The permafrost in the bogs of subarctic Sweden is undergoing dramatic changes. The part of the soil that thaws in the summer, the so-called active layer, has become thicker since 1970, and the permafrost has disappeared altogether in some locations.

This has lead to significant changes in vegetation and to a subsequent increase in emission of the greenhouse gas methane. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. [...]

Methane is released from the breakdown of plant material under wet soil conditions. The disappearance of permafrost and subsequent wetter soil conditions have lead to the observed increases in methane emissions.

"At a particular mire, Stordalen, we have been able to estimate an increase in methane emissions of at least 20 percent, but maybe as much as 60 percent, from 1970 to 2000," says the lead researcher, Torben R. Christensen of Lund University's GeoBiosphere Science Centre.

Despite methane being an important greenhouse gas, it is often forgotten in discussions of the greenhouse effect, the scientists say. Methane is released from rice agriculture and meat production, but the largest single source of methane is the natural wetlands.

If what is seen in subarctic Sweden is representative of the circumpolar North, this could mean an acceleration in the rate of predicted climate warming, they say. [...]

"One might imagine the cold subarctic ecosystems as very static, but in areas where the mean annual temperature is around zero [Celsius; 32 degrees Fahrenheit], the ecosystems may be extremely sensitive. The ecosystems are dynamic and their response to climate change is very rapid. This we have seen clearly here in Abisko," says Christensen.

A CYCLONE edging closer to the Western Australia coast was expected to hit the town of Mardie by 9pm tonight local time (midnight AEDT), the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said.

The latest BOM warning said category three tropical cyclone Monty was just 20km west-north-west of Mardie and 80km north-east of Pannawonica and was moving south-east at 10kph.

BOM has placed communities on Barrow Island, Mardie, Onslow, Fortescue Roadhouse, Pannawonica and Nanutarra on red alert.

Roebourne, Wickham and Karratha residents have also been warned to take shelter as destructive wind gusts up to 210kph (130mph) were expected this evening [...]

Arlington, Va. -- Scientists using cores drilled from the New Jersey coastal plain have found that ice sheets likely caused massive sea level change during the Late Cretaceous Period -an interval previously thought to be ice-free. The scientists, who will publish their results in the March-April issue of the Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin, assert that either ice sheets grew and decayed in that greenhouse world or our understanding of sea level mechanisms is fundamentally flawed.[...]

The scientists propose that the ice sheets were restricted in area to Antarctica and were ephemeral. The ice sheets would not have reached the Antarctic coast, explaining the relative warmth in Antarctica, but still could significantly alter global sea level.

New calculations by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher indicate global sea levels likely will rise more by the end of this century than predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001.

The projected sea-level rise is due to a revised estimate of the ice melt from glaciers, said geological sciences Emeritus Professor Mark Meier. [...]

GENEVA (Reuters) - The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion (82 billion pounds) a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Centre attack annually.

"There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said in the report.

"The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe -- or it can avert it."

The report comes as a growing number of policy experts warn that the environment is emerging as the security threat of the 21st century, eclipsing terrorism. [...]

Overfishing isn't the only reason fish have disappeared.

Overfishing is not the sole cause of dramatically declining fish stocks in the north Atlantic Ocean, or worldwide, said marine biologists at a Royal Society meeting last week in London. Environmental changes such as climate warming may be just as important, they said, urging governments to consider these factors when managing fisheries.

"Marine ecosystems, particularly in the northern Atlantic, are much more vulnerable to natural fluctuations than previously realized," says Michael Heath, a biologist at the Scottish Fisheries Research Services' Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, and UK chair of the international project Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC). [...]

"There is evidence for significant decadal-scale biological changes, which have major consequences for the abundance of natural resources," says Grégory Beaugrand, a marine biologist at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth. [...]

According to a new study, the shrinking of the ozone layer over the Arctic is much worse than previously believed. In Climate change set to poke holes in ozone , Nature tells us it is a side-effect of global warming, the polar stratospheric clouds absorbing more and more industrial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). [...]

If the upper reaches of the Arctic atmosphere get colder -- a predicted consequence of climate change -- then the rate of ozone depletion could be three times greater than currently forecast, according to Markus Rex of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam , Germany, and his co-workers. [...]

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - Emergency workers repaired downed power lines and assessed other damage early Friday after line of severe thunderstorms bore down on northern Texas and Oklahoma with heavy rain, high winds and twisters.

The storms overturned mobile homes, ripped roofs off other buildings and snarled airport and freeway traffic across the area Thursday. Three traffic deaths were blamed on the storm in Oklahoma.

Several twisters were reported in Texas, where straight-line gusts of up to 80 mph overturned tractor-trailer rigs. A number of homes were damaged or destroyed in East Texas and minor injuries were reported. [...]

Children in a nursery were shocked when they spotted a three-headed frog hopping in their garden.

The creature - which has six legs - has stunned BBC wildlife experts who warned it could be an early warning of environmental problems. [...]

WASHINGTON The summers from 1994 through 2003 were the hottest in Europe in more than 500 years, with the summer of 2003 by far the steamiest, according to a study by Swiss researchers.

The study said that temperatures during the summer of 2003 exceeded European summer temperatures from 1901 to 1995 by about 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. "It appears that the summer of 2003 was very likely warmer than any other summer back to 1500," the study said.

Record temperatures were recorded in most of the major cities of Europe last summer, with many readings over 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Authorities in European countries have attributed thousands of deaths last summer to the excessively high temperatures, making the heat wave one of the deadliest weather phenomena in the past century.

In France, the death toll was estimated at 14,802. About 2,000 more people than normal died in August in England and Wales. The average number of summer deaths increased by 4,175 in Italy, 1,300 in Portugal and more than 1,000 in the Netherlands.

Altogether in Europe, based on official numbers collected by The Associated Press, there were more than 19,000 excess deaths in the 2003 summer months.

The intense heat also wilted crops, caused wildfires and continued a century-long trend of melting the continent's glaciers.

