Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

Heavy rains swamp camps holding Haiti's homeless

Port-au-Prince - One of the heaviest rainfalls since Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake swamped homeless camps Friday, sweeping screaming residents into eddies of water, overflowing latrines and panicking thousands.

The overnight downpour sent water coursing down the slopes of a former golf course that now serves as a temporary home for about 45,000 people.

There were no reports of deaths in the camp, a town-size maze of blue, orange and silver tarps located behind the country club used by the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne as a forward-operating base.

But the deluge terrified families who just two months ago survived the collapse of their homes in the magnitude-7 earthquake and are now struggling to make do in tent-and-tarp camps that officials have repeatedly said must be relocated.

Target

The Biggest Dump in the World

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© Algalita Marine Research FoundationA shark carcass on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, where plastic particles outnumber sand grains until you dig down about a foot.
As large as the USA, the Great Pacific Waste Patch is the biggest dump in the world. Ed Cumming discovers that it keeps getting bigger, and could be poisoning us all.

The world's biggest rubbish dump keeps growing. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - or the Pacific Trash Vortex - is a floating monument to our culture of waste, the final resting place of every forgotten carrier bag, every discarded bottle and every piece of packaging blown away in the wind. Opinions about the exact size of this great, soupy mix vary, but some claim it has doubled over the past decade, making it now six times the size of the UK.

Dr Simon Boxall, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Center at the University of Southampton, goes even further:
"It's the size of North America. But although the patch itself is extremely large, it's only one very clear representation of the much bigger worldwide problem."

Comment: The growing problem of trashing the world's oceans with toxic rubbish is clearly defined in the following article:

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage pit that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage pit that stretches from Hawaii to Japan
Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday:
"The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."
Dr Eriksen said:
"The slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles - the raw materials for the plastic industry - are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple,"
Additional articles about the ocean being the 'Biggest Dump in the World':

What is the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch?

Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers

Plastic trash vortex menaces Pacific sealife: study

Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too


Bizarro Earth

New Zealand: 5.7 quake felt in Southland

An earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale shook Southland tonight.

GNS Science said the quake happened at 7.28pm, 360km southwest of Invercargill at a depth of 33km. It was felt in Riverton.

Bizarro Earth

5-magnitude earthquake jolts Taiwan

A 5-magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan Thursday, said the local weather bureau.

The quake occurred at 5:01 p.m. about 26.3 km southeast of Suao in the northeastern Ilan county, with its epicenter 31.5 km underground, according to the bureau.

The tremor was felt in Taipei.

Attention

Climate Change - The mystery deepens: Where did that decline go?

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© Joannenova
Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing "decline" in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original "hide the decline" statement comes from the ClimateGate e-mails and refers to "hiding" the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It's known as the "divergence problem" because tree rings diverge from the allegedly measured temperatures. But, Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs, and that real measured temperatures did decline from 1960 onwards...sharply. Yet, in the GISS version of that period, temperatures from the cold 1970's were repeatedly "adjusted" years later, and progressively made warmer.

The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later, this was reduced so far it became a mild warming against the detailed corroborating Raobcore evidence. Raobcore measurements are balloon readings. How accurate are they? They started in 1958, twenty years before satellite temperature records (which are renowned for their accuracy). Put the two methods side-by-side, and they tie together neatly, telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.

Bizarro Earth

Magnitude 5.6 - South of the Fiji Islands

Fiji
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 09:14:07 UTC

Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 09:14:07 PM at epicenter

Location:
23.352°S, 177.195°W

Depth:
168.3 km (104.6 miles)

Distances:
315 km (195 miles) SW of NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga

335 km (210 miles) SSE of Ndoi Island, Fiji

620 km (385 miles) SSW of Neiafu, Tonga

1680 km (1050 miles) NNE of Auckland, New Zealand

Magnify

High Levels of Mercury Found in Cataraqui River, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

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© Michael OnesiStudent Nathan Manion took part in the Queen's study that examined the sediment of the Cataraqui River.
The Inner Harbour on the Cataraqui River in Kingston, Ont., has mercury levels in sediment more than two times the Canadian government's most severe effect limits, according to a Queen's University study.

"Mercury levels in this part of the river have never been studied before," says biology professor Linda Campbell. "Now we know the sources of the problem and just how widespread it is."

Most of the western shore of the Cataraqui River south of Belle Park and above the LaSalle Causeway Bridge had levels of contamination, with the worst area around the Cataraqui Canoe Club, just south of the former Davis Tannery.

Over the past century, the area has been home to many industries, such as a coal gasification plant, tannery and lead smelter, municipal dump, textile mill and fuel depot. The report found rain is washing contaminated shoreline soil near the canoe club into the river, adding to the sediment already contaminated by decades of industry.

Umbrella

A Third of U.S. is Waterlogged and Ripe for Flooding

Flood risk map
© NOAA2010 National Hydrologic Assessment
One-third of the United States faces the possibility of "historic flooding" in coming weeks, especially the upper Midwest states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa, government forecasters said.

"Once again we are delivering an urgent message to get ready," John Hayes, director of the National Weather Service, said in a conference call yesterday. "The flood risk is above-average over one-third of the country."

The flood potential is driven in part by El Nino, a warming in the Pacific Ocean, which steered storms that have left the ground saturated from record rains and heavy snows. The area designated for above-average risk stretches from New Mexico to Maine, federal maps show.

"We are looking at potentially historic flooding in some parts of the country this spring," Jane Lubchenco, administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in the conference call.

Many areas of the eastern U.S. have received twice the normal amount of rain in the past three months, said Tom Graziano, a weather service hydrologist.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Cosmic Climate Change: Yellow snow falls in Russia's far east, again

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Valeriy Melnikov
The Amur region in Russia's Far East was hit by yellow snow, Elena Pechkina, a regional meteorologist, told RIA Novosti on Friday.

High winds in Mongolia mixed the clouds from a front with dust and sand, crossed northern China, and then dumped the unique-colored snow in Russia.

"This type of precipitation is not harmful to the residents of the area and no additional analyses will be done," Pechkina said.

She said this type of snow was not rare, however usually falls in the region at the end of March or early April.

Comment: Four years ago Sott.net published this: Comet dust build-up? South Korea gets rare yellow snowfall

Two years ago we noticed this: Yellow snowfall over western Siberia

Just last week we reported an incident of purple snowfall, again in Russia.

Of course, they'll say it was the "high winds from Mongolia" that produced this effect, and that explanation will suffice for most. Some however, have looked closer...
From 25 July to 23 September, 2001, in Kerala, India, red rain sporadically fell, staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal Astrophysics and Space Science state that the cometary fragment contained a dense collection of red cells.



Arrow Down

Climate Change - Hide the decline and rewrite history?

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70's, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It's a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it's impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is. The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.

But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.

Maybe they had good reasons for making these adjustments. But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.