Date-Time:
Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 10:11:17 UTC

Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 01:11:17 AM at epicenter

Location:
43.939°N, 128.464°W

Depth:
10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program

Distances:
339 km (211 miles) WNW (287°) from Bandon, OR

341 km (212 miles) WNW (283°) from Barview, OR

345 km (214 miles) W (276°) from Winchester Bay, OR

424 km (263 miles) NW (306°) from Crescent City, CA

492 km (306 miles) WSW (251°) from Portland, OR

More rumblings underground, all in the same location, have been reported as earthquakes by the Oklahoma Geological Survey in Norman, bringing the total to 9 separate earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the state, the U.S. Geological Survey reports today.

Saint-Michel-en-Greve - It should have been a perfect day for Vincent Petit, finishing up an afternoon gallop on a wide expanse of beach along a pastel-colored bay. Instead, he and his mount were sucked into a hole of noxious black sludge.

The horse died within seconds, the rider lost consciousness and a dirty secret on the Brittany coast reverberated across France - decaying green algae was fouling some of its best beaches.

A report ordered by the government after the accident found concentrations of hydrogen sulfide gas emitted by the rotting algae were as high as 1,000 parts per million on the beach where the horse died - an amount that "can be fatal in several minutes."

Scientists identify genes involved in the taming and farming of wild caterpillars

A sampling of today's domesticated silkworms reveals a rich tapestry of genes, suggesting that a lot of individuals were tamed during a relatively short time, scientists report online August 27 in Science.

By mapping the genetic books of instructions for 11 wild silkworms collected in mulberry fields in China and 29 domesticated silkworms of differing pedigrees, Jun Wang and colleagues found that the domesticated silk-makers still have 83 percent of the genetic variation observed in the wild.

Still, the genetic makeup of domesticated silkworms is distinct enough to distinguish them from their wild counterparts, suggested domestication happened quickly, says Wang, of the Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen in China.

Inspect the image below. It is a photo of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Can you guess what day it was taken? Scroll down for the answer.

August 28th, today. But it could have been taken on any day of the past seven weeks. For all that time, the face of the sun has looked exactly the same--utterly blank.

According to NOAA sunspot counts, the longest string of blank suns during the current solar minimum was 52 days back in July, August and September of 2008. If the current trend continues for only four more days, the record will shift to 2009. It's likely to happen; the sun remains eerily quiet and there are no sunspots in the offing. Solar minimum is shaping up to be a big event indeed.

Spotless Days

• Current Stretch: 48 days
• 2009 total: 190 days (79%)
• Since 2004: 701 days
• Typical Solar Min: 485 days

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters.

The massive machine - the UK's most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory - was installed in the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter, Devon.

It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

The machine was hailed as the 'future of weather prediction' with the ability to produce more accurate forecasts and produce climate change modelling.

However the Met Office's Headquarters has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution - responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

A federal official says the world's only naturally migrating whooping cranes died at about twice their normal rate last year and will likely see an overall drop in numbers this year.

Tom Stehn, who oversees whooping crane conservation efforts for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says 21 percent of a flock of whooping cranes that migrates between northern Canada and the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas each year died off last year. Typically about 10 percent of the flock dies off.

An email from Norm Kalmanovitch

There is a very good case to be made for anthropogenic global cooling from CO₂ emissions. The beginning of rapid increases in global CO₂ emissions started in 1945 with the rapid increase in post war industrialization that has seen CO₂ emissions rise from under 4gt/year in 1945, to over 31.5gt/year today. This increase in CO₂ emissions over the past 63 years has resulted in over 40 years of global cooling. The only time that there was a decrease in emissions was from 1979 to 1982 when the world was warming.

This forms a positive correlation of sufficient statistical significance to make a reasonable case for this relationship to be valid. Although correlation is not causation, there is nothing in the current science literature database that demonstrates any contrary evidence so based solely on "peer reviewed" science literature (as is the case for AGW), this hypothesis could be taken as valid.

The original paper on this topic by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 can be shown to be in error because at the time quantum physics had not yet revealed the physical process of interaction between the Earth's radiative energy and atmospheric CO₂.

The only part of the Earth's thermal radiative spectrum that is affected by CO₂ is the 14.77micron band, but Arrhenius, unaware of this fact used measurements limited to only 9.7microns and therefore was not actually measuring the effect from CO₂. He also used an experimental source for thermal radiation that was at 100°C, and the radiative spectrum from this source includes the 4.2micron wavelength band of CO₂ that is not part of the Earth's radiative spectrum, so he was not measuring the actual effect from the thermal radiation from the Earth.

MIT climate scientists Richard Lindzen and collaborator Yong-Sang Choi soon-to-be published paper (Geophysical Research Letters, American Geophysical Union) pegs the earth's "climate sensitivity" - the degree the earth's temperature responds to various forces of change - at a value that is about six times less than the "best estimate" put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The smaller the climate sensitivity, the less the impact that rising carbon dioxide levels will have on the earth's climate. The less the impact that CO2 emissions will have on the earth's climate, the less the "problem" and ability to reverse the "problem."

Lindzen and Choi's findings should come as a solace to those folks who are alarmed about future climate and as a bulwark to those folks fighting to limit Congresses negative impact on U.S. energy supplies and our economy. Indeed, climate sensitivity to GHGs is the multi-billion dollar question in climate science. If climate sensitivity is low, then the earth's temperature doesn't react very much to variations in processes which impact it - such things as solar variations, volcanic eruptions, cloud cover fluctuations or changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases.

If, on the other hand, the climate sensitivity is high, then changes in the climate drivers can lead to large changes of the earth's average temperatures. Another way to think of it is that the lower the climate sensitivity, the more stable the earth's climate.

Some months back, I mentioned that I felt the sun-earth connection was much like a transistor. This new NCAR study suggests this may be the case where small solar variances are amplified in the earth atmosphere-ocean system.

From EurekAlert

Small fluctuations in solar activity, large influence on the climate

Sun spot frequency has an unexpectedly strong influence on cloud formation and precipitation

Our sun does not radiate evenly. The best known example of radiation fluctuations is the famous 11-year cycle of sun spots. Nobody denies its influence on the natural climate variability, but climate models have, to-date, not been able to satisfactorily reconstruct its impact on climate activity.

Researchers from the USA and from Germany have now, for the first time, successfully simulated, in detail, the complex interaction between solar radiation, atmosphere, and the ocean. As the scientific journal Science reports in its latest issue, Gerald Meehl of the US-National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and his team have been able to calculate how the extremely small variations in radiation brings about a comparatively significant change in the System "Atmosphere-Ocean".

Katja Matthes of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, and co-author of the study, states: ,Taking into consideration the complete radiation spectrum of the sun, the radiation intensity within one sun spot cycle varies by just 0.1 per cent. Complex interplay mechanisms in the stratosphere and the troposphere, however, create measurable changes in the water temperature of the Pacific and in precipitation".