Earth ChangesS

Bulb

Global warming advocates swiftly becoming political terrorists

It is well known that many university staff list to port and try to engineer a brave new world. The cash cow climate institutes now seem to be drowning in their own self-importance.

In a wonderful gesture of public spiritedness, seven academics who include three lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a former director of the World Climate Research Program wrote to Australian power generating companies on April 29 instructing them to cease and desist creating electricity from coal.

In their final paragraph, they state with breathtaking arrogance:
The unfortunate reality is that genuine action on climate change will require the existing coal-fired power stations to cease operating in the near future.

We feel it is vital that you understand this and we are happy to work with you and with governments to begin planning for this transition immediately.

The warming of the atmosphere, driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, is already causing unacceptable damage and suffering around the world.
No evidence is provided for this statement and no signatory to this letter has published anything to support this claim.

These university staff are unctuously understanding about the plight of those who face employment extinction in the smokestack towns of Australia.

They write:
We understand that this will require significant social and economic transition that will need to be managed carefully to care for coal sector workers and coal-dependent communities.
This love for fellow workers brings tears to the eyes.

Bizarro Earth

Dozens of whales beach on South African shore

Dozens of pilot whales beached this morning near the storm-lashed tip of South Africa, prompting a massive rescue operation.

Rescuers were using six bulldozers to push the 55 whales back into the water, but "as soon as we put them back into the sea, they swim back to the beach again," said National Sea Rescue Institute spokesman Craig Lambinon.

One whale has died, and high winds and rough seas were frustrating the rescue attempts.

"It's not a very easy situation," Lambinon said.

Pilot whales, about 3 meters (10 feet) long, are fairly common around South Africa. There was no immediate explanation as to why they were beaching.

Binoculars

Still More on Diminished Solar Activity and Global Cooling

Sun storm
© NASASunspot activity captured by the TRACE spacecraft. The bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots has a temperature of over 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.

As more and more real scientific data comes in, and we are able to move further and further beyond the mythology and high-hopes of global warming high priest Al Gore, it becomes clearer and clearer that the public has been fed a massive campaign of hooey for the past 20 years.

Just a few days ago we looked at the extensive report from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine which showed the correlation between temperature change and solar activity. Not only does current science show this, but the examination of historical climate data shows up-and-down climate cycles across the earth long before SUVs and power plants were ever dreamed of.

Just yesterday Space Daily featured an article about the recent diminished solar activity:
According to the forecast, the sun should remain generally calm for at least another year. From a research point of view, that's good news because solar minimum has proven to be more interesting than anyone imagined. Low solar activity has a profound effect on Earth's atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract.

Better Earth

Starfish defy climate change gloom

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© D. Gordon E. Robertson, Wikimedia Commons
A species of starfish has confounded climate change doom-mongers by thriving as sea temperatures and acidity increase - a scenario that is likely as the world gets warmer.

Most studies have concluded that sea animals with calcified shells or skeletons, such as starfish, will suffer as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels dissolves in the sea, making the water more acidic and destroying the calcium carbonate on which the creatures depend.

But the sea star Pisaster ochraceus may ride out the climate storm. Rebecca Gooding and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, exposed sea stars to rising temperatures and water acidity. They thrived in temperatures of up to 21 ยฐC and atmospheric CO2 concentrations of up to 780 parts per million - beyond predicted rises for the next century (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: link).

Heart

'Crazy Turtle Woman' Transforms Graveyard into Maternity Ward

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© Kathleen Toner/CNNSuzan Lakhan Baptiste's efforts have turned a beach from a leatherback turtle graveyard to a nesting colony.
Matura, Trinidad -- With its white sand and clear, blue water, Trinidad's Matura Beach looks like a postcard. It's a far cry from its recent past, when leatherback sea turtle carcasses littered the ground and kept tourists away.

"Twenty years ago, this was a graveyard," Suzan Lakhan Baptiste said of the six-mile stretch of beach near her home.

"The stench was horrendous. You could smell it for miles," she said.

Saddened and frustrated, Baptiste launched a crusade to help end the slaughter of the gentle giants. Today, she and her group are succeeding: What was once a turtle graveyard is now a maternity ward -- one of the largest leatherback nesting colonies in the world.

Better Earth

Huge undersea mountain with potentially catastrophic power found off Indonesia

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© UnknownThis aerial view shows new homes being constructed to the north of Banda Aceh on the island of Sumatra in 2006. A massive underwater mountain discovered off the Indonesian island of Sumatra could be a volcano with potentially catastrophic power, a scientist said Friday.
A massive underwater mountain discovered off the Indonesian island of Sumatra could be a volcano with potentially catastrophic power, a scientist said Friday.

Indonesian government marine geologist Yusuf Surachman said the mountain was discovered earlier this month about 330 kilometres (205 miles) west of Bengkulu city during research to map the seabed's seismic faultlines.

The cone-shaped mountain is 4,600 metres (15,100 feet) high, 50 kilometres in diameter at its base and its summit is 1,300 metres below the surface, he said.

"It looks like a volcano because of its conical shape but it might not be. We have to conduct further investigations," he told AFP.

He denied reports that researchers had confirmed the discovery of a new volcano, insisting that at this stage it could only be described as a "seamount" of the sort commonly found around the world.

"Whether it's active or dangerous, who knows?" he added.

Bizarro Earth

Earthquake Magnitude 5.7 - Mindanao, Philippines

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© USGS
Date-Time:
- Friday, May 29, 2009 at 19:51:18 UTC
- Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 03:51:18 AM at epicenter

Location:
5.933ยฐN, 125.799ยฐE

Depth:
158.9 km (98.7 miles) set by location program

Region:
MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES

Butterfly

Thousands of Marauding Caterpillars Trap Car in Silky Web

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© unknownMoth attack: Spindle ermines covered this car with a giant silk web in Rotterdam
Most drivers would be delighted if their car came with a silk-lined interior.

Whether it's such an appealing prospect on the outside is another matter.

This is the sight that greeted one unlucky motorist when he returned to his vehicle in Rotterdam.

Under a giant silk cocoon created by an army of caterpillars, the shape of a Honda is just about visible.

The car was mistaken as food by spindle ermine larvae, which had already begun to strip a nearby tree of its leaves.

Fish

Human fishing spree goes back 1000 years

Call it the myth of industrial sin. It seems fish stocks were declining due to human exploitation long before the arrival of giant trawlers and factory ships, according to marine scientists at a conference being held this week in Canada.

"We are discovering that human pressure on marine life was much earlier, much larger and much more significant than previously thought," says Poul Holm, an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. "We now know that there was major commercial exploitation of fisheries, doing huge damage to fish populations, back in medieval times and even before. The idea that it is only modern fishing technology that has done damage turns out to be completely wrong."

Blackbox

Dirty secret of Vietnamese wildlife farms revealed

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© AFP/Getty ImagesRestaurant workers skinning a crocodile. But is it from a farm or from the wild?
Wildlife farms are supposed to promote conservation by providing a sustainable alternative to hunting animals in the wild. But those in Vietnam are having exactly the opposite effect, says a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York.

Over the past two decades, dozens of commercial wildlife farms have sprung up in Vietnam. WCS investigators and Vietnamese officials who visited 78 farms undercover found that half had taken original breeding stock from wild populations, and 42 per cent were still doing so.

Animals farmed include snakes, turtles, crocodiles and monkeys. Worst affected are species such as tigers and bears, whose body parts or secretions are valued in traditional medicine. Not only are they slow to breed, but farms can also be used to launder products from animals killed in the wild.