacity of the sea to go on absorbing man-made carbon pollution.

Scientists at the conference agreed that if temperatures go beyond a threshold, this stored carbon in the soil will be released into the air. And at some point, the sea, which has already absorbed 48 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning oil, gas and coal, will no longer be able to absorb any more pollution.

That means vast amounts of gas will be dumped into the air, amplifying the global warming crisis at a stroke.

But carbon storage in such vast and complex mechanisms is a complex and little-understood phenomenon.

"The precise point at which the land biosphere will start to provide a positive feedback [i.e. release CO2 into the air instead of storing it] cannot yet be predicted with certainty," says Peter Cox of Britain's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

"This depends on a number of poorly understood processes, such as the long-term response of photosynthesis and soil respiration to increased temperatures and the possible acclimation of photosynthesis to high CO2."

EXETER, England : Global warming will boost outbreaks of infectious disease, worsen shortages of water and food in vulnerable countries and create an army of climate refugees fleeing uninhabitable regions, a conference here was told.

The scale of these impacts -- the theme of the second day of the major scientific forum on global warming -- varies according to how quickly fossil fuel pollution is tackled, how fast the world's population grows and how well countries can adapt to climate shift.

But a common expectation is that widespread misery is lurking, a few decades down the road.

According to a study quoted by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's top scientific authority on climate change, by 2050 as many as 150 million "environmental refugees" may have fled coastlines vulnerable to rising sea levels, storms or floods, or agricultural land that became too arid to cultivate.

In India alone, there could be 30 million people displaced by persistent flooding, while a sixth of Bangladesh could be permanently lost to sea level rise and land subsidence, according to the study.

Pachauri's body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), estimated in 2001 that by 2100, temperatures would rise by between 1.4 C (2.5 F) and 5.8 C (10.4) compared to 1990 levels, driven by atmospheric carbon pollution which stokes up heat from the Sun.

The mean global sea level would rise by between nine and 88 centimetres (four and 35 inches).

Those increases depend on whether carbon dioxide (CO2), doubles or nearly quadruples from the pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm).

Global warming will also add significantly to Earth's worrisome water problems.

Already around 1.4 billion people live in water-stressed areas, a term defined as having less than 1,000 cubic metres (35,000 cubic feet) of water per person per year, said Nigel Arnell of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Britain's University of Southampton.

Most of them live in southern and southwest Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

By the 2050s, water availability in these water-stressed regions -- but also in parts of central, north and south America -- may be further crimped because of changed rainfall patterns.

Between 700 million and 2.8 billion people in such areas will be affected, depending on population growth and the pace of temperature rise.

Sari Kovats of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine put forward a study co-authored by four World Health Organisation (WHO) scientists that gives a snapshot of global health problems caused by climate change.

Between the 1970s -- when temperatures first rose significantly -- and the year 2000, climate change cost around 150,000 lives from malnutrition, diarrhoea, malaria and floods.

That tally will "approximately double" by 2020, mainly because of diarrhoea, which is propagated easily in floods, and hunger, Kovats said.

The basis for this calculation is "business as usual," in other words, no controls are put on carbon pollution, causing Earth's temperature to reach some four C (7.2 F) higher at the end of this century when compared with 1990.

"Climate change will bring some health benefits," but these will mainly go to northern countries, where fewer people will die of cold and crop yields will be better, his study said.

Overall, these benefits will be hugely outweighed by increased disease and malnutrition.

Bill Hare, a former Greenpeace campaigner who is visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in eastern Germany, said a two C (3.6 F) rise seemed to be a key threshold.

"Above two C, the risks increase very substantially, involving potentially large extinctions or even ecosystem collapses, major increases in hunger and water shortage risks as well as socio-economic damages, particularly in developing countries," said Hare.

The conference wraps up on Thursday with a set of conclusions about the current state of knowledge about the dangers of global warming. The document will be submitted to Group of Eight (G8) policymakers and the IPCC for consideration in its next big report, due out in 2007.

Australia faces an ever-shrinking water supply, the extinction of plant and animal species and the loss of billions of dollars from a less productive agriculture sector, says a submission to an international global warming conference.

A joint presentation by the Australian Greenhouse Office, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO said the 2002-03 drought cost Australia 1.6 per cent of its gross domestic product - about $10 billion - and about 70,000 jobs.

The agriculture industry already had to adapt to extreme climate variations, the submission to the British conference said, and "that situation would get worse with a drier climate and more droughts".

As well as coping with a harsher climate, water supplies would be stretched because of growing demands by farms and cities. Water is also needed to protect species, the submission said.

"Higher temperatures in the future and possible rainfall decreases are likely to increase water demand and reduce supply, further increasing the pressure on this key resource," the Australian presentation said.

"Increases in the intensity of daily rainfall are likely to place increased pressure on urban drainage capacity and catchment management."

The submission was carefully worded to discuss only the predicted effects of global warming on Australia. It avoided any mention of what, if any, action should be taken to address climate change.

It noted the Great Barrier Reef "may be significantly affected by climate change under even moderate emission scenarios" and that the rate of extinction could increase.

At this week's conference in Exeter, scientists from 30 countries are trying to establish what constitutes dangerous levels of warming. But they will stop short of making policy recommendations.

The Australian submission did not discuss what temperature range it believed could be coped with, but supported the need to determine the point at which species and ecosystems can no longer adapt to a changing climate.

The Exeter conference is being held less than a fortnight before the Kyoto Protocol on global warming comes into force. [...]

EXETER - Global warming could hit millions of Africans hardest, an international conference on climate change heard Wednesday.

Nigerian scientist Tony Nyong said agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa could drop by up to a third within 60 years because of changes in rainfall patterns and longer dry seasons, while warmer water could all but wipe out coastal fisheries.

"All the present studies indicate that Africa will be worst affected," Nyong , an environmental scientist at Nigeria's University of Jos and member of the UN's top panel on climate change, told Agence France Presse.

Temperatures could rise by two degrees and rainfall drop by 10 per cent by 2050 if trends continue, scientists warned on the second day of the scientific forum on climate change.

The resulting droughts and poor harvests could threaten as many as 100 million Africans with starvation, Nyong warned.

One study suggests that as many as 5.2 million people in South Africa alone could get malaria as mosquitoes migrate to previously dry areas.

"What makes Africa vulnerable is not just climate change but also poverty, AIDS and subsistence dependence on the ecosystem," he said.

"All of these add to the challenge of adapting to climate change."

Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this...

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.

Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.

Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.

The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached "dangerous" levels.

Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's worst predictions. And an international task force - also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers - concluded that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.

Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out - just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem - to warn that unless governments take urgent action there "will be a disaster".

But it was last week at the Met Office's futuristic glass headquarters, incongruously set in a dreary industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, that it all came together. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on how to "avoid dangerous climate change". He needed help in persuading the world to prioritise the issue this year during Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of economic powers.

The conference opened with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, warning that "a significant impact" from global warming "is already inevitable". It continued with presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent. These showed that some dangerous climate change was already taking place and that catastrophic events once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely (see panel). Avoiding the worst was technically simple and economically cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.

About halfway through I realised that I had been here before. In the summer of 1986 the world's leading nuclear experts gathered in Vienna for an inquest into the accident at Chernobyl. The head of the Russian delegation showed a film shot from a helicopter, and we suddenly found ourselves gazing down on the red-hot exposed reactor core.

It was all, of course, much less dramatic at Exeter. But as paper followed learned paper, once again a group of world authorities were staring at a crisis they had devoted their lives to trying to avoid.

I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The conference formally concluded that climate change was "already occurring" and that "in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought". But the cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.

We learned that glaciers are shrinking around the world. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness in recent decades. Natural disasters are increasing rapidly around the world. Those caused by the weather - such as droughts, storms, and floods - are rising three times faster than those - such as earthquakes - that are not.

We learned that bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year, after the sand eels on which they feed left its warmer waters - and how the number of scientific papers recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming has escalated from 14 to more than a thousand in five years.

Worse, leading scientists warned of catastrophic changes that once they had dismissed as "improbable". The meeting was particularly alarmed by powerful evidence, first reported in The Independent on Sunday last July, that the oceans are slowly turning acid, threatening all marine life (see panel).

Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, presented new evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft: 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels. Recalling that the IPCC's last report had called Antarctica "a slumbering giant", he said: "I would say that this is now an awakened giant."

Professor Mike Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois, reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, once seen as a "low probability event", was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving us a climate like Labrador (which shares our latitude) even as the rest of the world heats up: if it comes later it could be beneficial, moderating the worst of the warming.

The experts at Exeter were virtually unanimous about the danger, mirroring the attitude of the climate science community as a whole: humanity is to blame. There were a few sceptics at Exeter, including Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russia's President Putin, who last year called the Kyoto Protocol "an interstate Auschwitz". But in truth it is much easier to find sceptics among media pundits in London or neo-cons in Washington than among climate scientists. Even the few contrarian climatalogists publish little research to support their views, concentrating on questioning the work of others.

Now a new scientific consensus is emerging - that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. This almost certainly involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million.

Unfortunately we are almost there, with concentrations exceeding 370ppm and rising, but experts at the conference concluded that we could go briefly above the danger level so long as we brought it down rapidly afterwards. They added that this would involve the world reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 - and rich countries cutting theirs by 30 per cent by 2020.

Economists stressed there is little time for delay. If action is put off for a decade, it will need to be twice as radical; if it has to wait 20 years, it will cost between three and seven times as much.

The good news is that it can be done with existing technology, by cutting energy waste, expanding the use of renewable sources, growing trees and crops (which remove carbon dioxide from the air) to turn into fuel, capturing the gas before it is released from power stations, and - maybe - using more nuclear energy.

The better news is that it would not cost much: one estimate suggested the cost would be about 1 per cent of Europe's GNP spread over 20 years; another suggested it meant postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by just two years. Many experts believe combatting global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.

The big question is whether governments will act. President Bush's opposition to international action remains the greatest obstacle. Tony Blair, by almost universal agreement, remains the leader with the best chance of persuading him to change his mind.

