Parts of Europe are being gripped by unusual cold, even though the calendar says it's meteorological summer. Now children in Sweden are finding out what snow is like - in June! Strangest warming I've ever seen.
The English language The Local here writes that "Stockholm broke an 84-year-old cold record on Saturday, as the capital's temperature only reached 6 degrees Celsius, the lowest June maximum daily temperature the city has seen since 1928."

"Indeed, you could be excused for thinking that the current chill is more like winter than summer. It was actually colder in the capital yesterday than on Christmas Eve. 'The temperature was a degree lower than it was at Christmas in Stockholm, so it is colder. And it's windier, too,' said SMHI's meteorologist Lisa Frost to newspaper Dagens Nyheter."

Just two days ago The Local here reported that snow blanketed northern parts.

Date-Time
Monday, June 04, 2012 at 00:45:15 UTC

Sunday, June 03, 2012 at 06:45:15 PM at epicenterTime of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
5.287°N, 82.580°W

Depth
9.7 km (6.0 miles)

Region
SOUTH OF PANAMA

Distances
346 km (214 miles) S of David, Panama

356 km (221 miles) SSW of Santiago, Panama

372 km (231 miles) SW of Las Tablas, Panama

526 km (326 miles) SW of PANAMA CITY, Panama

Firefighters battling New Mexico's largest-ever blaze gained ground on Sunday and officials said they would begin to allow evacuated residents to return home on Monday.
The Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire, which has burned 241,701 acres in the Gila National Forest, is now 17 percent contained with progress being made by the hour, said Fire Information Officer Heather O'Hanlon.

Residents of the historic mining town of Mogollon, which was evacuated last Saturday, will be allowed to return starting on Monday, she said.

Los Angeles, California - Years of ferocious storms have threatened to gnaw away the western tip of a popular beachfront park two hours drive north of Los Angeles. Instead of building a 500-foot-long wooden defense next to the pier to tame the tide, the latest thinking is to flee.

Work is under way to gauge the toll of ripping up parking lots on the highly eroded west end of Goleta Beach County Park and moving a scenic bike path and buried utility lines inland away from lapping waves.

Up and down the California coast, some communities are deciding it's not worth trying to wall off the encroaching ocean. Until recently, the thought of bowing to nature was almost unheard of.

But after futile attempts to curb coastal erosion - a problem expected to grow worse with rising seas fueled by global warming - there is growing acknowledgment that the sea is relentless and any line drawn in the sand is likely to eventually wash over.

"I like to think of it as getting out of the way gracefully," said David Revell, a senior coastal scientist at ESA PWA, a San Francisco-based environmental consulting firm involved in Goleta and other planned retreat projects.

As several record low temperatures for the month of June were recorded across Sweden the last couple of days, the Met Office now says the blustery, rainy weather is here to stay until at least next weekend.

On Friday morning, the town of Börtnan in northern Sweden had survived night temperatures of minus 6 degrees Celcius - the coldest June temperature in Sweden for the past two decades.

In the last few weeks beekeepers have reported staggering losses in Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio after their hives foraged on pesticide-treated corn fields. Indiana too, two years ago. What's going on in the Corn Belt?

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said,

"You know, I held out for years on buying them GE [genetically modified or engineered] seeds, but now I can't get conventional seeds anymore. They just don't carry 'em."

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What do GE seeds have to do with neonicotinoids and bees? and 2) How can an Iowa corn farmer find himself feeling unable to farm without poisoning pollinators? In other words, where did U.S. corn cultivation go wrong?

The short answer to both questions starts with a slow motion train wreck that began in the mid-1990s: Corn integrated pest management (IPM) fell apart at the seams. Rather, it was intentionally unraveled by Bayer and Monsanto.

Scientists are saying the Tanagaroa seamount off the Bay of Plenty coast should be declared off limits to commercial exploitation by fishing and mining.

A group of Wellington scientists have just confirmed volcanic activity on the deep water seamount.

Niwa principal scientist Malcolm Clark says they have discovered new hydrothermal vents, which create chimney-like structures.

"Some of the venting we found was very high temperature, black smoker type situations, where the temperature is several hundred degrees Celsius," says Malcolm.

He has just returned from taking the first biological samples of the animals which have adapted to Tangaroa's unique environmental conditions.

The top of the seamount is nearly a kilometre below the ocean's surface.

"These are species which are adapted to live in quite extreme conditions, high levels of hydrogen sulphide which is toxic to most life forms, quite high temperatures, they're deep, there's no light, they're under quite high pressure," says Malcolm.

The research will help agencies protect these habitats from fishing or mining.

"These seamounts and deep sea areas in general are sites of deep sea trawling for species like orange roughy and they're also of interest for seabed mining," says Malcolm.

Human Rights, Environment and Nuclear Disaster

Are you wondering about the disconcerting contradictions in the nuclear news in recent weeks?

Following the release of a May 2012 report, newspapers around the world posted headlines announcing that the World Health Organization concludes that Fukushima radiation emissions pose minimal health risk. Based on an assessment of reported emissions of radioiodine and cesium up through September 2011, Japan's nuclear meltdown poses no serious cancer risk, except for localized exposures around Fukushima prefecture, which may result in increased risk of thyroid cancer.

In the same week, Japanese press reported the alarming news that TEPCO's assessments of total radioiodine releases were some 1.6 times greater than the Japanese Government's assessment while, on the same day, the Japanese government issued a reassuring statement that "while gross releases of iodine-131 and cesium-137 are actually far greater than originally estimated, the public can rest assured, as releases to the sea have not resulted in contamination beyond the plant's immediate area because the mixing power of ocean currents has dispersed the substances beyond the limits of detection in seawater samples"

Meanwhile, the US press reported findings from a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating that by August 2011, cesium-134 and cesium-137 from Fukushima was present in the tissue of Pacific blue fin tuna, as evidenced samples taken off the coast of San Diego, in Southern California. In the media storm that followed this report, government experts with the US Food and Drug Administration proclaimed no need for public panic, as radiation levels were detectable but simply too low to be hazardous and independent scientists explained why the presence, even at small levels, was so alarming and noted the need for additional monitoring.

As has been the norm in this most recent nuclear disaster, contradictory information abounds, with alarming news countered or contradicted by reassurances that muddy the water, yet achieve the goal of containing and controlling an impotent public.

NPR shouldn't trivialize the risk of radioactive tuna from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Yesterday, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story asserting that cesium-137 from the Fukushima nuclear accident found in Bluefish tuna on the west coast of the U.S. is harmless.

It's not harmless. The Fukushima nuclear accident released about as much cesium-137 as a thermonuclear weapon with the explosive force of 11 million tons of TNT. In the spring of 1954, after the United States exploded nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the Japanese government had to confiscate about 4 million pounds of contaminated fish. Radiation from Fukushima spread far and wide. Like American hydrogen bomb testing, the Fukushima nuclear accident deposited cesium-137 over 600,000 square-miles of the Pacific, as well as the Northern Hemisphere and Europe. With a half-life of 30 years, cesium-137 is taken up in the meat of the tuna as if it were potassium, indicating that the metabolism holds on to it.