FUZHOU - East China is bracing for the arrival of severe tropical storm Fengshen, which is forecast to make a possible landfall in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong on Wednesday.
The Fujian provincial meteorological observatory issued a warning at 6:33 am on Tuesday, saying strong winds would hit the southern coastal area and the Taiwan Strait in the next 24 hours.
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©Cat Sidh. Creative Commons
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Hole Punch Clouds
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Yesterday afternoon, the citizens of Elmira, NY received a treat as they looked up to the sky. The phenomenon is referred to as 'Hole Punch Clouds'. It is caused by an area of cold air that sinks through a layer of clouds.
More than 800 wildfires sparked by an "unprecedented" lightning storm burned a swath of Northern California from Big Sur to wine country to Humboldt County on Monday.
Thousands of firefighters battled the blazes on the ground and from the air and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was alarmed by the number of fires that kept erupting.
A fast-spreading virus recently killed thousands of round gobies near Milwaukee, and officials fear the same fate may await fish elsewhere in Lake Michigan.
The gobies washed ashore May 28 after dying from viral hemorrhagic septicemia, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The virus causes fish to hemorrhage and suffer organ failure.
The Milwaukee incident made Lake Michigan the fourth of the five Great Lakes to suffer a large VHS-related fish kill.
Only Lake Superior has avoided the disease. It has killed millions of fish in lakes Erie, Ontario and Huron and threatens the Great Lakes' $7 billion sport and commercial fisheries.
Wild salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, off the west coast of Canada's British Columbia, will be extinct within 10 years due to parasite contamination from fish farms, according to a study published in the journal Science.
"The impact is so severe that the viability of the wild salmon populations is threatened," said lead researcher Martin Krkosek, from the University of Alberta.
"The probability of extinction is 100 percent," Krkosek said, "and the only question is how long it is going to take."
Loma Linda, California - A magnitude-4.0 earthquake shook large parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties early Monday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The temblor, which struck around 7:15 a.m., was centered 2 miles east of Loma Linda in San Bernardino County and occurred at a depth of 6 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The main shock was preceded by a pair of magnitude-2.6 foreshocks including one that hit 10 minutes earlier, California Institute of Technology seismologist Kate Hutton said.
"It was felt pretty much throughout the Inland Empire," Hutton said, referring to the fast-growing region east of Los Angeles that includes San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Hutton said it was too early to pin down which fault the quake occurred on. But she said the quake was close to the San Jacinto Fault, an active offshoot of the San Andreas Fault.
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Comment: The British professor, Frank Furedi,
elaborated on modern demonologists such as James Hansen:
Demonologists are intensely hostile to anyone who questions the way they interpret and talk about threats. As moral entrepreneurs, they regard their opponents, not only as irresponsible, but also as potentially evil. From this standpoint, dissidence comes to be seen as an act of moral subversion. The moralising of hazards serves to shut down discussion. At the very least, anyone who questions claims about the alleged gravity of a threat facing mankind is depicted as the stooge or accomplice of a malevolent agenda.
The act of raising questions about a 'warning' is now discussed as an insidious deed of denial. Increasingly, questioning things is seen as the moral equivalent of Holocaust Denial. In recent years, people who have questioned the warnings about climate change have been labelled 'deniers'. The allusion to Holocaust Denial is clear. The implication of this moral condemnation of questioners - the denouncement of critics as 'deniers' - is that disbelief itself is a sign of moral bankruptcy.
Believing in a statement of warning is considered to be morally principled; disbelieving the statement, or even just questioning it, is stigmatised as morally corrupt. This transformation of disbelief into a sin was also widespread during the witch-hunts that plagued Europe in earlier centuries. In the era of the witch-hunt, anyone who questioned the existence of demonic forces could be denounced as an 'associate of Satan'. Such was the power and influence of demonologists that few were prepared to question the existence of witchcraft.
...
Increasingly, the heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned. Here, 'overwhelming evidence' serves as the equivalent of revealed religious truth, and those who question 'scientists of unquestioned reputation' - that is, the new priestly caste - are guilty of blasphemy.
Heresy-hunters who charge their opponents with 'ecological denial' also warn that the 'time for reason and reasonableness is running short' (9). Crusaders against denial don't only wish to silence their opponents. In the true tradition of heresy-hunting they also want to inflict punishment on those who deny the true faith. David Roberts, a journalist for the online magazine Grist, would like to see global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals. In a vitriolic tone characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors, he argued: 'We should have war crimes trials for these bastards... some sort of climate Nuremberg.' (10) At the very least, it seems, these 'criminals' should be castigated as the moral equivalents of Josef Fritzl.
