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Quake, tsunamis kill more than 700 in Chile

Mario Naranjo
Reuters
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:24 UTC
A massive earthquake and tsunamis killed 350 people in one Chilean coastal town, doubling the total death toll on Sunday as the government tried to get aid to hungry survivors and halt looting.

President Michelle Bachelet said at least 708 people had been killed and called for calm as people desperate for food and water looted stores in some areas worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the world's biggest in a century.

Television images showed houses washed away by swirling waters, cars tossed into shattered buildings and boats lifted into the streets in coastal towns including Pelluhue and Constitucion, where 350 deaths alone were reported.

"It's an enormous catastrophe ... there's a growing number of missing people," Bachelet said, adding that food and medical aid was being sent to help the roughly 2 million people affected by the quake.
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Better Earth

Flashback The World Has Never Seen Such Freezing Heat

Christoper Booker
Telegraph
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:16 UTC
Image
© Getty ImagesA sudden cold snap brought snow to London in October
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
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Better Earth

Flashback The catastrophe behind climate change

Christopher Booker
Telegraph
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:02 UTC
As the estimated cost of measures proposed by politicians to "combat global warming" soars ever higher - such as the International Energy Council's $45 trillion - "fighting climate change" has become the single most expensive item on the world's political agenda.

As Senators Obama and McCain vie with the leaders of the European Union to promise 50, 60, even 80 per cent cuts in "carbon emissions", it is clear that to realise even half their imaginary targets would necessitate a dramatic change in how we all live, and a drastic reduction in living standards.

All this makes it rather important to know just why our politicians have come to believe that global warming is the most serious challenge confronting mankind, and just how reliable is the evidence for the theory on which their policies are based.
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Bizarro Earth

Thousands of dead fish raise stink at Rio lagoon


Associated Press
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:30 UTC
Dead Fish
© ReutersDead fish float along the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon in Rio de Janeiro.
Thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores of a popular beachside lagoon in Rio over the weekend, offending joggers' olfactory senses and leading the city to fight the stench with disinfectant.

The official state news service Agencia Brasil said about 100 city employees working full-time cleared nearly 80 tons of fish as of Sunday (local time). There was no immediate estimate of how many died, but several species were involved.

Rio's environmental secretary speculated that increased levels of a harmful algae may be the immediate cause of the sudden die-off Friday.
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Bizarro Earth

Climate change rhetoric spiraling out of control

Christopher Booker
Telegraph
Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:02 UTC
Christopher Booker says that the Government must be absolutely sure that their data on climate change is accurate.

It was another bad week for the "warmists", now more desperate than ever to whip up alarm over an overheating planet. It began last weekend with the BBC leading its bulletins on the news that a "leading climate scientist" in America, Professor Chris Field, had warned that "the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed". Future temperatures "will be beyond anything predicted", he told a Chicago conference. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had "seriously underestimated the size of the problem".

The puzzle as to why the BBC should make this the main news of the day only deepened when it emerged that Prof Field was not a climate scientist at all but an evolutionary biologist. To promote its cause the BBC website even posted a video explaining how warming would be made worse by "negative feedback". This scientific howler provoked much amusement and derision on expert US blogs, such as Anthony Watts's Watts Up With That - since "negative feedback" would lower temperatures rather than raise them. The BBC soon pulled its video.
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Magnify

University 'tried to mislead MPs on climate change e-mails'

Ben Webster
The Times
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:04 UTC
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has been accused of making a misleading statement to Parliament.

The University of East Anglia wrote this week to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee giving the impression that it had been exonerated by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). However, the university failed to disclose that the ICO had expressed serious concerns that one of its professors had proposed deleting information to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act.
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Target

3.9-magnitude earthquake rattles western Quebec, Canada


CTV.ca
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:57 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The earth shuddered closer to home Saturday night when a 3.9-magnitude earthquake hit western Quebec, hours after a devastating quake hit central Chile.

The quake hit at about 10:50 p.m. local time, according to Earthquakes Canada. Its epicentre was 13 kilometres northwest of Lachute, a town of about 12,000 located 75 km northwest of Montreal.

There were no immediate reports of damage.

About 50 km northeast of Lachute, Louise Tremblay was sitting on her couch in Ste. Adele, Que., watching images of destruction from the quake in Chile flash on television when she was startled by a loud and violent noise.
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Attention

A Perfect Storm is Brewing for the IPCC

Christopher Booker
telegraph.co.uk
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:59 UTC
Image
© Artizons.com
The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm - after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.
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Bizarro Earth

Storm Batters Southern Europe, At Least 51 Dead


CNN
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:48 UTC
storm france
© AFP/Getty ImagesRescuers evacuate a flooded street Sunday using a motor boat in Chatellaillon, western France
Paris, France - A winter storm named "Xynthia" battered the western coast of Europe Sunday, its high winds downing trees and power lines and leaving as many as 51 people dead, authorities said.

Hardest hit was France, where at least 45 people were killed, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced.

The extra-tropical cyclone whipped the country's coastal regions and moved inland, bringing sometimes heavy flooding with it.

"It's a national catastrophe," Fillon said in a brief news conference. "Many people drowned, surprised by the rapid rise of the water."

The departments of Vendee and Charente-Maritime, on the French coast west of Paris, had severe flooding flooding when the strong winds whipped up the water at high tide.
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Bizarro Earth

18 killed as storm batters France


sify.com
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:41 UTC
At least 18 people have died in a violent storm that swept across France late Saturday and Sunday, France Info radio reported.

Packing winds of up to 160 km per hour, the storm uprooted trees, flooded houses, wreaked havoc with transportation and cut electricity supply to more than one million households, primarily along the Atlantic coastline.

Among the victims was an 88-year old woman who was found drowned in her house on the Isle of Oleron, off the west coast. Another octogenarian woman and a 10-year-old child also died in the region.

In addition, a man was struck by a branch and killed Saturday in the south-western city of Luchon.

Officials fear that the death toll could still rise, since many people have been reported missing and are feared swept away by the floodwaters.

The heavy rains and strong winds made numerous roads impassable and flooded cities along the coast, cutting off many communities from the outside world.

The flooding was exceptional in many areas because the passage of the storm coincided with the annual spring tide. As a result, many dikes were swamped or simply collapsed.
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