Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Storm Pounds Canadian Maritimes

Image
© CBC NewsA snowplow clears streets in downtown Halifax on Saturday.
A storm is battering most of the Maritimes, wreaking havoc on travel and power lines.

Snow, ice pellets, freezing rain and rain have been falling most of the day in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I., creating treacherous road conditions in some areas.

High winds are also being experienced right across the region, resulting in blowing snow and whiteouts.

No major accidents have been reported, but RCMP on Saturday reminded motorists to drive carefully.

Confederation Bridge officials were restricting certain types of vehicles from crossing the bridge linking Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, effective 6:30 p.m. local time, due to high winds.

Bizarro Earth

Ocean Storm Brings Deep Snow To New England

An ocean storm was backing into northern New England on Saturday, and forecasters said it will likely stick around through the weekend.

It's expected to bringing bursts of heavy snow to Maine and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, with accumulations up to a foot and a half in places.

Meteorologist David Glenn said most storms approach the area from the south, but because this one is coming in from the east, it will likely hang around longer.

The snow was expected to increase in intensity throughout the day and so were the winds. Forecasts called for gusts up to 45 mph Saturday night that could create drifting snow, while coastal areas were seeing higher tides than normal and could get some flooding.

Cloud Lightning

Hundreds Flee Australia Flooding


More than 1,000 people have been evacuated from an outback town in the Australian state of New South Wales, after days of flooding.

Two areas of the state have been declared natural disaster areas after days of heavy rains swelled rivers and left farms cut off.

As water levels threatened to reach 5.5m (18ft), up to 1,200 people were moved from the town of Coonamble.

It comes after summer wildfires wreaked havoc on the other side of the country.

Bizarro Earth

Lightning Strikes Sleeping Woman

A woman has been taken to hospital after her house was struck by lightning in Melbourne's east last night.

She was sleeping in her home in Glencairn Avenue, Ringwood when the lightning struck about 10pm (AEDT).

The Metropolitan Fire Brigade's (MFB) Alan Hunter says the bolt hit the roof, travelled down into the house and into a wardrobe.

Snowman

U.S. East Coast Faces Deep Freeze; Florida Oranges Threatened

The U.S. East Coast faces the coldest night of the season as frigid air spills south and threatens agriculture in Georgia, Alabama and the orange crop in Florida.

Freeze warnings were posted by the National Weather Service as far south as the Orlando area, which may be as many as 20 degrees below normal tonight, the National Weather Service said. The advisory alerts growers that subfreezing temperatures are imminent and may kill crops or other sensitive vegetation.

Tampa and others cities in the central part of the state are under a freeze warning from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. local time tomorrow. Temperatures may fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero Celsius) for more than three consecutive hours, the National Weather Service in Tampa said on its Web site.

Snowman

Climategate: You should be steamed

Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by "Climategate."

If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations.

Mr. Potato

Michael Mann: Science Journals Must Be Unpolluted by Politics

In his Dec. 18 op-ed "How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus," Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.

In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.

That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama - who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse - have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.

And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.

Fish

Oceans love carbon dioxide, say sea scientists

Now the doomsayers are telling you that the oceans are turning acid from all that nasty carbon dioxide being absorbed into the seas. How frightening! Or perhaps not? According to oceanographers there's as much chance of the planet's seas turning acid as there is of Al Gore admitting he lied. So it seems we can trust the ecofascists even less now they've started pontificating about other scientific disciplines. In response to the latest environmental hype oceanographers have come out to tell us what the facts actually are and its not good reading for Mr. Gore!

It seems that sea life thrives on warmer water and increased carbon dioxide. On June 2nd, 2009 a groundbreaking new research paper was announced by zoologists that indicated that elevated water temperatures and heightened concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) dramatically increases the growth rate of a keystone species of sea star and may well be beneficial to other sea crustaceans.

Yes, that's right - sea-dwelling creatures like a drop of acid in the drink. Crustaceans (e.g. shellfish and coral) survive by making carbonate structures and they do so by turning soluble bicarbonates in the water to carbonates. In basic terms, their way of life causes them to release CO2 into the water. It's normal, not nasty, say the sea scientists.

Gear

"Ocean acidification" keeps evil man-made pollutant CO2 on the agenda

I first chanced upon this horror (in abbreviated form) while in the bath reading The Week (which used to be my favourite mag but has gone seriously off now that it has abandoned all pretence of neutrality on the AGW * issue). And though I admit it wasn't quite as bad as having Freddy Krueger's clawed hand come from beneath the bubbles to disembowel me then drag me down the plughole, it still gave me a seriously nasty turn - as I'm sure it will you too once I've parsed its insidious monstrousness.

It's an article Charles Clover wrote in The Sunday Times a few weeks ago titled "If climate change doesn't grab you, meet its evil twin." On first glance, it might look like just more of the same old glib drivel we've come to expect from the MSM's environment specialists...

There's the statutory de haut en bas dismissal of your typical sceptic: "always a man, almost invariably wearing a tweed jacket", apparently, claims the tweed-jacket-wearing, pheasant-shooting Clover.

MIB

Climategate: Michael Mann's very unhappy New Year

As I said yesterday, one of our jobs this year is to wipe the complacent smiles off the smug faces of the lobbyists, "experts", "scientists", politicians and activists pushing AGW.

This is why I am so glad to report that Michael Mann - creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal - is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he'll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.

Comment: Who is Kent Clizbe? CIA counter-terrorism 'expert':
Kent served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as a contractor after 9/11. He has worked in various capacities in intelligence positions in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His specialty is Counter-terrorism and Islamic Extremism.

Kent has also worked Counter-intelligence, Counter-proliferation, Counter-narcotics, and other targets. In addition to extensive liaison work with foreign intel services, he has worked in the US Intel Community in inter-agency, inter-governmental intelligence operations since 9/11. He was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest civilian intelligence agency decoration for contractors, for his counter-terrorist operations in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. His work in the Philippines was described in an article by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2007, Jihadists in Paradise.