Minneapolis - Powerful winds slammed parts of four Midwestern states on Wednesday, leaving behind shattered windows, toppled power lines and a handful of injuries. At least a half dozen suspected tornadoes were reported.

The National Weather Service received reports of a possible tornado near downtown Minneapolis, where winds tore off part of a 90-year-old metal church steeple. Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois were also hit, though the only confirmed tornado as of Wednesday night was in Hastings, about 30 miles southeast of Minneapolis, where a 100-yard-long swath of trees was flattened.

Two killer whales have been spotted off the Mullet peninsula.

Dúlra Nature Tours was conducting a survey of whales, dolphins and sharks, when 'Comet' and 'Puffin', male and female members of the west coast community in Scotland, were seen near the Inishkea Islands.

Machiel Oudejans, a marine biologist working with Dúlra Nature Tours, said the killer whales were identified using photographs of the dorsal fins and the white saddle patch behind the dorsal fin.

"By matching the photos to an online database in Scotland, the whales were identified. These whales are commonly observed near the Hebrides, west of Scotland. Little is known about the distribution of these whales, which occasionally travel long distances and visit the Irish coastal waters," said Mr Oudejans.

For the first time in more than a century, scientists have found wild-born Atlantic salmon in a Lake Ontario tributary that once teemed with the fish, suggesting that the native species is recovering after many years of reproductive failure.

Jim Johnson, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said Wednesday that 41 yearling wild Atlantic salmon were collected this summer in the Salmon River at the eastern end of the lake in New York. He attributes the increase to changes in the lake's food chain.

Atlantic salmon were once abundant in Lake Ontario and its tributaries, with reports from the 1800s of fishermen catching thousands of 15- to 20-pound fish per night from the Salmon River. By the turn of the century, overfishing, dams, deforestation and pollution had wiped out the population.

Miami Hurricane Bill became a dangerous Category 4 storm Wednesday as it howled through the open Atlantic's energizing waters, which could further boost the storm's power as it moves north.

Forecasters said Bill should begin pushing large swells toward Bermuda and parts of the southeastern U.S. coast by the weekend, but it wasn't yet clear how close the storm will come to land.

The National Hurricane Center also said people in the Leeward Islands should keep an eye on the storm, though its core was expected to pass well to the northeast of the chain in the next 24 hours. Fishermen in Antigua were advised to dock their boats.

Date-Time:
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 10:45:14 UTC
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 04:15:14 PM at epicenter

Location:
26.565°N, 92.486°E

Depth:
10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program

Distances:
85 km (55 miles) ENE of Gauhati, Assam, India

125 km (80 miles) NNE of Shillong, Meghalaya, India

610 km (375 miles) NE of Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India

1530 km (950 miles) E of NEW DELHI, Delhi, India

Enough data has already been released to unequivocally prove scientific fraud. All of the global temperature datasets that include the actual physical measurements of the global temperature clearly demonstrate that there was a rapid rise in global temperature from around 1910 to about 1942, followed by a slow drop in global temperature from 1942 to 1975, at which time the world reverted to warming which all global temperature datasets clearly show ended after 1998, with a cooling trend that is still continuing.

Global emissions increased by just half a billion tonnes of CO₂ per year during the global warming of about half a degree C from 1910 to 1942. This equates to each gigatonne increase in CO₂ emissions causing a one degree C rise in global temperature.

As a result of increased CO₂ emissions from post-war industrialization, from 1942 to 1975 global emissions increase from under 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year in 1942 to over 20 billion tonnes of CO₂ by 1975.

During the cooling that occurred from 1942 to 1975 the global emissions increase by 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year and based on the previous warming this should have caused 16C of global warming but instead there was nothing but cooling.

In a Time/CNN story by Michael Grunwald "Steven Chu, A Political Scientist" on Chu's mission to China, attempting to convince them to cooperate on emissions reductions in the December Copenhagen UN conference to discuss the next step after Kyoto (the Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank because they know our pain would be their gain).

Grunwald noted "When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious, almost plaintive: "You know, it's totally irresponsible. You're not supposed to make up the facts.""

I agree with the very last sentence. NOAA, NASA GISS and Hadley though are guilty of exactly that. They have created or enhanced man-made global warming by careless and possibly fraudulent methods. They started by dropping 80% of the world's stations from their calculations, most rural, by not ensuring the instruments are not improperly sited (90% of the approximately 1000 surveyed and photographed by Anthony Watt's team of volunteers do not meet the government's own published standards), by not adjusting properly for the urbanization warming that has taken place as the world's population rose for 1.6 to 6.7 billion people since 1900 (in the case of the US data, actually removing a very good urban adjustment), by employing and using instruments not really meant for precision temperature measurements or with warm biases, and most recently by eliminating ocean data sources like satellite or not using promising new sources like the Argo buoys because they are showing a cold 'bias' or cooling when the goal is to show warming in agreement with the models and their forecasts.

Those apparently tasked with carrying the standard for anthopogenic global warming are increasingly resembling the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. This has huge implications for the political struggle for resources to reduce emissions and convert our energy base to greener technologies. So what follows will look like piling on--but it isn't. We really need to get better measurements, better analysis and better communications or our efforts to control global warming will go the same way as Australia's, where they recently voted down their version of Cap and Trade.

First up is Phil Jones from East Anglia University in the UK, where he is charged with collating, smoothing and computing average temperatures from thousands of measurement stations around the world. When served with Freedom of Information requests by climate skeptics, the response from Dr. Jones and East Anglia was more or less that they lost it. Steve Macintyre from Climate Audit, who made one of the FOI requests, reports on it here. Roger Pielke Jr., who also filed one request, talks about the implications of their inability to archive data here. Key quote:"Can this be serious? So not only is it now impossible to replicate or reevaluate homogeneity adjustments made in the past -- which might be important to do as new information is learned about the spatial representativeness of siting, land use effects, and so on -- but it is now also impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. CRU is basically saying, "trust us." So much for settling questions and resolving debates with empirical information (i.e., science)."

Miami - The National Hurricane Center says Hurricane Bill has become a Category 3 storm far out in the Atlantic.

A hurricane hunter plane found that winds had increased to near 125 mph Tuesday night, making Bill a major hurricane, the first of the Atlantic season.

The National Hurricane Center says people in the Leeward Islands should monitor Bill's progress.

As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, Bill was centered about 635 miles east of the Leeward Islands, moving west-northwest near 16 mph.

The most significant threat the storm seemed to pose was to Bermuda, which it could pass in three or four days. But it also could move directly between Bermuda and the eastern coast of the U.S. without making landfall.

A Nevada earthquake monitoring station reported a moderate jolt early Sunday, but the U.S. Geological Survey and a Utah station say they have no record of such a temblor.

A report by the Nevada Seismological Laboratory said a magnitude-4.2 quake struck early Sunday about a dozen miles east-southeast of Rock House, near the Idaho line.

Richard Buckmaster, a USGS geophysicist stationed in Golden, Colo., told The Associated Press late Sunday that his agency had no record of any quake approaching 4 magnitude in Nevada, and none around Rock House.

Calls to the Nevada Seismological Laboratory went unanswered Sunday but the lab's Web site carried no reports of such a quake.

Jim Pechmann, a seismograph for the University of Utah, also was unable to verify the report.

"We would certainly have picked that up," Pechmann said.