But so far the Prime Minister has been more influenced by the President than the other way round. He appears to be moving away from fighting for the pollution reductions needed in favour of agreeing on a vague pledge to bring in new technologies sometime in the future.

By then it will be too late. And our children and grandchildren will wonder - as we do in surveying, for example, the drift into the First World War - "how on earth could they be so blind?"

WATER WARS

What could happen? Wars break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.

How would this come about? Over 25 per cent more people than at present are expected to live in countries where water is scarce in the future, and global warming will make it worse.

How likely is it? Former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali has long said that the next Middle East war will be fought for water, not oil.

DISAPPEARING NATIONS

What could happen? Low-lying island such as the Maldives and Tuvalu - with highest points only a few feet above sea-level - will disappear off the face of the Earth.

How would this come about? As the world heats up, sea levels are rising, partly because glaciers are melting, and partly because the water in the oceans expands as it gets warmer.

How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries. Some small islands have already sunk for ever. A year ago, Tuvalu was briefly submerged.

FLOODING

What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water, as the seas rise dramatically.

How would this come about? Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt. The Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by more than 20ft, the West Antarctic ice sheet by another 15ft.

How likely is it? Scientists used to think it unlikely, but this year reported that the melting of both ice caps had begun. It will take hundreds of years, however, for the seas to rise that much.

UNINHABITABLE EARTH

What could happen? Global warming escalates to the point where the world's whole climate abruptly switches, turning it permanently into a much hotter and less hospitable planet.

How would this come about? A process involving "positive feedback" causes the warming to fuel itself, until it reaches a point that finally tips the climate pattern over.

How likely is it? Abrupt flips have happened in the prehistoric past. Scientists believe this is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, but increasingly they are refusing to rule it out.

RAINFOREST FIRES

What could happen? Famously wet tropical forests, such as those in the Amazon, go up in flames, destroying the world's richest wildlife habitats and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to speed global warming.

How would this come about? Britain's Met Office predicted in 1999 that much of the Amazon will dry out and die within 50 years, making it ready for sparks - from humans or lightning - to set it ablaze.

How likely is it? Very, if the predictions turn out to be right. Already there have been massive forest fires in Borneo and Amazonia, casting palls of highly polluting smoke over vast areas.

THE BIG FREEZE

What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.

How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.

How likely is it? About

evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.

STARVATION

What could happen? Food production collapses in Africa, for example, as rainfall dries up and droughts increase. As farmland turns to desert, people flee in their millions in search of food.

How would this come about? Rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 60 per cent in winter and 30 per cent in summer in southern Africa this century. By some estimates, Zambia could lose almost all its farms.

How likely is it? Pretty likely unless the world tackles both global warming and Africa's decline. Scientists agree that droughts will increase in a warmer world.

ACID OCEANS

What could happen? The seas will gradually turn more and more acid. Coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all life depends, will die off. Much of the life of the oceans will become extinct.

How would this come about? The oceans have absorbed half the carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, so far emitted by humanity. This forms dilute carbonic acid, which attacks corals and shells.

How likely is it? It is already starting. Scientists warn that the chemistry of the oceans is changing in ways unprecedented for 20 million years. Some predict that the world's coral reefs will die within 35 years.

DISEASE

What could happen? Malaria - which kills two million people worldwide every year - reaches Britain with foreign travellers, gets picked up by British mosquitos and becomes endemic in the warmer climate.

How would this come about? Four of our 40 mosquito species can carry the disease, and hundreds of travellers return with it annually. The insects breed faster, and feed more, in warmer temperatures.

How likely is it? A Department of Health study has suggested it may happen by 2050: the Environment Agency has mentioned 2020. Some experts say it is miraculous that it has not happened already.

HURRICANES

What could happen? Hurricanes, typhoons and violent storms proliferate, grow even fiercer, and hit new areas. Last September's repeated battering of Florida and the Caribbean may be just a foretaste of what is to come, say scientists.

How would this come about? The storms gather their energy from warm seas, and so, as oceans heat up, fiercer ones occur and threaten areas where at present the seas are too cool for such weather.

How likely is it? Scientists are divided over whether storms will get more frequent and whether the process has already begun.

WELLINGTON : Hundreds of foreign tourists have been evacuated from the Cook Islands as Cyclone Meena neared super-cyclone status, authorities said on Sunday as the small Pacific nation prepared to cut itself off from the world as a safety precaution.

Winds close to the eye of Meena were estimated at 230 kilometres an hour, giving it a severity rating of four, one level short of the maximum.

"This is now a critically dangerous situation" for the Cook Islands, the
Australian-Pacific Centre for Emergency and Disaster Information said on its website.

The storm is forecast to pass very near or over the main island of
Rarotonga "as category 4-5 super-cyclone with the capacity of causing severe damage to the capital late tonight and tomorrow".

Huge seas were expected to cause flooding in coastal areas of the Cook Islands, and forecasters have warned of damaging gale-force winds over northern parts of the southern Cook Islands in the next 36 to 48 hours.

"Frequent heavy rain with squally thunderstorms, phenomenal seas, damaging heavy swells, flooding including sea flooding of coastal areas," the Fiji Meteorological Service website said.

A spokesman at the Aitutaki Lagoon Resort told Radio New Zealand that residents were calm, but the resort had been boarded up, about 300 tourists evacuated and flights cancelled.

New Zealand's foreign ministry said an Air New Zealand flight out of the Cook Islands was packed with tourists as the storm neared.

The Cook Islands telecommunications tower was to be taken down at 11:00pm Saturday local time (1100 GMT Sunday) to avoid destruction in the winds and "from then on there won't be any communication," a ministry spokeswoman said.

The Cook Islands national emergency operations centre has been activated to monitor the situation.

Meena had curved southeast after skirting American Samoa earlier in the week.

The Cook Islands, made up of 15 small islands with a total land area of 240 square kilometres, is spread over an area of the South Pacific greater than the size of India and has a population of around 21,000.

Winter storms took the life of two elderly people - a woman and a man - and forced authorities in Bulgaria to declare a state of emergency in 35 municipalities and nine districts to date.

Rescue services have been fighting to transport nine baby-delivering women through the snow-drifts to hospitals in Eastern Bulgaria.

The country's coastal capital Varna has seen one of its gravest winters in decades waking totally blocked under a two-meter snow cover since Friday.

The sea and airports of Varna remained closed on Saturday, as the wind reached the hurricane speed of 20m/s.

More than 140 villages were left without electricity and 72 continue to be deprived of water because of the damages incurred by the stormy winds.

Meteorologists forecast a freezing weekend for Bulgaria with temperatures dropping to minus 18 on Sunday and Monday until the Mediterranean cyclone draws off the country.

NOVOROSSIISK (Krasnodar territory), -- Lights are down in the homes of 8,571 people, including 3,000 children, because of a hurricane in Novorossiisk and suburbs, a source in the Kubanenergo energy company press service told Itar-Tass on Sunday.

The wind reached 35-37 meters per second, and temperatures dropped to ten degrees below zero, Celsius. The villages of Natukhayevskaya, Rayevskaya and Lenin were damaged most. Fallen trees broke electric wire and damaged transformer sub-stations. Additional teams of repairmen were sent from Krasnodar.

Meanwhile, the electricity supply to Anapa and Gelendzhik has been restored.

VIENNA - Three people were killed and four were missing Sunday after avalanches in Austria, emergency services said.

A Belgian snowboarder, 42, was found dead Sunday afternoon after an avalanche in the region of Obergurgl in the Tyrol. He was snowboarding off the ski trails despite a high avalanche risk.

Earlier in the day, an Austrian was found dead in an avalanche at Schmirntal also in the Tyrol, while a 28-year-old German woman was buried by an avalanche at Koenigsleiten near Salzburg in the centre of the country Saturday and later died in Innsbruck hospital.

A man buried under an avalanche Sunday afternooon at Weisskirchen in the southern Styria region was rescued but remained in a critical condition in hospital.

Searches continued for three hunters who disappeared Thursday in Styria, the APA news agency reported. [...]

Flash flooding which ripped through Dunedin last evening left retailers and emergency services mopping up through the night.

The damage bill is expected to climb into the millions of dollars.

Scores of businesses and homes were flooded as up to 34mm of rain was dumped on the city in just 20 minutes.

The violent storm hit just before 6pm, and within 15 minutes shops and roads were under knee-deep water and fire brigades were struggling to respond.

By 7.30pm the flooding calls had reached 52, and by 9.30pm firefighters were working their way through a backlog of more than 100 calls.

Most of the flooding had receded within an hour of the storm, leaving people to mop up their shops, homes, clubs and roads.

Such was the ferocity of the water, roads were ripped in the central city and shop doors were burst open by its force. [...]

Severe tropical Cyclone Harvey was heading for the Australian coast and intensifying, with high winds of up to 190 km/h lashing the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.

Harvey was rated a category three cyclone on a scale of one to five.

Late yesterday it was about 100km north of Wollogorang in the Northern Territory and 130km north-west of Mornington Island in Queensland.

Harvey was expected to make its landfall in a largely unpopulated area and would miss Mornington Island.

TORONTO - Coal-fire generating stations and diesel-spewing vehicles combined with a lack of wind in Ontario has led to the first winter smog watch in the Canadian province's history, the Ontario Ministry of Environment said on Monday.

The ministry issued the alert on Friday after smog blanketed southern Ontario and parts of western Quebec.

"We are normally under the influence of a northwestern air shed, which is clean but cold," said John Steele, spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.

"For the last few days, we've had a front...that has moved some fine particulate from the U.S. and we add to it from our own coal-fire generating stations and our own vehicles that use diesel fuel. So from a lack of air movement, it's remained here and there's been very little dispersion."

Smog is a combination of airborne pollutants from vehicles and other gasoline or diesel-powered machinery, factories, chemical sprays, and oil-based paints.

It causes the air quality to fall below acceptable standards and can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. It can also lower resistance to infection and can exacerbate heart and lung conditions.

Havana - As efforts continue in Guyana to recover from the worst floods in the last 100 years, volunteer Cuban doctors are assisting hundreds of patients a day.

