Earth ChangesS


Nuke

Dangerous levels of radioactivity found at fracking waste site in Pennsylvania

Felicity Carus
The Guardian, UK
Wed, 02 Oct 2013 14:41 UTC
Gas Production
© Julia Schmalz/Getty ImagesA gas production site at the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania.

Scientists have for the first time found dangerous levels of radioactivity and salinity at a shale gas waste disposal site that could contaminate drinking water. If the UK follows in the steps of the US "shale gas revolution", it should impose regulations to stop such radioactive buildup, they said.

The Duke University study, published on Wednesday, examined the water discharged from Josephine Brine Treatment Facility into Blacklick Creek, which feeds into a water source for western Pennsylvania cities, including Pittsburgh. Scientists took samples upstream and downstream from the treatment facility over a two-year period, with the last sample taken in June this year.

Elevated levels of chloride and bromide, combined with strontium, radium, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopic compositions, are present in the Marcellus shale wastewaters, the study found.

Radioactive brine is naturally occurring in shale rock and contaminates wastewater during hydraulic fracturing - known as fracking. Sometimes that "flowback" water is re-injected into rock deep underground, a practice that can cause seismic disturbances, but often it is treated before being discharged into watercourses.

Radium levels in samples collected at the facility were 200 times greater than samples taken upstream. Such elevated levels of radioactivity are above regulated levels and would normally be seen at licensed radioactive disposal facilities, according to the scientists at Duke University's Nicholas school of the environment in North Carolina.
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Question

Mutton birds in their hundreds wash up on Sydney's northern beaches as their migration ends

Andrew Priestley
dailytelegraph.com.au
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 09:40 UTC
Image
Mutton birds have been found dead in large numbers on the northern beaches
Hundreds of dead mutton birds have turned up on the northern beaches in a grim demonstration of nature's way.

The Tasmanian mutton birds, also known as short-tailed shearwaters, have been found in large numbers on Newport, Narrabeen, Collaroy and Dee Why beaches in the past week.

The mass deaths are a natural result of the bird's epic migration from Bass Strait to the Bering Sea on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

The 30,000km return journey sees a number of birds reach the limits of their endurance, falling into the sea and being washed up on our shores as they near the end of their journey.

As a result, large numbers of birds can sometimes be found on Australian east coast beaches, according to the NSW Wildlife, Rescue and Education Service
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Cloud Precipitation

Typhoon Fitow wreaks havoc in E China province

Zhu Ningzhu
Xinhua
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 09:16 UTC
Flood in China
© AP
Wenzhou - Ten people were killed and five others remain missing in Wenzhou City after Typhoon Fitow brought heavy rains to east China's Zhejiang province, local authorities announced on Wednesday.

Among the dead, eight died of electric shocks, including a family of three, according to a statement from the government of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Two men died after their car plunged into a river, said the statement.

Typhoon Fitow, which made landfall in Fujian Province, just south of Zhejiang, early on Monday, has triggered heavy rain in the region, inundating roads and houses, and causing river breaches and power failures.

As of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, 254,746 households in Zhejiang Province had no power supply. About 10,000 workers are repairing electrical facilities in the province.

The typhoon has affected 7 million people in 11 cities in Zhejiang, causing direct economic losses of 12.4 billion yuan (2 billion U.S.dollars)as of 10 p.m. on Monday, according to the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.

The county-level city of Yuyao, which is administered by Ningbo City, has been severely affected in the recent typhoon-triggered storms.h As of Wednesday, over 70 percent of the downtown area of the city had been flooded. Over 830,000 people from 21 townships in the city have been affected, though no casualties have been reported so far, according to the local government.
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Snowflake Cold

Winter to open with bitter cold, snow in U.S. northwest, Rockies -forecaster

Daniel Kelley
newsdaily.com
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 08:04 UTC
The Pacific Northwest and western Rockies should brace for a dramatic start to the winter, with bitter cold and significant snowfalls, while the eastern United States will have less of both, according to a long-term forecast by Accuweather.

The private forecasting firm also warned that the upper Midwest, including Chicago, could face heavy snow around the holidays, in a forecast released on Wednesday, less than a week after a rare October snowstorm hit the central Rocky Mountain region, stranding motorists, killing livestock, and downing trees in parts of Wyoming and South Dakota.

Warmer weather is forecast for Oregon and Washington, with colder conditions to the east in Wyoming and Montana. Those colder conditions will bring more snow, but forecasters are less certain of where the temperature differential will occur.
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Question

Mystery of why 22 long-finned whales washed up to their deaths on Spanish beach

Hayley O'keeffe
The Daily Mail, UK
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 07:47 UTC
  • Whales washed up and died at Manon Beach in Spain
  • Authorities and conservationists battled to save long-finned pilot whales
  • The whales are sociable creatures and often interact with dolphins
Image
22 long-finned pilot whales have died after coming ashore on the Manon beach, north of La Coruna, Galicia today. Conservationists and authorities battled to save the animals, and now a mystery surrounds why they beached in the first place
A natural mystery is unfolding in Spain after 22 long-finned pilot whales came ashore at Manon Beach.

The picture shows six of the 22 long-finned pilot whale that beached on the shore, north of La Coruna, Galicia, Spain today (Monday).

Sadly 11 of the whales died on arrival to the beach and the others died later despite the efforts of the Spanish Civil Protection, environmentalists and Galicia Coordination mammalian studies.

