Earth Changes
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign's fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying "It is too so!" In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
Monday, March 08, 2010 at 17:03:18 UTC
Monday, March 08, 2010 at 02:03:18 PM at epicenter
Location:
25.707°S, 66.599°W
Depth:
19.3 km (12.0 miles) (poorly constrained)
Distances:
155 km (95 miles) SW of Salta, Argentina
185 km (115 miles) NW of San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina
215 km (135 miles) SW of San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina
1245 km (770 miles) NW of BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Up to 40 centimetres of snow fell overnight in France's central southern region, including Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence, the Rhône valley and Mid-Pyrénées.
Such snowfall is "exceptional", especially at the beginning of March, according to national weather bureau Météo France.
The forecaster expects the snow clouds to make their way east on Monday, concentrating over the Hérault department.

A wild dolphin swims in the ocean near Mikura island, 200km south of Tokyo, August 3, 2008 file photo.
They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.
In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.
Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas - in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans - appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.
"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.
Both chemicals are widely used in North America and elsewhere, including China. And, the researchers point out, the concentration of each pesticide that produced adverse effects in the experiments was at or below those that bees could encounter while pollinating treated crop fields.
In recent years, there's been a big move by U.S. farmers to turn away from broad-spectrum potent bug killers to the more targeted and environmentally friendly pyrethroids. These synthetic chemicals have been fashioned after the natural pyrethrin bug deterrent in chrysanthemums.
The authors of the new study don't argue that pyrethroids are a cause of colony collapse disorder, the mysterious die-offs affecting honeybees throughout North America. But they do argue that their findings suggest further investigation is warranted to confirm whether these immensely popular crop-protection chemicals might prove a previously unrecognized threat to pollinators. The source of a double-whammy, if you will, for already hammered bees.
The earthquake surprised many residents as they slept, crumpling buildings into piles of rubble. Panicked survivors fled into narrow village streets, some climbing out of windows, as nearly 80 aftershocks measuring up to 5.5 and 5.3 magnitude rattled the region.
The Kandilli seismology center said the 6.0-magnitude quake hit at 4:32 a.m. (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) near the village of Basyurt in a remote, sparsely populated area of Elazig province. The region is 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of Ankara, the capital. The U.S. Geological Survey listed the quake at 5.9 magnitude.
The government initially put the death toll at 57 but later lowered it to 51 with no explanation. In addition to the deaths, 34 people were being treated for injuries, Turkey's crisis center said.
The damage appeared worst in the village of Okcular, where at least 15 of the village's 900 residents were killed, the Elazig governor's office said.
As relatives rushed in for news of their loved ones, authorities blocked off the area so ambulances and rescue teams could maneuver up Okcular's narrow, steep roads. Residents lit fires to keep warm in the winter cold, with snow-covered mountains in the background.
"The village is totally flattened," village administrator Hasan Demirdag told private NTV television. Resident Ali Riza Ferhat said he was woken up by the jolt. "I tried to get out of the door but it wouldn't open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors," he told NTV television. "We removed six bodies."
Electrical storms, product of a unique meteorological phenomenon, have lit up nights in this corner of Venezuela for thousands of years. Francis Drake abandoned a sneak attack on the city of Maracaibo in 1595 when lightning betrayed his ships to the Spanish garrison.
But now the lightning has vanished. A phenomenon that once unleashed up to 20,000 bolts a night stopped in late January. Not a single bolt has been seen since.
"This is unprecedented. In recorded history we have not had such a long stretch without lightning," said Erik Quiroga, an environmentalist and leading authority on the Relampago de Catatumbo, or Catatumbo Lightning.
The spectacle, one of the longest single displays of continuous lightning in the world, lasts up to nine hours a night. On average it is visible over 160 nights a year and from 400km away. Lightning bolts discharged from cloud to cloud strike 16 to 40 times a minute. They can reach an intensity of 400,000 amps but are so high thunder is inaudible. There are similar phenomena in Colombia, Indonesia and Uganda but they do not last the whole night.
In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:
The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:
From NIWA's web site - Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 - 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:
Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?
On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.
He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that "the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".
Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.
Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".
This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.













Comment: What a load of nonsense: "Barth and others say the changes are consistent with current climate-change models. Previous studies have found that the oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."
The oceans are warming due to undersea volcanism. This is heating the LOWER atmosphere, while the UPPER atmosphere is cooling rapidly due to space dust and other possible factors. When the moisture in the lower atmosphere hits the colder upper atmosphere, you get torrential rains, hail, snow. All of this is precursor to the rapid onset of the next Ice Age.
There is no Global Warming, though there is certainly coming Global Climate change.