Earth ChangesS

Cloud Lightning

Tropical Storm Andres brushes Mexico; 1 killed

Natalia Parra
Associated Press
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:05 UTC
Image
© Reuters
Tropical Storm Andres flooded homes and knocked down trees along Mexico's Pacific coast, killing at least one person as it headed toward a likely hurricane-force scrape with land on Tuesday.

Mexico issued a hurricane warning for the strip of coast from just south of Manzanillo to near Puerto Vallarta. To the south, the storm dumped heavy rains on Acapulco, where flooding forced about 200 people to evacuate their homes on Monday.

A fisherman drowned when choppy currents overturned his boat in a lagoon Monday in Tecpan de Galeana, between Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, a state police report said. The sun peeked through cloudy skies in Acapulco on Tuesday, but the government closed all schools.

Andres sped up as it headed on a course to graze the port city of Manzanillo at hurricane strength late Tuesday, then push along shore past towns such as Barra de Navidad that are home to some American and Canadian expatriates.
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Info

Why some monkeys are better liars

Catherine Brahic
Science Daily
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:07 UTC
Some monkeys use deceit to fool other group members, and the ability varies from species to species - now researchers think they know why.

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Fish

Great White Sharks' Hunting Skills As Refined As Jack The Ripper's


Science Daily
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:04 UTC
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© Neil HammerschlagUniversity of Miami's Neil Hammerschlag and collaborators from the University of British Columbia and Texas State University collected data on 340 natural predatory attacks by white sharks on Cape fur seals in False Bay, South Africa. They found that spatial patterns of shark predation were not random and that smaller sharks had more dispersed prey search patterns and lower kill success rates than larger sharks. (
What do great white sharks have in common with serial killers? Refined hunting skills, according to a paper recently published in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology. Researchers have found that sharks hunt in a highly focused fashion, just like serial criminals.

Predation is one of the most fundamental and fascinating interactions in nature, and sharks are some of the fiercest predators on Earth. However, their hunting pattern is difficult to study because it is rarely observed in the wild. As a result, shark predatory behavior has remained much of a mystery. Now, researchers from the United States and Canada are using geographic profiling -- a criminal investigation tool used to track a connected series of crimes and locate where serial criminals live -- to examine the hunting patterns of white sharks in South Africa.
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Cult

Scientist: Obama's climate report 'would make Pravda editors blush with envy'

Joseph D'Aleo
IceCap
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:48 UTC
The following is a guest post by Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Chris Walcek, a professor at the University at Albany in NY and a Senior Research Associate at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center who studies the relationship of pollutants within the atmosphere. Dr. Walcek is joining many other scientists in critiquing President Obama's new global warming report.

Dr. Walcek: The authors of the latest US climate change report would make Pravda editors and reporters blush with envy on how they can misconstrue and mis-report truths for a propaganda angle.

In the climate report's Executive Summary there is statement that winter temperatures across the northern great plains have increased more than 7 degrees over the past 30 years. Whenever I see absurd claims like these, I delve into archived temperatures (Global Historical Climate Network) archived at our National Climate Data Center and wade through the analysis to see the "truth". Attached are two figures showing actual thermometer measurements (I doubt that actual thermometer measurements are shown anywhere in this report...) This was the first site I looked at.... but I am confident that the conclusions are robust and more general.

Why only look at winter temperatures (3 months of the year), and ignore the other 75% of the measurements? Because summer temperatures and annual temperatures show cooling!!
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Bizarro Earth

Scaremongering, Scientists Pan Obama Climate Report

Marc Morano
Climate Depot
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:14 UTC
'This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA'...'Misrepresents the science'

Below is a small sampling of first reactions to the President Obama's new global warming report. (See: Obama issues global warming report -- 'Detailed picture of the worst case scenarios' -- 'Poised for its most forceful confrontation with American public' )

Sampling of Scientific Reactions to report

Meteorologist: 'This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA'> - June 16, 2009
By Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting. D'Aleo publishes www.IceCap.US

Excerpt: The report issued was the Hollywood supported NOAA CCSP report which after two rounds of comments by many scientists citing peer review reasons to change, largely ignored the comments and delivered a document even more alarmist than the UN IPCC. It starts out DAY ONE being wrong on many of its claims but goes much further to rely on climate models for 2050 and 2100 to make even more dire prognoses. This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA. They gave the administration the cover to push the unwise cap-and-tax agenda. For D'Aleo's complete reaction, go here.
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Attention

Obama targets US public with call for climate action

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:18 UTC
The Obama administration unveiled the most authoritative report to date on the effects of global warming in America today in an effort to persuade the public of the need to act now to prevent the sweeping and life-altering consequences of global warming.

Americans have been living with the heavy downpours, rising sea levels, and blistering summer heat waves produced by man-made climate change for 30 years said the report, which was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.

The effects of climate change will be even more severe by the end of the century.

Comment: For a little more on this landmark psychological project see -

Propaganda USA: Our hellish future as the planet fries

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Telescope

Volcano Photo From Space Shows Earliest Stages of Massive Eruption


Nasa Earth Observatory
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:33 UTC
volcano
© Nasa Earth ObservatorySaychev Peak on Matua Island erupting
A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption occurred in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the multi-day eruption has been detected 2,407 kilometers east-southeast and 926 kilometers west-northwest of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake.
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Bulb

Scientists Put Global Warming Into Deep Freeze - Warn Of The Coming Ice Age


The Weekly Vice
Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:56 UTC
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In June, 1974, Time Magazine unleashed a mountain of evidence to support what scientists - at the time - suspected was the onset of a coming ice age. Characterizing it's evidence as "telltale signs everywhere", the article went back three decades to summarize statistics and events which pointed towards global cooling.

Newsweek Magazine conducted it's own investigation about a year later, concluding that evidence supporting a coming ice age had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists (were) hard-pressed to keep up with it all."

When average temperatures over a 100 year period were found to have risen about a half-degree Celsius, the global cooling drum beat faded in lieu of a new worry - Global Warming. Environmentalist, looking for a way to connect man-made pollution to a more substantial argument, blamed CO2 emissions as the culprit for changes in the earth's climate. The drum beat of Global Warming grew louder and louder until the turn of the century - when climate data began defying weather model predictions and climate trend forecasts.
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Bizarro Earth

5.4 earthquake rattles Greek island of Rhodes


Associated Press
Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:32 UTC
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 occurred south of the Greek holiday island of Rhodes. There were no reports of damage or injuries.

Athens Geodynamic Institute says the undersea quake occurred at 5:05 p.m. (1405 GMT) Friday at a depth of 25 miles (40 kilometers).

Earthquakes are common in Greece and neighboring Turkey.
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Magnify

In a St. Paul lab, scientists race to defeat a killer wheat fungus

Karen Kaplan
TwinCities.com
Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:57 UTC
The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in multiple layers of envelopes.

Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto dozens of healthy wheat plants each day. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99.

Nearly all of the plants were goners.

Crop scientists fear the Ug99 fungus could wipe out more than 80 percent of worldwide wheat crops as it spreads from its home base in eastern Africa. It has jumped the Red Sea and traveled as far as Iran. Experts say it is poised to enter the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan, and the wind inevitably will carry it to Russia, China and even North America - if it doesn't hitch a ride with people first.
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