The study, led by Jürg Luterbacher of the University of Bern, Switzerland, is scheduled to appear this week in the journal Science. Luterbacher said the increased temperatures in Europe were not limited to the summers. He said the study found that the average winter and average annual temperatures in the three decades from 1973 to 2002 were the highest in 500 years.

Birds make one of nature' s best alarm systems. Like canaries taken down the mineshaft to test for poisonous gas, they are good indicators of when nature becomes so fouled-up that it is life-threatening.

Now experts want to make them more widely recognised as such. They say people are particularly aware of birds because they are so noisy, active and conspicuous. It therefore makes it relatively easy to see when they are in trouble, and when that happens it usually is a sure sign that the environment itself is in trouble.

As it is, the picture presented by birds is not rosy. The world has about 9 000 different species, and of these close to 1 200 are threatened.

Dr Aldo Berruti, director of BirdLife South Africa, says that had other parts of nature been as easily observable, whether it be fungi or frogs or such, chances are they would have shown similar patterns of stress.[...]

Global warming could plunge North America and Western Europe into a deep freeze, possibly within only a few decades.

That's the paradoxical scenario gaining credibility among many climate scientists. The thawing of sea ice covering the Arctic could disturb or even halt large currents in the Atlantic Ocean. Without the vast heat that these ocean currents deliver--comparable to the power generation of a million nuclear power plants--Europe's average temperature would likely drop 5 to 10°C (9 to 18°F), and parts of eastern North America would be chilled somewhat less. Such a dip in temperature would be similar to global average temperatures toward the end of the last ice age roughly 20,000 years ago.

Some scientists believe this shift in ocean currents could come surprisingly soon--within as little as 20 years, according to Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Others doubt it will happen at all. Even so, the Pentagon is taking notice. Andrew Marshall, a veteran Defense Department planner, recently released an unclassified report detailing how a shift in ocean currents in the near future could compromise national security. [...]

CHICAGO - A bus toppled from a bridge in central Illinois on Friday during blustery wind storms that tore across the Midwest with gusts topping 60 mph. The bus driver and a passenger were hospitalized.

Elsewhere, the wind pushed over trucks, peeled off rooftops and knocked out power to thousands in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. [...]

The Biblical story of Noah's ark is a "great myth", devoid of any scientific or historical credibility according to a new BBC programme about the great flood.

Noah's Ark, which has been produced by the Corporation's religion and ethics division, argues that there is no evidence to support the idea of an ark, a global flood or even a man called Noah. It claims that the story in the Book of Genesis was a fabrication inspired by the story of King Gilgamesh, who was caught up in a flood while trying to transport his own livestock.

Gilgamesh, who was King of Uruk in Babylonia in around 2,700 BC, had a shaved head and wore make up as well as a kilt. He bore no resemblance to the traditional image of Noah as displayed in countless paintings.

He and his family were stranded at sea when a freak flood swept them from the river they were in. Unable to drink seawater they stayed alive by drinking the beer that they were transporting.

Jeremy Bowen, the programme's presenter, tells viewers: "It is time to forget the original story and start again. The traditional notion of the Noah story does not pass any sort of rational or historical test. Maybe it was not meant to, maybe it was made up."

In the programme, Bowen interviews a number of scientists and historians who dismiss the idea that the world was engulfed by a global flood. They say that there is not enough water in all of the world's oceans to support a torrent of such proportions. Bowen further concludes that even 40 days and nights of continuous rain would not have produced enough water.

Recent claims that the flooding could have been caused by a comet bursting onto the earth's surface are also dismissed.

Bowen and his team also contradict traditional notions about the ark itself, saying that such a huge ship - two thirds the size of the Titanic - would have not been possible with the level of technology available at the time. Loading so many animals onto a single vessel would have taken 35 years, it claims.

They conclude that the Noah story was invented by Jewish scribes who embellished the story of Gilgamesh to evoke an all powerful and vengeful God.

Ah, the natural disaster film... always a special treat!  [...]

Here's the setup: Climatological disruption of gargantuan proportions is ravaging Earth and people are freaking out.  Millions of terrified survivors are surging South. But Professor Adrian Hall (Dennis Quaid), a brilliant paleoclimatologist, is going in the other direction.  Hall believes that his son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), may still be alive in the frozen wasteland that was once New York City.

Devastating tornados rip Los Angeles, a massive snowstorm pounds New Delhi; hail the size of grapefruit batters Tokyo; and in New York City, the temperature swings from sweltering to freezing in one day.  If you're into apocalyptic eye-candy (or if you're recruiting for Greenpeace), this one's for you! [...]

The film hits theaters worldwide on May 28th. [...]

He has already irked environmentalists by saying that the condition of the world is not as bad as they think it is. Now he wants to pinpoint how world leaders could improve it.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistics professor whose book The Skeptical Environmentalistput environmentalists on the defensive with its relatively optimistic outlook, has a new and more ambitious project in the pipeline.

He has persuaded a panel of nine of the world's leading economists to look at 10 of the world's most serious problems and list their solutions according to value for money. [...]

Professor Lomborg infuriated environmentalists worldwide with his 2001 book, in which he attacked what he said was their central tenet - that the condition of the world is deteriorating.

He said that concerns such as deforestation and the effects of acid rain were exaggerated, and that others such as hunger and disease were on a downward trend. He did not, however, deny that serious problems existed and in London yesterday he launched the Copenhagen Consensus, his initiative to solve them.

He said that prioritisation was key. "The world faces serious problems such as pollution, hunger and disease," he said. "Which problem should be addressed first? There are 800 million people starving, 2.5 billion people lacking sewerage, and billions affected by climate change. We all wish that there were money enough to solve all problems, but our means are limited. Policymakers prioritise every day, but not always on the best basis. We hope to provide a framework to allow us to make better prioritisations."

His panel of economists, which includes four Nobel prize winners, will examine the ten world problems and produce a list of the best solutions, on a basis of cost-benefit analysis.

Professor Lomborg said: "Some problems make good television but are not so frightening in reality, such as pesticide residues, or birds caught in oil slicks.

"We need to get our priorities right. A really important problem is indoor air pollution in the developing world, which the World Health Organisation thinks causes two million deaths a year."

