Earth ChangesS


Hourglass

Australia: Queensland Residents On Edge As Floodwaters Rise

Queensland Floods 1
© Tomas GuerinA car is engulfed by floodwaters in Toowoomba
Sodden Queensland continues to battle its week-long flood crisis, with one town facing its second inundation since Christmas, residents forced to evacuate in several areas and waters receding ever so slowly in other drenched cities.

Toowoomba in the state's south-east is currently in shock after a raging torrent of water swept through the city this afternoon, claiming the lives of at least two people and leaving enormous damage across the city.

Elsewhere in the south-east, emergency services are focused on Dalby and Gympie, which are both on flood alert.

Comment: Here is a sample of what took place in Toowoomba earlier today. A deadly torrent of water unleashed its force with unbelievable fury - it was gone as quickly as it appeared.




Better Earth

Switzerland hit by three minor quakes

Three small earthquakes shook the west of Switzerland overnight but there were no reports of damage, Swiss police said on Sunday.

The quakes, which registered between 2.8 and 3.3 on the open-ended Richter scale, were recorded in the Valais canton.

Bizarro Earth

Triple Punch Hole Clouds

Hole Punch Clouds
© Wesley TylerHole punch clouds over Myrtle Beach.

"I've lived by the sea for many years, but never seen anything like this," reports Wesley Tyler of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "On Friday, Jan. 7th, there were three punch hole clouds in the same place." He grabbed his camera and recorded the phenomenon.

Considered a mystery for many years, punch hole clouds appear on rare occasions all over the world, sometimes attracting widespread attention, e.g., the famous Moscow UFO cloud of 2009. Recently meteorologists have penetrated the mystery: punch holes form when airplanes fly through thin layers of high altitude clouds. If water droplets in the cloud are supercooled (below freezing but still liquid), they can suddenly turn to snow when shocked by the passage of the plane. This mini-snowstorm occurs over a circular area much wider than the airplane itself.

Igloo

The Met Office Fries While the Rest of the World Freezes

Russian icebreaker Krasin
© Getty ImagesThe Russian icebreaker Krasin is sailing to the relief of fishermen trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk
As the Met Office desperately tries to salvage its reputation, another of this 'warm' winter's ice disasters is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk.

First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.

Let us begin with last week's astonishing claim that, far from failing to predict the coldest November and December since records began, the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office in October that Britain was facing an early and extremely cold winter. In what looked like a concerted effort at damage limitation, this was revealed by the BBC's environmental correspondent, Roger Harrabin, a leading evangelist for man-made climate change. But the Met Office website - as reported by the blog Autonomous Mind - still contains a chart it published in October, predicting that UK temperatures between December and February would be up to 2C warmer than average.

So if the Met Office told the Government in October the opposite of what it told the public, it seems to be admitting that its information was false and misleading. But we have no evidence of what it did tell the Government other than its own latest account. And on the model of the famous Cretan Paradox, how can we now trust that statement?

Bad Guys

Biggest Cover-up in US History

oiled pelican/gulf
© unknown
Months after the US government declared the waters in the Gulf of Mexico safe, thick layers of oil have been found along Louisiana coastal marshes, prompting local officials to accuse relevant authorities of 'cover-up.'

Louisiana officials say parts of the state's coastline are still being fouled more than eight months after British Petroleum's (BP) Deepwater Horizon rig caused the biggest oil disaster in the United States.

"This is the biggest cover-up in the history of America,'' Associated Press quoted Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser as saying.

On Friday, Robert Barham, secretary of Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, joined Nungesser on a tour of the area.

"It has been eight months since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, and five months since the well was capped. While workers along the coast dedicated themselves to cleaning up our shores there is still so much to be done," Barham said in a statement.

The heavily saturated area that reporters saw was 30 feet (9 meters) to 100 feet (30 meters) wide in sections.

"There's been no mechanism to clean that up thus far," the parish president said.