The Cuban medical team, made up of 40 doctors and other specialists, arrived in that South American nation last week in order to offer their assistance to victims in the most affected areas.

The floods that hit Guyana in January left over 80,000 homes partially or totally destroyed, while some 4,000 persons were left homeless and are currently in shelters, reports Guyana's National Information Agency.

Heavy rains and the subsequent mud slides have claimed 19 lives, 11 of which were due to leptospirosis-related infections.

Community authorities are addressing the issue by working to drain still flooded areas and distribute drinking water and food.

Local authorities have repeatedly called on the population to cooperate with rehabilitation and clean up of the affected zones, as well as to collect garbage in plastic bags to avoid further contamination.

OHIO - THE JANUARY 2005 flood in the Muskingum River Watershed of eastern Ohio will be one for the record books, according to a report issued by Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District officials.

Seven of the 16 reservoirs in the system set all-time marks for high water and nearly $400 million in potential property damage was saved by the system of dams and reservoirs that temporarily holds floodwaters. Communities that endured temporary flooding were spared the widespread devastation that could have occurred without any of the protection offered by the dams and reservoirs, the report said.

Many other communities endured the frustration of seeing roads inundated by standing floodwaters, cutting off reliable access to their homes, jobs and schools. [...]

How come trees have rings? asks Jonathan Tam, a student in Manhasset.

What if there were a record of what had happened to our planet, before human beings wrote down what they were seeing? What if there were a way to know when a volcano erupted a continent away, a comet crashed into an open plain, or a rash of sunspots erupted on the Sun's fiery face?

There is such a silent diary; it is locked in the heart of trees.

The rings revealed when a tree trunk is cut horizontally or sampled with a corer are a kind of natural hieroglyphics, in which scientists can read some of the history of Earth. There is even a branch of science dedicated to translating the riddle of the rings: dendrochronology.

Deciduous and cone-bearing trees (conifers) in temperate climates usually have distinct growth rings. Trees expand outward by growing a new layer of wood cells just under the bark. In the spring, the growth layer makes large, thin-walled cells called "early wood." As the season becomes drier, the cells produced become smaller and thicker-walled "late wood." By fall the tree has stopped making new cells. You can tell one yearly ring from the next because the darker, late-wood cells from one year lie beside the next year's lighter, early-wood cells. By counting rings, we can get a good idea of the tree's age in years.

Rings are thinner when rainfall is scant or temperatures plunge in the growth season. Sunlight, soil fertility, and diseases and pests all affect rings, too. Because rings vary, sometimes dramatically, from year to year, they provide clues as to what happened in those years - droughts, floods, erupting volcanoes, forest fires, global cooling and warming. By counting the rings backward in time, we can often figure out when such events occurred.

To read the record hidden in the wood, scientists can drill into trees and pull out slim cores. By matching up rings from living trees, dead trees, and ancient wood, scientists can cross-date rings and make a timeline extending far into the past. (For more on tree-ring mapping, visit www.nps.gov/ seki/fire/pdf/firehistory.pdf.)

One of the best ring histories hides in bristlecone pines, slow-growers that take 3,000 years to reach their full height (40 to 60 feet). By matching up the overlapping rings of living and long-dead bristlecone wood, scientists have dated events back to about 7,000 BC.

Tree rings help scientists track climate changes. When volcanoes erupt, spewing soot and sulfur droplets, the atmosphere darkens, making for frosty summers and thin rings. The widespread thinning of tree rings about 1,500 years ago points to a bigger catastrophe - possibly pieces of a giant comet hitting Earth.

Tree rings even help us glimpse events elsewhere in the solar system. When cosmic rays strike nitrogen molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, radioactive carbon-14 forms. High sunspot and solar wind activity means fewer cosmic rays reach the atmosphere, and carbon-14 creation falls. By comparing the carbon-14 content of tree rings with other natural objects, scientists have traced sunspot activity back thousands of years.

There is one natural phenomenon that affects the daily life of Russians in a profound way. Millions of people keep track of its changes every morning, experts offer suggestions on minimizing its detrimental effects: rest, eat lots of bananas, don't make sudden movements. It's a national peril-national, because outside of Russia the phenomenon is virtually unknown. Maybe it's yet another challenge fortune throws Russia's way, maybe it's a crafty invention of Soviet scientists and maybe, just maybe, the importance and danger of this phenomenon is that one thing which people need to add meaning to their lives. To spice up the conversation on their commute. To excuse their sudden fatigue, restlessness, and inability to carry on. I speak, of course, of the great threat of geomagnetic storms.

Just like the weather, geomagnetic activity is often a suitable topic for chit-chat on the shuttle bus, or for a conversation between two babushkas on a park bench. Yet it's an issue of vital importance, with daily prognoses, recommendations, and warnings. Every now and then all the media outlets start screaming about giant explosions on the sun, about dangerous solar particles approaching Earth at fantastic speeds that cause "aching joints, migraines, plane crashes, epidemics, and grasshopper infestations," as Lenta.Ru recently reported in sensationalist fear.

Huh? That's what all non-Russians are wondering. Have you ever seen any of these solar prognoses anywhere outside Russia? Maybe the Dow, the latest side-effects of consuming too much soy, and perhaps the ubiquitous ten weight loss tips, but nowhere among the front pages of Anglophone news sources will you find anything about solar spots, winds and explosions that are supposed to influence your daily grind.

Outside Russia, these phenomena are reserved for space nerds in the "science" section at best, and for astrology fringe theorists at worst. If in Russia geomagnetic storms are a serious health hazard, elsewhere they are about as hazardous as the full moon that may or may not turn a stock broker into a werewolf.

While non-Russian sources modestly link geomagnetic activity only with possible satellite troubles, Russians make it responsible for all of their pain and suffering. The end of January was particularly rich in geomagnetic storm warnings. Colleagues whined about not being able to concentrate — solar storms made them limp and incompetent. Women especially are known to sometimes stay in bed all day, moaning with a sack of ice over their heads. Oh that darn storm last night, I didn't sleep at all, did you feel it? —they would ask their girlfriends the next morning.

If you google "geomagnetic storms", you will not get many sources dealing with people's health. Experts both in Europe and America admit that sometimes the sun's actions can harm communication with space missions, and one particularly strong storm caused a major power shortage in Montreal. But in Russian search engines, thousands of links and news pieces deal with "magnitnye buri," and their ill-effects (sometimes mortal) on the human body. Something that happens on the Sun is supposed to affect people from Helsinki to Buenos Aires, not Russians exclusively. Right?

My theory is that geomagnetic storms are sort of a cultural fable--maybe every country has a national malaise, a media-propagated inanimate adversary that just keeps everyone on guard. Or, as some Russophobes argue, it's just another excuse for Russians to stop working and lounge on a sofa, Oblomov-style.

Finding an entirely corresponding example of an American national malaise is difficult, but realistic. I have always been curious, for example, about why PMS is such a big deal in the United States. Having PMS has almost become a part of being American — if you don't think you have it, the media will help you find its symptoms anyway. Even if you are a guy. After all, they did discover something called "male PMS" recently. Having PMS is okay, you're told in a comforting tone, don't be scared, it's not your fault.

In Russia no one knows what PMS is. Searching PMS on Russian internet I find an article titled "post modernity today," and lots of alphabet soup-type administrative acronyms. Younger generation may have heard of it, but we can write that off as sneaky western influence on innocent girls, acting through half-baked translations from "Cosmopolitan." Maybe that's because the role of PMS is already taken in the Russia's public mind by geomagnetic storms. It's also a mysterious sickness of unknown exact causes. The difference is that Russia's malaise comes from the Sun and the American one from people's own hormones.

Anyway, back to geomagnetic storms. One notable Russian scientist, Alexander Chizhevsky, went so far as to propose that human history is shaped by what's happening on the Sun. According to him, geomagnetic storms affect the concentration of adrenalin and stress people's mental health. People who are motivated by charismatic leaders like Lenin are in fact victims of a "mass psychosis" triggered every eleven years by peaks in the sun's activity. Chizhevsky even came up with a set of tongue-in-cheek recommendations for political reformists who fancy a bloodbath: just make sure to sow your propaganda while the explosions on the Sun's surface make the masses more susceptible to persuasion.**

Meanwhile, the turn of 2004-05 is another one of geomagnetic peaks. January 2005 is highest in the Sun's activity since 1938. Anyone who is still surprised at the mass pensioners' protests across the country should ponder the geomagnetic theory. Experts say that old people are more susceptible to the Sun's activity: with their weaker hearts they don't tolerate stress as well as others. My grandma sighs, promising not to listen to geomagnetic prognoses any more, saying that knowing the date makes her symptoms worse. Maybe she too suspects a conspiracy.

** "sun activity peaks" of the 20th century:
- revolutions of 1905 and 1917
- beginning of repressions (1928)
- peak of political persecutions (1937)
- beginning of the Cold War (1947)
- Hungarian revolt (1956)
- Soviet troops enter Czechoslovakia (1968)
- Soviet troops enter Afghanistan (1979)
- Mass demonstrations and perestroika (1989)

TOKYO : Eleven killer whales were declared dead after being trapped between ice floes and concrete blocks on the northern Japanese coast, but one managed to escape badly wounded back into the ocean.

The 12 giant mammals were found trapped in floating ice off the town of Rausu on the Shiretoko Peninsula, some 1,050 kilometers (650 miles) northeast of Tokyo, on Monday. [...]

CARACAS : Heavy rains that have pounded Venezuela since the weekend have left nine more people dead in the country's northwest, raising the death toll to 14, local officials said Wednesday.

A mother and her five children were among nine people killed when buildings collapsed in the coastal Carabobo state, local officials said.

Five other people were killed Tuesday, including three in Caracas, according to an official toll.

Mudslides and rising waters have affect at least 5,000 people across the country and caused chaos on the roads.

QUETTA, Pakistan - More than 130 people have been killed across Pakistan in the heaviest rains in 16 years that caused a dam to burst, provincial officials said on Friday.

