Perhaps you've been wondering why the alarmists have been so shrill lately? It's not because the climate is overheating, to the contrary it's beginning to cool - and so their sham is about to be blown out into the open for everyone to see.

Evaluated data from the Austrian ZAMG meteorological institute now unmistakably show that the Alps have been cooling over the last 20 years and longer, "at some places massively" thus crassly contradicting all the loud claims, projections, and model sceanrios made earlier by global warming scientists.

Pilchards have been confirmed as the fish which died in their thousands in Nelson's lower Maitai River yesterday and the city council says people shouldn't fish in the area for the next few days.

The deaths are unexplained but seem to have affected just the one species, with Fish & Game field officer Lawson Davey suspecting a chemical spill into Saltwater Creek, which joins the Maitai beside the Queen Elizabeth II Dr bridge.

Nelson City Council communications manager Angela Ricker said yesterday that, based on the good health of other species in the river, the public health risk was "probably low". The council was taking a cautionary approach.

Rain records are falling like, well, rain, around Arizona on Friday, the start of a what is expected to be a very wet weekend.
More than an inch of rain has dropped on Sky Harbor Airport, the most in a single day since 1973. The previous mark was a half-inch. The airport rain gauge hadn't measured any rain since Sept. 9. Rain began falling Thursday night.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix has issued a flood watch, which will be in effect until 11 p.m. Heavy rain has already forced closure of southbound Loop 303 from Peoria Avenue to Camelback Road. Motorists had already been trapped in flooded areas before 7 a.m.

Snow and whiteout conditions were reported on State Route 87 north of Flagstaff. Thursday, Yuma broke a 129-year-old single-day mark with more than a third of an inch. Forecasters said the storm system from the West could last 18 hours.

An oil reservoir on Iran's Khark Island caught fire on Nov. 21, IRNA news agency reported on Nov. 22.

Reportedly the reservoir caught fire because of the lightning that struck it. The incident happened at 13:20 (local time).

Managing director of Iran's Oil Terminals Company (IOTC) Seyyed Pirouz Mousavi said that the fire was fully put out by 14:35 (local time), by the experts of Iran's oil industry.

A company involved in creating genetically modified mosquitos has another project nearing outdoor testing. The U.K.-based Oxitec has applied to release genetically modified olive fruit flies under netted olive trees in Spain, the BBC reports. The flies are a major pest to olive crops.

The idea is that the flies, all male, will mate with wild olive fruit flies. Any female flies produced from such a union will die as maggots, while any male offspring will carry the deadly gene, just as their fathers did. Over time, this should bring down local olive fruit fly population dramatically.

In a study done in cages, weekly releases of the Oxitec flies crashed the fly population. The added genes are similar to the ones that appear in Oxitec's mosquitos, which the company has tested in Brazil, bringing down one town's dengue-fever-carrying mosquito population by 96 percent.

• Fajardo lagoon usually glows when organisms in the water are disturbed

• For the past nine days the water in the lagoon has remained dark

• Biologists don't know why it's stopped glowing and are investigating

• Nearby construction work, or bad weather could be to blame

A glowing lagoon off Puerto Rico's northeastern coast has gone almost completely dark and biologists have no idea why.

The Fajardo Grand Lagoon in Las Cabezas de San Juan usually glows when bioluminescent organisms that live in the water are disturbed, yet they have not been visible for at least nine days.

Nearby construction work is thought to have caused disruption to the area, but biologists also believe a recent spate of bad weather could have caused the glowing lagoon to dull.

Athens County shook Wednesday afternoon in a way it hasn't since the 19th century. A 3.5 magnitude earthquake, strong enough to be felt, with an epicenter slightly east of Nelsonville, was recorded at 1:01 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The earthquake was the strongest to hit Athens since a quake of similar magnitude rocked the county in 1886, scientists said.

There were no reports of damage, though both ODNR and the Athens County Emergency Management Agency received dozens of calls about the quake. "(Southeast Ohio) is not really a seismically active area," said Tim Leftwich, a seismologist at ODNR. "It's not noted to be an earthquake prone area of the state."

