Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

US: More power loss possible in ice-ravaged Northeast


Associated Press
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:11 UTC
Joined by people seeking shelter from the bitter cold, parishioners at the Jaffrey Bible Church on Sunday thanked God for a warm place to sleep and for the utility crews struggling to repair power lines snapped by New England's devastating ice storm.

"Your fellow Jaffrey residents have stepped up and made this a more bearable situation," Walt Pryor, recreation department director for the town of 5,700, told the congregation Sunday morning.
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Umbrella

Cold weather sets records in several cities


Great Falls tribune
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:08 UTC
Several places in the state have already shattered daily record lows, and more are expected to be broken as the sub-zero temperatures continue through Sunday night.

White Sulphur Springs reported 29 degrees below zero to the National Weather Service today, stretching way beyond the last daily record low of 17 degrees below zero set in 1922.

"We're waiting for a lot of reports to come in still," said Scott Coulston, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls.
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Better Earth

Flashback 32,000 Global Warming Deniers

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
Fri, 16 May 2008 21:08 UTC
That's the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of science.

climate petition
© unknownFreeman Dyson is one of the world’s most eminent physicists.

How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?

The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the public's of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.

In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
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Attention

Did Magnetic Blip Trigger Mass Extinction?

Michael Reilly
Discovery News
Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:59 UTC
It was a dying on a scale never seen before or since on Earth. The slaughter was everywhere; the fertile ocean and balmy supercontinent Pangea were transformed into killing fields, littered with the bodies of ancient animals. By the time the dust had settled on the Permian-Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago, 90 percent of life on the planet had been snuffed out.

Now a new theory suggests the catastrophe was set in motion 15 million years earlier, deep in the Earth. On the edge of the molten outer core, a plume of super-hot material began rising through the mantle, upsetting convection in the core and throwing the planet's magnetic field into disarray.
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Cloud Lightning

UK : Coldest start to winter since 1976

Stephen Adams
Daily Telegraph
Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:32 UTC
Image
© Christopher PledgerDeer graze in the early hours in Richmond Park, London, after a heavy overnight frost.
Since December 1, the meteorological start to the season, the average UK temperature has been only 35.1F (1.7C), well below the long-term 1971-2000 average of 40.5F (4.7C) for the first 10 days of the month.

It is the coldest start to December since 1976, when the average was 33.4F (0.8C).

Arctic and continental winds have dominated the weather since mid November, bringing colder conditions than normal.

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Igloo

New Orleans snow earliest ever recorded


The Times-Picayune
Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:12 UTC
For the first time in nearly four years, snow fell across the New Orleans region this morning, with flurries reported on the north shore and in the city, Metairie, Kenner, LaPlace and other parts of the south shore. By around 10 a.m., the snow had mostly stopped, replaced by freezing rain in many places, making driving treacherous. By noon, the precipitation had mostly ceased altogether.

By mid-morning, enough snow had accumulated on the ground in some areas to lure children and adults onto their front lawns to build snowmen or have snowball fights. In the city, neutral grounds remained blanketed in white, though the streets generally remained clear as the wet stuff melted upon hitting the pavement.
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Igloo

Houston: Surprise snow ties 64 year old record

Eric Berger, Jennifer Latson, Jennifer Leahy
Houston Chronicle
Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:07 UTC
Falling snowflakes glimmered in streetlights, so wide that they billowed to the ground like parachutes, and so tantalizing that even awestruck adults reached out their hands or stuck out their tongues to catch one.

By Wednesday evening, the flakes were big enough to hold their shape for a moment on the street before melting into the pavement, and a dusting had collected on parked cars in some parts of town.

The flurries tied a record for Houston's earliest snowfall ever and warmed the hearts of winter weather lovers who have pined for snow since it last made an appearance on Christmas Eve 2004.
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Cloud Lightning

Ice storms knock power out for millions across NY, New England

Jason Szep
Reuters
Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:23 UTC
Boston - A powerful ice storm knocked out power to more than 1 million homes and businesses across New York and New England on Friday, closing roads and forcing the state of Maine to shut government offices.

"This is a very, very serious situation right now," New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch said after declaring an emergency in his state, where as many as 320,000 customers lost power in what local authorities describe as the worst outages in three decades.

"I don't think anyone anticipated it would be as bad as it is," Lynch said.
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Heart - Black

Zoo life is killing elephants: study


Reuters
Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:32 UTC
Zoo life can be deadly for elephants, researchers concluded in a study that found wild elephants live longer than their captive sisters. The average African female elephant lived to be just under 17 in a zoo but female elephants living natural lives in Amboseli National Park in Kenya lived an average of 56 years, they found.
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Hourglass

Oscillation Rules as the Pacific Cools


Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:23 UTC
Pasadena, Calif. -- The latest image of sea-surface height measurements from the U.S./French Jason-1 oceanography satellite shows the Pacific Ocean remains locked in a strong, cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a large, long-lived pattern of climate variability in the Pacific associated with a general cooling of Pacific waters. The image also confirms that El Niño and La Niña remain absent from the tropical Pacific.

PDO
© NASA/JPL

Pacific Decadal Oscillation
© NASA/JPLA cool wedge of lower-than-normal sea-surface heights continues to dominate the tropical Pacific, ringed by a horseshoe of warmer waters. The continuation of this long-term cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation stacks the odds against a wetter-than-average winter/spring in the southwestern United States.

The new image is available online here.

The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on Nov. 15, 2008, compared to the long-term average of observations from 1993 through 2008. In the image, places where the Pacific sea-surface height is higher (warmer) than normal are yellow and red, and places where the sea surface is lower (cooler) than normal are blue and purple. Green shows where conditions are near normal. Sea-surface height is an indicator of the heat content of the upper ocean.
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