Authorities rushed thousands of troops to join rescue operations in the remote southwestern Baluchistan province, where some 20,000 people had been affected by the floods, said Raziq Bugti, a government spokesman in the province said.

Officials said at least 60 people died on Thursday night after Baluchistan's Shadikor dam burst, sweeping through villages near the coastal town of Pasni. More than 40 more died from heavy rains in other parts of the province.

Some reports said hundreds were missing, though officials said there were no reliable estimates. [...]

Officials said at least five villages, home to around 7,000 people, had been submerged by waters that poured through the 35 meter (115 foot) high and 300 meter long embankment of the dam, constructed just two years ago. [...]

Pakistan has seen its heaviest rains and snowfalls for 16 years, according to the Meteorological Department.

In Peshawar, the provincial capital of NWFP, four people, including a mother and her three children, were killed when the roof of their house caved in on Thursday night.

Elsewhere, two soldiers were killed by an avalanche in the Neepa valley of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir on Thursday.

Another three people died, and two are missing, after an avalanche hit them in Astore valley near Gilgit, the main town in Pakistan's mountainous Northern Areas, police said.

The Northern Areas, where the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountain ranges meet, have been cut off, with roads buried under several feet of snow and the Chitral valley particularly badly affected.

The Karakoram Highway, linking Pakistan and China, has been blocked and flights have been suspended since Feb. 3, said residents of Gilgit, the main town in the Northern Areas.

Weather officials said the intensity of rains had subsided in Baluchistan but would continue in most of the rest of Pakistan for the next 24 hours.

Venezuela's government has sent military helicopters and patrol boats to evacuate thousands of coastal residents stranded by torrential rains and flooding that left at least 14 people dead.

The rescue operation is taking place in the northern state of Vargas. It is the same area where heavy rains and flooding more than five years ago left thousands dead.

President Hugo Chavez visited the coastal state on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the severe weather forced the government to declare a state of emergency in northern coastal areas as well as the capital, Caracas.

The rains are expected to continue for at least two more days but with less intensity.

BELGRADE, Serbia - Snowbound villagers fought off starving wolves and the Danube River iced over as a Siberian frost gripped much of the Balkans for the second straight week, killing at least a dozen people.

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania all registered record or near-record low temperatures, according to local press reports.

In Karajukica Bunari on the Serbia-Montenegro border the temperature fell to minus minus 29 Fahrenheit. Meteorologists predicted the January 1954 record would fall in the coming days.

According to inland shipping reports, the Danube River was partially iced up in dozens of places, from Hungary to Romania.

"Huge blocks of thick ice are floating on the river. We expect the lower Danube to be completely iced by tomorrow," the Bulgarian state news agency BTA quoted an official as saying.

The Black Sea coast was badly hit by frozen snowdrifts topping 6 feet and many roads were closed.

In Macedonia, an army captain was found frozen solid just yards from his border post in the Sar mountains on the Kosovo border.

Three people died of cold in rural Croatia, four hypothermia fatalities were reported in Bosnia and four in Albania.

Hospitals in central Bosnia were closed when antiquated heating systems lost the battle against the freeze.

"We are sending patients home and operation rooms are closed except for the most urgent cases," hospital spokesman Marko Radoja told Reuters in the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka, which has recorded its lowest temperatures in 20 years.

In Albania and western Kosovo, villagers in remote areas had to drive off wolves and wild boar searching for food.

The Albanian daily Metropol said a 27-year-old mentally ill man was found devoured by wolves in the mountains near Elbasan, where villages lie six feet deep in snow.

Researchers think interstellar dust could cause a reverse greenhouse effect on Earth.

Our planet may have frozen over in the past as it drifted though giant dust clouds in space. The result of the dust-bath would have been an almost complete overcoat of ice for the world, according to a new theory.

A group of US and Russian researchers argue that interstellar dust might have accumulated in Earth's atmosphere and cooled the planet, tipping the climate towards a 'snowball Earth' event in which ice sheets keep growing until they cover almost the entire globe.

But the idea does not persuade some geologists. "It conflicts with the geological record," says Daniel Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He points out that there seem to have been dramatic changes in the Earth's carbon cycle up to a million years before known snowball Earth events, which the dust-cloud hypothesis is at a loss to explain.

Alexander Pavlov, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his colleagues counter that their climate-cooling mechanism is almost inevitable, however. They say that on at least two occasions in the past 2 billion years, the Solar System must have passed through clouds of dust thick enough to cause a snowball Earth1,2. They think it is possible that two such ultracold episodes, 600 million and 750 million years ago, might have been triggered in this way.

Dusty answer

Snowball Earth events are much more severe than normal ice ages. They occur through a runaway process in which growing ice sheets reflect ever more sunlight back into space, resulting in further cooling and more ice. Eventually, the ice advances from the Poles virtually all the way to the Equator, trapping the planet in a deep freeze.

There is strong evidence in the geological record that Earth may have iced over in this way several times during its history. Various causes have been proposed, but Pavlov and his colleagues say that none is fully convincing.

They argue that their dust trigger is more plausible. Our Galaxy contains many giant molecular clouds, which are huge clusters of molecules that can clump into dust grains. As the Solar System moves through the galaxy, it passes through such clouds roughly once every 100 million to 1 billion years.

Pavlov and colleagues have calculated how much of this dust might be captured by Earth's gravitational field, filling the atmosphere with dust. Dust particles reflect sunlight, but they let Earth's heat out into space. In other words, they act as the precise opposite of greenhouse gases, cooling the planet.

On reflection

Such a cooling effect was observed after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which scattered volcanic dust into the atmosphere. The researchers calculate that the cooling effect of a passage through a dense molecular cloud could be at least two or three times greater.

That, they say, would be sufficient to trigger snowball cooling. If the planet were already on the verge of an ice age, even a molecular cloud of modest density could push it over the edge a larger freeze. The snowball Earth could then persist for about 10 million years, much longer than it would take the Solar System to cross a typical molecular cloud. The ice would thaw only when enough greenhouse gases from volcanoes had built up in the atmosphere.

International Human Genome enth International Human Genome
The researchers suggest that there could be a detectable geological signature of such an event. Interstellar dust is enriched in the isotope uranium-235, relative to its natural abundance on Earth. This dust would gradually settle out of the atmosphere and find its way into sedimentary rocks laid down at the time of the snowball freeze.

Schrag doubts that such evidence, if it were to be found, would be conclusive. And he does not see how an extraterrestrial trigger for the cooling can explain the apparent timing of such events. "Why would you get two of them close together [600 and 750 million years ago], and then nothing?" he asks.

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- When bears wake early from hibernation, Australia suffers its worst drought in 100 years and multiple hurricanes hammer Florida should we believe the end is near?

That's the nub of a debate over the human impact on global warming that pits scientists who say such anomalies are signs of impending doom against those who say they are evidence that the earth's climate has always been chaotic.

Amid those signs of warming, for instance, Algeria had its worst snow in 50 years last month.

This month 141 countries will attempt the best effort to arrest a forecasted continued rise of global temperatures by bringing into force the Kyoto protocol. The treaty is an agreement aimed at curbing emissions of gases from cars and industry, blamed for trapping the earth's heat.

"Dealing with (global warming) will not be easy. Ignoring it will be worse," the United Nations says.

At issue is how humanity should deal with global warming, the risks of which are not yet fully understood despite broad consensus among scientists that people are heating the planet with the emission of such heat-trapping gases as carbon dioxide.

Not everyone is convinced of Kyoto's importance. U.S. President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, reckoning it will be too costly and that it wrongly excludes developing countries from cuts in emissions until 2012.

Bush accepts there are risks from climate change but says more research is needed -- exasperating even allies who say that the time for Kyoto-style caps on emissions is now.

"We're talking about spending perhaps $150 billion a year on Kyoto with fairly little benefit," said Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

Lomborg said that money would be better spent on combating AIDS and malaria, malnutrition and promoting fair global trade.
Biggest threat?

Many climate scientists say that floods, storms and droughts will become more frequent and that climate change is the most severe long-term threat to the planet's life support systems.

Rising temperatures could force up ocean levels, swamping coasts and low-lying Pacific islands and drive thousands of species to extinction by 2100.

But full proof is elusive.

A Caribbean hurricane season last year, when Florida was the first U.S. state to be hit by four hurricanes in one season since 1886, might be a fluke. Bears are waking in Estonia in the warmest winter in two centuries, again a possible climate freak.

"Imagine a pot of boiling water on the stove. If I turn up the heat I can't say that each bubble is from the extra heat," said Mike MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute, a Washington think-tank.

"But there are more bubbles and they're larger," he said, adding it was best to act now rather than risk disaster.

The warmest year at the world's surface since records began in the 1860s was 1998, followed by 2002, 2003 and 2004, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization.

World surface temperatures have risen by 0.6 degrees centigrade (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s when the Industrial Revolution started in Europe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,000 scientists which advises the United Nations, projects a further rise of 1.4-5.8 degrees centigrade by 2100. Even the lowest forecast would be the biggest century-long rise in 10,000 years.
Beyond doubt?

Yet the evidence for a human impact on the climate falls short of being "beyond a reasonable doubt," the standard of proof needed in a criminal court.

"It is really for a legal mind to decide whether the scientific consensus of the IPCC provides findings that are beyond reasonable doubt," said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

Many so-called skeptics concede that carbon dioxide stokes global warming but say U.N. models of what will happen in 2100 are about as reliable as tomorrow's weather forecast.

Other factors, like variations in the sun's radiation, ash from volcanoes or other natural effects may have a bigger role, they say. The IPCC tries to account for all such effects.

"My bottom line is that natural variations are much larger than the human component," said George Taylor, state climatologist for Oregon state.

Backers of Kyoto say it is a blueprint for regulating the climate by cutting rich nations' emissions of carbon dioxide by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Supporters say that much deeper cuts will be needed after 2012.

In a landmark phrase in 1995, the IPCC said that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence on the global climate. And its 2001 report spoke of "new and stronger" evidence that humans had caused warming in the past 50 years.