Cairo - Egypt will reject any proposal to lower its quota of the Nile water, Egyptian Irrigation Minister Mahmud Abdel Halim Abu Zeid said on Saturday, ahead of delicate talks with other countries sharing the African river basin.

"The talks will have to comply with one permanent feature: not to touch Egypt's historical rights," the minister told a news conference. [...]

Israel has signed an agreement in principle to import 50 million cubic meters of water annually from Turkey. The agreement stretches over a period of 20 years for a total of one billion cubic meters of water, Haaretz reported.

The water will be transferred to the Jewish state from an export facility on the Manbaget river in southern Turkey. [...]

An agreement for the transaction was made between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Turkish energy minister Zeki Cakan in 2002. Although the price of water desalination is lower than that of importing the natural resource from Turkey, Israel closed the deal with Ankara after it tied the negotiated water deal to a big arms purchase, providing for the sale of Israeli-made tanks and air force technology.

Air pollution was responsible for more deaths among Australians than road accidents, the nation's leading science body said today.

[...] "Each year, on average, 2,400 of the 140,000 Australian deaths are linked to air quality and health issues - much more than the 1,700 people who die on our roads.

SEOUL (Reuters) - Helicopters dropped food and fuel supplies to thousands of drivers marooned on highways across South Korea, officials said on Saturday, after the worst March snowfall in a century blanketed the country's central region.

About 4,000 passengers that had been stranded on highways were released late in the afternoon, after struggling in snow for more than a day, as frozen roads were cleaned and traffic returned to normal, the Korea Highway Corporation said. [...]

A heavy snow storm that began late on Thursday dumped the largest March snowfall in 100 years on the central region of South Korea, forcing schools to close and bringing traffic to a standstill.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - One person has been killed in a landslide in eastern Turkey, bringing the death toll to at least 11 as extreme weather has gripped much of the country.

The landslide in Artvin province on Sunday was the latest natural disaster at the weekend in Turkey, which has been battered by powerful storms that have also unleashed floods and avalanches. [...]

[...] Nevertheless, experts were scarcely prepared for the shock that came from the Greenland ice plateau in 1993. Plans had been laid to drill at the summit of the ice cap, where irregularities due to the deep flow of ice would have been minimal. Early hopes for a new cooperative program joining Americans and Europeans broke down and each team drilled its own hole, some 3 km deep. Competition was transmuted into cooperation by a decision to put the two boreholes just far enough apart (30 km) so that anything that showed up in both cores must represent a real climate effect, not an artifact due to bedrock conditions. The match turned out to be remarkably exact for most of the way down. The comparison between cores showed convincingly that climate could change more rapidly than almost any scientist had imagined. Swings of temperature that were believed in the 1950s to take tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s to take thousands of years, and in the 1980s to take hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades. Greenland had sometimes warmed a shocking 7°C within a span of less than 50 years. More recent studies have reported that, during the Younger Dryas transition, drastic shifts in the entire North Atlantic climate could be seen within five snow layers, that is, as little as five years!

Studies of pollen and other indicators--at locations ranging from Ohio to Japan to Tierra del Fuego, and dated with greatly improved radiocarbon techniques--suggested that the Younger Dryas event affected climates around the world. The extent of the climate variations was controversial (and to some extent remains so). Likewise uncertain was whether such variations could occur not only in glacial times, but also in warm periods like the present. Computer modelers, now fully alerted to the delicate balance of salinity and temperature that drove the North Atlantic circulation, found that global warming might bring future changes in precipitation that could shut down the current heat transport. The 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pronouncing the official consensus of the world's governments and their climate experts, reported that a shutdown in the coming century was "unlikely" but "cannot be ruled out." If such a shutdown did occur, it would change climates all around the North Atlantic--a dangerous cooling brought on by global warming.

Now that the ice had been broken, so to speak, most experts were prepared to consider that rapid climate change--huge and global change--could come at any time. "The abrupt changes of the past are not fully explained yet," wrote the NAS committee in its 2002 report, "and climate models typically underestimate the size, speed, and extent of those changes. Hence, . . . climate surprises are to be expected." Despite the profound implications of this new viewpoint, hardly anyone rose to dispute it.

Although people did not deny the facts head-on, many denied them more subtly by failing to revise their accustomed ways of thinking. "Geoscientists are just beginning to accept and adapt to the new paradigm of highly variable climate systems," wrote the NAS committee. And beyond geoscientists, "this new paradigm has not yet penetrated the impacts community"--the economists and other specialists who try to calculate the consequences of climate change. Policymakers and the public lagged even farther behind in grasping what the new scientific view could mean. As a geologist once remarked, "To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need."

A gradual discovery process

How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not. So wasn't the preceding half-century of research a waste of effort? If only scientists had enough foresight, couldn't they have waited until they were able to get good ice cores and settle the matter once and for all with a single unimpeachable study?

The actual history shows that even the best scientific data are never that definitive. People can see only what they find believable. Over the decades, many scientists who looked at tree rings, varves, ice layers, and such had held evidence of decade-scale climate shifts before their eyes. They easily dismissed it. There were plausible reasons to dismiss global calamity as nothing but a crackpot fantasy. Sometimes the scientists' assumptions were actually built into their procedures: When pollen specialists routinely analyzed their clay cores in 10-cm slices, they could not possibly see changes that took place within a centimeter's worth of layers. If the conventional beliefs had been the same in 1993 as in 1953--that significant climate change always takes many thousands of years--the short-term fluctuations in ice cores would have been passed over as meaningless noise.

First, scientists had to convince themselves, by shuttling back and forth between historical data and studies of possible mechanisms, that rapid shifts made sense, with the meaning of "rapid" gradually changing from millennia to centuries to decades. Without that gradual shift of understanding, the Greenland cores would never have been drilled. The funds required for those heroic projects became available only after scientists reported that climate could change in damaging ways on a time scale meaningful to governments. In an area as difficult as climate science, in which all is complex and befogged, it takes a while to see what one is not prepared to look for. 