"Every day, this shoreline is moving inland," lessening flood protection for residents, Nungesser added.

Meteor

Noctilucent clouds filmed from Space Station - why are these 'nightshiners' visible at ever lower altitudes?

Noctilucent clouds were captured on the following video by the International Space Station's Science Officer, Ed Lu, in 2003. Now, the rare high-altitude clouds are showing up at lower and lower latitudes and scientists aren't sure why.


Comment: You may want to read these, then wake up and smell the ozone:

A Puzzling Collapse of Earth's Cooling Upper Atmosphere

Shields down! Earth's magnetic field may drop in a flash

Earth's Magnetic Field Is Fading


Bizarro Earth

Vanuatu - Earthquake Magnitutde 6.4

Vanuatu Quake_100111
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Sunday, January 09, 2011 at 17:21:55 UTC

Monday, January 10, 2011 at 04:21:55 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
19.281°S, 168.132°E

Depth:
32.8 km (20.4 miles)

Region:
VANUATU

Distances:
125 km (75 miles) WNW of Isangel, Tanna, Vanuatu

170 km (105 miles) S of PORT-VILA, Efate, Vanuatu

250 km (155 miles) N of Tadine, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia

1785 km (1110 miles) ENE of BRISBANE, Queensland, Australia

Bizarro Earth

Vanuatu - Earthquake Magnitutde 6.6

Vanuatu Quake_090111
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Sunday, January 09, 2011 at 10:03:43 UTC

Sunday, January 09, 2011 at 09:03:43 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
19.163°S, 168.326°E

Depth:
17.4 km (10.8 miles)

Region:
VANUATU

Distances:
110 km (65 miles) WNW of Isangel, Tanna, Vanuatu

160 km (100 miles) S of PORT-VILA, Efate, Vanuatu

270 km (165 miles) N of Tadine, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia

1815 km (1130 miles) ENE of BRISBANE, Queensland, Australia

Magnify

SOTT Focus: Chemtrails? Contrails? Strange Skies

Image
© NASAContrails as seen from space: the fact that now the contrails persists for so long is in itself a sign that something is not going well, but it's NOT evidence they are "chemtrails."
A few things that should be considered when talking about so-called "chemtrails":

1) Obviously, there is some "spraying" that goes on and it's not for the benefit of humanity. I've heard a few stories from people about very low flying planes dispersing stuff that lands all over everything or makes people sick. And I do mean LOW flying.

2) Spraying that actually affects a designated area beneath the sprayer (the plane in question) must be at a fairly low altitude otherwise what is sprayed will not come down on the area beneath the spraying. This is due to the fact that our atmosphere has a number of layers and each layer has its own temperature and wind speed and direction, and very often, things in one layer take a very long time and distance to mix or mingle with other layers, IF they mix at all. Usually, the wind speeds in the upper layers are such that anything deposited there might only penetrate to lower, weather, layers, after many thousands of miles of travel. It's a very nonlinear situation and highly, impossibly, unpredictable.

3) So, if you are talking about chemical spraying that you can see above in the sky, that then falls on the area below it, you must be talking about low altitude spraying.

4) Therefore, trails that are very high in the sky that have no hope of ever interacting with the ground below them cannot properly be called "chemtrails" except, perhaps, if a chemical is being sprayed that is supposed to affect the weather (and even that is done fairly low). Cloud seeding is done by dispersing elements such as dry ice crystals or silver iodide in the atmosphere with an airplane or even ground based stations. Seeding clouds is believed to promote condensation of water droplets, thus, rain.

Hourglass

Swedish bird mystery: Deaths due to 'external injuries'

Officials investigating the mysterious deaths of up to 100 birds on a road in Sweden say tests have revealed they suffered external injuries.

Dozens of jackdaws were found in the centre of Falkoeping prompting comparisons with the mysterious deaths of 3,000 birds in the US.

Sweden's National Veterinary Institute said it had tested five of the birds and found evidence of traumatic injury.