Pachauri said that he hoped the next report, in 2007, would fill in gaps in knowledge. But Washington has given no signs of being won over to Kyoto, preferring to focus on funding new clean technologies like hydrogen.

The Environmental Protection Agency says:

"The fundamental scientific uncertainties are these: How much more warming will occur? How fast will this warming occur? And what are the potential adverse and beneficial effects? These uncertainties will be with us for some time, perhaps decades."

OTTAWA—The country's biggest greenhouse gas emitters have been handed a near 20 per cent break on their reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol, according to sources familiar with the federal negotiations.

The sources said the oil and gas industry, electricity sector, heavy manufacturing and mining companies will together have to reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide by only 45 million tonnes annually, instead of the target of 55 million tonnes announced in the government's 2002 Kyoto plan.

These so-called large final emitters account for more than half of the country's total emissions of greenhouse gases, which reached about 750 million tonnes in 2003. The companies lobbied hard to have their cumulative target cut to 37 million tonnes, claiming the technology didn't exist to make larger reductions economically.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- A weak El Nino and human-made greenhouse gases could make 2005 the warmest year since records started being kept in the late 1800s, NASA scientists said this week.

While climate events like El Nino -- when warm water spreads over much of the tropical Pacific Ocean --affect global temperatures, the increasing role of human-made pollutants plays a big part.

"There has been a strong warming trend over the past 30 years, a trend that has been shown to be due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," said James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, based in New York.

The warmest year on record was 1998, with 2002 and 2003 coming in second and third, respectively.

Short-term factors like large volcanic eruptions that launched tiny particles of sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere in 1963, 1982 and 1991 can change climates for periods ranging from months to a few years.

Last year was the the fourth-warmest recorded, with a global mean temperature of 57 degrees Fahrenheit (14 Celsius), which was about 1.5 degrees warmer than the middle of the century, NASA scientist Drew Shindell said in an interview.

Average temperatures taken from land and surfaces of the oceans showed 2004 was 0.86 degrees Fahrenheit (0.48 Celsius) above the average temperature from 1951 to 1980, according to Hansen.

The spike in global temperatures in 1998 was associated with one of the strongest El Ninos of recent centuries and a weak El Nino contributed to the unusually high global temperatures in 2002 and 2003, NASA said.

Carbon dioxide, emitted by autos, industry and utilities, is the most common greenhouse gas. Hansen also said that the Earth's surface now absorbs more of the sun's energy than gets reflected back to space.

That extra energy, together with a weak El Nino, is expected to make 2005 warmer than 2003 and 2004 and perhaps even warmer than 1998, which had stood out as far hotter than any year in the preceding century, NASA said in a statement.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday the current weak El Nino will diminish and end during the next three months.

ROSEAU, Dominica - The water in Dominica's Boiling Lake, which mysteriously stopped boiling three months ago, is rising and could abruptly spew out toxic fumes, making it dangerous for visitors to approach, officials said Friday.

The Boiling Lake, actually a volcanic crater in the heart of a rainforest, stopped boiling Dec. 24 and the water level dropped about 12 metres. The Agriculture Ministry warned visitors not to approach the lake, saying the water has since risen about six metres.

Scientists said they cannot predict when it might start bubbling again.

It was the third time in a century the lake - perhaps the most popular tourist attraction in Dominica - stopped boiling. In 1901, toxic fumes killed two people when the lake suddenly filled up months after it emptied. The crater also stopped boiling in 1977 and 1999.

Scientists don't know for sure what has caused the lake to stop boiling. But one theory is a 6.3-magnitude earthquake Nov. 21 clogged underground fissures where hot gasses rose through the surfaces and heated the water, said Allen Smith, the chairman of the geology department at California State University in San Bernardino, California.

At the same time, the earthquake may have created other fissures that drained the lake, Smith said. He said the lake could be refilling with rainfall and underground seepage.

"If the lake is filling up with surface water and there is hot water beneath, being blocked, the hot water could be building up pressure," Smith said.

"It would blow out suddenly."

Although Watt Mountain, where the lake is located, might erupt one day, the fluctuations in water level are not related to volcanic activity, said Richard Robinson, a geologist with the Seismic Research Unit of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.

Scientists believe the crater was created from an explosion when a head of steam built up in fissures, bringing water vapour and volcanic gas to the surface. The vapour and volcanic gas make the water boil.

Sulphuric fumes from the lake have destroyed much of the rainforest around it. The lake is so hot it can boil an egg in five minutes.

BOGOTA, Feb. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Heavy downpour which has flooded northeast Colombia since Tuesday has left at least 11 dead and 22,000 homeless, a report by the office for the prevention and management of disasters of Santander said Saturday.

It said the adverse weather has completely cut off communications in the Giron municipality, a neighbor of the city of Bucaramanga, capital of the northeastern Santander state.

The heavy downpour has produced an overflow of rivers in Santander.

Rescue personnel indicated that the inhabitants of 50 neighborhoods of Giron and 15 of Bucaramanga are being evacuated in the face of the risk of landslides and floods. [...]

PHOENIX - A strong storm lashed parts of Arizona with heavy rain on Saturday, forcing authorities to close portions of four highways because of rock slides and flooding and driving dozens of people from threatened homes.

Some 40 residents of two mobile home parks in Punkin Center, about 80 miles northeast of Phoenix, were evacuated because of rising water from Tonto Creek. People living east of the creek were stranded by flooding at low water crossings.

Some precautionary evacuations were ordered in at least three other communities for residents living near rivers.

Authorities blocked portions of four state highways near Globe because of rock slides and flooding. It was not clear when the roads would reopen.

Heavy rain and melting snow caused many rivers and streams to swell to near flood levels on Friday, but most peaked and started to decline by Saturday, said Judy Kioski, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Division of Emergency Management.

TEHRAN - Snow has cut off more than 700 villages in northern Iran and damaged thousands of houses and schools, including more than 150 whose roofs collapsed under the weight of the falls.

After 10 days of snowstorms, roads were buried under between two and four metres (between about six and 13 feet) of snow in Gilan province off the Caspian Sea.

A break in the weather enabled helicopters to be sent on Sunday to help in the worst affected mountainous areas of the province.

The state news agency IRNA reported that some 20,000 houses, schools and government buildings had been damaged in the province. Schools had been closed for the past week.

"No-one was reported dead from cold," Asghar Shokr-Gozar, mayor of Rasht, the provincial capital, told AFP, denying some press reports of deaths.

"We have managed to re-open the main roads of the city but due to the lack of sufficient snow-plowing machinery the process is slow ... In some areas (in the city) we are faced with more than one metre of snow," he added.

ISLAMABAD - An avalanche killed at least 33 people in a small hamlet in the Neelam Valley of Pakistan-held Kashmir, Minister for Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas Faisal Saleh Hayat told Reuters on Saturday.

The minister said 18 houses in Mathawali Siri hamlet had been buried by the avalanche which struck overnight.

Rescuers were still trying to reach the site of the disaster, ploughing through snow drifts more than 2 metres (6 ft) deep, but they could see the bodies of 20 women and 13 men from a vantage point overlooking the hamlet. Four injured had been rescued. 

GRENOBLE, France - Mountain areas have long been recognised as being vulnerable to global warming, with rising temperatures damaging a fragile habitat for wildlife and threatening the future of low-altitude ski resorts.

Now, though, a further threat is starting to emerge: tsunamis.

The idea may sound bizarre. After all, killer waves are perceived as a threat to coastal communities, vulnerable to walls of water unleashed by giant earthquakes.

That was the case in the December 26 tsunami that scoured shorelines around the Indian Ocean, killing 284,000 people.

But European specialists say there is also a risk in the mountains, from huge lakes of meltwater that build up behind glaciers. If the icy barrier is breached, communities downhill are at risk of being swept away.

"In the Himalayas, some glaciers are up to 70 kilometers (43 miles) long," said Martin Beniston, a climate scientist at Freiburg University in Switzerland.

"In Bhutan alone, there are at least 50 lakes in this category, and a similar number in Nepal as well. Towns and villages in their path could be hit by a tsunami," he told AFP.

The unusual phenomenon came to light last October in France's Savoie region, says Christian Vincent, a research engineer at the Glaciology Laboratory in Grenoble.

A huge lake, five hectares (12 acres) across and 25 metres (81 feet) deep, formed at the back of the Rochemelon glacier at an altitude of 3,218 metres (10,450 feet), due to summer heat that had melted part of the glacier.

The discovery prompted the intervention of engineers, who decided to drain the lake to avoid the risk that the glacier wall could erode and then crack open.

A series of studies over the past five years has accumulated evidence that glaciers are in retreat in the Andes, the Alps in western Europe and the Himalayas, thanks not only to warmer temperatures but also shorter or less prolific seasons for snowfall. [...]

QUETTA, Pakistan : Severe flooding and avalanches have killed around 350 people in Pakistan, officials said after a week of torrential rain and heavy snow, while 2,000 others were missing and tens of thousands left homeless.

At least 250 people were killed in heavy flooding in the southwest. About another 40 were meanwhile feared dead in a new series of avalanches in the north of the country, where more than 50 people had already been confirmed killed by the snow in the past week.

The dead in the southwestern province of Baluchistan included 80 people whose bodies were recovered after a dam burst late Thursday. The remainder came from six other districts inundated by around 10 days of heavy rain.

"We have confirmed reports that 250 people have died in Baluchistan due to floods," the provincial chief minister's media consultant, Raziq Bugti, told AFP.

More than 2,000 people were missing, while 40,000 had lost their homes in Lasbella, Gwadar, Khuzdar, Awaran, Ketch and Panjgoor districts, Bugti said. [...]

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- A threat of flooding forced residents to evacuate part of one southeastern Arizona community Sunday following the latest in a series of winter storms that have pushed streams out of their banks in the midst of a drought.

The Gila River was headed toward a crest Sunday near the New Mexico state line and authorities were concerned about homes in the town of Duncan.

About 50 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution, said Steve Rutherford, emergency management coordinator for Greenlee County.

