Because of the Wenchuan Earthquake last May, Sichuan Province has had frequent post-earthquake seismic activity. Following the successive five recent earthquakes on March 9, another five earthquakes were reported in the Sichuan area on March 12.
The maximum magnitude of the five earthquakes was 4.7on Richter scale and the epicenter was 10 kilometers underground in Quhe Town, Qingchuan County, according to the China Earthquake Network Center.
Earth Changes
A moderate earthquake stuck Wednesday in the Atlantic Ocean north of Puerto Rico, but there were no immediate reports of damage in the U.S. island territory.
The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 4.9, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 4.9, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
Date-Time
* Monday, March 16, 2009 at 14:15:56 UTC
* Monday, March 16, 2009 at 10:15:56 PM at epicenter
* Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 3.820°N, 126.500°E
Depth 35 km (21.7 miles) set by location program
Distances 295 km (180 miles) SSE of General Santos, Mindanao, Philippines
315 km (195 miles) NE of Manado, Sulawesi, Indonesia
1335 km (830 miles) SSE of MANILA, Philippines
2460 km (1520 miles) ENE of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia
* Monday, March 16, 2009 at 14:15:56 UTC
* Monday, March 16, 2009 at 10:15:56 PM at epicenter
* Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 3.820°N, 126.500°E
Depth 35 km (21.7 miles) set by location program
Distances 295 km (180 miles) SSE of General Santos, Mindanao, Philippines
315 km (195 miles) NE of Manado, Sulawesi, Indonesia
1335 km (830 miles) SSE of MANILA, Philippines
2460 km (1520 miles) ENE of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia
© Seth Stein
This map shows areas damaged by the Dec. 16, 1811, magnitude 7.2 earthquake. That earthquake was the first of three major temblors along the New Madrid fault in 1811 and 1812.
This map shows areas damaged by the Dec. 16, 1811, magnitude 7.2 earthquake. That earthquake was the first of three major temblors along the New Madrid fault in 1811 and 1812.
The New Madrid fault system does not behave as earthquake hazard models assume and may be in the process of shutting down, a new study shows. A team from Purdue and Northwestern universities analyzed the fault motion for eight years using global positioning system measurements and found that it is much less than expected given the 500- to 1,000-year repeat cycle for major earthquakes on that fault. The last large earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone were magnitude 7-7.5 events in 1811 and 1812.
Estimating an accurate earthquake threat for the area, which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky, is crucial for the communities potentially affected, said Eric Calais, the Purdue researcher who led the study.
"Our findings suggest the steady-state model of quasi-cyclical earthquakes that works well for faults at the boundaries of tectonic plates, such as the San Andreas fault, does not apply to the New Madrid fault," said Calais, who is a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. "At plate boundaries, faults move at a rate that is consistent with the rate of earthquakes so that past events are a reliable guide to the future. In continents, this does not work. The past is not necessarily a key to the future, which makes estimating earthquake hazard particularly difficult."
The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday in Copenhagen. Between 2,000 and 2,500 researchers from around the world attended three days of meetings during which 600 oral presentations (together with several hundred posters on display) were delivered on topics ranging from the ethics of energy sufficiency to the role of icons in communicating climate change to the dynamics of continental ice sheets.
I attended the Conference, chaired a session, listened to several presentations, read a number of posters and talked with dozens of colleagues from around the world. The breadth of research on climate change being presented was impressive, as was the vigour and thoughtfulness of the informal discussions being conducted during coffee breaks, evening receptions and side-meetings.
What intrigued me most, however, was the final conference statement issued yesterday, a statement drafted by the conference's Scientific Writing Team. It contained six key messages and was handed to the Danish Prime Minister Mr Anders Fogh Rasmusson. The messages focused, respectively, on Climatic Trends, Social Disruption, Long-term Strategy, Equity Dimensions, Inaction is Inexcusable, and Meeting the Challenge. A fuller version of this statement will be prepared and circulated to key negotiators and politicians ahead of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in December this year - also in Copenhagen.
I attended the Conference, chaired a session, listened to several presentations, read a number of posters and talked with dozens of colleagues from around the world. The breadth of research on climate change being presented was impressive, as was the vigour and thoughtfulness of the informal discussions being conducted during coffee breaks, evening receptions and side-meetings.
What intrigued me most, however, was the final conference statement issued yesterday, a statement drafted by the conference's Scientific Writing Team. It contained six key messages and was handed to the Danish Prime Minister Mr Anders Fogh Rasmusson. The messages focused, respectively, on Climatic Trends, Social Disruption, Long-term Strategy, Equity Dimensions, Inaction is Inexcusable, and Meeting the Challenge. A fuller version of this statement will be prepared and circulated to key negotiators and politicians ahead of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in December this year - also in Copenhagen.
The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers.
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.
The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".
What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.
Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".
Comment: The wave of propaganda from this so called Climate Congress is astounding. Here are just a few of the stories that the worldwide propaganda machine grabbed onto as mentioned in this article:
Propaganda: Global temperatures 'will rise 6C this century'
Propaganda: Global warming 'will be worse than expected' warns Stern
Propaganda: Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say
Propaganda: Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected
Propaganda: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion
Propaganda: Scientists are grim, economists more optimistic about climate change's effects
Propaganda: Make clear dire scenarios to prod climate action
Propaganda: Scientists plan emergency summit on climate change
A clear perspective of what this conference (congress?) was about and the psychological media wave that it produced can be found in this story - (Link).