Downing Street tried to muzzle the Government's top scientific adviser after he warned that global warming was a more serious threat than international terrorism.

Ivan Rogers, Mr Blair's principal private secretary, told Sir David King, the Prime Minister's chief scientist, to limit his contact with the media after he made outspoken comments about President George Bush's policy on climate change.

In January, Sir David wrote a scathing article in the American journal Science attacking Washington for failing to take climate change seriously. "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism," he wrote.

Support for Sir David's view came yesterday from Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, who said the environment was at least as important a threat as global terrorism. He told BBC1's Breakfast with Frost: "I think we still overestimate the danger of terror. There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks."

Since Sir David's article in Science was published, No 10 has tried to limit the damage to Anglo-American relations by reining in the Prime Minister's chief scientist.

In a leaked memo, Mr Rogers ordered Sir David - a Cambridge University chemist who offers independent advice to ministers - to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio 4's Today.

"To accept such bids runs the risk of turning the debate into a sterile argument about whether or not climate change is a greater risk," Mr Rogers said in the memo, which was sent to Sir David's office in February. "This sort of discussion does not help us achieve our wider policy aims ahead of our G8 presidency [next year]." The move will be seized on by critics of Mr Blair's stance over the Iraq war as further evidence that he is too subservient to the Bush administration. It will also be seen as an attempt to bolster the Prime Minister's case for pre-emptive strikes to combat the threat of international terrorism, which he outlined in a speech on Friday.

YELLOWKNIFE - Research scientists have discovered that ancient carbon deposits are becoming unlocked from permafrost and scientists worry that could be dangerous as the ground warms up.

Ron Benner, a member of the research team from the University of South Carolina, and other scientists took water samples from the western part of the Arctic Ocean. "We can measure molecules in the ocean that we know came from land," says Benner. "We know it came from the soils and the plants growing on land, so we trace their origins back to the soils." Permafrost has locked in carbon for thousands of years, but permafrost has been changing and melting.

Benner says the frozen carbon is slowly making it way to the ocean and and that's a potential threat because it turns into carbon dioxide — one of the gases that contributes to the greenhouse effect.

"The more carbon dioxide you put in the atmosphere, the more you enforce the greenhouse effect and increase the warming," says Benner Benner's test samples show that not much carbon has been released from permafrost so far, but constant monitoring will reveal how much more carbon is entering the atmosphere and contributing to the warming of the climate.

European researchers say last summer was the hottest on the continent for at least five centuries.

"When you consider Europe as a whole, it was by far the hottest," said Juerg Luterbacher of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

According to the study, published by this week's Science magazine, European winters are also getting warmer.

Average winter and annual temperatures during the past three decades were the warmest for 500 years, it says.

LOS ANGELES - Winter doesn't even give way to spring until March 20, but California baked in summerlike heat Monday as temperatures soared to record highs.

Downtown Los Angeles, with mountains to the east still capped in snow from a storm last week, topped out at 93 degrees, 24 above normal. That broke the 1996 record of 89 for March 8, the National Weather Service said.

A 112-year-old mark fell in downtown San Francisco when the temperature hit 82, besting the record of 78 set in 1892. Sacramento tied its 1953 record for the date with a high of 80. [...]

ANTANANARIVO (AFP) - Madagascar called for international aid after cyclone Gafilo wreaked havoc in the north of the Indian Ocean island nation, killing at least seven and leaving up to 100,000 homeless.

Gafilo may return to the island within 48 hours, meteorological officials said late Monday. [...]

Port Moresby - More than 10 000 people were evacuated as floods destroyed their homes and food gardens along the banks of the Waghi river in Papua New Guinea's western highlands over the past few days.

Emergency supplies, including thousands of litres of diesel, were stranded in Kundiawa Chimbu province after rising floodwaters badly damaged a bridge near Kudjip, washing away parts of the Highlands Highway.

Precious livestock has also perished in swollen rivers as torrential rain pounded the region for the past two weeks, turning into a flood last Friday. The rains will affect major coffee and tea growers entering a new season in Anglimp, Aviamp and Kudjip.[...]

BEIJING, March.9 (Xinhuanet) -- TV reception in the Shanghai has been affected by a so-called sun outage, which occurs when the sun, the earth and a satellite are aligned. The phenomenon began on February 28 and will last until March 28, according to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

"When it happens, all satellite TV signals will be cut right off," said an official surnamed Du at Shanghai Cable Network Co Ltd. "But local television networks and out-of-town channels supported by cable or fiber technologies won't be affected."

He said since March 5, sun outages have hit satellites with links to Shanghai every day at about noon, and lasted an average of six to 10 minutes.

"But this year's outbreak is within normal scope," he added.

When the sun appears directly behind a satellite, ground antennas' communication links, like cable television, may be disrupted by the sun's RF energy. This happens during the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox. The outages are brief and tend to occur over the course of several consecutive days.

MACCLENNY, Fla. - A fire that started as a prescribed burn but leapt out of control had swept through about 30,000 acres by late Tuesday and forced the evacuation of about 35 homes in north Florida, officials said Tuesday.

The blaze was damaging valuable timber in national and state forests, officials said. [...]

San Francisco Breaks 112 Year Record

LOS ANGELES -- It's still winter, but it feels more like summer in California.

It was 93 degrees in downtown Los Angeles Monday. That's 24 degrees above normal and 4 degrees higher than the old record for March 8.

For 112 years, the record high in San Francisco was 78. But on Monday, it was 82. It was 84 in San Diego, and Sacramento tied its record high for the day with 80.

Hot on the heels of the weekend's torrential rain, Sydney sweltered yesterday in one of the hottest March days on record.

In a quirky one for the record books, the inner-city recorded its second-highest March temperature, with the mercury peaking at 39.3 degrees, beaten only by 39.8 degrees recorded on the same day in 1983, a Bureau of Meteorology spokesman said. [...]

A new study from the University of California shows, for the first time, that the deep-ocean circulation system of the north Atlantic, which controls ice-age cycles of cold and warm periods in the Northern Hemisphere, is integrally coupled to salinity levels in the Caribbean Sea.