Heavy rain fell across wide areas of Arizona on Friday and Saturday as the storm arrived from California, where three deaths were blamed on the high wind and drenching rain.

Rainfall around Arizona during the weekend included 1.28 inches in Phoenix, 2.36 at Apache Junction, and 2.01 at Cave Creek, authorities said.

Flooding on the Verde River north of Phoenix damaged about 16 homes in a rural area between Cottonwood and Clarkdale. No injuries or deaths were reported, said Yavapai County emergency management coordinator Nick Angiolillo.

Near the headwaters of the Verde, water spread a quarter-mile across in the normally dry Big Chino Wash, isolating some residents of Paulden, north of Prescott, said Susan Quayle, a spokeswoman for the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department.

Two homes and a car were swept away by high water in Wickenburg, northwest of Phoenix, but no injuries were reported.

Mayor Ron Badowski said damage to sewers, power lines and water mains could be repaired this week.

It was the third round of storms to strike central and northern Arizona since late December, but officials have said the storms aren't enough to pull Arizona out of its nine-year drought.

People living in parts of Norfolk, Essex and Suffolk have been warned to be prepared for possible floods with some homes being evacuated.

On Sunday, the Environment Agency (EA) issued flood warnings for large parts of the Norfolk coastline between the river Great Ouse and Winterton.

An EA spokeswoman said some homes were being evacuated in the Hunstanton area.

The EA also issued alerts of possible flooding along the coast from Shingle Street, Suffolk, to Southend, Essex.

A spokeswoman said there was particular concern of flooding in west Norfolk including the urban area of King's Lynn. [...]

KABUL, Afghanistan, - Kabul is digging out from its biggest snowstorms in over a decade. While residents hope the snowfall may help ease the crippling seven-year drought, the severe winter weather has been responsible for scores of deaths and injuries in the capital and blamed for the crash of a passenger aircraft travelling from Herat to Kabul on February 3, killing all 104 people on board.

Over a foot of snow fell on the city during the first week of February, overwhelming municipal services.

It is the most severe winter weather in Afghanistan in over 15 years, according to Abdul Qadir Qadir, head of meteorology at the Ministry of Aviation and Tourism. Temperatures plunged to minus 17 Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit), resulting in at least five recorded deaths from hypothermia in Kabul's under-equipped refugee camps.

Another 18 people were reported dead in Zabul when their vehicles were trapped in the heavy snow on the Kabul-Kandahar highway.

The cold and icy weather is also responsible for a sharp rise in disease and injury, according to city medical workers. [...]

QUETTA, Pakistan : Disease threatened flood survivors in Pakistan's southwest as officials said the death toll from freak rains and snow across the country was as high as 450.

Troops and authorities were trying for a fourth day to get medicine, shelter, food and drinking water to desperate people in Baluchistan province, where some 250 alone have died -- including 80 killed by a burst dam.

Another 150 to 200 people were now known to have perished in avalanches and heavy snow at the other end of the country in northern Pakistan, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told reporters in Islamabad.

"The entire machinery of the government has mobilised," he said after overflying part of snowbound North West Frontier Province to survey the devastation.

Around 2,000 people are missing and tens of thousands have been left homeless throughout Pakistan. Some 40,000 lost their dwellings in Baluchistan alone, according to officials.

"We are worried about the spread of disease in the area and officials are considering taking immediate measures to stop any possible outbreak," Raziq Bugti, media consultant to the chief minister of Baluchistan, told AFP.

The World Health Organisation has also warned of possible dangers from infectious and waterborne diseases.

"Over the next few days we may see the emergence of serious health problems among the population in the affected areas," its country director for Pakistan Khalif Bile said Sunday.

President Pervez Musharraf, who flew over Baluchistan on Saturday and announced compensation for all bereaved families, insisted that the damage in that province had been exaggerated.

"I would like to give a correct picture of what has happened. There was no... flood there except the water kept collecting and people started shifting to higher grounds," Musharraf told state television late Sunday.

But there were continuing problems getting to aid to affected people, particularly near the southwestern coastal town of Pasni, where the Shadi Kor irrigation dam collapsed late Thursday and washed entire villages into the sea.

Another three small dams collapsed over the weekend. [...]

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Two tropical cyclones were brewing in the South Pacific Monday, threatening several island nations as forecasters warned of gale force winds and rough seas.

Cyclones Nancy and Olaf were threatening a wide area of the South Pacific, the Australian-Pacific Centre for Emergency and Disaster Information (APCEDI) says.

About 9 a.m. U.S. ET, the Fiji Meteorological Service's hurricane center estimated, based on satellite photos, that the strongest winds in both storms were around 115 mph.

Olaf was expected to affect Samoa within the next 24 to 48 hours, bringing heavy rain, rough seas and damaging swells, it said. Samoa consists of the independent nation of Samoa and American Samoa.

Nancy was intensifying northeast of Pago Pago in American Samoa and was projected to head towards the Cook Islands which narrowly escaped severe damage when struck a glancing blow by Cyclone Meena last week. [...]

SYDNEY : Twin cyclones began battering three south Pacific nations and weather experts warned they could combine into one giant, destructive storm center that would create havoc in the region.

Cyclone Olaf, a powerful Category 4 storm packing winds of up to 250 kilometers per hour (155 miles per hour), was bearing down on Samoa and American Samoa and was expected to reach "super cyclone" status by the time it strikes the two territories' main islands around 0000 GMT Wednesday.

Olaf has intensified steadily in the past 24 hours and was forecast to reach Category 4/5 out of a maximum of 5, meaning it will whip up sustained winds of more than 250 kilometers per hour and gusts above 300 kph, the Australian-Pacific Center for Emergency and Disaster Information (APCEDI) said.

Samoa and American Samoa were under states of emergency, with schools, businesses and airports closed and boarded up and low-lying areas evacuated, residents in the American Samoa capital Pago Pago told AFP.

The Samoa and Fiji meteorological centers said Olaf was expected to pass directly over the Samoas and then continue southeast to the southern Cook Islands, which were already being buffeted by a second cyclone, Nancy.

"This continues to be a critically dangerous situation for Samoa, American Samoa and the Southern Cooks," APCEDI said.

Nancy uprooted trees, tore off roofs and flooded coastal areas of the small Cook Islands atoll of Aitutake overnight, the Aitutake Cyclone Center reported.

Tourists had earlier been evacuated from Aitutake, one of the Pacific's most picturesque atolls, and half the island's 200 residents were in emergency shelters, the center said.

Nancy was a weaker, Category 3 cyclone but was considered very dangerous for the Cook Islands, which were still recovering from significant damage caused by a category 4 storm, Meena, which struck just 10 days ago.

Cyclone Nancy was expected to miss the main island of Rarotonga by about 110 kilometers (65 miles), but high winds and "phenomenal" seas were still expected to cause damage to the east coast, where buildings and sea walls were ravaged by Meena, the Fiji Meteorological Center said.

The storm was due to pass directly over four smaller Cook Islands atolls.

Kevin Vang at APCEDI said it was possible Olaf and Nancy could cross paths, spinning around each other in a giant storm center until one of the storms is flung off.

"For the South Pacific it is unusual to have two cyclones this close together," Vang said. "This has the making of an absolute mess."

The danger was greatest for the Cook Islands, where Olaf was forecast to follow hard on the heels of Cyclone Nancy.

"Authorities should in fact be prepared for a quick double hit by both storms in a 24-48 hour period starting late Monday or Tuesday. This is an unusual and very dangerous situation," Vang said. [...]

(Lebanon) - The waning storm picked up force Sunday, as snow covered  villages located above 800 meters and rain poured down on the Lebanese capital and its surroundings.

Beirut International Airport's weather department said the weather will remain stormy over the next two days with rain on the coast and snow above 1,200 meters. Temperatures will range between five and 16 Celsius along the coast and between one degree below zero and eight in the mountains.

Last week's violent snowfall left several villages isolated. Traffic was at a halt and many areas witnessed power cuts. [...]

Scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean that they warn could have a major impact on global climate.

Expedition leader Steve Rintoul of Australia said his multinational team of researchers had found that waters at the bottom of the Southern Ocean were significantly cooler and less salty than they were 10 years ago.

He said the size and speed of the changes surprised scientists, who have long believed deep ocean waters underwent little temperature change, and could indicate a slowdown in the flow of deep water currents.

"Ocean circulation is a big influence on global climate, so it is critical that we understand why this is happening and why it is happening so quickly," Rintoul said after he and his team docked at Hobart on the Australian island state of Tasmania.

"The surprise was just how rapidly the deepest parts of the ocean are changing, at depths of four or five kilometers (13,200-16,500 feet) below the sea surface," Rintoul said.

"Whether its a natural cycle that takes place over many decades, or it's climate change, it's an indication that the deep ocean can respond much more rapidly to changes that are happening near the surface than we believed possible," he said.

The expedition sampled 3,000 kilometers of the Southern Ocean basin during an eight-week expedition aboard the Australian Antarctic Division's research ship Aurora Australis.

Their findings added new urgency to the study of climate change, Rintoul said.

"It's another indication that the climate is capable of changing and is changing now," he said. [...]

Peshawar, Pakistan — The death toll from a week of torrential rain and heavy snow in Pakistan rose to at least 529 on Tuesday as 79 more dead were reported in the country's northwest.

Snow and landslides blocked roads to hard-hit areas in the North West Frontier Province and elsewhere in the country, hampering efforts to bring in food, medicine, tents and blankets, officials said.

Relief commissioner Ghulam Farooq told a news conference that the province's death toll jumped Tuesday to 260 from 181.

Storms have destroyed 2,400 houses, damaged 3,700 more and killed hundreds of livestock. The provincial government has released 60 million rupees ($1.7-million Canadian) for district authorities to buy relief supplies.

Melbourne, Australia - Freak summer storms lashed eastern Australia overnight, dumping record rains on Melbourne, hitting Brisbane with a towering dust storm and leaving at least two people dead, officials said Thursday.

Melbourne received more rain in the 24 hours to Thursday morning than during any day since records began in 1856, leaving the city's rivers and waterways swollen to the bursting point.

