Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Drought extinguishes Venezuela's lightning phenomenon

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© Vladimir MarcanoCatatumbo lightning over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.
Darkness rarely lasted long in the skies over Lake Maracaibo. An hour after dusk the show would begin: a lightning bolt, then another, and another, until the whole horizon flashed white.

Electrical storms, product of a unique meteorological phenomenon, have lit up nights in this corner of Venezuela for thousands of years. Francis Drake abandoned a sneak attack on the city of Maracaibo in 1595 when lightning betrayed his ships to the Spanish garrison.

But now the lightning has vanished. A phenomenon that once unleashed up to 20,000 bolts a night stopped in late January. Not a single bolt has been seen since.

"This is unprecedented. In recorded history we have not had such a long stretch without lightning," said Erik Quiroga, an environmentalist and leading authority on the Relampago de Catatumbo, or Catatumbo Lightning.

The spectacle, one of the longest single displays of continuous lightning in the world, lasts up to nine hours a night. On average it is visible over 160 nights a year and from 400km away. Lightning bolts discharged from cloud to cloud strike 16 to 40 times a minute. They can reach an intensity of 400,000 amps but are so high thunder is inaudible. There are similar phenomena in Colombia, Indonesia and Uganda but they do not last the whole night.

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Flashback Uh, oh - raw temperature data in New Zealand tells a different story than the "official" one

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The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:
From NIWA's web site - Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 - 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).
But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

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Umbrella

Lysenkoism and James Hansen

[This is the essay Australia's ABC tried to ban. See story here...]

Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that "the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

Evil Rays

A dubious defender of the scientific faith

Some of America's top "warmist" scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the "climate sceptics", according to the Washington Times. "We're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.

As for "well-funded", a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true "science".

Comment: Here is a PDF of all the emails relating to the global warming scientists proposed fight back. This is again a most revealing email trail. It makes for very interesting reading and tells us a lot about the character and psychology of these people.


Cloud Lightning

Australia: Massive hailstones pound Melbourne amid severe thunderstorm

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© Peter RisbeyHailstones piled up on a Melbourne street after a storm on March 6, 2010
Severe thunderstorms have hit Melbourne as parts of Victoria are lashed by strong winds and large hail stones. Hailstones the size of golf balls have hit the suburb of Melton, in Melbourne's west, as a line of storms moved through western Victoria.

Winds of more 100 kilometres an hour have been recorded at Melbourne Airport while nearly 40 millimetres of rain fell at Rockbank, west of Melbourne.

Streets across Melbourne's CBD have been flooded and police are warning people not to drive through the flooded areas after some motorists became trapped. Trains and trams have been disrupted by the weather.

The Bureau of Meteorology says the storms will continue through to the evening and heavy rain is likely.

Blackbox

Mysterious ailment is killing foxes

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© NTAFoxes
An unidentified disease is making its way through the fox population of Tuolumne County, leading to an increase in sick foxes that have appeared in populated areas.

According to Jennifer Clarke, Tuolumne County Animal Control manager, agents responded to 12 to 14 cases of sick foxes in February alone.

"It's cyclical," she said. "Every seven or eight years a disease will make its way through a certain population of animals."

Animal Control only tests dead animals that have come into contact with humans and domestic pets. It also only tests for rabies.

Four foxes have met this criteria. One was touched by a person and the other three were attacked by pet dogs.

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Mystery problem again hits bee colonies

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© Fresno BeeHoneybees climb over each other entering and exiting a beehive near Woodlake. Colony collapse disorder is characterized by a sudden drop in a bee colony’s population and the inexplicable absence of dead bees. After several mild years, it has resurfaced in California.
A mysterious problem that causes bee colonies to decline is once again taking its toll on the state's beekeepers.

The problem known as colony collapse disorder is characterized by a sudden drop in a bee colony's population and the inexplicable absence of dead bees.

The disorder has no known cure and appears to be cyclical. After several mild years, it has resurfaced with a vengeance, said Eric Mussen, apiculturist with the University of California at Davis.

"It never went away, but this year a substantial number of beekeepers got walloped again," said Mussen, the state's leading bee expert. "And worse than they had been hit before."

Although Mussen said it is too early to tell exactly how many bees have been lost, a bee industry official said losses in the state vary from 30% to 80%.

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Giant Panda Genome Reveals New Insights Into the Bear's Bamboo Diet

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© iStockphoto/Bryan FaustA panda eats a large bamboo stalk
A Chinese-led team including international researchers with a scientist from Cardiff University, has shed new light on some of the giant panda's unusual biological traits, including its famously restricted diet.

The team has successfully sequenced the panda genome for the first time and now, the genetic insights gleaned from the work may aid conservation efforts for the endangered species.

Giant pandas are known for their bamboo diet but the researchers discovered that the animal actually lacks the genes necessary for compete digestion of this staple food source.

Professor Mike Bruford, Cardiff School of Biosciences, worked on the study as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Zoology, funded by the Royal Society.

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Hormone Study Gives Scientists a Sense of How Animals Bond

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© iStockphotoScientists have pinpointed how a key hormone helps animals to recognize others by their smell.
Scientists have pinpointed how a key hormone helps animals to recognize others by their smell.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have shown that the hormone vasopressin helps the brain differentiate between familiar and new scents.

The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that when the hormone fails to function, animals are unable to recognize other individuals from their scent.

The ability to recognize others by smell is crucial in helping animals to establish strong bonds with other animals.

The research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), may offer clues about the way people make emotional connections with others through smell and deepen our understanding of the role scent plays in memory.

Bad Guys

Climate scientists to fight back at skeptics

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

Comment: Such interesting times we live in. After spending the last ten years or so blocking dissent, stopping opposings views being published and fiddling the data to get the results their political masters want, (and thus guaranteeing their rich research funding), suddenly the shoe is on the other foot.

These scientists are upset that they have been outed, that their manipulations have been exposed, their cosy and privileged life has been disrupted and they can see their research incomes drying up in the very near future. So they resort to the classic manipulation tactics - ad hominum attacks, references to McCarthyesque tactics in a vain attempt to further besmirch their opponents, claims that the climate sceptics are funded by the huge multinational energy companies, claims of false science and claims of an unshakable belief system that won't be moved by the facts.

Now look at this last statement from the enraged George Woodwell - "We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths," he wrote.

Is he really saying that his group are "people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths"? Or is this an example of the mask of sanity slipping and showing us his true nature?