Far more dangerous to humanity is the Taurid meteor stream which we are passing through right now. Or perhaps
some other cyclic stream which may be coming our way. And with the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event on June 30th, and as the US enters it's 7th year of the so-called "War on Terror" astronomer
Victor Clube's comments are worth repeating:
I'd like to remind you now that one of these [meteor] peaks that you are looking at here-the 1601 occurs round about 1640 through 1680, and it coincides with the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe, and the Civil War in England. I mentioned this briefly last night. Cromwell, and others of that time-I only name him because, of course, he's a familiar name to you, but there are many others-described all the upheaval of the time, in millennarian terms, as due to "God's revolution" only a century after Copernicus' De Revolutionibus.
My point here is that the word "revolution" is popularly used nowadays in a social sense. It didn't have that at the time Copernicus was writing; it acquired it. It acquired it at the time of the English Civil War. And it was because of the perception that things in the sky were driving things, terrible things, that were happening on the ground. Only three hundred and fifty years ago, then, mankind was still in the era of an invisible sky god from a once visible heaven associated with angels, fallen angels, and dangerous demons hurling thunderbolts.
We have to get rid of the idea that our ancestors thought that space was empty. They didn't have [the] specialized astrophysical knowledge that has allowed me to build the Taurid stream for you; they just knew it was there. That's really rather a remarkable thing. We've had to unlearn that knowledge in the last three hundred and fifty years in order to put ourselves in the state of rediscovering it.
So, what was The Enlightenment only forty years after Cromwell? It was the pragmatic English decision to get rid of all the angels and demons, invisible sky gods, and a once visible heaven. It was the decision to stop worrying about the evidence of fireballs and the supposed behavior of comets. It was a decision to reconstruct the cosmos without heaven in the solar system and put it in the ether or outside the cosmos altogether of infinity al la Bruno. It was the decision to create a purified, less frightening cosmos in much the same way as Aristotle did after Plato. On both occasions we shifted from astrology to physics, and from a sky of foreboding to a sky of inspiration, from prison and terror to freedom and hope.
Indeed, the cry of the revolutionary periods of 1640 to 1680 and 1760 to 1800, the time of the American War of Independence, was the cry of freedom from heavenly oppression, demons, and fireballs.
For the last two hundred years of Enlightenment we have been rewriting history so that the cry of freedom is from earthly oppressors. No wonder the world has gone wrong and the astrophysicists today cannot come to terms with the Taurid torus. I'm really trying to say that this is just not an astrophysical discovery that we are talking about. Everything has got to, sort of, turn around in order to come to terms with what is being said. And this, in a way, is rather like what Irving was describing beforehand. There is a paradigm shift involved in recognizing that it's not just ancient history we have got wrong-it's all history.
So, what is my point? My point is that you do not have to dabble first in mythology and prehistory and geology, as Velikovsky did, in order to understand the sky. You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.
The fact that James Hansen is so blind to an extra-terrestrial influence on climate, known about at least 5000 years ago
(June 29 in the year 3123BC to be precise.) , preferring an anthropogenic, apocalyptic vision of doom and gloom on Earth, points to the same old program to hide the fact that we may be shortly entering a period of increased risk from cometary bombardment and gives the psychopathic masters an excuse to launch their not-so-original, but highly effective witch hunts.
Many bird species migrating to Massachusetts from points south are arriving earlier each spring as temperatures warm along the east coast of the United States. Some of those species migrate thousands of miles from South America, but a new study shows that the farther the birds travel, the less likely they are to keep pace with the rapidly changing climate.
Massachusetts scientists have learned that being slow to change in response to warming temperatures could have serious repercussions for long-distance migrant birds.
Firefighters worked to contain some 400 wildfires burning across Northern California on Sunday as the state baked under a fourth day of an early summer heat wave that has strained the power grid and left residents wilted.
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.
The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Comment: The British professor, Frank Furedi, elaborated on modern demonologists such as James Hansen: Far more dangerous to humanity is the Taurid meteor stream which we are passing through right now. Or perhaps some other cyclic stream which may be coming our way. And with the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event on June 30th, and as the US enters it's 7th year of the so-called "War on Terror" astronomer Victor Clube's comments are worth repeating: The fact that James Hansen is so blind to an extra-terrestrial influence on climate, known about at least 5000 years ago (June 29 in the year 3123BC to be precise.) , preferring an anthropogenic, apocalyptic vision of doom and gloom on Earth, points to the same old program to hide the fact that we may be shortly entering a period of increased risk from cometary bombardment and gives the psychopathic masters an excuse to launch their not-so-original, but highly effective witch hunts.