Earth Changes
White Sulphur Springs reported 29 degrees below zero to the National Weather Service today, stretching way beyond the last daily record low of 17 degrees below zero set in 1922.
"We're waiting for a lot of reports to come in still," said Scott Coulston, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls.
How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?
The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the public's of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.
In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
Now a new theory suggests the catastrophe was set in motion 15 million years earlier, deep in the Earth. On the edge of the molten outer core, a plume of super-hot material began rising through the mantle, upsetting convection in the core and throwing the planet's magnetic field into disarray.

Deer graze in the early hours in Richmond Park, London, after a heavy overnight frost.
It is the coldest start to December since 1976, when the average was 33.4F (0.8C).
Arctic and continental winds have dominated the weather since mid November, bringing colder conditions than normal.
By mid-morning, enough snow had accumulated on the ground in some areas to lure children and adults onto their front lawns to build snowmen or have snowball fights. In the city, neutral grounds remained blanketed in white, though the streets generally remained clear as the wet stuff melted upon hitting the pavement.
By Wednesday evening, the flakes were big enough to hold their shape for a moment on the street before melting into the pavement, and a dusting had collected on parked cars in some parts of town.
The flurries tied a record for Houston's earliest snowfall ever and warmed the hearts of winter weather lovers who have pined for snow since it last made an appearance on Christmas Eve 2004.
"This is a very, very serious situation right now," New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch said after declaring an emergency in his state, where as many as 320,000 customers lost power in what local authorities describe as the worst outages in three decades.
"I don't think anyone anticipated it would be as bad as it is," Lynch said.

A cool wedge of lower-than-normal sea-surface heights continues to dominate the tropical Pacific, ringed by a horseshoe of warmer waters. The continuation of this long-term cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation stacks the odds against a wetter-than-average winter/spring in the southwestern United States.
The new image is available online here.
The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on Nov. 15, 2008, compared to the long-term average of observations from 1993 through 2008. In the image, places where the Pacific sea-surface height is higher (warmer) than normal are yellow and red, and places where the sea surface is lower (cooler) than normal are blue and purple. Green shows where conditions are near normal. Sea-surface height is an indicator of the heat content of the upper ocean.
reports of any casualties.
The shallow quake, at a depth of just 10 kilometres, was centred 46 kilometres from Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, the US Geological Survey said.