Earth ChangesS

Cloud Lightning

Stormy weather wreaks havoc across Egypt

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© AFPA lightning illuminates the sky over Cairo.
Cairo - Four people were killed and more than 50 hurt as bad weather wreaked havoc across Egypt, pelting the capital with a freak hail storm and smashing a luxury liner into a pier, officials and media said Friday.

In the northern Mediterranean city of Alexandria, waves as high as a two-storey building pounded the coast, media reports said.

Thursday evening's hail storm in Cairo, the first in many years, caused mayhem in the capital, snarling traffic and bringing the sprawling city to a virtual standstill.

Cars crawled on the slippery roads as lightning periodically lit up the drenched streets.

The downpour followed a heat wave and caught many off guard.

Bizarro Earth

At least 64 dead as huge 8.8 quake rocks Chile

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© Associated Press
A huge 8.8-magnitude earthquake rocked Chile early Saturday killing at least 64 people, toppling buildings and triggering a tsunami warning around the Pacific rim of fire, a government minister said.

The massive quake plunged much of the Chilean capital, Santiago, into darkness as it snapped power lines and severed communications, and AFP journalists spoke of walls and masonry collapsing. People in pyjamas fled onto the streets.

Residents in the south of the city, which appeared to have borne the brunt of the quake, said roads had crumpled and a bridge had been damaged, as an AFP correspondent said buildings "shook like jelly."

Japan's meteorological agency also warned of a tsunami risk across large areas of the Pacific including as far away as the Antarctic as the Philippines warned low lying coastal areas to prepare for a possible evacuation. Related article: 'Widespread' tsunami warning for Pacific nations

Bizarro Earth

Chile quake 1000 times greater than Haiti.Tsunami on the move.

An earthquake with an initial magnitude of 8.8 has hit Chile. Early reports of buildings having collapsed and communications disrupted. Tsunami warning issued as far as Australia.

Update#7. Almost all countries in the Pacific have been issued a warning, including New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Hawaii and as far as Russia and Japan.

There has been no contact with the Chilean city of Concepcion, a coastal area home to more than 600,000 people which is under 100 kilometres from the quake epicentre.

Target

7.3 quake rattles Japan's Okinawa

japan quake
© Unknown
A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 jolts south of Japan in the Pacific Ocean, the government's Meteorological Agency says.

The quake struck the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, 84 km east of Naha, and about 1,600 km south of Tokyo, at 5:31 a.m. local time Saturday (2031 GMT Friday), at a depth of 29 km below the seabed.

A tsunami warning for waves of up to two meters in some areas was issued, the agency said.

Question

Flamingos die en masse in Cyprus but experts say they are not worried yet

The number of dead or dying flamingos on Larnaca's Salt Lake has increased to between 30 and 40 from around ten earlier this week, it emerged yesterday.

Fifteen more birds have been collected from the lake and taken to the Veterinary Department for testing but the results are still pending. The results of water samples taken are also pending.

The flamingo deaths were briefly discussed during the Parliament's Environmental Committee meeting yesterday but no new information emerged, said Martin Hellicar, Campaign Manager for Bird Life Cyprus.

Bizarro Earth

Quake hits off Japan's southern coast, tsunami warning briefly issued

Quake
© AFP/FileA quake reading on a seismograph. A 7.0 magnitude quake struck southern Japan early Saturday the USGS โ€ฆ
Tokyo - A magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit off Japan's southern coast early Saturday, shaking Okinawa and nearby islands, where a tsunami warning was briefly issued, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.

The quake occurred off the coast of the island of Okinawa at a depth of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) at 5:31 a.m. Saturday (2031 GMT Friday), the agency said.

There have been no reports of major damage or casualties so far, except for reports of ruptured water pipes in two locations, Okinawa police official Noritomi Kikuzato said.

The Meteorological Agency had initially predicted a tsunami up to 6 feet (2 meters) near the Okinawan coast, warning nearby residents to stay away from the coastline. The agency later lifted the warning within two hours after observing only a small swelling of tide.

Brick Wall

Best of the Web: Global warmists insist this winter has been the hottest the world has ever seen!

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© Unknown
Singapore - The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards.

The bitter cold, with more intense winter weather forecast for March in parts of the United States, have led some to question if global warming has stalled.

Understanding the overall trend is crucial for estimating consumption of energy supplies, such as demand for winter heating oil in the U.S. northeast, and impacts on agricultural production.

"It's not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven't warmed in the past 50 years," veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing.

Attention

Yanomami fear for their lives as miners invade their land

Yanomami
© Steve Cox/SurvivalYanomami mother and child.
Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa has made an urgent appeal for support as the Yanomami territory in northern Brazil is being invaded by gold-miners.

Davi said, 'The arrival of miners is increasing, and the Yanomami are very worried... Soon there will be conflicts between the miners and the Yanomami... I know how the miners treat the Yanomami and I am also very sad because some Yanomami are working at the mining sites in return for food. They will fall ill; they'll catch malaria and sexually transmitted infections, because the miners will use the Indian women as they have done in the past'.

He added, 'I am very angry with FUNAI (the Brazilian government's indigenous affairs department) and the police; they have not controlled the entrance of miners. The Yanomami territory is being invaded'.

Davi Yanomami's warning comes just months after he met with President Lula to ask him to remove all the gold-miners working illegally in the Yanomami territory.

Mr. Potato

Al Gore Is Lying Low - for Good Reason

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© Ramirez
Maybe Al Gore's been advised by legal counsel to lie low. He may be the leader of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement, but he's not defending it in public, not even when it's falling apart and his new fortune is based upon it.

Mr. Gore and his financial backers earned millions of dollars in start-up "green" companies and carbon trading schemes. If the scam worked, he could've become the first "carbon billionaire."

"What goes up can fall down" applies to ill-gotten gains in the stock market or "carbon trading" schemes. In such schemes, it's foreseeable that trusting investors will (a) not only get hurt when the scam collapses, but they'll also (b) pursue legal remedies and sue him for fraud.

Mr. Gore's financial gains were based on the contradictory and error-plagued assertion that man's release of the trace gas CO2 will fry the planet.

Bandaid

Mission Impossible! UK Met Office to re-examine 150 years of temperature data in futile effort to re-sell 'global warming'

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© Holbert
Temperature records dating back more than 150 years are to be re-examined by the Met Office because public belief in global warming has plummeted.

The re-analysis, which was approved at a conference in Turkey this week, comes after the climate change email scandal which dealt a severe blow to the credibility of environmental science.

The Met Office says that the review is 'timely' and insists it does not expect to come to a different conclusion about the progress of climate change.

But the reassessment, which will take an international group of experts three years to complete, will be seen as a tacit admission that previous reports have been tainted by the association with the University of East Anglia's controversial Climatic Research Unit.

Since the leak of more than 1,000 emails and documents from the unit in November, belief in global warming has fallen from 41 per cent to 26 per cent.