Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Bad weather hampers search for Kenyan landslide victims


AFP
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:48 UTC
Torrential overnight rain hampered a search on Monday for at least 16 people buried alive in a weekend landslide in western Kenya, police said.

©Unknown

"We still believe there are more bodies buried in the rubble but rescuers have not been able to retrieve them due to bad weather. Overnight rains have hampered the exercise," said Peter Kavila, police chief of the Western Province.

Rescue teams from the national police force, the Kenya Red Cross Society, the ministry of works and the National Youth Service are sifting through rubble at Kuvasali village, 290 kilometres (180 miles) northwest of Nairobi, where a landslide that began on Friday buried scores of houses and livestock.
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Cloud Lightning

Quake shakes Hawaii as preparations for hurricane continue


Associated Press
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:31 UTC
An earthquake on Monday jolted the Big Island of Hawaii, which is already under a hurricane watch and a tropical storm warning.

The magnitude 5.3 temblor struck at 7:38 p.m. local time, about 25 miles south of Hilo, according to a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey.
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Bizarro Earth

Global Warming Debate Reignited After NASA Quietly Corrects Temperature Data

David Silverberg
Digital Journal
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:08 UTC
A Toronto blogger discovered a problem with how NASA records U.S. temperatures, concluding that 1934 is actually the hottest year on record, not 1998. The climate change controversy is heating up once again.
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Stop

Orang-utans home destroyed for bio-diesel

Thomas Bell
The Telegraph
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:00 UTC
The Orang-utans of Borneo are facing an unprecedented threat as their habitat is destroyed to satisfy increasing global demands for bio-fuel.
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Life Preserver

North Korea seeks help after floods ravage country


Reuters
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:55 UTC
North Korea is seeking international help after it reported massive flooding had left hundreds of people dead or missing and washed away many buildings, a U.N. aid agency spokesman said on Tuesday.

North Korea, which has struggled with chronic food shortages for years, also said in a report early on Tuesday that floodwaters caused "tens of thousands of hectares of farmland (to be) inundated, buried under silt and washed away."

©AP
Pyongyang has been badly hit by flooding.

Paul Risley, Asia spokesman with the U.N. World Food Programme, said: "If the figures are borne out by our own assessment, then we are very concerned that this is a significant emergency crisis."
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Cloud Lightning

Atlantic depression forms, another eyed in Gulf: NHC


Reuters
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:02 UTC
Tropical Depression 4 formed in the far eastern Atlantic Ocean and another depression could form in the Gulf of Mexico over the next day or so, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Monday.

In an advisory issued at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), the NHC said the center of Tropical Depression 4 was located about 620 miles west-southwest of the southernmost Cape Verde Islands and about 1,900 miles east of the Lesser Antilles.
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Evil Rays

Quake, 7.2 magnitude, reported near Vanuatu - USGS


Reuters
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:55 UTC
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake was recorded 46 km east of Santo in the South Pacific island archipelago of Vanuatu, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Monday.
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People

Flashback Thomas Gold: The science maverick who challenged establishment thinking - and quite often turned out to be right

Anthony Tucker
The Guardian
Thu, 24 Jun 2004 10:02 UTC
Professor Thomas "Tommy" Gold, who has died aged 84, was the initiator, the pragmatist and the persuader among the trio of young Cambridge scientists who turned cosmology upside down in the 1950s by proposing their controversial and comforting "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. This held centre stage for several years, with Fred Hoyle as its underpinning cosmological philosopher, Hermann Bondi in mathematical support, and Tommy Gold as its extrovert propagandist.
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Bizarro Earth

Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society

Freeman Dyson
The Edge
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:04 UTC
1. The Need for Heretics

In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, "Sorry, but we don't know". The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.
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Bizarro Earth

500 evacuated as Indonesian volcano spews lava


AFP
Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:12 UTC
More than 500 people have been evacuated from the slopes of Mount Karangetang, which has been spewing lava and hotclouds on the northern Indonesian island of Siau.

The conditions have forced authorities to raise the area's alert status, with a total of 151 families or 564 people being evacuated from three villages on the slopes of the 1,784-metre volcano.
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