Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Mt. Krakatau activity increases


jakartapost.com
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:52 UTC
SERANG, Banten (Antara): Mount Krakatau volcanic activity has increased over the past three days, prompting authorities to raise its status.

The volcano had produced 20 tremors and released 80-meter to 200-meter-long white-grey smoke plumes every hour from Oct. 24 to Oct. 26, Sigin, a monitoring officer , said Friday.
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Tropical depression forms south of Haiti


Reuters
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:11 UTC
The 16th tropical depression of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season formed south of Haiti, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Saturday.

The depression could become Tropical Storm Noel if its sustained winds reach 39 miles per hour (63 km per hour).
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Hazardous air sparks mass warnings in California


Agence France-Presse
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:17 UTC
Health officials on Saturday warned of extremely hazardous air quality in the wake of this week's wildfires that devoured swaths of Southern California territory and spewed massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere.

©Agence France-Presse
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Australia: Village cops battering as freak twister pays a visit

Heath Gilmore and Manuel Mitternacht
The Sydney Morning Herald
Sat, 27 Oct 2007 20:59 UTC


©n/a
Trail of destruction ... the tornado blew the walls out of St Matthew's Anglican Church.

A freak tornado with winds up to 150 kmh that tore through a northern NSW village was one of the rarest weather events to happen in a populated area of Australia.
Read More...
Stop

California fires still threaten 20,000 homes

Jennifer Steinhauer and Randal C. Archibold
Herald Tribune
Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:35 UTC
The nine scattered fires that have caused seven confirmed deaths in Southern California continued to burn Saturday, with more than 20,000 homes still in danger, officials said.

Lighter winds and higher humidity enabled firefighters to go on the attack, but many fingers of the fire remain unpredictable. It will take more than a week to put the fires out and probably longer to stamp out flare-ups, officials said.

©Unknown

Fire crews at the Santiago Canyon fire in Orange County made a stand on an old ridge-top truck trail to prevent the fire from burning several homes and heading into Riverside County.
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Powerful typhoon heads for Tokyo


News.com.au
Sat, 27 Oct 2007 14:15 UTC
A typhoon packing winds of up to 144km/h was today churning off Japan's main island in the Pacific Ocean, heading for the Tokyo region.

Typhoon Faxai was located 300km south of Tokyo and was moving northeast at 85km/h, the meteorological agency said.

"Faxai", a Laotian name for a woman, is expected to bring strong winds, the national weather agency said, warning of heavy rain and possible landslides in eastern Japan.

The typhoon is expected to leave Japan by early Monday, it added.
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Much of U.S. Could See a Water Shortage

Brian Skoloff
Associated Press
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:42 UTC
An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn't have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York's reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.

Across America, the picture is critically clear - the nation's freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst. The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.
Read More...
X

Rains Flood Capital of Congo, 30 Die


Associated Press
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:15 UTC
Heavy rains swelled into a torrent of water that swamped Congo's sprawling capital, killing 30 people in less than 24 hours, the government said Friday.

The death toll was likely to rise, an official at Congo's humanitarian affairs ministry said, because relief workers have not been able to reach many flooded neighborhoods.
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Climate Predictions: Call Off the Quest

Myles R. Allen and David J. Frame
Science Magazine
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:31 UTC
Over the past 30 years, the climate research community has made valiant efforts to answer the "climate sensitivity" question: What is the long-term equilibrium warming response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide? Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) concluded that this sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2° to 4.5°C, with a 1-in-3 chance that it is outside that range. The lower bound of 2°C is slightly higher than the 1.6°C proposed in the 1970s (2); progress on the upper bound has been minimal.

©Science Magazine
Carbon dioxide-induced warming under two scenarios simulated by an ensemble of simple climate models. (Left) CO2 levels are stabilized in 2100 at 450 ppm; (right) the stabilization target is recomputed in 2050. Shading denotes the likelihood of a particular simulation based on goodness-of-fit to observations of recent surface and subsurface-ocean temperature trends (7, 8). Simulations are plotted in order of increasing likelihood, so worse-fitting models are obscured. The bar labeled "EQM" shows the models' likelihood against their long-term equilibrium warming at 450 ppm. How these likelihoods are translated into forecast probabilities is controversial, and the more asymmetric the likelihood function, the greater the scope for controversy.
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Huge Ash Cloud as Indonesia's Mount Soputan Erupts


Javno
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:24 UTC


©n/a

Mount Soputan volcano on the northern tip of Indonesia's Sulawesi island has erupted, throwing columns of ash 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) into the air, an official said on Friday. Saut Simatupang, of Indonesia's Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, said that the eruption did not appear to pose an immediate threat to residents, although ash had reached the nearest town.
Read More...