Victoria state police were searching for a teenage boy reported to have been swept away in a suburban Melbourne creek while two people were killed by falling trees in neighboring New South Wales state.

The storms, caused by an intense low-pressure system, hit a vast area from Queensland state in the north, through New South Wales and Victoria and on to the island state of Tasmania off mainland Australia's southeastern corner.

Moscow - Muscovites on Tuesday braved the biggest snow storm to hit the Russian capital in half a century as officials reported numerous traffic accidents.

"For the first time in half a century, we recorded blizzards that lasted throughout the day in every weather station in the Moscow region," a Moscow weather official told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

More than 13cm fell across Moscow as night fell on Monday, weather officials said.

And the mood was positively grouchy on Tuesday morning, with traffic at a standstill in the city centre and accidents recorded by the minute.

Monday's reported accidents rate meant that someone got into a jam every 90 seconds, state television reported

The Shanghai Observatory claimed that they had detected two huge solar flares in an active region on the surface of the sun yesterday, which indicates eruptions of sunspots in the coming days, reported today's Oriental Morning Post.

Though the sun is becoming cooler, more recently than in previous days, solar activity should remain high due to the peppered spots on its surface, according to the National Satellite Meteorological Center.

A tremendous sunspot, newly born and numbered as "720", has been in an extremely active state since the middle of last January.  Its strong magnetic field has influenced short-wave broadcasts in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hainan, Lanzhou and Urumchi. 

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa : Fears were held for nine fishermen missing at sea off Samoa and American Samoa two days after Super Cyclone Olaf swept through the region.

Two of the men were on a vessel known to have sunk when pounded by 190 kilometre-an-hour (119 miles per hour) winds and 15-metre (50-foot) seas, and the American owner of another boat with seven people on board said he had not heard from the crew since Wednesday. [...]

MEXICO CITY—The population of monarch butterflies has suffered a drastic decline, but Mexico, where deforestation has long devastated monarch wintering grounds, is now blaming the United States and Canada.

Mexico's environment department said on Wednesday that 75 per cent fewer monarch butterflies have appeared in 2004 compared to previous years. It blamed cold weather and intensive farming — including genetically modified crops — in areas of the United States and Canada where the butterflies spend the summer and reproduce.

In past years, Mexico acknowledged the butterflies were affected by illegal logging of the central Mexico fir forests that provide winter nesting grounds.

Activists and researchers suggested Mexico may be trying to offload some of the blame, after its own highly publicized efforts to stop illegal logging ran up against often violent resistance from logging gangs.

"This is an incomplete and tendentious report, that seeks to put all the blame on other countries which do share responsibility," said Homero Aridjis, whose Group of 100 environmental organization has long opposed illegal logging.

The Mexican government said the decline was because of a number of factors, including an unusually cold summer in the United States and a high mortality rate for the butterflies in Mexico in 2003 because of cold, wet conditions. "It is clear that the migratory phenomenon of the monarch butterfly ... is not at risk," the environment department said. "This is a species with a great capacity for recovering from die-offs.''

However, the announcement focused almost exclusively on events in the United States and Canada, including "industrial agriculture that displaced breeding and feeding grounds,'' "the use of herbicides and loss of habitat," and the planting of genetically modified crops not used in Mexico.

Aid workers and officials have sounded alarm bells over a looming humanitarian crisis in western Afghanistan saying they feared up to 1000 children may have died during severe winter weather.

Cold, disease and malnutrition were the biggest killers and relief groups said they could not reach areas cut off by snow to help after the poverty-stricken province of Ghor was hit by the harshest winter in a decade.
  
"Several hundred to a thousand would be a low estimate of the number of children that could have died," Paul Hicks, programme director western region Afghanistan for Catholic Relief Services said in Kabul on Friday.
  
Afghan and UN officials have said that the cold snap had claimed at least 267 lives in Afghanistan in the past month, many of them children. Thousands more people are thought to be stranded in remote areas. [...]

Severe drought in the central and southern provinces of Vietnam has wreaked havoc on farmers and could possibly cause food shortages in several provinces, reported Thanh Nien.

With nearly two months left before the peak of the dry season, Mekong Delta provinces have already witnessed lack of water for household and farming use.

Most major reservoirs in the Mekong Delta and central regions have dried out, reported Thanh Nien. [...]

Hunger alarmed

Some 30,000 households in Khanh Hoa province will likely face food shortage if the drought continues as poor harvest yields are expected from summer-spring paddy crops, said Vo Lam Phi, chairman of the Khanh Hoa People’s Committee.

In central Ninh Thuan province, farmers are reportedly unable to cultivate 50 per cent of their paddy fields as water supply from the major irrigation system Da Nhim is shrinking.

Farmers have gathered at large dried-out lakes and started digging wells in the middle of the lakes to look for water, reported Thanh Nien.

Meanwhile, Binh Thuan province in the central region could possibly lose 200,000 cattle suffering from thirst and hunger.

The provincial authority has already provided food aid to 17,000 households, mainly ethnic minority people, in drought-hit areas. [...]

KHABAROVSK, - A powerful cyclone hitting southern Khabarovsk region, has grounded planes and paralyzed the work of intercity and commuter buses, the regional meteorological service reported on Sunday.

All planes from Moscow and other cities have been diverted to Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok and other airports as they failed to land at Khabarovsk. Flights from Khabarovsk have also been delayed.

All bus routes to Birobidzhan, Bikin and other cities have been cancelled because of snowdrifts on highways. Even commuter routes have been cancelled.

According to the meteorological service, heavy snowfalls and gale-force winds will persist in the southern part of the Khabarovsk region for at least another 24 hours.

DHAKA : Eighty-one people are confirmed dead and at least 100 more are missing after a ferry capsized when it was hit by a cyclone overnight near the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, police said.

Thousands of relatives, many distraught, gathered near the scene of the tragedy to await news of missing family members.

Some survivors contradicted the official figure for the missing, saying up to 500 people could have been on board.

Fire service and police divers found 44 bodies Sunday, bringing the total number of corpses recovered to 81 after the accident in the Buriganga river on the outskirts of Dhaka, police officer-in-charge Mustafa Ahmed told AFP.

"Our father, two cousins and three other relatives are dead, Five more relatives are missing," said two brothers, both in tears, who gave their names as Naser and Mannan. The party of 13 people had been travelling to a wedding, they said.

Delwar Husain, 50, told AFP he saved his life by jumping from the deck of the boat, although his 20-year-old daughter Beauty died.

"It was very crowded. There were more than 400 on board, I think. There were heavy winds and the ferry lurched and then I think it was hit by a trawler.

"It was chaos. I lost my daughter. Then I jumped and swam to the shore," he said.

Another survivor, Shahidul Islam, 45, said he had identified the body of his brother-in-law. "I think there were between 450 and 500 passengers on the launch," he said.

"The wind came out of nowhere. I tried to hold my brother-in-law's hand as I jumped but it was dark and everything was confused and he got lost."

Police said they believed about 200 people were on board the boat, the MV Maharaj.

The accident happened at Pagla Bazar when the ferry was caught in a pre-monsoon cyclone while sailing from the capital to the central town of Chandpur.

"Some of the passengers who survived said that it capsized immediately after the cyclone hit, trapping them inside," said traffic inspector Mohiuddin, from the Dhaka Ferry Terminal.

The vessel was registered as having 167 people on board, he said, but the true number could be higher as ferries in Bangladesh are often overcrowded. [...]

SRINAGAR, India : At least 41 people have been killed in Indian Kashmir after the heaviest snowfall in two decades brought life in the region to a near-halt, officials and witnesses said.

Sixteen bodies were recovered from two villages hit by an avalanche near a mountain tunnel about 100 kilometres (62 miles) south of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, an army spokesman said.

About 40 people were missing from the villages and army teams with sniffer dogs were searching for survivors, Lieutenant Colonel V.K. Batra said.

Earlier in the day, 11 bodies were recovered after an avalanche hit Loren village in southern Poonch district, police said, while 12 deaths were reported overnight from similar snow-related accidents in Doda, Udhampur, Srinagar and Budgam district.

Two people were killed in a house collapse in Dras district.
This takes the death toll in two weeks of heavy snow to 69, including 19 soldiers. [...]

LOS ANGELES -- A Pacific storm that came ashore Saturday produced tornadoes near San Diego as it made its way inland.

One twister struck at about 9:15 a.m. in the town of Fallbrook. It gathered momentum as it headed northeast, National Weather Service Meteorologist Philip Gonsalves said.

An hour later, a tornado was reported near the Riverside County line. Buildings were damaged and powerlines were knocked down, Gonsalves said.

A tornado was also reported in Temecula, where there were reports of animals injured, Gonsalves said.

Almost 400 lost power due to that tornando, San Diego Gas & Electric spokesperson Anne Silva said.

Power had been restored to all but 130 customers by 1:30 p.m. she said.

More rain is on its way to Southern California and the San Diego area, putting homeowners in mudslide-prone areas on high alert.

Forty-one killed as heavy snowfall brings Indian Kashmir to a halt
SRINAGAR, India : Avalanches that swept rugged Himalayan Kashmir killed at least 115 people at the weekend with scores missing after the heaviest snowfall in two decades brought the region to a near-halt, officials said.

Seventy bodies were recovered from avalanches overnight and Monday around Verinag, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar, and other southern villages, police said.

Four more people died Monday near the southern towns of Qazigund and Ramsu when heavy snow collapsed their houses, police said.

Since heavy snows started blanketing Kashmir two weeks ago, 133 people have died, including 19 soldiers.

Police said many are still reported as missing in avalanches from various parts of Kashmir, mostly around Verinag, adding army rescue and medical teams were searching for survivors.

"The death toll could be higher as we are losing hope for the missing," a police officer said, adding there were no avalanches on Monday. [...]

JAKARTA : Some 146 people are believed to have died under hundreds of tonnes of garbage and earth on Indonesia's main island on Monday when heavy seasonal rain unleashed a massive landslide, police said.

