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Seabirds wash up on English coast covered in sticky substance

Steven Morris
Guardian
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:39 UTC
Image
© Photograph: RSPCA/PA
RSPCA staff have been working to clean up surviving seabirds at West Hatch animal centre in Devon
Conservationists mount rescue operation after birds found on beaches coated in waxy oil

Conservationists are becoming increasingly alarmed by the number of seabirds being washed on to the south coast of England covered in a sticky, waxy substance.

Around 200 birds have been found alive, but by Friday morning 20 dead birds had also been discovered and the RSPB was receiving many reports of distressed birds being spotted out at sea.

Scientists from the Environment Agency and Maritime Coastguard Agency have taken samples to establish what the substance is, which will help efforts to clean the surviving birds. One theory being examined is that it could be palm oil.

Most of the birds affected are guillemots, which spend most of their life out at sea and are more vulnerable to oil spills. But there are growing concerns that rarer birds may also have been affected.
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Bizarro Earth

Nine people killed as freak hailstorm rains massive boulders down on Indian villages

Jill Reilly
Daily Mail, UK
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:25 UTC
Hailstones the size of boulders have rained down on villages in southern India.At least nine people were killed when the violent weather hit several villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The hailstorm which lasted for almost 20 minutes, destroyed crops, houses and live stock, causing devastating financial implications for residents.
Freak Hailstorm_1
© Mohammed Aleemuddin/Barcroft l
Raining down: People cleaning the streets covered with large boulders of hailstorm Andhra Pradesh, India.
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Nuke

What's the deal with Arkansas' radioactive snow?

Greg Newkirk
WhoForted?
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:32 UTC
Daren
© WhoForted?
Daren Foraday believes the radioactive snow in White Country, Arkansas reaches levels dangerous to health.
On January 15, White County, Arkansas resident Daren Foraday walked outside to play in the fresh snow. No, not with his sled.. but with his geiger counter. What he found, levels of radiation comparable to the kind exposed to workers in a radioactive plant, disturbed him.

Foraday, a self proclaimed "science nerd", wonders why the citizens exposed to the snowfall weren't warned of it's levels. According to Daren, the area around White County generally clocks in at 35cpm in background radiation, but after the snowfall that number was much higher.

"The sleet and snow was showing an alert level above 100cpm," he wrote. "The high levels only lasted about 24 hours indicating a short half life of the hot particles. This kind of exposure can reduce the immune system and may be the cause for recent spikes in flu and illness in this area and others.

Read article here
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Question

Mysterious, purple spheres found in the desert

Liz Kotalik
KGUN9
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:02 UTC

It was a normal Sunday in Vail for Geradine Vargas. Normal, until she and her husband stumbled upon something kind of weird."We were taking photos around the area and we just.... I mean, how could you miss this?" Geradine said. "It was just like glittering in the sun."Thousands of tiny, purple-hued spheres piled in the middle of nowhere.

"It's just one of those things that you've never seen before."They were watery, some where translucent, and the pile was completely isolated. Gerardine was amazed, and she wanted answers."We did email a friend of ours who's a zoologist, but she didn't know. I mean, she didn't seem to recognize what it was."
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Satellite

Satellite image shows Eastern U.S. severe weather system

Rob Gutro
NASA
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:19 UTC
A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake.

On Jan. 30 at 1825 UTC (1:25 p.m. EST), NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of clouds associated with the strong cold front. The visible GOES-13 image shows a line of clouds that stretch from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast and contain powerful thunderstorms with the potential to be severe. The front is moving east to the Atlantic Ocean.
Image
© NOAA/NASA/GOES Project
NOAA's GOES-13 satellite continually provides real-time visible and infrared imagery of weather over the eastern United States. The NASA GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., created the image from GOES data. The colorized image uses GOES-13 satellite visible data of clouds, and is overlaid on a U.S. map created by imagery from the Moderate Resolution Spectroradiometer instrument (MODIS), an instrument that flies aboard both the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites.
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Cloud Precipitation

State of Emergency declared in the Seychelles after tropical cyclone Felleng

Steff Gaulter
Al Jazeera
Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:36 UTC
Seychelles map
© Al Jazeera
A state of emergency has been declared in three districts of Mahe, the largest island in the Seychelles
Flooding and landslides have destroyed well over a hundred houses on the main island of Mahe.

