The USGS confirmed a small earthquake struck San Diego County Thursday night. The quake struck with a magnitude of 3.3 and at a depth of 7 miles at 11:09 p.m. The epicenter of the earthquake was four miles south-southeast of the Palomar Observatory, 17 miles northeast of Escondido and 39 miles north-northeast of San Diego, according to a computer-generated USGS report.

News stations in the area said they received over a dozen calls from concerned viewers who described the earthquake as very loud and said it was accompanied by three eerie booms. There were also reports of violent shaking. No injuries or damage was reported the tremor. No one in our generation remembers so many small tremors across the world triggering so many sonic booms. One has to wonder what is happening in the earth beneath our feet.

At least 10 more dolphins stranded themselves on the beaches of Cape Cod this week, a Cape-based animal welfare group said. The strandings raised the annual total to more than 200 in just three months, an unusually high number that has left scientists scrambling to find a cause.

"This week we had 10 common dolphins strand in various locations including Brewster, Wellfleet, and Orleans," Michael Booth, spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said. "We had four strand on Monday - one in Wellfleet and three in Brewster."

Six more dolphins stranded Tuesday -- two in Wellfleet, three in Brewster, and one in Orleans, Booth said.

A natural gas well in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, sprung a massive methane leak on March 25. The 238 workers were all safely evacuated. But the situation is so explosive that an exclusion zone for ships and aircraft has been set up around the rig, reports the Mail Online. And nearby rigs have been evacuated, reports the New York Times:

Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.

But that's not the worst of it. The platform lies less than 100 yards/meters from a flare that workers left burning as crew evacuated. The French super-major oil company owner of the rig, Total, dismissed the risk, while the British government claimed the flame needs to burn to prevent gas pressure from building up. But Reuters reports:

[O]ne energy industry consultant said Elgin could become "an explosion waiting to happen" if the oil major did not rapidly stop the leak which is above the water at the wellhead.

A bizarre creature that washed ashore last week in Folly Beach, S.C., sparked speculation in the area and on the Internet that a dead sea monster might have been discovered. The tan-brown animal with greenish patches was strange enough, but what really baffled beachgoers was its massive size and the dinosaur-like bony plates on its sides. It's not clear just how long it was, but photos suggest it exceeded 10 feet.
Like many washed-up carcasses it carried both a salty stench and an air of mystery. Speculation ran rampant, with commenters suggesting that the creature was everything from a dinosaurian sea monster to a toxin-spawned mutation to a chupacabra.

Scientists, however, were somewhat more skeptical. One of the first to identify the monster was Dr. Shane Boylan of the South Carolina Aquarium. Two big clues allowed Boylan to identify the fish more or less immediately: the animal's shape and distinctive bony plates.

A storm system that could spawn twisters in the central U.S. on Thursday already did some damage overnight in Madison, Kan., where softball-sized hail smashed car windshields.

A twister nearly formed near the town just after midnight, the national Storm Prediction Center noted, but the biggest impact was from hail.

"That was a HUGE bow-hook, a monster funnel cloud," WxRisk.com, a private weather forecasting firm, posted on its Facebook page. "Hail in excess of 4.25 in[ches] (107.95 mm). Slightly larger than softballs at times."

The firm said one of three storm cells that moved through the town of 700 "produced monster-size hail for almost 30 minutes ... lots of reports of cars and structures being damaged due to the large hail. Tennis-ball hail, CD hail, Soft-ball hail, and even larger."

Large hail pounded other parts of Kansas overnight as well, and the forecast for Thursday had much of the region, including Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, with a high chance of severe weather, weather.com reported.

"We're getting into that time of year when we get severe thunderstorms just about every day," said Greg Forbes, weather.com's severe weather expert.

The storm system will trigger strong storms in the Ohio Valley on Friday, weather.com forecast.

A recent examination at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has revealed radiation levels up to ten times the fatal dose. The news alarmed thousands of people who have been living in constant fear of radiation exposure for over a year.

­On Tuesday, Fukushima workers inserted a remotely controlled probe into Reactor Two to assess the damage. The device is equipped with a video camera, a thermometer, and a dosimeter - which registered radiation levels much higher than expected.