This research reinforces concerns that global warming, by melting the glacial ice of Greenland, could quickly and profoundly change salinity and temperatures in the north Atlantic Ocean. One consequence might be much colder weather in northern Europe and Britain and perhaps even in eastern Canada and the U.S. northeast. [...]

Latest list of state's 'impaired' streams at its deepest ever

Colorado's latest list of polluted waters has grown to 117 river, stream and lake segments, the highest number in the 15 years the state has tracked such problems.

The list of "impaired" waters, approved Wednesday by the state Water Quality Control Commission, includes stretches in every major river basin, including the Colorado and South Platte, and involves nearly two dozen contaminants harming fish and degrading water. [...]

[...] Many ecologists think the Amazon rainforest is one of the major "carbon sinks" that keep atmospheric CO 2from rising more quickly than it already has.

If anything were to interfere with that, says Oliver Phillips, a tropical forest ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK, "that's bad news". [...]

The disintegrating sunspot has a "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class solar flares.

Comment: Do geomagnetic storms have an impact on our health. There has been some research that concludes that there may be.

GEOMAGNETIC STORMS AND HUMAN HEALTH Psychiatric admissions. Since the work of T. Dull and B. Dull in 1935, other studies have reinforced the suspicion that solar activity and the resultant geomagnetic activity are associated with human health problems. Here is the abstract of the latest study found:

"Numbers of first admissions per month for a single psychiatric unit, from 1977 to 1987, were examined for 1829 psychiatric inpatients to assess whether this measure was correlated with 10 parameters of geophysical activity. Four statistically significant values were 0.197 with level of solar radio flux at 2800 MHz in the corresponding month, -0.274 with sudden magnetic disturbances of the ionosphere, -0.216 with the index of geomagnetic activity, and -0.262 with the number of hours of positive ionization of the ionosphere in the corresponding month."

(Raps, Avi, et al; "Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXIX. Solar Activity and Admission of Psychiatric Inpatients," Perceptual and Motor Skills , 74:449, 1992.)

Comment: The above correlations are significant, but who knows how these parameters operate on the human body?

Cancer recurrence . Another possible health correlation was explored by H. Wendt in a paper presented at the 1992 European meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, in Munich. In this paper, Wendt claimed a correlation between the incidence of cancer recurrence and geomagnetic storm activity. Hopefully, further details will soon become available. (Anonymous; "SSE News Items," Journal of Scientific Exploration , 6:208, 1992.)

CAPE SAN BLAS, Florida (AP) -- Scientists stepped up efforts Friday to discover what's been killing bottlenose dolphins in and near a bay in the Florida Panhandle, as the death toll climbed to at least 22 over three days.

Water samples from St. Josephs Bay will be tested for possible toxins, and autopsies were being conducted, but it could be two weeks before biologists have an answer, said Blair Mase of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The carcasses have been found in the bay up to a mile from shore, and in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the bay, about 80 miles southwest of Tallahassee.

Anne Harvey, manager of St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, said redfish and horseshoe crabs also have been killed. That has increased suspicion that red tide or some other toxin may be responsible, Mase said.

The scattering of dolphin carcasses in open water as well as along the shore indicates the mammals did not strand themselves, Harvey said.

0Antananarivo - At least 59 people were killed on Madagascar when a tropical cyclone swept across the north of the Indian Ocean island last week, the national rescue centre said on Saturday in an updated toll.

[...] According to the updated toll, 161 people are missing, 21 injured and more than 33 400 left homeless.[...]

WASHINGTON -- Physicists in New Zealand have shown that last November's record-breaking solar explosion was much larger than previously estimated, thanks to innovative research using the upper atmosphere as a gigantic x-ray detector.

Their findings have been accepted for 17 March publication in Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

On 4 November 2003, the largest solar flare ever recorded exploded from the Sun's surface, sending an intense burst of radiation streaming towards the Earth.

Before the storm peaked, x-rays overloaded the detectors on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), forcing scientists to estimate the flare's size. [...]

In the high mountains, plants and animals are in a tight corner. Unlike temperate species, they have fewer capabilities for coping with change, yet the ecological "islands" they inhabit are shrinking as global warming goes on.

Scientists say that research is now indicating a grim future for alpine ecosystems. As warming encourages species from the lower slopes to invade, they outcompete creatures at the top. Populations of butterflies, low-growing alpine plants and aquatic species have all suffered, while pikas - small mammals with limited adaptive ability - are dying in droves.[...]

A plague of locusts that has devastated crops in the Australian outback has begun migrating south.

Heavy rains that ended a long drought in north-eastern Australia has provided ideal breeding conditions for the bugs.

Officials said the swarms that appeared in remote parts of Queensland had moved to more built-up New South Wales.

"We were just staggering out of the drought, we are incredibly frustrated," said farmer Bev Dennis, based 550 km (340 miles) west of Sydney.

"A thick haze of them came through over the weekend and chomped their way through our oats crop overnight," she added. [...]

Until the weekend, locust fighters thought they had won the battle over Australia's worst locust outbreak since December 2000. [...]

New South Wales farmer Joe Davis, who has already lost crops to the locusts, said he had been warned to expect the worst.

"In a few days, we will see locusts that will just black the sun out," he told ABC television. "There won't be a green thing, they'll even eat the clothes off the washing line."

Imagine an Earth where ice sheets cover continents and freeze the seas almost down to the Equator, plunging the planet into a white hell lasting millions of years.

This scenario does not belong in the realm of fantasy, for it happened not once but at least twice between 800 million and 550 million years ago, in extraordinary climate events that have become known as "Snowball Earth".

How these brutally protracted Ice Ages unfolded have always been a puzzle.

Some speculate that the Sun abruptly cooled for a while or that the Earth tilted on its axis or experienced an orbital blip that dramatically reduced solar warmth.

But a new study by French scientists throws light on a little-explored theory -- how tectonic wrenches that ripped apart the Earth's land surface provoked a runaway "icehouse" effect.