Parts of the Seychelles have been declared a state of emergency after severe weather hit the country.

Fortunately no casualties have been reported, but flooding, landslides and rock falls have hit the main island of Mahe. Over 150 houses have been damaged by the extreme conditions.

Pointe Au Sel in the southeast of the island reported 184mm of rain in a 24 hour period. This is nearly half the amount of rain which is expected in the entire month of January, which is the wettest month of the year.

Many other parts of the island also received well over 100mm, easily enough to generate flooding. With the ground fully saturated, landslides were inevitable.
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Windsock

Tropical cyclone Felleng strongest of the season so far

Jim Andrews
Accuweather
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:08 UTC
Cyclone Felleng
© Joint Typhoon Warning Center
Category-4 equivalent Tropical Cyclone Felleng as of 1130 UTC Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013. To the west lies Madagascar; Reunion and Mauritius to the southeast (lower right).
Tropical Cyclone Felleng has become the strongest cyclone of the South Indian 2012-2013 storm season and the strongest storm in this tropical cyclone region since last February.

Highest sustained winds rose to an estimated 115 knots, or about 215 km/h, as of 1200 UTC Wednesday, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) said.

The dangerous storm, equivalent to a Category-4 hurricane, was centered less than 400 miles northwest of Reunion and within 360 miles east-northeast of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Storm movement was towards the south-southwest 13 knots, or 24 km/h.

Official forecasts tracking Felleng have been consistent since the first of the week, inasmuch as they have shown the southward-veering cyclone tracking "safely" between Madagascar and Reunion before racing southward over open water.
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Blackbox

Global warming propaganda: Humans have already set in motion 69 feet of sea level rise?

Chris Mooney
Mother Jones
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:09 UTC
Last week, a much discussed new paper in the journal Nature seemed to suggest to some that we needn't worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth's history - the Eemian period, some 126,000 years ago - without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).


Comment: Indeed, the Earth naturally heats and cools and the desire to blame such natural occurrences on humans is unfounded and shifts the attention away from the truth, that our planet, and our whole solar system, could be in a natural heating up stage and that "human caused global warming" is just a distraction away from that.


But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn't buying it.

At Monday's Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we've already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What's more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher - both with no signs of stopping. "There is no analogue for that in the ice record," said Box.

And that's not all. The present mass scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren't happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland's icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.


Comment: This article is obviously bent on spewing the 'human caused global-warming' schtick. The reader may enjoy more Climate Change Swindlers and the Political Agenda. And as far as worrying about 'sea rise flooding', read
Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

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Info

Do increasing temperatures lower crop yields?

Willis Eschenbach
Watts Up With That?
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:36 UTC
Image

Figure 1. Changes in global grain yields and global temperatures 1961-2011
Data Sources: FAO, BEST, Photo

I keep reading these claims that we're all going to starve because of global warming. People say it's going to be the death of agriculture, that increasing temperatures will cause significant drops in crop yields. Here's a typical bit of alarmism (emphasis mine):
A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), indicates that climate change would hit developing countries the hardest, leading to massive decline in crop yields and production.
Whoa, a massive decline in crop yields due to increasing temperatures, sounds scary. So I thought I'd review the facts. Here is the global situation, showing the global yields of rice, corn, and wheat, along with the change in global temperature.
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Evil Rays

Dead robins found in Northeast Portland

Lynne Terry
The Oregonian
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:45 UTC
Image
© Lynne Terry/The Oregonian
A few berry-studded bushes sit near the intersection of Northeast Russell and Rodney, where more than 30 dead robins have been found in recent days. The question is: Did they die of berry binge drinking?
The dead robins are back.

More than 30 carcasses have been found on the ground in Northeast Portland in the past week. Wildlife experts don't know for sure what killed them but one possible cause is a berry binge -- just like in February 2008.

That month, the carcasses of more than 50 American robins were found around Mount Tabor in Southeast Portland. When scientists opened them up, they found their bellies full of holly berries.

"They had gorged themselves on fermenting berries," said Bob Sallinger, conservation director at the Audubon Society of Portland.

The robins had died of alcohol poisoning.
      Read More...
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