Earth ChangesS

Snowman

Russia: Heavy snowfall leaves over 40,000 people without power

Over 40,000 people were left without electricity in the Moscow and Smolensk Regions, west Russia, after Sunday's snowstorm damaged power lines, local emergencies said on Monday.

The spokesman also said that power has now been restored in a total of 241 villages.

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Arrow Down

22 miners dead, 15 missing in Colombian landslide

BOGOTA - Colombian rescuers used dogs on Sunday to locate bodies buried in a landslide that swamped an open pit gold mine killing at least 22 workers, a Red Cross spokesman said.

The search for 15 missing workers at the small, privately owned Suarez Gold Mine in the southwestern province of Cauca was hindered by the same heavy rains that caused the landslide on Saturday.

Snowman

Winter storm blows through Colorado

DENVER - A rambling storm dropped as much a foot of snow in the mountains and shed rain at lower elevations Sunday, slowing marathon runners, wetting baseball fans and jump-starting the ski season.

The snow caused some fender-benders but no injuries along Interstate 70 through the mountains, State Patrol Master Trooper Ron Watkins said.

Wine

In Georgia Water may be more limited

If Georgia orders watering restrictions in metro Atlanta beyond the current outdoor ban, it will be taking drought-fighting steps that not even arid Southern California or Las Vegas has had to make.

As the state considers restrictions on commercial and industrial users, water experts around the nation say they don't recall any major U.S. metro area being forced into such dire drought measures in about two decades.

"Most large metropolitan areas have systems in place where they try to be better managers of the resource than that," said Don Wilhite, who founded the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has been involved in drought responses for at least three decades.

Cloud Lightning

Storms pound north Texas with heavy rain, wind

Showers and thunderstorms flooded roads, damaged buildings and knocked out power Monday as a strong weather system swept across North Texas. The rainy weather was blamed for at least one death and caused numerous accidents and traffic delays in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Light Saber

Famous meteorologist on Gore's warming warning: "We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was"

One of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

Comment: For more information on what Dr. William Gray is talking about, read Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow.


Chess

Flashback Dissidents Against Dogma

We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naรฏvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.

Comment: He says, "As vapor, [water is] a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it." While it is the most important, it simply is untrue that models don't take into account water vapor as a radiative forcing feedback. He's misinformed about this. In terms of radiation feedback effects of water vapor in the atmosphere models take this into account along with precipitation, evaporation and snow and ice cover. However, he may be referring to the cloud feedback mechanism which models do have a hard time dealing with. Whether low clouds or high clouds develop in response to CO2 forcing plays a large role on the effects on climate. Low clouds tend to cool the planet by making a high albedo surface and thus reflecting sunlight whereas high clouds tend to cause a blanket-type warming by reflecting long wave radiation back to the surface. In this, the models may have got it wrong.


Cloud Lightning

Tourists die in Thai cave floods

Eight tourists, including one Briton, have died after being swept away by flash floods in Thailand while exploring a cave.

The tour group were trekking through the Khao Sok national park in Surat Thani province when the cave flooded.

Bizarro Earth

Elephant rampage frightens villagers in India



Wild elephants play in the Deeparbil wetland, a wildlife sanctuary, in Deeparbil, India.

GAUHATI, India - About 100 wild elephants have converged on a river island in northeast India, demolishing homes, feasting on sugarcane and panicking residents, officials said Saturday.

Magnify

Thought Extinct: Rare South China Tiger Spotted in Wild

BEIJING - A type of tiger thought to be extinct in the wild for more than two decades has been photographed in a mountainous area in northwest China, state media reported Saturday.

The endangered subspecies known as the South China tiger was spotted by a farmer on Oct. 3, the China Daily said.

Experts confirmed that it was a young wild South China tiger, the newspaper quoted Shaanxi Forestry Administration Bureau Deputy Director Zhu Julong as saying.