Earth Changes
Believe it or not, officials say there was a minor earthquake centered near Williamsburg.
It was enough to make for some scary moments for those who experienced it.
People across the mountains were expecting wintry weather this morning, but at six-twenty, people across Whitley County got something else.
One bus driver had just shut down his bus after hearing that school was called off.
Jellyfish usually die after propagating but Turritopsis reverts to a sexually immature stage after reaching adulthood and is capable of rejuvenating itself.
Recent seismic activity could be a prelude to an eruption, "perhaps within hours to days," said geologists from the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
At least 15 deaths had been blamed on the weather.
Villager Li Qingliang said that this fire initially began in the middle of December, 2008 when locals noticed plumes of smoke emerging from the mountain. A few days later, flames emerged. The temperature in the area has been very low, and it has also been raining steadily for the past month, yet the fire remains burning and only continues to grow. And now Li says that thick smoke is also coming from a location near his home. He worries that the fire might emerge even closer to him.
Far from supporting a sound scientific theory that humans are creating a global warming crisis, last week's assertion by prominent global warming alarmists that Antarctica is getting warmer illustrates the flip-flopping nature of global warming predictions.
Antarctica was first inserted into the debate when Al Gore, in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," referred to Antarctica as a "canary in the coal mine" indicating human-induced climate change. After Gore asserted icebergs breaking off the West Antarctic ice sheet proved Antarctica was feeling the effects of human-induced global warming, real scientists pointed out that most of Antarctica has been getting colder for decades. Although a small portion of West Antarctica is warming, scientists noted this was the exception to an overall Antarctic cooling pattern.
The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet" threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.
Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.
However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula - the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.
I also believed that a consensus of the international scientific community supported these conclusions.
I based these beliefs on information from the popular press, television and political leaders.
Then I began some real research on the topic.
I quickly discovered three critical things:
- First, the Earth has experienced significant warming over the past 18,000 years that has nothing to do with human activity.
- Second, more recent temperature variations demonstrate that there is little or no correlation between levels of atmospheric CO2 and temperature.
- And third, there is no "consensus" among scientists on climate change.
You must also understand what the Earth was like 18,000 years ago. Back then, our planet was at the peak of its most recent major ice age. At 18 degrees Celsius, average ocean surface temperatures were 5 degrees lower than they are today. Half of North America and Eurasia were covered by massive ice sheets thousands of feet thick and sea level was more than 400 feet lower than today. Then, the Earth began a dramatic warming and the ice age ended.
As the storm moved across Oklahoma and sections of Texas, highway and emergency crews braced for icy conditions in Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky and the southern slices of Indiana and Illinois.
A truck driver died in Oklahoma when his semi skidded off an icy stretch of turnpike near Chandler, authorities said. The victim's name wasn't immediately released. Another deadly accident also occurred on Interstate 44 near Afton.