Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

South Dakota storm chaser gets hit by lightning while filming

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© SevereStudios via YouTubeStorm chaser Scott Sheppard was filimg a storm near Fairburn, South Dakota, when he was struck by lightning.
Scott Sheppard was in his car, holding his camera out the window during a Fairburn, S.D., storm, when he got hit by a bolt that totaled his car and blew a hole in the street.

Now here's some shocking footage.

A storm chaser in South Dakota wanted to catch video of a powerful thunderstorm. Instead, he recorded himself being struck by lightning.

Scott Sheppard was filming video of an oncoming storm in Fairburn when the lightning storm started, the video summary explains.

He was in his car, holding his camera with an arm outstretched through the window, when the bolt struck him.


Cloud Lightning

Lightning hits electricity pole on busy Texan highway


A lightning bolt misses drivers by metres on a busy highway in Texas, US

Dramatic footage has emerged from Texas, US of a lightning bolt striking a pole on a busy highway in Texas.

Avery Tomasco captured the moment the lightning struck just metres away from the vehicle in which he was travelling in on Tuesday evening.

The lightning bolt was produced by a massive supercell storm which meteorologists had warned could produce a tornado.

Source: Newsflare / Abtomasco

Ice Cube

New paper finds Ross Sea ice in Antarctica has increased 5% since 1993

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A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters reconstructs sea-ice area in the Ross Sea, Antarctica from a 130 year coastal ice-core record. The authors find the "data show prevailing stable SIA from the 1880s until the 1950s, a 2 - 5% reduction from the mid-1950s to the early-1990s, and a 5% increase after 1993."

Thus, the overall trend in the Ross Sea, Antarctica over the past 130 years would be stable to increasing.

Comment:
It's not just Antarctica bucking the trend, but the whole globe. In the last 17 years there has been no 'global warming'. As IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth said: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't."

Yes, it is a travesty! Climate models are only as good as the assumptions they're based on. The authors of climate papers are trained to frame everything in terms of one factor: a carbon dioxide increase they attribute to human activity, which obscures awareness of being part of a much larger system that surely has multiple influences acting on the planet's complex climate.

Antarctica, is it melting or not? Man-made global warming can't explain this climate paradox



Eye 2

Woman bitten by snake while on toilet in Naron, Spain

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© Getty Images/iStockphotoThe snake is still in the area, causing panic among neighbors, afraid that they, too, might be bitten on the bottom.
A Spanish woman went to hospital after being bitten on her bottom by a snake as she sat on the toilet.

Iris Castroverde, a mother-of-two, was bitten on the left buttock.

Frightened neighbors are "psychotic" because the bright yellow and green snake is still on the loose, said one resident of the town of Naron, northern Spain, where the reptile struck.

After biting 30-year-old Castroverde, the snake disappeared down the drain after she flushed, reported The Local.

Eye 2

Deputies remove snake from car on I-44 in Springfield, Missouri

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© Greene County Sheriff’s OfficeThis black snake was found around a passenger’s feet in a car traveling down Interstate 44 Tuesday.
A family driving down Interstate 44 on Tuesday had an unwelcome visitor in their car.

According to the Greene County Sheriff's Office, a woman was driving down the interstate when a passenger noticed a 4-to-5-foot-long black snake wrapped around his or her feet.

The driver pulled over, removed all the family members and called 911 for assistance.

Deputies responded, removed the snake and released it.

Eye 2

Snake found slithering around cash register in Spokane store

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Shoppers at Shopko said a snake was found slithering around a cash register at the store on Spokane's South Hill in May but that SCRAPS refused to come get it.

Based on the description of the snake from witnesses, some experts said they believed the snake was a python or a boa constrictor. A different expert said they thought the snake was a bull snake and therefore harmless.

Staff at Shopko said SCRAPS would not come retrieve the snake. They said SCRAPS told them to call Crime Check. SCRAPS said they would not respond to the snake because it was possibly a native snake. Shopko employees said they eventually guided the snake to a nearby field.

A woman told staff that she found a large snake dead nearby the Shopko a few days later. Reptile experts responded to the area to make sure it was the same snake. It was unknown on Tuesday whether it was the same snake.

The picture of the snake attached to this story was taken by a witness as the snake was guided to a field.

Snowflake Cold

Global Warming? Unusual winter turned corporate chiefs into meteorologists

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© Darren McCollester/Getty ImagesA snow-swept parking lot with no cars on March 26 in Hyannis, Mass.
In addition to accounting and corporate finance, business schools should teach would-be executives how to pull off a successful snow dance. A little winter weather, it turns out, is a perfect excuse for shoddy results. Unlike revenue and profits, there are no reliable metrics for measuring just how bad a recent winter has been, and executives capable of posting decent results in frigid temperatures can herald the challenge overcome through managerial determination.

With the earnings season coming to a close and summer almost in full swing, Bloomberg Businessweek decided to see just how much executives at S&P 500 companies played the weather card this winter. The short answer: a lot. In earnings conference calls since Feb. 1, they mentioned "weather" 520 times, up from just 313 in the same period last year. The results were the same with other meteorological catchphrases: "winter" (340 times, vs. 172), "snow" (134 times, vs. 69), and "polar" (44 times, vs. 6).

This, of course, is mostly excusable. It was a pretty terrible winter - particularly in the Northeast - and that had an effect on any business that relied on foot traffic or transportation. As Costco (COST) Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti put it: "I'm not trying to make excuses, but it's been unbelievable."

Attention

Pygmy sperm whale found dead on Delaware beach

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© MERR Institute A dead pygmy sperm whale washed onto the beach at Delaware Seashore State Park on Sunday.
A dying 10-foot long, 800-pound pygmy sperm whale washed up at Delaware Seashore State Park on Sunday and no one is sure, just yet, why the animal died.

"He appeared to be a fairly robust animal with what looked like what might have been a previous entanglement around his tail," said Suzanne Thurman, executive director of the Marine Education Research and Rehabilitation Institute.

"He did have a fairly heavy parasite load in his GI tract, which is indicative of poor health."

But it's unknown whether additional testing on the animal to determine the cause will be done. Thurman said they collected samples and preserved them, but they have no money to send them off for testing.

They reported the stranding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has been tracking a large scale dolphin die-off along the Atlantic Coast over the last year.

Snowflake Cold

Cold wave kills 3 in Bolivia

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A cold wave that has been besetting Bolivia since the end of last week has caused the deaths of three people and dozens of head of livestock, authorities said Monday.

Two indigents died on Friday in the eastern city of Santa Cruz when temperatures plummeted from 23 to 8 C (73 to 46 F) due to the cold wave that entered Bolivia from Argentina, according to the government weather service, known by the acronym Senamhi.

The cold front, which originated in Antarctica, is now leaving Bolivia to the north, and so temperatures will begin to gradually improve in the eastern part of the country, Senamhi chief forecaster Marisol Portugal told Efe.

Fish

Fish deaths a mystery at Lake Mendocino

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© Glenda Anderson/The Press DemocratHundreds of dead carp are lining the shores of Lake Mendocino, but officials aren't sure why.
Hundreds of dead carp, mouths agape, are lining the shores of Lake Mendocino, but the cause of the die-off remained a mystery on Tuesday.

"Right now, we're just in limbo," said Ryan McClymont, a spokesman with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages Lake Mendocino.

The fish were first reported washing ashore on Sunday, McClymont said. State Fish and Wildlife biologists have been asked to investigate the deaths, he said.