The probe also discovered that the level of cooling water in the reactor is significantly lower than expected.

The other two melted-down reactors have not yet been examined, but some fear their condition could be even worse.

The management of the Tepco company, which owns the plant, says the findings will not affect the process of cooling down the nuclear fuel.

US, Washington - Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that countries should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists says in a report issued Wednesday.

The greatest danger from extreme weather is in highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe - from Mumbai to Miami - is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.

The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which recently have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.

"We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme," said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who is one of the report's top editors. "That's where we have the losses. That's where we have the insurance payments. That's where things have the potential to fall apart.

Clintonville, Wisconsin - Residents are shaken by booms once again in a small Wisconsin city where a small earthquake was recorded last week. Clintonville police say they received 65 calls Tuesday night between 10:35 and 11:40 from residents who experienced the booming. The city has been relatively quiet lately after the booms awakened residents for several days early last week.

The U.S. Geological Survey said a 1.5-magnitude earthquake struck March 20 in Clintonville, a town of about 4,600 people about 40 miles west of Green Bay.

City administrator Lisa Kuss says she has again contacted the Geological Survey about the latest booms.

US: Conifer, Colorado - Firefighters were hoping to start containing at least part of a mountain wildfire Wednesday that forced hundreds of residents to flee, damaged 28 homes and may have caused the deaths of two people.

Strong gusts and erratic fire behavior forced crews to focus largely on protecting homes overnight instead of attacking the fire that broke out Monday, but more resources have been arriving.

The blaze is among the top in the nation for the priority to get firefighting resources, fire officials said late Tuesday.

Some 450 firefighters from Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Utah were sent to assist 250 firefighters on the ground. Weather permitting, four aircraft were scheduled to drop retardant Wednesday on the 7-square-mile blaze that resulted in mandatory evacuations of 900 homes south of the commuter town of Conifer, about 25 miles southwest of downtown Denver.

Residents of 6,500 more homes were warned Tuesday to be ready to leave because of the fire's behavior. Many homes are in winding canyons, and authorities wanted to give citizens as much advance warning as possible.

Meanwhile, investigators are trying to determine whether the fire reignited from a controlled burn that was meant to reduce vegetation that could fuel a devastating blaze around homes and watersheds.

Are you worried about global warming during this unusually mild winter? Geeze, who would have expected to see 75º F March temperatures in Chicago? Or those earlier than usual cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. which hasn't happened since 1946 (albeit, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 310 ppm vs. 385 ppm now)? Even regions of the Southern Hemisphere had a year with practically no winter temperatures.

So was Al Gore right after all? Perhaps you heard...he's been off to Antarctica watching the ice melt along with NASA's famous climate alarmist James Hansen, featured ClimateGate figure Kevin Trenberth, billionaire Richard Branson and about 100 other panicky pals. Their timing is perfect, offering a lot for them to observe. The Antarctic Peninsula sea ice expanse is nearly 200% greater now than usual.

For those of you here who would have preferred more typical sub-zero temperatures and rampaging tag team blizzards, I've also got some great news. While these conditions bypassed the continental U.S. this year for other locations, don't discard those flannel long johns just yet. There's every indication that you are going to need them over the next many years.

First, for a bit of background perspective, let's realize that climate change is very real, and has been going on for a very long time...dating back to always. It actually began to occur even before the advent of flatulent dinosaurs, industrial smoke stacks and SUVs. And although temperatures have been generally mild over about the past 150 years (since the end of the last "Little Ice Age"...not a true Ice Age), we should remember that significant fluctuations are normal. In fact the past century has witnessed two distinct periods of warming.

The first warming period occurred between 1900 and 1945. Since CO2 levels were relatively low then compared with now, and didn't change much, they couldn't have been the cause before 1950. The second, following a slight cool-down, began in 1975 and rose at quite a constant rate until 1998, a strong Pacific Ocean El Nino year. Yet U.K. Hadley Center and U.S. NOAA balloon instrument analyses fail to show any evidence, whatsoever, of a human CO2 emission-influenced warming telltale "signature" in the upper troposphere over the equator as predicted by all U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global circulation models.