At the time, all the Earth's future continents were glommed together in a super-continent dubbed Rodinia, an entity so vast that rainfall, brought by winds from the oceans, failed to travel far inland.

When Rodinia pulled apart, breaking up into smaller pieces that eventually formed today's continents, rainfall patterns changed dramatically.

Rain tumbled over basalt rocks, freshly spewed from vast volcanic eruptions.

That initiated a well-known reaction between the water and calcium silicate, in which carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules are taken from the air and sequestered in calcium carbonate, which is then washed down to the seas.

CO2 is the famous "greenhouse" gas -- it hangs like an invisible blanket in the atmosphere, and prevents the Sun's heat from bouncing back into space. Instead, this heat is stored up in the seas and land masses.

At present CO2, disgorged by the burning of fossil fuels, is being blamed for the looming threat of global warming.

But a computer model published on Thursday postulates that the reverse happened hundreds of millions of years ago.

The weathering of silicate rocks sucked CO2 out of the air, thus leading to a catastrophic cooling.

According to the simulation, before Rodinia broke up around 800 million years ago, C02 concentrations were around 1,830 parts per million (ppm); the mean global temperature was 10.8 C (51.5 F); and regions of the Earth that were below freezing point extended down to around 60 degrees in both hemispheres.

Fast-forward to Rodinia's breakup, 50 million years later, and the picture is greatly different.

CO2 levels are at 510 ppm; the planet's mean temperature is a frigid two C (35.5 F); and freezing temperatures have migrated towards the mid-latitudes, of 40-45 degrees.

"Tectonic changes could have triggered a progressive transition from a 'greenhouse' to an 'icehouse' climate during the neo-Proterozoic Era," the authors say.

Combine this with the rock/rainfall reaction, and the simulation "results in a snowball glaciation."

Lead author of the study, published on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature, is Yannick Donnadieu of the CNRS' Laboratory for Climate and Environment Sciences at Gif sur Yvette, south of Paris.

Accelerating the movement towards an Ice Age is a phenomenon called albedo.

Scientists at Oxford University say they have discovered what could be behind some wayward weather forecasts.

The researchers say small atmospheric fluctuations ignored by meteorologists may have a far greater impact on weather systems than previously thought.

The fluctuations, known as inertia-gravity waves, can often be seen from the surface of the Earth as stripy features in clouds, but forecasters had always thought they had little effect on cold and warm weather fronts. [...]

A wave of massive explosions which erupted from the sun's surface was so powerful it came close to shutting down power grids and radio and mobile phone networks across the world.

The solar flare last November was more than twice as big as the previous recorded explosion - and so violent that satellite detectors were unable to record its true scale because they were blinded by its radiation.

It generated a massive stream of electrically charged particles and gas which rocketed across space at two million miles per hour, with the ability to cause unprecedented disruption to radio transmissions and navigation systems on earth.

Until now the size of the flare and the seismic waves which followed it was unknown, but scientists have discovered it dwarfed the previous biggest flare in August 1989, which plunged six million people in Quebec into an electrical blackout.

A team of scientists at New Zealand's University of Otago have said that it almost wreaked unimaginable destruction.

Their calculations showed the flare's X-ray radiation striking the atmosphere was equivalent to that of 5,000 suns, although they said none of it reached the earth's surface.

The flare was not on a direct course and harmful radiation was absorbed by the magnetosphere, a protective layer around the earth.
The flare came during a spell of extraordinary solar activity, when the sun produced a series of vast explosions.

As gas from the core of the sun was heated to millions of degrees, radiation and billions of tonnes of charged particles were pumped into space.

An accompanying aurora was seen over the skies of southern England. At the time one scientist described the power of the flare as being greater than "every nuclear warhead being detonated at once".

Extinction is a term that most of us associate with the animal and plant kingdom. We hear often of the various animals that became extinct in the past, or that are now threatened with extinction, yet this term is seldom ever considered in relation to the human species. Until now that is. Recently the Pentagon and other sources have released documents declaring that we are in for a rough ride, that the future of humanity and the planet, at least in its present form, is facing a clear and present danger. Surprisingly (or not) the public response to this revelation has been lukewarm at best, and we understand why.

Most humans couldn't really care that humanity might well be facing extinction. The unaware and egocentric nature of most humans means that, even if it were to happen tomorrow, the mass dying of humanity would be somewhat irrelevant for the individual. What should you or I care that everyone else dies along with us? For the individual, there is no such thing as the "end of the world", there is only the end of each individual's world which occurs when we die. We are all going to die someday anyway, right?

Standard history teaches us that time is linear, that it began with the big bang or Adam and Eve and has continued to this day in a linear fashion. When an intelligent yet obviously self-serving species such as ours inhabits a planet for thousands of years, the ultimate destruction of both is perhaps inevitable. The fact that our planet and species might be on the brink of destruction is, then, not so surprising.

But what if this is not the case?

What if there were evidence that our planet had gone though cyclical destructions, the last being only a few thousand years ago? The idea that planetary cataclysms and extinctions are a recurring cyclical event, and have occurred perhaps countless times before, would suggest that the human experience is also cyclical. This concept, if opened to the public, might give rise to the idea that, without awareness of this reality, we are essentially caught in a loop, condemned to play our part in a endlessly repeating plot, where the details may change but the ending does not.

You can find out more about the cyclic character of time in Laura Knight-Jadczyk's book, Ancient Science. For a look at cyclic catastrophes and the possibility of one in our future, see her articles Independence Day and Is the World Going to End?

The Earth may be on the brink of a sixth mass extinction on a par with the five others that have punctuated its history, suggests the strongest evidence yet.

Butterflies in Britain are going extinct at an even greater rate than birds, according to the most comprehensive study ever of butterflies, birds, and plants.

There is growing concern over the rate at which species of plants and animals are disappearing around the world. But until now the evidence for such extinctions has mainly come from studies of birds. "The doubters could always turn around and say that there's something peculiar about birds that makes them susceptible to the impact of man on the environment," says Jeremy Greenwood of the British Trust for Ornithology in Norfolk, and one of the research team.

