Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Half of Stranded Air Comet Passengers Rescued


Agence France-Presse
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:00 UTC
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© AFPPassengers of Spanish airlines Air Comet wait in Barajas airport in Madrid
Special charter flights have rescued nearly half of the 7,000 passengers left stranded by the collapse of Air Comet, according to information released Saturday by Spain's airport authority.

Spain suspended Air Comet's operating license on Tuesday after the airline filed for protection from creditors and laid off all of its 666 employees.

Thousands of travelers were left stuck at airports in Spain and Latin America, and the Spanish government said Wednesday it had chartered four planes to take them to their destinations.

A 400-seat charter flight took off from Madrid's Barajas airport for Lima on Saturday, according to a spokesman for Aena, Spain's publicly-owned airport management company.
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Binoculars

Barmy Brits Brave Winter Chill for Christmas Dip


Agence France-Presse
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:00 UTC
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© AFPMembers of the Bournemouth Spartans swimming club taking to the Channel for their Christmas Day swim in Boscombe near Bournemouth, Dorset.
The traditional British Christmas: a cosy fire, turkey, mince pies and sherry. Or, for some brave souls, stripping off in the bitter winter chill and charging headlong into the sea.

In Brighton, and at Porthcawl on the south Wales shore, hundreds of people, some in fancy dress, joined in the annual festive dips, to the bemusement of onlookers.

In the capital, swimmers in more traditional bathing costumes and caps made do by plunging into The Serpentine lake in Hyde Park.

The Brighton Swimming Club's traditional dip -- bracing might best describe it -- was first recorded in 1885.

"Spectators-wise, I've never seen so many people here. There must have been around 1,500 to 2,000," said club chairman John Ottaway.
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Bizarro Earth

US: Forecasters Warn of Continued Blizzards in Plains

Dinesh Ramde
My Way News
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:34 UTC
Residents in the nation's heartland were digging out after a blustery storm as meteorologists warned that blizzard conditions could continue across the northern Plains on Saturday.

The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin through Saturday. The storm had already dumped significant snow across the region, including a record 14 inches in Oklahoma City and 11 inches in Duluth, Minn., on Thursday.

Slippery roads have been blamed for at least 21 deaths this week as the storm lumbered across the country from the Southwest.
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Fish

North America's biggest fish slips toward extinction

Matthew Brown
The Associated Press
Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:24 UTC
White sturgeon
© AP Photo/Monterey Bay Aquarium, Randy WildeThis undated image provided by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, shows the endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon. As efforts falter to save this largest freshwater fish — a toothless beast left over from the days of dinosaurs — officials hope to stave off extinction by sending more water hurtling down a river so the fish can spawn in the wild.
Billings, Montana. - As efforts falter to save North America's largest freshwater fish - a toothless beast left over from the days of dinosaurs - officials hope to stave off extinction by sending more water hurtling down a river so the fish can spawn in the wild.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday declared that attempts over the past two years to save the endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon had failed.

The prehistoric sturgeon, characterized by its large head and armor-like scales, can reach 19 feet long and top 1,000 pounds.

An isolated population of the species lives along a stretch of the Kootenai that passes through Montana, northern Idaho and southern British Columbia. Fewer than 500 of the bottom-feeding behemoths survive - and it's been 35 years since they successfully spawned.

The problem is Libby Dam, a hydroelectric facility in Montana run by the Army Corps of Engineers that serves power markets in the Pacific Northwest. When the dam went up in 1974, it stopped periodic flooding of Bonners Ferry, Idaho - but also high water flows that triggered the sturgeon to move upriver and spawn.
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Bizarro Earth

6.0 Earthquake Hits Off Banda Sea, Indonesia


Xinhua
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:47 UTC
An earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale hit off Banda Sea, Indonesia, at 17:04 p.m. ( 0904 GMT) Saturday, according to a bulletin released by the Hong Kong Observatory.

The epicenter was initially determined to be at 5.6 degrees south latitude and 131.1 degrees east longitude, about 390 km east- southeast of Ambon, Indonesia.
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Bizarro Earth

Scientists Say Magma Building Up in Mayon Volcano

Bullit Marquez
PhysOrg
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 06:00 UTC
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© AP Photo/Bullit MarquezLava flows continuously from the crater of Mayon volcano in a continuing mild eruption as viewed from Sto. Domingo township, Albay province, about 500 kilometers southeast of Manila, Philippines.
Fewer earthquakes have been recorded in the Philippines' lava-spilling Mayon volcano, but magma continues to build up inside and any lull in activity could be followed by a bigger eruption, scientists said Saturday.

A hazardous eruption remains possible within days, and residents who live near the volcano's slopes should not be misled into leaving the evacuation centers that they spend Christmas in and venturing back to their homes, volcanologist Ed Laguerta warned.

"The number of volcanic earthquakes has gone down, but this is just part of the eruptive cycle of Mayon," he said.

The number of quakes decreased from 871 recorded during the 24-hour period ending Friday morning to 406 recorded during the next 24 hours, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said.
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Bizarro Earth

Just 16 Ships Expel as Much Pollution as All the Cars in the World

E. Huff
Natural News
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:59 UTC
Large shipping vessels have become commonplace in today's global marketplace as goods are imported and exported across the world. While the high levels of pollution they create are something that most people don't think too much about, some scientists are beginning to evaluate their environmental effect. One of the most disturbing facts discovered about these giant ships is that a mere 16 of them emit as much sulfur as do all the cars in the world combined.

Fred Pearce, a science writer and environmental consultant for New Scientist, has been studying the shipping industry for quite some time. He has focused particularly on their use of filthy, toxic fuel that is polluting the air at a staggering pace. According to his assessment, thousands of people die every year from the toxic fumes that are emitted from their smokestacks, lingering in the air as a brown haze for many days. If current practices continue, he estimates that upwards of a million people will die in the next decade due to ship pollution.
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Better Earth

North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux

Richard A. Lovett
National Geographic
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 08:29 UTC
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Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.

The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.

Now, newly analyzed data suggest that there's a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core's surface, possibly being created by a mysterious "plume" of magnetism arising from deeper in the core.
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Cloud Lightning

Best of the Web: The Coming Ice Age

David Deming
The American Thinker
Wed, 13 May 2009 06:00 UTC
Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.... Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models.... our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. ... By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.


Comment: The above remarks from this thoughtful article provoke the unavoidable speculation that the PTB are TRYING to induce another ice age with their global warming nonsense. Who needs WMDs when you can kill billions by starvation and freezing cold?


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Our near future?
Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.

On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously.
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Igloo

Arctic Britain falls to -16C as Christmas getaway descends into chaos

Sophie Freeman
UK Daily Mail
Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:32 UTC
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© AFP/Getty ImagesTractors remove snow from the ground at Manchester Airport
  • Temperatures plunge to -16C in Scotland and -9C in England
  • 12million drivers expecting to begin Christmas getaways today
  • AA attends about 3,000 breakdowns since midnight across the UK
  • EasyJet cancels at least 20 flights in and out of London airports
  • Nine weather-related deaths reported across Britain since Monday
Nine people have died and millions face Christmas travel chaos as Britain endures freezing temperatures colder than Alaska.

The mercury plunged to -16C overnight in Tulloch, Aberdeenshire - the coldest place in the UK - while the Hampshire village of Odiham recorded England's lowest temperature of -9.6C.

The continuing freezing weather comes as 12million drivers in the UK are expected to attempt to travel to family and friends for Christmas, staggered over today and tomorrow.
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