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After The Storm


Space Weather
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:46 UTC
Last week, a powerful blizzard paralyzed parts of the US Midwest. Mike Hollingshead of Blair, Nebraska, walked outside after the storm and this is what he saw:
Image
© Mike Hollingshead

Sunlight shining through ice crystals had produced a bright pair of sundogs and a vivid circumzenithal arc. "These tend to appear on the backside of a storm's clearing line as ice crystals blow through the air," notes Hollingshead. "It's a beautiful sight but not a ton of fun to photograph at 5o F with winds blowing 40 mph."
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Fish

Nine whales beached in Italy in rare accident


The Telegraph
Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:05 UTC
Beached sperm whale
© Agence France-Presse
The sperm whale is the largest of all toothed whales and is considered a vulnerable species.
A pod of sperm whales was beached on Italy's southern coast and at least five died in what experts said was a rare mass beaching for such a large species.

Nine whales measuring up to 40 feet in length were stranded Thursday on a beach in Puglia, the heel of boot-shaped Italy.

Only two managed to swim back to deeper waters and at least five were dead by Saturday, said Nicola Zizzo, one of the veterinarians caring for the animals. He said officials were considering euthanising the last two whales still trapped in high waves just off the beach.

The rough seas were making it difficult to understand even how many whales were still alive, with other experts telling Italian media that only one was breathing.

The sperm whale is the largest of all toothed whales and is considered a vulnerable species.
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Cow Skull

Second Drug to Treat Cattle Deadly to Vultures

Michael Casey
The Associated Press
Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:01 UTC
Bangkok - A second drug used to treat cattle for pain could be deadly to endangered vultures and should be prohibited as part of a campaign to prevent their extinction, according to a study released Wednesday.

Millions of long-billed, slender-billed and oriental white-backed vultures have died in South Asia - mostly in India - after eating cattle carcasses tainted with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory painkiller given to sick cows.

Now, researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters have found that a second drug, ketoprofen, has proven toxic to vultures and should no longer be used to treat livestock in Asia.
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Better Earth

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: The World is COOLING, Not Warming Says Scientist Peter Taylor...And We're Not Prepared


Daily Mail
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:12 UTC
daily mail icebreaker
© Reuters
The ice breaker L'Astrolabe in the Antarctic sea. Many scientists expect a repeat of the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century when the Earth cooled and the Thames froze every winter
In his provocative book Chill, he warns that the world is cooling not warming and that solutions proposed at Copenhagen ignore the risks of a possible return of the Ice Age...

Like a magician who fools themselves but not audience, the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) lobby have identified the wrong problem and the wrong solution.

Global cooling threatens disaster for humanity in the developed and developing world alike, yet the media and the scientific consensus ignores this peril.

The Climategate controversy revolves around whether warming has been real and why it has not persisted - but it misses the point.

Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming.
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Bizarro Earth

Deadly Storm Leaves Behind a Shivering Nation

Carolyn Thompson
The Associated Press
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:43 UTC
Image
© AP Photo
Carol Silvestri has a little fun with her penguin hat as she braves chilling temperatures during an annual trip to the city with her sisters.
A deadly, windy storm that has paralyzed a wide swath of the nation for days left bitter cold behind as it finally made its exit Thursday, with temperatures below freezing in several states and gusts that made it feel as cold as minus 25.

Power failures in the Midwest, dozens of lost hunters in the West and howling winds that helped blow over a bus in New York provided just a few lingering miseries from the first major storm of the season.

Emergency rooms took in people who had slipped and fallen, overdone shoveling or reached their hands into clogged snowblowers, while tow trucks freed drivers from the sides of icy roads and everyday residents simply struggled to get around in the frigid winds.

"Like I stuck my face in the freezer," was how Bincy Mathew described the feeling in Chicago on Thursday, complaining about his watering eyes: "I think they are going to freeze up."
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Better Earth

Earth's Atmosphere May Be Extraterrestrial in Origin

Sid Perkins
Science News
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:00 UTC
Analyses of noble gases hint that air didn't fizz from within the planet

Isotopic analyses of the gases krypton and xenon suggest that much of Earth's atmosphere came from outer space, not inner space.

