Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

UK: 2.8 Earthquake Shakes Kent

Kent
© Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesFolkestone residents sit in the street after an earthquake damaged houses in April 2007.
Krakatoa, east of Maidstone? Not exactly, but tremor did reach 2.8 on Richter scale.

People in Folkestone, Kent were shaken, but not stirred, by a small earthquake in their vicinity yesterday.

A tremor measuring 2.8 on the Richter scale was registered but there were no reports of any damage to buildings or any injuries.

Kent police said: "We have had ­telephone calls and obviously people were concerned that it might be a bomb, but we can confirm it was indeed a tremor."

Frog

Male Lizards Disguise as Females to Avoid Attack

Lizard
© Discovery NewsMale Lizard
Young, male lizards desperate to mate, access women and avoid attack from older males by pretending to be one of the girls, a new study said.

According to the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, young male Augrabies flat lizards (Platysaurus broadleyi) hide their colors so as to imitate plain, brown females.

"In this system the adult males are extremely colorful and extremely territorial and the females are a plain brown," said co-author Scott Keogh, of the School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University. "Young males purposefully only develop colors on their belly, so they reach sexual maturity by still looking like a female."

Imitating a female allows the juvenile lizards to mate with females, without being detected and driven away by the larger, territorial, adult males, who will chase and bite their young rivals.

Info

Gutsy bloodworms pump out laughing gas

Bloodworms
© Christian Lott / MPI Bremen / HYDRABloodworms are just one type of water-dwelling animal that produces laughing gas.

They may be no match for methane-burping cows, but bloodworms are doing their best to make a name for themselves with climate scientists. New research shows that their guts leak "laughing gas" - a powerful greenhouse gas - albeit in amounts too small to significantly affect the climate.

Previously, no water-dwelling animal was known to produce the gas, more properly known as nitrous oxide (N20).

Some land invertebrates such as earthworms are known to produce nitrous oxide, so to see if water invertebrates are also a source, Peter Stief and his colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark surveyed seven aquatic sites including freshwater creeks, lakes and the seashore.

They collected a wide range of worms, larvae and bugs, placed them in closed vials, and analysed what came off. They found not only that N20 is produced, but that the amount increased with time.

Fish

Fish numbers outpace human population

Image
© Israel Sun/Rex FeaturesFish in the confines of a fish farm, Eilat, Israel.

It's increasingly likely that the fish you eat was farmed not caught wild, according to the latest statistics of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The group's two-yearly assessment of world fisheries, published today, comes with mitigated good news.

The outlook for wild ocean fish remains gloomy: 80% of all fisheries are at or beyond their maximum yields, and over-fishing continues to climb. Yet the amount of fish available to eat is growing faster than the human population, thanks to a boom in fish farming.

The FAO calculates that, for the first time, fish farms produce half the fish we eat, up from less than a third in 2002. With wild-catch fisheries maxed out, any more increases in fish production will depend on farms.

Igloo

'New York may face largest snowstorm'

New York storm
© UnknownA fierce storm in the East coast of the United States
New York City may face the largest snowstorm in this year as a massive storm ravaged the eastern United States, according to US media.

Sanitation commissioner John Doherty warned that New York should expect "the largest snowstorm we've seen in this year."

The snowstorm early Monday snapped power lines, closed schools and snarled the morning commute amid freezing temperatures from Maryland to Maine.

Umbrella

Ferocious snow storm hits US east coast

A ferocious storm packing freezing rain, heavy snow and furious wind gusts paralyzed most of the East Coast, sending dozens of cars careening into ditches, grounding hundreds of flights and closing school for millions of kids.

The devastating effects of the storm were seen up and down the coast. A crash caused a 15-mile (25-kilometer) traffic jam in North Carolina, forcing police and the Red Cross to go car-to-car to check on stranded drivers. The storm was blamed for more than 500 crashes in New Jersey, and a Maryland official counted about 50 cars in the ditch on one stretch of highway.

By Monday, the storm had moved north into New England, and most areas in the storm's wake expected to see up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) of snow. The weather contributed to four deaths on roads in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and on Long Island.

Evil Rays

Human factor suspected in mass beaching of whales in Australia

Conservationists are demanding an immediate and thorough inquiry into what they say is the suspicious stranding of 200 whales and dolphins.

Fears that the mass stranding on an Australian beach on Sunday was caused by human disturbance were raised because two species of cetacean came ashore simultaneously.

Most of the animals were pilot whales, but a number of bottlenose dolphins were also among the pod.

Fish

Pink dolphin appears in US lake

The world's only pink Bottlenose dolphin which was discovered in an inland lake in Louisiana, USA, has become such an attraction that conservationists have warned tourists to leave it alone.

Pink dolphin
© Caters NewsPinky the rare albino dolphin has been spotted in Lake Calcasieu in Louisiana, USA
Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern USA.

Capt Rue originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side.

Fish

South Korea: Strange Humanoid Carp Found in Pond

humanoid carp
© Unknown
The hybrid descendants of a carp and a leather carp (tangerine fish) are the new sensation in the small South Korean town of Chongju because of their "humanoid" facial features.

The look suddenly appears after observing the front part of their heads for a moment or two. Two lines and two dots on their heads bear some resemblance to human eyes.

The local newspapers managed to snap some sensational pictures of the fish, which are about 80 centimeters long (more than three feet) and 50 centimeters (almost two feet) in circumference.

Attention

Polar regions found warming fast, raising sea levels

Geneva - The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought, raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever, international scientists said on Wednesday.

New evidence of the trend was uncovered by wide-ranging research in the two areas over the past two years in a United Nations-backed programme dubbed the International Polar Year (IPY), they said.

"Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic as well as global atmospheric circulation and sea-level," according to a summary of a report by the researchers.

An assessment of the findings of the research was still being refined, said the IPY's "State of Polar Research" report.

"But it now appears certain that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing," it said.

"New data also confirm that warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to IPY."


Comment: Alarmist journalism at its best. This new data that confirms Antarctic warming is a complete mess, see this link here. This great evidence, even if there is a snowball's chance in heck of it standing up to scrutiny would show nothing more than a cycle in Antarctica just as has happened dozens of times in the past. But the new great evidence appears to be just another Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" piece of work where the authors chose the data parameters and algorithms for the specific purpose of generating warming evidence where none exists.

The effectiveness of the propaganda machine is evidenced by the very existence of this piece of info-entertainment journalism. It does however accomplish its purpose of spoon feeding the public that something never seen before in billions of years of the history of the planet's climate is now taking place which is utter nonsense.


More than 63 countries and some 10,000 scientists took part in the $1.5 billion programme, which began in March 2007 and ends next month.

Comment: The above article and this similar one are great examples of the sleeping press, propagating the global warming signal to the public.