Earth ChangesS


Blackbox

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists

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© REUTERS/Yuriko NakaoA wild dolphin swims in the ocean near Mikura island, 200km south of Tokyo, August 3, 2008 file photo.
Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas - in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans - appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.

"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.

Comment: What a load of nonsense: "Barth and others say the changes are consistent with current climate-change models. Previous studies have found that the oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

The oceans are warming due to undersea volcanism. This is heating the LOWER atmosphere, while the UPPER atmosphere is cooling rapidly due to space dust and other possible factors. When the moisture in the lower atmosphere hits the colder upper atmosphere, you get torrential rains, hail, snow. All of this is precursor to the rapid onset of the next Ice Age.

There is no Global Warming, though there is certainly coming Global Climate change.


Better Earth

So called "Green Pesticides" pose reproductive threat to Honey Bees

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© unknownBeekeeper attending to Honeybee hives
Pesticides are agents designed to rid targeted portions of the human environment of undesirable critters - such as boll weevils, roaches or carpenter ants. They're not supposed to harm beneficials. Like bees. Yet a new study from China finds that two widely used pyrethroid pesticides - chemicals that are rather "green" as bug killers go - can significantly impair the pollinators' reproduction.

Both chemicals are widely used in North America and elsewhere, including China. And, the researchers point out, the concentration of each pesticide that produced adverse effects in the experiments was at or below those that bees could encounter while pollinating treated crop fields.

In recent years, there's been a big move by U.S. farmers to turn away from broad-spectrum potent bug killers to the more targeted and environmentally friendly pyrethroids. These synthetic chemicals have been fashioned after the natural pyrethrin bug deterrent in chrysanthemums.

The authors of the new study don't argue that pyrethroids are a cause of colony collapse disorder, the mysterious die-offs affecting honeybees throughout North America. But they do argue that their findings suggest further investigation is warranted to confirm whether these immensely popular crop-protection chemicals might prove a previously unrecognized threat to pollinators. The source of a double-whammy, if you will, for already hammered bees.

Better Earth

Flashback Fox RIPS Global Warming Advocate! Reveals FRAUD!

Stuart Varney interviews scientist Pat Michaels, with the CATO institute, who was the target of physical threat from Climate Scientist Ben Sanders. He also DESTROYS Ben Weiss, from the Center for American Progress. Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed "Climategate" are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.

Bizarro Earth

Turkey: Earthquake Magnitude 5.9 kills 51

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© USGS
Okcular - A strong, pre-dawn earthquake knocked down stone and mud-brick houses, barns and minarets in eastern Turkey on Monday, killing 51 people in five villages, the government said.

The earthquake surprised many residents as they slept, crumpling buildings into piles of rubble. Panicked survivors fled into narrow village streets, some climbing out of windows, as nearly 80 aftershocks measuring up to 5.5 and 5.3 magnitude rattled the region.

The Kandilli seismology center said the 6.0-magnitude quake hit at 4:32 a.m. (0232 GMT, 9 p.m. EST Sunday) near the village of Basyurt in a remote, sparsely populated area of Elazig province. The region is 340 miles (550 kilometers) east of Ankara, the capital. The U.S. Geological Survey listed the quake at 5.9 magnitude.

The government initially put the death toll at 57 but later lowered it to 51 with no explanation. In addition to the deaths, 34 people were being treated for injuries, Turkey's crisis center said.

The damage appeared worst in the village of Okcular, where at least 15 of the village's 900 residents were killed, the Elazig governor's office said.

As relatives rushed in for news of their loved ones, authorities blocked off the area so ambulances and rescue teams could maneuver up Okcular's narrow, steep roads. Residents lit fires to keep warm in the winter cold, with snow-covered mountains in the background.

"The village is totally flattened," village administrator Hasan Demirdag told private NTV television. Resident Ali Riza Ferhat said he was woken up by the jolt. "I tried to get out of the door but it wouldn't open. I came out of the window and started helping my neighbors," he told NTV television. "We removed six bodies."

Bizarro Earth

Drought extinguishes Venezuela's lightning phenomenon

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© Vladimir MarcanoCatatumbo lightning over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.
Darkness rarely lasted long in the skies over Lake Maracaibo. An hour after dusk the show would begin: a lightning bolt, then another, and another, until the whole horizon flashed white.

Electrical storms, product of a unique meteorological phenomenon, have lit up nights in this corner of Venezuela for thousands of years. Francis Drake abandoned a sneak attack on the city of Maracaibo in 1595 when lightning betrayed his ships to the Spanish garrison.

But now the lightning has vanished. A phenomenon that once unleashed up to 20,000 bolts a night stopped in late January. Not a single bolt has been seen since.

"This is unprecedented. In recorded history we have not had such a long stretch without lightning," said Erik Quiroga, an environmentalist and leading authority on the Relampago de Catatumbo, or Catatumbo Lightning.

The spectacle, one of the longest single displays of continuous lightning in the world, lasts up to nine hours a night. On average it is visible over 160 nights a year and from 400km away. Lightning bolts discharged from cloud to cloud strike 16 to 40 times a minute. They can reach an intensity of 400,000 amps but are so high thunder is inaudible. There are similar phenomena in Colombia, Indonesia and Uganda but they do not last the whole night.

Magnify

Flashback Uh, oh - raw temperature data in New Zealand tells a different story than the "official" one

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The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:
From NIWA's web site - Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 - 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).
But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

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Umbrella

Lysenkoism and James Hansen

[This is the essay Australia's ABC tried to ban. See story here...]

Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that "the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

Evil Rays

A dubious defender of the scientific faith

Some of America's top "warmist" scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the "climate sceptics", according to the Washington Times. "We're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.

As for "well-funded", a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true "science".

Comment: Here is a PDF of all the emails relating to the global warming scientists proposed fight back. This is again a most revealing email trail. It makes for very interesting reading and tells us a lot about the character and psychology of these people.


Cloud Lightning

Australia: Massive hailstones pound Melbourne amid severe thunderstorm

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© Peter RisbeyHailstones piled up on a Melbourne street after a storm on March 6, 2010
Severe thunderstorms have hit Melbourne as parts of Victoria are lashed by strong winds and large hail stones. Hailstones the size of golf balls have hit the suburb of Melton, in Melbourne's west, as a line of storms moved through western Victoria.

Winds of more 100 kilometres an hour have been recorded at Melbourne Airport while nearly 40 millimetres of rain fell at Rockbank, west of Melbourne.

Streets across Melbourne's CBD have been flooded and police are warning people not to drive through the flooded areas after some motorists became trapped. Trains and trams have been disrupted by the weather.

The Bureau of Meteorology says the storms will continue through to the evening and heavy rain is likely.

Blackbox

Mysterious ailment is killing foxes

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© NTAFoxes
An unidentified disease is making its way through the fox population of Tuolumne County, leading to an increase in sick foxes that have appeared in populated areas.

According to Jennifer Clarke, Tuolumne County Animal Control manager, agents responded to 12 to 14 cases of sick foxes in February alone.

"It's cyclical," she said. "Every seven or eight years a disease will make its way through a certain population of animals."

Animal Control only tests dead animals that have come into contact with humans and domestic pets. It also only tests for rabies.

Four foxes have met this criteria. One was touched by a person and the other three were attacked by pet dogs.