Now there is concrete evidence that insects - which account for more than half the described species on Earth, are disappearing faster than birds.

"If we can extrapolate that pattern of the British butterflies to other British insects, and indeed to invertebrates across the planet, we are obviously looking at a very serious bio-diversity crisis," says team member Mark Telfer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Bedfordshire, UK.

Major ecosystems

Six large sets of data collected over the past 20 to 40 years in England, Wales, and Scotland were analysed by Jeremy Thomas of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorchester, UK and colleagues. More than 20,000 volunteers submitted over 15 million records of species.

The researchers found that populations of 71 percent of the butterfly species have decreased over the last 20 years, compared to 56 percent for birds and 28 percent for plants. Two butterfly species (3.4 percent of total) became extinct, compared to six (0.4 percent) of the plant species surveyed. None of the native breeding birds went extinct in the last 20 years.

Crucially, the decline in populations happened in all the major ecosystems and was distributed evenly across Britain, rather than in just a few heavily degraded regions.

The crisis could be foreshadowing a sixth mass extinction, warn the researchers. Life on Earth has already seen five mass extinctions in its four billion year old history. The last one, which wiped out the dinosaurs, happened 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period and was possibly caused by a giant meteor collision.

The current extinction is being precipitated by the widespread loss of habitats because of human activity, according to Tefler. The remaining habitats are small and fragmented, and their quality has been degraded because of pollution.

Nitrogen pollution

This claim is strongly supported, at least for plants, by a second study published alongside Thomas' paper in Science. Carly Stevens of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and her colleagues studied the diversity of plants in 68 grassland sites in the UK. The number of species in each site varied greatly, from a mean of 7.2 to 27.6 species per site. Nitrogen pollution was found to blame for this variability.

"We found strong evidence that the decline in the species richness of grasslands within the UK was linked to nitrogen pollution," says Stevens. "In areas of high nitrogen pollution the species richness was much lower than in areas of low pollution, such as the Scottish highlands."

Atmospheric nitrogen pollution is caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and from intensive agriculture, especially from the volatilisation of animal waste. This nitrogen is deposited on the soil, favouring the growth of some species to the cost of others.

"Evidence of a global extinction crisis has come into stark focus with these important results," comments Mark Collins of the United Nations Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, UK.

The sharp contrast between President Bush and his presumptive Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) over climate change policy and regulation of carbon dioxide could significantly raise the stakes for the candidates in key coal-producing states expected to swing the outcome of the November election.

In interviews yesterday, political observers and participants in the climate change debate offered varying perspectives on how Kerry's commitment to tight federal controls on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants and other industries could affect voter preferences in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Edward Krenik, an industry lobbyist and former director of the EPA congressional affairs office under former Administrator Christie Whitman, said he expected the Bush campaign to translate Kerry's support for "four-pollutant" legislation into a blunt message that Kerry would undercut economic recovery and simultaneously kill domestic jobs, two critical issues in the election.

Kerry's climate change platform, which according to his campaign Web site also includes a renewed U.S. commitment to international negotiations and domestic caps on all greenhouse gas-producing industries, will be a "tough sell" for coal-producing states, Krenik said.

The Bush administration's climate change position, perhaps best reflected by his decision in 2001 to pull the United States out of Kyoto Protocol negotiations, has allowed Kerry to chart an alternative course as a presidential candidate.

[...] The study found cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned America's breadbasket into a dust bowl from 1931 to 1939. The team's data is in this week's Science magazine.

These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains. [...]

By discovering the causes behind U.S. droughts, especially severe episodes like the Plains' dry spell, scientists may recognize and possibly foresee future patterns that could create similar conditions. [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Drought conditions blanketing much of the Western United States are not expected to improve this spring, leading to more potential for "large, destructive" fires in some areas, U.S. government weather forecasters said on Friday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned in its spring weather outlook, which covers the April-June period, that above average precipitation during the winter has done little to improve multi-year drought conditions in Western states such as Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho and Montana. [...]

Some Western areas are entering their sixth year of drought, which has shriveled crops, drained water reservoirs and sparked fires in bone-dry forests. NOAA estimated drought had affected more than 50 percent of the West. [...]

Duan said Beijing has suffered five straight years of drought...

She said rehabilitation of the Guanting Reservoir, the second largest in Beijing, would be finished next year, and by then the reservoir's water should be fit for drinking again.

Due to severe pollution in Beijing and neighbouring areas, the Guanting Reservoir has not supplied drinking water since 1997.

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii (AP) -- Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano.

The reason for the faster buildup of the most important "greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

"But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up," said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo., which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii.

Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.

The climatologists forecast continued temperature rises that will disrupt the climate, cause seas to rise and lead to other unpredictable consequences - unpredictable in part because of uncertainties in computer modeling of future climate. [...]

[...] Using a new technique to gauge the effects of cosmic rays on minerals found in boulders carried by South American glaciers thousands of years ago, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has demonstrated that the Earth's most recent ice ages were global events, likely driven by change in the atmosphere. [...]

"The results are significant because they indicate that the whole Earth experiences major ice age cold periods at the same time, and thus, some climate forcing mechanism must homogenize the Earth's climate system during ice ages and, by inference, other periods," says Michael R. Kaplan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh who conducted the work in a postdoctoral position at UW-Madison. [...]

Heavy rainfall over much of the country might not have been enough to break the drought, a senior government official has warned.

Mike Muller, the director-general of water affairs and forestry, said water saving measures could be imposed to ensure dams did not run dry during winter.

He said although South Africa was not in immediate danger of water shortages, the government would decide next month whether to impose restrictions on water usage in parts of the country.

"The good recent rainfalls have not resulted in dams filling up. Many dams throughout parts of the country are still at low levels," he said. [...]

Cornelius Pietersen, an Eastern Cape farmer, said although there had been some improvement, it would take a while for the situation to return to normal.

"If we don't get follow-up rains, crops for grazing may not recover well enough for grazing."

Pietersen said up to 2 000 cattle had died during the drought because there had not been sufficient grass for grazing.[...]