Long-finned pilot whales or globicephala melas are very sociable and family-orientated animals and are even known to socialise with bottle nosed-dolphins
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Einstein

Propaganda Fail: Almost half of survey respondents don't know the 'CO2 warms the atmosphere' claim

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 18:50 UTC
People send me stuff.

In my Inbox today was a link to a Science Poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The aim of the poll was to gauge American knowledge of science and it is a parallel poll to one conducted by telephone. Given the millions spent on global warming/climate change messaging, I was shocked to see the results of this question on Carbon Dioxide. Note what I circled in red.

Image
Similarly, I thought far more people would get this grade school science question right. Only 20% did.

Image
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Better Earth

Opening of NSA's massive data terminal in Utah delayed again as 'fiery explosions caused by electrical surges' continue to melt facility's equipment

Abby Ohlheiser
The Atlantic Wire
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 16:28 UTC
NSA Data Center
© The Atlantic Wire
The NSA's huge Utah data center is supposed to help U.S. intelligence collect billions of bytes of data when it opens this fall. But the agency hit a snag or two in trying to take the complex live: a mysterious, repeated electrical failure keeps melting the facility's equipment. The center, located in Utah in part because of a need to access the massive amounts of cheap electricity available there, has suffered 10 meltdowns over 13 months, starting in August 2012. Each incident created about $100,000 dollars in damage.

And according to the Wall Street Journal report on the facility, those problems could have a lot to do with the contractors (a running theme) tasked with building it. The Journal, using documents and interviews, outlines the delays and problems encountered by the agency in its completion of the mostly classified complex.

Speaking to an official, the paper notes that the electrical problems plaguing the facility are like "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box." And those flashes, they continue, "create fiery explosions, melt metal and cause circuits to fail." So, why is it happening?

Comment: Whoever said watching the end of the world (as we know it) wouldn't be fun?!

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Igloo

Early snow kills thousands of cattle in South Dakota

Chet Brokaw
Associated Press
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 19:00 UTC
Dead Cattle
© Keloland.com
Pierre - A record-breaking storm that dumped 4 feet of snow in parts of western South Dakota left ranchers dealing with heavy losses, in some cases perhaps up to half their herds, as they assess how many of their cattle died during the unseasonably early blizzard.

Meanwhile, utility companies were working to restore power to tens of thousands of people still without electricity Monday after the weekend storm that was part of a powerful weather system that also buried parts of Wyoming and Colorado with snow and produced destructive tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa. At least four deaths were attributed to the weather, including a South Dakota man who collapsed while cleaning snow off his roof.

Gary Cammack, who ranches on the prairie near Union Center about 40 miles northeast of the Black Hills, said he lost about 70 cows and some calves, about 15 percent of his herd. A calf would normally sell for $1,000, while a mature cow would bring $1,500 or more, he said.

"It's bad. It's really bad. I'm the eternal optimist and this is really bad," Cammack said. "The livestock loss is just catastrophic. ... It's pretty unbelievable."

Cammack said cattle were soaked by 12 hours of rain early in the storm, so many were unable to survive an additional 48 hours of snow and winds up to 60 mph.

"It's the worst early season snowstorm I've seen in my lifetime," said Cammack, 60.
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Igloo

Climate guru puts 'global warming' on ice


WorldNetDaily
Sun, 06 Oct 2013 21:54 UTC
Dr. Tim Ball
© Dr.TimBall.comDr. Tim Ball
Far from being the final word on climate change, last week's United Nations report suggesting near certainty that human activity is causing a rise in Earth's temperatures is actually further proof that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong and the Earth is cooling right on schedule, according to one of the leading scientists who is skeptical of the climate-change premise.

Last week, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported it was 95 percent certain that climate change was the result of human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that emit "greenhouse gases."

"That's the result that they get when you premeditate your science," said Dr. Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. "When you set out to establish a certain scientific outcome and you program your computers to do that, you shouldn't be surprised if that's the result you get.

The problem is what they're getting out of their computers is not fitting with what's actually happening. Of course, that's been the problem with the IPCC all along."

Ball told WND the deception of the IPCC and its allies can be seen in how the reports are released, with the policy statement drawing headlines while the scientific information comes later and is largely ignored.

"(The summary for policymakers) is a document written to scare to public and scare the politicians into providing more funding for their own research and their own political agenda," he said. "The actual science report, which it supposedly is based on isn't going to be released right away. They've always done it his way because the summary for policymakers completely disagrees with what the science report is saying. They know that the media and the public are not going to read the science report. And they also know that if any of them get into it, they won't understand it anyway."
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Cloud Lightning

Lightning strikes killed 32 people, including nine children, during weekend storms in India


Daily Mail
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 09:23 UTC
Lightning
© Unknown
Lightning strikes killed 32 people, including nine children, during storms at the weekend in India.

It is not rare for lightning to strike someone when it is monsoon season, but that the sheer number of the death toll is extremely rare.

The strikes killed people in the eastern Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand.

'About 24 people including seven children were killed Saturday and Sunday by bolts of lightning across Bihar,' State Disaster Management Minister Renu Kumari Kushwaha said.

In neighbouring Jharkhand, eight people including two children died, Puran Mahto, an official in the state's Dhanbad district said.

Torrential rains accompanied by strong winds uprooted trees, damaged houses and brought down power cables across the region on Sunday night.
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