Earth Changes
The mainstream media and climate-alarmist blogosphere uncritically accepted the Cook study and trumpeted the consensus claims as gospel. We reported on May 21 ("Global Warming 'Consensus': Cooking the Books") on the critiques of the Cook study by experts who show that Cook cooked the data. Out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook's team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook's alarmist position. That's less than one percent, not 97 percent. Moreover, as we reported, the Cook study was flawed from the beginning, using selection parameters designed to weight the outcome in favor of the alarmist position.
In a May 22 follow-up article ("Climate 'Consensus' Con Game: Desperate Effort Before Release of UN Report") The New American reported on additional problems with the Cook study and cited a large and growing list of eminent climate scientists - including Nobel Prize recipients and scientists who served on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - who challenge the claim that there is any "scientific consensus" on climate change, or that "the science is settled" in favor of the Al Gore alarmist position.

The sun sets on Echo Bay at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Monday, June 10, 2013, near Overton, Nev. Authorities are warning people to avoid the Overton Arm section of Lake Mead after park officials found dead carp and a mysterious foam there. The foam appeared to be coming from the mouth of the Virgin River and stretched about eight miles down to Echo Bay.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is monitoring water quality at two intakes and so far hasn't found anything problematic, according to spokesman Bronson Mack. Typically, pollutants are diluted in the reservoir. "It really is a massive body of water, and that's one benefit from a drinking water perspective," Mack said, noting that water from the Overton Arm typically takes about a month to meander to the intake area.
A park volunteer collected water samples several days ago and they turned up normal, Mack said. But the water agency wants to gather new samples using more precise methods.
High winds and waves prevented crews from collecting water Monday, and the foam wasn't readily visible from the shore. "We're hoping we can still get samples" of the foam, Mack said.
Thick smoke plumes visible for miles billowed from fires near Colorado Springs, in southern Colorado, and in Rocky Mountain National Park to the north.
A wildfire in a heavily wooded residential area northeast of Colorado Springs led to the mandatory evacuations of more than 1,000 homes, including some worth more than $1 million, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said.
Video from a helicopter showed several large homes engulfed in flames. About eight homes had burned, Maketa said, but he had no exact number because the fire was moving so quickly across the parched forest.
"Right now the firefighters are more focused on fighting fires, drawing lines. And law enforcement, to be very honest, is scrambling to get people out of there as well as do searches," Maketa said. He said firefighters have shifted from evacuation mode to search-and-rescue mode.
Military officials said a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter from the Colorado Army National Guard and three helicopters from Fort Carson were helping firefighters. Another National Guard helicopter was on standby for search and rescue.
The area is not far from last summer's devastating Waldo Canyon Fire that destroyed 346 homes and killed two.
"The sunset was a very weird one," says Koeman. "Inversions in the atmosphere gave it some very odd shapes."
In some cases a derecho will spawn tornados and accompany storms that produce hail the size of golf balls. The current pattern could affect larger metropolitan areas in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the next two days, said Bill Bunting, a meteorologist in the agency's storm prediction center in Norman, Okla.
"We tend to be careful using the D word, but yes, a derecho is possible," Bunting said.
The weather service was predicting a chance of storm activity beginning in southern Montana and northeastern Wyoming on Tuesday afternoon. It was expected to sweep eastward, with a 30 percent chance of severe wind activity in a rectangle covering parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.
"Thirty percent is pretty high in the world of predicting severe weather," said Paul Collar, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sullivan, Wis.
The storms could generate straight-line wind gusts of 70 mph or more. That's enough to rip shingles off a roof, knock down trees and even tip over semi-trailers. They could also cause flights to be delayed or canceled, said Collar, who added that commercial airlines have on-board navigation that allows pilots to navigate around the worst weather.

A picture shows a broken dam (foreground) built to contain the swollen Elbe river during floods near the village of Fischbeck in the federal state of Saxony Anhalt, June 10, 2013.
There have been at least a dozen deaths as a result of floods that have hit Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic over the past week.
Officials said more than 8,000 people were evacuated by bus from towns and villages around Aken, south of Magdeburg. Some took their pets or farm animals with them.
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Tropical Storm Andrea was a quick-forming storm, pulling itself together in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico midway through the week and moving to assault the residents of the eastern seaboard as it moved northward. After soaking rains, heavy winds, and tornadoes battered parts of Florida, Andrea quickly picked up ground speed and moved quickly across the eastern coast of Georgia late Thursday evening, moving north to flood the Carolinas with a light, consistent rain, intermixed with bouts of absolute downpours.
The paper delves into a key aspect of so-called Bt corn and cotton -- plants that carry a gene to make them exude a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, which is toxic to insects.
Publishing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, US and French researchers analysed the findings of 77 studies from eight countries on five continents that reported on data from field monitors.
Of 13 major pest species examined, five were resistant by 2011, compared with only one in 2005, they found. The benchmark was resistance among more than 50 percent of insects in a location.
Of the five species, three were cotton pests and two were corn pests.
Three of the five cases of resistance were in the United States, which accounts for roughly half of Bt crop plantings, while the others were in South Africa and India.
Ibu's activity has been characterized by the slow building of a new lava dome inside the breached summit crater since 1999. While present growth rate is still slow, and no or little incandescence is observed at the moment, the new seismic activity could herald a phase of more vigorous activity in the near future. In that scenario, the occurrence of dangerous landslides and pyroclastic flows would be likely and the northern slopes of the volcano should be considered a high risk zone. - Volcano Discovery













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