Earth ChangesS


Alarm Clock

Honeybees are Modern-Day Canaries in Coal Mines

Over the past three years, more than 50 billion honeybees have died. Scientists understand the causes and now we need everyone to lend a helping hand.

The humble honeybee has been inextricably linked to humankind since prehistoric times - at first we were drawn to this remarkable creature because of its sweet honey.

Honey is to a bee what electricity is for humans - energy. One teaspoon of honey weighing 21 grams contains 16 grams of sugar or 60 calories, and it took 12 bees their entire foraging lives, combined flying time of about 6,000 miles, to produce 21 grams of honey.

To understand the importance of honeybees, consider that every third bite on your plate is a result of their primary role on the planet as pollinators - the most important group on Earth.

Honeybees contribute at least $44 billion a year to the U.S. economy by pollinating crops such as almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, broccoli, canola, carrot seeds, cherries, citrus, cranberries, cucumbers, grapes, lettuce, macadamizes, melons, peaches, plums, pumpkins, onion seeds, squash, sunflowers, kiwis, tomatoes and zucchinis, to name a few; alfalfa and clover for beef and dairy industries; cotton for our clothes; honey, candles and medicines.

Radar

More than 1,200 tiny quakes hit Yellowstone Park

Cheyenne, Wyoming. - Yellowstone National Park is shaking again, but jitters seem few so far.

Over eight days, more than 1,270 mostly tiny earthquakes have struck between Old Faithful and West Yellowstone. The strongest dozen or so have ranged between magnitudes 3.0 and 3.8.

That's strong enough to feel - barely. The vast majority have been too weak to be felt even nearby.

Likewise, online chatter about an imminent volcanic eruption in Yellowstone hasn't really picked up compared with the attention that a similar quake swarm drew just over a year ago.

"Perhaps we have done a better job in the past year or so helping the public understand that earthquake swarms are not unusual in Yellowstone," park spokesman Al Nash said Monday.

The largest quakes in the current swarm have included two of magnitude 3.1 and one of magnitude 3.0 late Sunday and early Monday, according to the University of Utah, which helps monitor seismic activity in Yellowstone.

Sun

Scientists warn solar activity could hit London 2012 Olympic Games

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Scientists today warned that a peak in the solar activity due in 2012 could disrupt television and internet networks during the London Olympic Games.

Speaking ahead of the launch of Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory next week, mission scientists said that the sun was due to hit a peak in its eleven-year cycle in 2012.

"The Olympics could be bang in the middle of a solar maximum," said Professor Richard Harrison, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire and a co-investigator on the mission.

It has long been known that surges in solar activity can cause disruption in satellite and terrestrial communications systems, but until now it has been almost impossible to predict solar storms in advance.

Snowman

Scotland records coldest winter

Scotland has suffered some of the coldest winter months in almost 100 years, the Met Office has confirmed.

By combining the temperatures of January and December it showed they were the coldest since 1914 - the year data started being logged.

Elsewhere, it was the coldest December and January in Northern Ireland since 1962/63 and the coldest in England and Wales since 1981/82.

Binoculars

New Zealand Teen Fights Off Shark with Body Board

A teenage New Zealand girl bitten by a shark bashed it over the head with her body board until it let her go, she said.

Lydia Ward, 14, was in waist-deep water with her brother on Monday at Oreti Beach on the country's South Island when the shark - believed to be a broad-nosed seven gill shark - grabbed her hip. She said she did not notice the shark until the attack was under way.

"I saw my brother's face and turned to the side and saw this large gray thing in the water so I just hit it on the head with a boogie board," Ward told National Radio, adding that she had read about a surfer who fought off a shark attack with her board. "That's what she did, and that's what you're meant to do."

Document

Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flaws

Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Better Earth

Can you see what it is yet? How a flock of starlings can look just like a bird, a duck and even a turtle

Flocks of starlings are renowned for forming a variety of shapes in the sky.

But on this occasion they must have been overcome by vanity - and created a giant starling for us ground-dwellers to admire.

The countless creatures created the awesome display by using the winter breeze as the low-setting sun caused the sky to glow red.

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Birdwatching: The giant starling formation over the setting sun was spotted in Taunton, Somerset
The amazing spectacle was spotted over Taunton, Somerset.

Elsewhere, starlings created a bizarre image of a rubber duck in the sky as they flew in formation across Britain.

Sun

Proof of warming is melting rapidly

President Obama picked an odd time to remind people he's in league with the global-warming alarmists. He did so in his State of the Union address.

He put in a pitch for his economy-hobbling, government-expanding global-warming "cap-and-trade" plan. This in the very same speech in which he declared he's focusing anew on creating jobs and reining in bureaucracy.

Odder yet, Obama also took the occasion to declare, as he has before, that science is on the side of global-warming alarmism.

Such an assertion has never been more in doubt than right now.

Magnify

Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures

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© Lee Foster / AlamyThe claim in an IPCC report that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear through global warming turned out to be unfounded
It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.

Cow Skull

Genetically Modified Forest Planned for U.S. Southeast

International Paper and MeadWestvaco are planning to transform plantation forests of the southeastern U.S. by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus

By adopting eucalyptus as a tree stock, the United States would simply be catching up with countries like Brazil, which has leveraged vast tree plantations in recent decades to pivot from a net wood importer to an exporter. While the South saw a rise in pine plantations during this time, pine cannot compete with eucalyptus for sheer growth rate, the company says.

"The United States is behind the game on this," said Les Pearson, ArborGen's director of regulatory affairs. "Lots of countries around the world have been growing eucalyptus for many decades."

Indeed, primarily because of competition from South America, demand for traditional American tree pulp has gone slack. This sagging industry could allow up to 10 million acres in the Southeast to be repurposed for fast-growing eucalyptuses, according to corporate estimates.