Calls from as far as Charleston, W.Va. were reporting shaking, Leftwich said. Though the county is hundreds of miles from the nearest tectonic plate boundary - in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean - a small fault line runs through the northern part of Athens County, said Doug Green, a geophysicist at Ohio University who studies earthquakes.

"It's consistent, the location of the earthquake (and) the approximate depth are consistent with a structural weak point in the Earth's crust," Green said. The U.S. Geological Survey placed the quake's depth at 7.9 km - too deep to be triggered by a fracking injection well, said Green, who is currently studying drilling's effects on seismic activity.

• The long-nosed chimaera was snagged by fishermen in the Davis Strait of Canada's extreme northerly province of Nunavut
• It is only the second of its kind ever documented in the area near the Hudson Strait

• Long-nosed chimaeras are believed to live in abyssal depths below 3,000 feet and are distance cousins of sharks and rays

An extremely weird looking fish was snagged recently in the frigid artic waters off northern Canada and after some confused speculation about what it even is, researchers have identified it as the super rare long-nosed chimaera.

'Potentially, if we fish deeper, maybe between 1,000 and 2,000 metres (3,000 to 6,000 feet), we could find that's there's actually quite a lot of them there,' University of Windsor researcher Nigel Hussey told CBC. 'We just don't know.'

The spooky, deep sea fish has a long nose, menacing mouth, and a venomous spine atop its gelatinous grey body and was caught near the northernmost province of Nunavut in Davis Straight.

Researchers, who at first believed the odd fish was the similarly freakish goblin shark, say the long-nosed chimaera likely makes its home at depths not often visited by humans.

A tiny new islet has been created in Japan after a dramatic volcanic eruption in the Pacific Ocean. The news was confirmed by officials on Thursday. It has happened for the first time that the nation has come across such a phenomenon. Smoke was spotted by the Navy to have engulfed 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of Tokyo on Wednesday. Birth of the islet was verified later on by Japan's coastguard around the Ogasawara island chain.

Plumes of smoke ash billowing from the 200-metre island can be witnessed through a video. "Smoke is still rising from the volcanic island, and we issued a navigation warning to say that this island has emerged with ash falling in the area", said a spokesman for the maritime agency.

Half a year's worth of rain fell in an hour and a half Monday night in the Italian island of Sardinia, flooding streets and killing at least 16 people.

Sardinia was pummeled by 17.3 inches of rain Monday by Cyclone Cleopatra, a drenching that Franco Gabrielli, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, called "an exceptional event." According to Italy's Civil Protection Agency, so far 2,500 people have been displaced by the storm and more than 10,000 have lost electricity. The Italian government has declared a state of emergency on the island and has allocated about $27 million in rescue and relief aid.

Marco Vargiu, councilor for tourism in Olbia, a Sardinian city, told CNN that the city had been among the hardest hit - in some places in the city, water levels reached 10 feet.

"The worst conditions are here in Olbia," he said. "There are rivers of water in the town. In lots of houses the ground floors are full of water, one or two meters of water, and a lot of families have lost everything - their house, their car, their clothes, the furniture."

Gianni Giovannelli, Olbia's mayor, said the rain was so intense that it was like a "water bomb" and described the storm as "apocalyptic."

Sardinia wasn't the only region hit hard by flooding this week. Over the weekend, four people were killed when 0.79 inches of rain fell over 12 hours in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. The rainfall tally may not seem like much, but it's double the average November rainfall for the city. And since Riyadh has a desert climate, seemingly small amounts of rain can be cause for major concern.

"Typically, desert cities do not invest the same resources in drainage as do cities in wetter climates - much as warm-weather cities do not invest much in snowplows or road salt," weather.com meteorologist Nick Wiltgen said. "As a result, rainfall amounts that might seem numerically insignificant in a place like Miami or New York can lead to major impacts in a desert metropolis."