Britain is bracing itself for more strong winds after three people were killed in gales that caused damage across the country.

Gales gusting up to 65mph are expected in southern and western areas while northern Britain will see hailstorms, thunder and snow.

BBC weatherperson Elizabeth Saary said motorists could still experience some hazardous road conditions.

A man was killed by flying debris and two others were crushed on Saturday.[...]

PORT MORESBY (AFP) - Torrential rains in Papua New Guinea have swept away bridges, roads and hundreds of homes in the second disastrous flooding to hit the Pacific nation this month, officials said.

A woman and her baby were feared lost in the floods, which struck the Ramu Valley in the north coast province of Madang following 10 days of rain, Government Relations Minister Peter Barter told local media.

"Hundreds of houses have been washed away and destroyed and in the vicinity desperate people are on the roofs of the houses waiting to be rescued," Barter told The National newspaper after flying over the area in a helicopter Monday.

Efforts were under way Tuesday to rescue stranded villagers by motorboat and rush supplies to the area after the floodwaters swept away vegetable gardens that are the main source of food for the subsistence villagers, he said.

The flood, carrying felled trees, also wiped out a community school, a mission station and a clinic, he said. [...]

The first hurricane ever reported in the south Atlantic has swirled off the coast of Brazil on Friday local time, and forecasters said it could make landfall in the South American country during the weekend.

Although it was far outside their usual territory, forecasters at the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami were helping the Brazilian Weather Service to track the unprecedented system.

"There's problems that happen when hurricanes occur in areas that we've never seen before," hurricane centre meteorologist Eric Blake said.

The storm was a category one hurricane - the least powerful on forecasters' five-level scale, with winds somewhere between 119 and 153 kilometres per hour.

[...] Mr Blake said there have been "questionable" tropical weather systems tracked in the area before, but none had developed into a hurricane.

"This one's broken all the rules," he said.

ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) - There won't be a cod fishery this year off the east and northeast coast of Newfoundland and the south coast of Labrador.

Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan said Wednesday stocks remain at historically low levels and prospects for rebuilding are poor.

Instead, the minister has asked officials with the Fisheries Department to work with the industry to develop a practical plan for the management of cod bycatch in the areas.

The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council has been given until April 22 to come up with recommendations on the Gulf cod stock off the west coast.

The federal government is considering whether to allow a limited cod fishery in the area.

RIO DE JANEIRO - Winds exceeding 120 kilometres per hour killed two people and left 3,000 homeless off Brazil's southern coast, said U.S. officials Sunday.

But Brazilian meteorologists claim the winds did not reach hurricane speed, and clocked in at 80 and 90 kilometres and hour, which would classify as a tropical storm.

The dispute aside, the wicked winds caused power outages in about 40 cities and towns Saturday leaving 35,000 people without electricity in Santa Catarina state.

A state of emergency was in affect in some areas. [...]

HEAVY rain -- and even lightning -- hammered southern Manitoba yesterday, shutting down some provincial highways and producing huge lakes on city roadways.

About 30 millimetres of rain pelted the Red River Valley throughout the day and well into the night as an unusual March low-pressure system spawned hail, thunder and lightning. [...]

ANTIGO, Wis. - Melting snow combined with rainfall to create a weekend deluge in this northeastern Wisconsin community, forcing the evacuation of homes and businesses near flood-swollen Spring Brook.

"It's the worst flooding we've had in about 40 years," Police Chief Bill Brandt said Sunday night, adding that the water reached 3 feet deep or more in some areas.

There were no reports of injuries.

Runoff from rainfall and melting snow also brought flooding to areas in northeastern North Dakota, prompting the state to close a section of Highway 81. Minor flooding was reported along portions of the Red River. [...]

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control.

Measurements by US government scientists show that concentrations of the gas, the main cause of the climate exchange, rose by a record amount over the past 12 months. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply, marking an unprecedented triennial surge.

Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear that it could show the first signs that global warming is feeding on itself, with rising temperatures causing increases in carbon dioxide, which then go on to drive the thermometer even higher. That would be a deeply alarming development, suggesting that this self-reinforcing heating could spiral upwards beyond the reach of any attempts to combat it.

LOS ANGELES - Unseasonably warm temperatures set records across Southern California Monday and contributed to an electrical emergency caused when the state's power reserves dropped suddenly.

Dozens of records were broken, including highs of 89 degrees at Los Angeles International Airport and 97 degrees at the University of California at Riverside. Bakersfield had its hottest March day on record, reaching 94 degrees.

Increased demand caused electricity reserves to fall, prompting a minor emergency and recommendations that customers reduce use of air conditioners and other appliances.

The agency that manages much of the state's power grid saw electricity use surpass projections by 1,100 megawatts. A megawatt can supply power to about 1,000 homes. [...]

- Marine "dead zones" - oxygen-starved areas of the oceans that are devoid of fish - are one of the greatest environmental problems facing the world, UN scientists warned yesterday. There are nearly 150 dead zones across the globe, they are increasing, and they pose as big a threat to fish stocks as over-fishing, the United Nations Environment Program. These lifeless areas of the sea are caused by an excess of nutrients, mainly nitrogen, that originate from heavy use of agricultural fertilizers, from vehicle and factory emissions and from human wastes.

They have doubled in number over the last decade, with some extending over 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles), about the size of Ireland, UNEP said. Dead zones have long afflicted the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay off the East Coast of America but they are now spreading to other bodies of water, such as the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Gulf of Thailand and the Yellow Sea as other regions develop, UNEP said.

SOGWIPO, South Korea (Reuters) - Dust and sand storms have plagued Northeast Asia for centuries but are getting worse in modern times, environment officials said on Wednesday.

Storms affect the region nearly five times as frequently as they did five decades ago, but strategies remain elusive, delegates from 158 countries were told on the final day of a United Nations Environment Program conference.

"They are man-made and nature-influenced disaster," the executive director of the UN Environment Program, Klaus Toepfer, told a forum on Wednesday.

"In the past 40 years, there has been a huge increase in the occurrence of the event, not only the number but the intensity has increased," he said.