Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

Fatal Storms Hit Spain and France


BBC News
Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:59 UTC
Three children have been killed in northern Spain when the roof of a sports hall collapsed amid high winds, local officials say.

Two adults were also reported to have died in other storm-related incidents.

Torrential rains and winds of up to 172km/h (107mph) have been battering northern Spain and south-west France.

At least one million homes in France are without electricity, roads and railways have been blocked and airports ordered closed, authorities there said.

Residents in affected areas in both countries have been warned to stay indoors.
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Bizarro Earth

Magnitude 5.1 earthquake shakes Guatemala


Associated Press
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:18 UTC
A magnitude-5.1 earthquake has shaken northern Guatemala near the Mexican border, but there are no reports of injuries or major damage. The U.S. Geological Service says the quake occurred at 8:03 a.m. local time and was centered two miles (three kilometers) west-southwest of Huehuetenango city.
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Bizarro Earth

Liberia in grip of worst caterpillar plague in 30 years: UN

Dharam Shourie
Press Trust of India
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:18 UTC
In what is being described by the UN food agency as Liberia's worst plague in 30 years, caterpillars are destroying crops in the country and posing a major threat to the precarious food security situation there.

The caterpillars, two to three centimetres in length and described by villagers as "black, creeping and hairy," are advancing in the tens of millions, devouring all plants and food crops in their path and in some cases overrunning homes and buildings.

The situation in Liberia is a national emergency and is likely to escalate into a regional crisis involving neighbouring Guinea, Sierra Leone and Coted d'voire, Representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Liberia, Winfred Hammond, has reported.
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Bizarro Earth

Is the American Southwest Running Dry?

Tara Lohan
AlterNet
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:05 UTC
Filmmaker Jim Thebaut talks about the precarious future of the Southwest and the call for a national water plan.

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Bizarro Earth

Global Cooling Under-Reported, Says SPPI


TransWorldNews
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:48 UTC
The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN's climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change - A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The paper posits that "The chief reason for scepticism at the official position on "global warming" is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic "global warming"; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.
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Target

How Cobras Spit With Perfect Accuracy


LiveScience
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:36 UTC
cobra
© Frank Luerweg/University of BonnSpitting cobra takes aim at a human face
Spitting cobras don't really spit venom. But they are incredibly accurate, hitting a target - the victim's eyes - from 2 feet (60 cm) away with impressive accuracy, studies have shown.

New research confirms how they do it.

Scientists have long known that spitting cobras don't actually spit. Rather, muscle contractions squeeze the cobra's venom gland, forcing venom to stream out of the snake's fangs, explains Bruce Young, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. The muscles can produce enough pressure to spray venom up to six feet (nearly 2 meters).
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Bizarro Earth

Tree deaths double across western US

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:56 UTC
Old, unmanaged trees in the western US
© Jerry FranklinOld, unmanaged trees in the western US are dying twice as fast as they were 50 years ago

The majestic old trees of the western US are disappearing twice as fast as they were three decades ago, and climate change is most likely to blame, say scientists.

Philip van Mantgem of the US Geological Survey and colleagues collected data from 76 plots on the west coast - from California up to British Columbia, Canada - and in Idaho, Arizona and Colorado. These are plots without any direct human management, so any tree loss is not due to logging.

The team focused on old forests, where many of the trees were at least 200 years old, and sometimes as much as 1000 years old. In 87% of the plots, trees are disappearing faster than new trees are springing up. Death rates varied, but the trend held whether the trees were old or relatively young, big or small, high up in the mountains or down in valleys.

The Pacific Northwest, including the pine trees of British Columbia, were the worst affected - death rates there are doubling every 17 years.
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Fish

Scientific Submarine Makes Deep-sea Discoveries


Science Daily
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:37 UTC
bright red, undescribed species of shell-less coral
© Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory WHOIA bright red, undescribed species of shell-less coral, called an anthomastid or gorgons-head coral, at 1700 metres deep at the Cascade Plateau, off south-east Tasmania.

A four-week expedition to explore the deep ocean south-west of Tasmania has revealed new species of animals and more evidence of impacts of increasing carbon dioxide on deep-sea corals.

The collaborative voyage of US and Australian researchers was led by chief scientists Dr Jess Adkins from the California Institute of Technology and Dr Ron Thresher from CSIRO's Climate Adaptation and Wealth from Oceans Flagships.

"We set out to search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters," Dr Thresher says. "We also gathered data to assess the threat posed by ocean acidification and climate change on Australia's unique deep-water coral reefs."

The survey through the Tasman Fracture Commonwealth Marine Reserve, south-west of Tasmania, explored the near vertical slice in the earth's crust, known as the Tasman Fracture Zone, which drops from approximately 2000 metres to over 4000 metres.
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Fish

Climbing Fish from Remote Venezuela Shakes the Catfish Family Tree


Science Daily
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:33 UTC
New catfish species Lithogenes wahari
© S. Schaefer/AMNHNew catfish species Lithogenes wahari found in the Río Cuao.

A new species of fish from tropical South America is confirming suspected roots to the loricariid catfish family tree. Lithogenes wahari shares traits with two different families of fish: the bony armor that protects its head and tail, and a grasping pelvic fin that allows it to climb vertical surfaces.

The discovery of both of these characteristics in Lithogenes suggests to ichthyologists Scott Schaefer of the American Museum of Natural History and Francisco Provenzano of the Universidad Central de Venezuela that the common ancestor of the Loricariidae and Astroblepidae probably could grasp and climb rocks with its tail and mouth.

The unusual catfish caught the team's attention twenty years ago in Caracas. An anthropologist working in the remote state of Amazonas collected samples of local foods and brought them to the Instituto de Zoologíca for identification.
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Better Earth

Much of Antarctica is Warming More Than Previously Thought


PhysOrg
Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:34 UTC
New Data
© NASAThis illustration depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years, with the dark red showing the area that has warmed the most.
Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part of Antarctica - the East Antarctic Ice Sheet - has actually been getting colder.

But new research shows that for the last 50 years, much of Antarctica has been warming at a rate comparable to the rest of the world. In fact, the warming in West Antarctica is greater than the cooling in East Antarctica, meaning that on average the continent has gotten warmer, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Quaternary Research Center at the UW.

"West Antarctica is a very different place than East Antarctica, and there is a physical barrier, the Transantarctic Mountains, that separates the two," said Steig, lead author of a paper documenting the warming published in the Jan. 22 edition of Nature.

For years it was believed that a relatively small area known as the Antarctic Peninsula was getting warmer, but that the rest of the continent - including West Antarctica, the ice sheet most susceptible to potential future collapse - was cooling.

Comment: There is more behind this story than meets the eye.

The Steig paper has been found to have some data errors and is raising other concerns about the agenda of the global warming advocates behind it.

Read about the data errors here.

Read how this paper was promoted by big media with robust disdain for critical thinking here.

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