A moderate earthquake struck southwest China on Sunday, causing hundreds of homes to collapse and injuring at least 30 people.

The earthquake bureau in Yunnan province, where the quake occurred, said three of the injured people were in serious condition.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the quake damaged 2,500 houses and caused 700 others to collapse.

At least six people died in a spate of snow-related incidents as blizzards swept across the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido over the weekend, police and news reports said Sunday.

A 40-year-old woman and her three teenaged children were found dead late Saturday in a car buried under snow in the town of Nakashibetsu, eastern Hokkaido, a local police spokesman said.

They are believed to have died of carbon monoxide poisoning as the car's exhaust pipe and was blocked by snow and the windows were up, Kyodo News said, adding that snowfalls of more than two metres (6.6 feet) were recorded in the area.

Florida rescue workers have ended their efforts to recover the body of a man who disappeared into a sinkhole that swallowed his bedroom while he slept in a suburban Tampa home, and the house will be demolished, a public safety official said on Saturday.

Jeff Bush, 36, who is presumed dead, was asleep when the other five members of the household who were getting ready for bed on Thursday night heard a loud crash and Jeff screaming.

"Our data has come back, and there is absolutely no way we can do any kind of recovery without endangering lives of workers," said Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico.

She said demolition of the home would begin early on Sunday.

Authorities had not detected any signs of life using listening devices and cameras at the scene.

"There's nothing compatible with life in this situation," Damico said. "There's no way of possible survival."

It makes you wonder what created all that CO2 millions of years ago.

From Louisiana State University

LSU researchers find new information about 'Snowball Earth' period

It is rather difficult to imagine, but approximately 635 million years ago, ice may have covered a vast portion of our planet in an event called "Snowball Earth." According to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, the massive ice age that occurred before animal life appeared, when Earth's landmasses were most likely clustered near the equator, precipitated relatively rapid changes in atmospheric conditions and a subsequent greenhouse heat wave. This particular period of extensive glaciation and subsequent climate changes might have supplied the cataclysmic event that gave rise to modern levels of atmospheric oxygen, paving the way for the rise of animals and the diversification of life during the later Cambrian explosion.

But if ice covered the earth all the way to the tropics during what is known as the Marinoan glaciation, how did the planet spring back from the brink of an ice apocalypse? Huiming Bao, Charles L. Jones Professor in Geology & Geophysics at LSU, might have some of the answers.

Bao and LSU graduate students Bryan Killingsworth and Justin Hayles, together with Chuanming Zhou, a colleague at Chinese Academy of Sciences, had an article published on Feb. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, that provides new clues on the duration of what was a significant change in atmospheric conditions following the Marinoan glaciation.

"The story is to put a time limit on how fast our Earth system can recover from a total frozen state," Bao said. "It is about a unique and rapidly changing post-glacial world, but is also about the incredible resilience of life and life's remarkable ability to restore a new balance between atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere after a global glaciation."

Bao's group went about investigating the post-glaciation period of Snowball Earth by looking at unique occurrences of "crystal fans" of a common mineral known as barite (BaSO4), deposited in rocks following the Marinoan glaciation. Out of the three stable isotopes of oxygen, O-16, O-17 and O-18, Bao's group pays close attention to the relatively scarce isotope O-17. According to Killingsworth, there aren't many phenomena on earth that can change the normally expected ratio of the scare isotope O-17 to more abundant isotope O-18. However, in sulfate minerals such as barite in rock samples from around 635 million years ago, Bao's group finds large deviations in the normal ratio of O-17 to O-18 with respect to O-16 isotopes.

While looking for quotes on an upcoming post about Ocean Heat Content, I ran across the press release for a new paper (in press) by Neely et al, which blames the recent slowdown in global warming on smaller more moderate volcanos.

Add another reason to the non-consensus

Many readers will recall the October 2011 article by Paul Voosen titled Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming. The article presented the different responses from a number of climate scientists, including John Barnes, Kevin Trenberth, Susan Solomon, Jean-Paul Vernier, Ben Santer, John Daniel, Judith Lean, James Hansen, Martin Wild, and Graeme Stephens, to the question, "Why, despite steadily accumulating greenhouse gases, did the rise of the planet's temperature stall for the past decade?" The different replies led Roger Pielke, Sr. to note at the end of his post Candid Comments from Climate Scientists:

These extracts from the Greenwire article illustrate why the climate system is not yet well understood. The science is NOT solved.

Judith Curry provided running commentary in her post Candid Comments from Global Warming Scientists. If you haven't read it, it's a worthwhile read.

Engineers worked gingerly to find out more about a slowly growing sinkhole that swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom, believing the entire house could eventually succumb to the unstable ground.

Jeff Bush, 37, was in his bedroom Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but managed to escape unharmed. Bush's brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued himself by a sheriff's deputy.

Engineers were expected at the home to do more tests after sunrise Saturday. They spent the previous day on the property, taking soil samples and running various tests - while acknowledging that the entire lot was dangerous. No one was allowed in the home.

"I cannot tell you why it has not collapsed yet," Bill Bracken, the owner of an engineering company called to assess the sinkhole, said of the home. He described the earth below as a "very large, very fluid mass."

"This is not your typical sinkhole," said Hillsborough County administrator Mike Merrill. "This is a chasm. For that reason, we're being very deliberate."

Chicago - People in Michigan are enjoying a very cool winter sight.

Massive ice balls are washing ashore. They are created when pieces of ice break away from ice floes in the lake and are rounded off by waves.

Thousands of them have piled up near Good Harbor Bay where they have become quite an attraction for local residents and tourists.

As Quebec residents wake up to a snowy morning commute, thousands are without power across the province.

Wednesday's heavy, wet snow fell on power lines and tree branches, knocking out power to more than 30,000 homes and businesses in Quebec. The Montérégie region was hit the hardest by power outages, where about 20,000 clients are in the dark.

Hydro Québec said it's not clear how long it will take for power to be restored.

Montreal was blanketed with about 16 centimetres of snow yesterday, and Environment Canada is forecasting about 4 more centimetres will fall by end of day Thursday.

Quebec City could see up to 12 centimetres of snow today and overnight.

Riverside, California - Firefighters stopped the spread of a 311-acre wildfire in the heavily vegetated Santa Ana River bottom Friday, despite gusty Santa Ana winds and extremely dry conditions amid a late-winter heat spell.

Firefighters continued to work on hotspots, and a firefighting helicopter was on standby, said Greg Birchfield, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in Riverside County.

Containment was estimated at 60 percent. Firefighters expect to have the fire fully contained by 8 p.m. Saturday. Afternoon conditions included northeast winds at 10-15 mph with gusts to 20-25 mph with temperatures in the low 80s and relative humidity at just 5 percent.

No injuries were reported, Birchfield said.

On March 1, great whites are protected by the California Endangered Species Act
Great white sharks off the coast of California will be protected by the California Endangered Species Act beginning March 1.

Three environmental groups asked the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to protect the fish at the beginning of February. The groups said there are only around 340 great whites in the Northwestern Pacific region, making them in danger of extinction.

Beginning March 1, great whites may not be hunted, pursued, or killed under CESA. Anyone caught harming or killing a shark could face criminal prosecution.