© Getty
Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100.
Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100.
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.
The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".
What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.
Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".
Comment: The wave of propaganda from this so called Climate Congress is astounding. Here are just a few of the stories that the worldwide propaganda machine grabbed onto as mentioned in this article:
Propaganda: Global temperatures 'will rise 6C this century'
Propaganda: Global warming 'will be worse than expected' warns Stern
Propaganda: Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say
Propaganda: Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected
Propaganda: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion
Propaganda: Scientists are grim, economists more optimistic about climate change's effects
Propaganda: Make clear dire scenarios to prod climate action
Propaganda: Scientists plan emergency summit on climate change
A clear perspective of what this conference (congress?) was about and the psychological media wave that it produced can be found in this story - (Link).
© Will Leach/Kent News
Thousands of people flocked to beaches as temperatures matched those in Italy and Greece.
Thousands of people flocked to beaches as temperatures matched those in Italy and Greece.
Thousands of people flocked to beaches as temperatures matched those in Italy and Greece.
In parts of eastern England thermometers hit 59F (15C), making it one of the hottest places in Europe.
Weathermen said the burst of spring sunshine will bring even higher temperatures over the next few days and the warm spell will last until Thursday.
Coastal areas of Devon and Cornwall were packed with crowds normally seen at the height of summer.
As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report's first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC's bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report's first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC's bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
A three-day conference on climate science and policy that drew some 2,500 scientists, economists, campaigners, dignitaries, industry representatives and journalists to Copenhagen has wrapped up, and organizers have issued a list of core "messages" that you can see at the bottom of this post. Their bottom line, echoing what many climate scientists have been saying with rising vigor for two decades, is that there is an urgent need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, and "inaction is inexcusable."
Is this effort, which one organizer described as "a deliberate attempt to influence policy," likely to change things? There are signs, some scientists warned on Thursday, that overheated descriptions of looming dangers coming out of the conference could actually backfire. More on those warnings is below.
Is this effort, which one organizer described as "a deliberate attempt to influence policy," likely to change things? There are signs, some scientists warned on Thursday, that overheated descriptions of looming dangers coming out of the conference could actually backfire. More on those warnings is below.
Surging global greenhouse gas emissions mean the world now faces likely temperature rises of up to 5-6C this century, according to the scientist leading the international Climate Congress in Copenhagen this week.
Professor Katharine Richardson, who chaired the scientific steering committee for the conference, said it was now almost impossible for the world to achieve the UN target of preventing global temperature rise exceeding 2C.
"We can forget about the 2C"," said Richardson in an interview. "We are now facing the situation where we have to avoid a 5-6C rise in temperature."
Richardson said her comments were based on sifting through hundreds of science research papers submitted to the congress. Details of the research are being presented to delegates this week and will be used in a report for the UN.
Her comments were not the only bad news to emerge on the first day of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change (IPCC) in Copenhagen. Other researchers warned that sea levels are now rising 50% faster than suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report.
Comment: The ISCCC 'International Scientific Congress on Climate Change' or Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen is not the IPCC. It is not backed or supported by the IPCC and is in fact a political gathering backed by a group of 10 Universities designed to specifically promote the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming in the most extreme fear mongering way possible. That these journalists and the Times UK would slip that subliminal in that it is the (IPCC) is just downright devious and shows their hand in the fear mongering propaganda.
Professor Katharine Richardson, who chaired the scientific steering committee for the conference, said it was now almost impossible for the world to achieve the UN target of preventing global temperature rise exceeding 2C.
"We can forget about the 2C"," said Richardson in an interview. "We are now facing the situation where we have to avoid a 5-6C rise in temperature."
Richardson said her comments were based on sifting through hundreds of science research papers submitted to the congress. Details of the research are being presented to delegates this week and will be used in a report for the UN.
Her comments were not the only bad news to emerge on the first day of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change (IPCC) in Copenhagen. Other researchers warned that sea levels are now rising 50% faster than suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report.
Comment: The ISCCC 'International Scientific Congress on Climate Change' or Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen is not the IPCC. It is not backed or supported by the IPCC and is in fact a political gathering backed by a group of 10 Universities designed to specifically promote the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming in the most extreme fear mongering way possible. That these journalists and the Times UK would slip that subliminal in that it is the (IPCC) is just downright devious and shows their hand in the fear mongering propaganda.
Comment: This is just one of dozens of articles flooding the Internet and news sites as an outcome of the ISCCC 'International Scientific Congress on Climate Change'. You might call it a wave of propaganda by the Anthropogenic Global Warming political machine.
For an honest view of this conference see this story - (Link).
Comment: The wave of propaganda from this so called Climate Congress is astounding. Here are just a few of the stories that the worldwide propaganda machine grabbed onto:
Propaganda: Global temperatures 'will rise 6C this century'
Propaganda: Global warming 'will be worse than expected' warns Stern
Propaganda: Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say
Propaganda: Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected
Propaganda: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion
Propaganda: Scientists are grim, economists more optimistic about climate change's effects
Propaganda: Make clear dire scenarios to prod climate action
Propaganda: Scientists plan emergency summit on climate change
For an honest view of the conference that produced this psychological media wave see this story - (Link).