Krypton and xenon appear in Earth's atmosphere - and in the universe as a whole - only in trace amounts. Detailed analyses of the gases provide clues about where those atmospheric components originated, says Greg Holland, an isotope geochemist at the University of Manchester in England. Those analyses, reported in the Dec. 11 Science, suggest that those gases, as well as many others now cloaking our planet, arrived via comets or were swept up from nearby gas clouds during the late stages of Earth's formation.

Some scientists have proposed that the gases in Earth's atmosphere originated within the planet, says Holland. According to those arguments, the atmosphere either seeped out of the Earth as the planet gradually cooled or were expelled from the crust when large numbers of asteroids pummeled the planet and melted its surface around 3.9 billion years ago. But new isotopic evidence gathered by Holland and his colleagues suggests that those scenarios probably aren't right.
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Fish

Scientist Work To Protect Cuba's Unspoiled Reefs

Nick Miroff
NPR
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:35 UTC
Image
© Noel Lopez
The reefs of Cuba's Los Jardines de la Reina are protected from fishermen, pollution and fertilizer runoff. The waters are plentiful with huge fish, sharks, sea turtles and saltwater crocodiles.
Cuba has some the most extensive coral reefs in the hemisphere, but political strains between Washington and Havana largely have kept American scientists away.

A new partnership for marine research is trying to change that at one of Cuba's most remote places, far from people and pollution.

Off of central Cuba's southern coast, hundreds of tiny islands stretch into the Caribbean. They are ringed with narrow beaches and thick stands of red mangrove.
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Monkey Wrench

Sorry Monsanto, You're Wrong: More GE Crops Mean More Pesticides

Tara Lohan
Alternet
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:23 UTC
When do we get to officially call the "green revolution" an environmental nightmare?

More genetically engineered crops means less pesticides are needed, right? That's what the big agricultural biotech companies, like Monsanto, promised. But, a report proves they're wrong. Really wrong.

First, the report was funded by a coalition of non-governmental organizations including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Food Safety, the Cornerstone Campaign, Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, Greenpeace International and Rural Advancement Fund International USA.

They found that GE corn, soybean, and cotton crops have increased the use of weed-killing herbicides in the U.S. by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008. Why? Because the idea behind many of the big GE crops is to make them resistant to herbicides, for instance Roundup Ready Soybeans won't be killed if you spray the herbicide Roundup on them. Roundup instead is suppose to kill the weeds around the plant. But, crafty little nature has outsmarted biotech again and now we've got weeds that have become resistant as well. Woops.
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Frog

Dark side of a natural gas boom: environmental destruction

Jad Mouawad and Clifford Krauss
New York Times
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:39 UTC
New Yorkers have just a few more days to petition Governor Patterson before permits for natural gas drilling utilizing a method called hydraulic fracturing will be issued in New York State. If drilling takes effect, New York's beautiful, pristine landscapes will soon be reduced to wastelands similar to these in Pennsyvania shown in this video


Dimock, Pennsylvania - Victoria Switzer dreamed of a peaceful retirement in these Appalachian hills. Instead, she is coping with a big problem after a nearby natural gas well contaminated her family's drinking water with high levels of methane.
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Magnify

'Act of nature': Climate change not to blame for polar bear cannibalism

Alison Brownlee
National Post
Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:41 UTC
Image

A polar bear with a cub it has killed and partly eaten
The gory photos of male polar bears devouring cubs, dragging shredded carcasses around and creating a bloody mess on the white snow of Canada's North have caused a stir on the Internet and in reports that link the activity to climate change.

But cannibalism among the species is a natural occurrence, says one expert, disputing what is just the latest story to put the polar bear in the debate over man-made global warming.

"Both Inuit and scientific knowledge show that cannibalism in polar bears happens, and it probably always has," said Steve Pinksen, director of policy and legislation for Nunavut's Department of Environment.

Comment: It is well documented that the polar bear population is increasing, not decreasing. So the increase in cannibalism among polar bears, if any, may be due to that rather than the non-existent global warming.

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