The landslide struck in the early hours when people were asleep and flattened up to 70 homes built in the shadow of a dumpsite at Cimahi, near Bandung, around 200 kilometres southeast of Jakarta.

Television footage showed whole houses buried under tonnes of earth and rubbish, with splintered rafters and smashed roof tiles littering the area.

Scores of rescuers and search teams from the military, police and local residents were desperately scouring the site in the forlorn hope of rescuing some of those missing.

"We believe that there are 139 people still buried under the garbage... it appears that all of them are buried and it is very likely that they are all dead," Police Commissioner Susiyanti told AFP.

Seven bodies had already been recovered from the disaster scene.

"The situation is still grave but we will continue rescue efforts while the weather still allows us to do so," she said, adding that while the rain had stopped, dark clouds remained.

The recovery effort was being hindered because rescuers feared triggering further landslides by disrupting the unstable ground, she added.

Second Sergeant Sudrajat from the Batujajar subdistrict police post said that while seven bodies had been dragged from shattered homes at the edge of the landslide, only five people had been pulled out alive.

The dumpsite was located on top of a hill above the homes and heavy rain had saturated the mountains of trash, causing the tragedy, she explained.

A policeman in Cimahi named Awan told AFP that at least 70 houses were engulfed by the landslide. [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Mudslides trapped people in their homes Monday and forced others to flee as Southern California was soaked by yet another of the powerful storms that have pounded the region this winter.

At least three deaths were blamed on the weather and part of the area's commuter rail service was halted.

Rescuers pulled three people from about 10 feet of mud that flowed into a town house in Hacienda Heights, a suburb east of Los Angeles. One woman was flown to a hospital while the other two escaped with only minor injuries, said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Mark Savage.

That same mudslide had forced the evacuation of 30 people from five units at the complex, as well as residents of five homes on the hill above it, Savage said.

The latest batch of rain, snow and hail started battering the region Sunday, part of a series of storms that arrived Friday and was expected to continue into Tuesday.

Since Thursday, downtown Los Angeles had gotten about 6.5 inches of rain. The city's total since July 1, the start of the region's "water year," has reached 31.40 inches, making it already the fifth wettest on record, said weather service forecaster Bruce Rockwell. The record, 38.18 inches, was set in 1883-1884.

Besides the mudslide victims in Hacienda Heights, mudslides and flooding chased about 30 people from 11 homes in Glendale, north of downtown Los Angeles, officials said. Three homes on an unstable hill were evacuated in nearby Pasadena and up to 10 homes were flooded in Fullerton.

A giant man-made lake in San Diego County spilled over a dam for the first time since 1998. The lake empties into a river and the overflow was not a threat, authorities said.

The California Highway Patrol reported more than 300 crashes in a 14-hour period, compared with between 50 and 75 accidents on a normal, dry day. [...]

What's wetter than San Francisco or even Seattle?

Los Angeles -- at least this winter -- which is headed for its second-rainiest season since 1877, when the National Weather Service began keeping records.

Rainfall as of Monday afternoon totaled 32.03 inches downtown, more than three times the normal through the date of 9.89 inches and bearing down on the annual record of 38.18 inches set in 1883-84.

"It is possible before the season is over that we'd even top the record," National Weather Service technician Bruce Rockwell said Monday. [...]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Californians braced for even more rain Tuesday as they struggled to recover from storms that have left at least nine people dead, triggered mudslides and tornadoes and washed away roads and runways.

Among the victims was a Nevada woman caught in an avalanche while cross-country skiing near Lake Tahoe and a 16-year-old Orange County girl doing homework on a computer when a mudslide crashed through the wall of her home.

In Ventura County, officials closed the small Santa Paula airport Tuesday after more than 47 metres of runway collapsed into the rushing Santa Clara River. Chunks of concrete crumbled into the water throughout the day.

"We've lost nearly the entire west third of the airport," said Rowena Mason, president of the Santa Paula Airport Association.

"This is millions and millions of dollars worth of damage."

Forecasters said another strong system expected early Wednesday could bring severe winds and drop an additional 2.5 centimetres or more of rain on southern California.

Despite brief glimpses of sun, a flash-flood watch was in effect across much of southern California on Tuesday. A tornado warning was also issued for coastal areas.

Authorities said dozens of homes were evacuated or red-tagged - marked as uninhabitable - because they threatened to collapse from sliding hillsides.

Mudslides forced Amtrak officials to suspend train service north of Los Angeles to Santa Barbara at least through Thursday.

The wild weather came from a series of storms that began battering the state Thursday, dumping more than 20 centimetres of rain on downtown Los Angeles. [...]

Severe weather moved through the Bay Area Monday night, bringing lightning, hail, and heavy rain.

Thunderstorms hit the South Bay, the East Bay, and the North Bay, with hundreds of lightning strikes in the area. There were also scattered reports of hail and strong downpours of rain.

In West Sacramento, a rare tornado ripped through a shopping complex. The roof of a gas station and a neighboring supermarket suffered minor damages. A nearby residential area was also hit by the powerful winds. No one was hurt.

(Georgia) - Powerful thunderstorms rolled across the northern metro area late Monday evening, contributing to a fatal wreck in DeKalb County and prompting storm and flash flood warnings from the National Weather Service.

The storms ended around midnight, after dumping as much as 3 inches of rain in parts of North Georgia, where some places also got hail. The Weather Service issued a dense fog adivisory until noon today. Visibility as low as 1/16 of a mile was reported at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport about 6:30 a.m., but by 8, the fog had lifted.

The fog thickened again around 9 a.m., and at 10:30, the Federal Aviation Administration reported delays averaging 30 minutes on some arriving flights at Hartsfield. [...]

Residents in Cherokee County reported seeing hail, some the size of golf balls. In Cobb, 911 call dispatchers said police had responded to several accidents but without serious injuries. Cobb firefighters responded to at least nine house fires caused by lightning.

Thunder, lightning and high winds were also reported in Gwinnett County around 7:15 p.m.

Golfball-sized hail pummeled eastern Canton, shattering car windshields and piling up in the gutters. [...]

CAMPBELL RIVER, B.C. – There are concerns that the lack of snow in the mountains on Vancouver Island could mean a very dry summer for residents, with a higher fire hazard in the woods.

Vancouver Island mountains haven't had the normal amount of snowfall this winter, and a series of warm weather systems dubbed the "pineapple expresses" have cut further into what little snowpack there is.

B.C. Hydro's Stephen Watson says the snowpack in the Campbell River watershed has hit a new low for this time of year.

"The snowpack that we measure is about 16 per cent of where it should be for this time of year," he says. "So that's the lowest it's been in 22 years of historical readings."

Coastal Fire Centre manager Phil Taudin-Chabot is also concerned. He says that without that moisture, there could be a hot dry summer in the woods.

"Certainly we're concerned with how fast the snowpack has diminished and how warm temperatures have become for this time of year," he says.

But Taudin-Chabot also notes that Island reservoirs are generally high at the moment, and water tables have refilled after last summer's drought-like conditions.

Madrid – a city rarely associated with snow – woke up under a white blanket today, as up to four inches of snow fell.

The snowfall, a rarity in Spain's capital, caused traffic jams and held up commuter trains.

Snow also covered much of northern Spain and cut off road access to a hundred of remote mountain villages, police said.

The French capital was also snowbound, giving Paris a rare dose of wintry conditions that challenged motorists stuck in huge traffic jams and delayed flights at both airports.

The National Centre for Road Information said there were 137 miles of traffic jams around the capital at rush hour.

Snow fell at a steady rate through the morning in Paris and other parts of France but relented on the Cote d'Azur, where enough snow had fallen yesterday for children to make snowmen on the Mediterranean beaches.

Many parts of the UK are also under snow.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Freezing temperatures, avalanches and food shortages brought on by the coldest winter in years have killed hundreds of people in the mountainous regions of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan, Christopher Alexander, said several thousand Afghans may have died, highlighting the continued poverty of the country and its government's weakness three years after the fall of the Taliban.

India reported 186 deaths in just the last week in its portion of Kashmir, while Pakistan said 346 have died in mountainous regions so far this season. [...]

Forecasters said the worst of the weather was over as skies cleared but snowfall may continue for a few days, while officials warned warmer temperatures will bring more danger of avalanches.

"Sunshine will make the snow unstable, increasing the frequency of avalanches," Maj.-Gen. Raj Mehta, the top Indian military commander in the Kashmir valley, said Tuesday. He asked people living in high-altitude areas to "immediately relocate." [...]

In Pakistan, more casualties were expected as workers cleared debris from avalanches and collapsed buildings. [...]

At a week-long forum in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, Washington cratered a French-German proposal that would have turned the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) into a full-fledged United Nations agency with stronger powers and a bigger budget, they said.

US opposition to the proposed mercury pact sparked "heated debate" at a meeting of UNEP's governing board, which ended up calling for voluntary public-private partnerships to reduce mercury levels, the diplomats said. [...]

A 2003 UNEP study found that coal-fired power plants and artisanal mining of silver and gold were a major source of mercury found in the earth's air, soil and waterways and recommended action to reduce its presence.

In response, several governments, including members of the European Union, called for a legally binding pact to ban mercury, which can cause brain damage in unborn children and infants and possibly impair their nervous systems.

"We are disappointed that other countries did not allow the proposal to move forward," said Elena Lymberidi of the EU's Environmental Bureau.

But the United States, which relies heavily on coal-generated electricity, objected, arguing that more study was needed before moving ahead with discussions on a treaty and proposing the partnerhip schemes as an alternative.

"We came here with a position that we wanted to take immediate action through these partnerships and that we wanted to defer a decision on a legally binding instrument until we have results on this partnerships," said Claudia McMurray, the senior diplomat who led the US delegation to the UNEP meeting. [...]

Precipitous declines in the numbers of some species, of up to four-fifths, have been registered over the past 30 years, but scientists are just realising what is happening, and they have no simple explanation.

In its scale and its range, the phenomenon is one of the most ominous events in the natural history of Britain over the past half-century. Perversely, the decline comes at a time when Britain is planting more woodlands than ever, and forest management has never been more sympathetic to wildlife conservation. [...]