Earth ChangesS


Whistle

Beware the global warming fascists: Johnny Ball on how he has been vilified for daring to question green orthodoxy

At London's Royal Court Theatre last week, a new play opened to rave reviews. It's about an environmental scientist who - horror of horrors - doesn't believe in global warming.

The play is called The Heretic and, though I haven't seen it yet, I could already sink to my knees in gratitude. Because in my own quiet and reasonable way, I am that global warming heretic.

In the past decade or so I've been mocked, vilified, besmirched - I've even been booed off a theatre stage - simply for expressing the view that the case for global warming and climate change, and in particular the emphasis on the damage caused by carbon dioxide, the so-called greenhouse gas that is going to do for us all, has been massively over-stated.
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© XposureDemonised: Johnny Ball, pictured with DJ daughter Zoe, has faced a vicious campaign because of his views on climate change and greenhouse gases

Info

UK: It's a 'hole' big mystery

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© UnknownHole in Eton Close, Burton
A mysterious hole has caused 'anger and confusion' among residents after being left unfilled and unattended for almost a year.

The hole, which is the size of a small car, appeared in Eton Close, Burton, in April last year and despite repeated attempts by homeowners no-one will lay claim to the 'disaster'.

One resident, who asked not to be named, said: "No-one has any idea why the hole was dug in the first place - it just popped up all of a sudden.

"The situation just continues to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and it has now been left for more than 11 months - nearly a whole year. It has obviously caused problems for all of the people in the road as it is not a small hole - it is as big as a small car.

"Some residents received anonymous notes at the end of last year telling them to sort out the problem.

"The borough council has been involved and could not come out last year due to the bad weather.

Bizarro Earth

Far North Pole Shaken by Moderate Quake

Far North Earthquake
© The Extinction Protocol
North Pole - A 4.8 earthquake rattles the far North Pole at a depth of 10 km at NORTH OF SEVERNAYA ZEMLYA (number 5 grid in Yellow) on the map of the Arctic Pole. The peculiar nature of the location of this quake leads us to conclude that since the magnetic north pole is now racing towards Russia and the Earth has been under constant bombardment from the rabid sheer of the solar winds over the last 48 hours, that this is a trembling effect in magnetic field generation- perhaps one more tangible sign that planet's magnetic field dexterity is insidiously eroding. We've been watching seismic anomalies under Greenland and strain starting to show across Antarctica from the recent bout of planetary tremors that have occurred over the last 4 months. Below are the latest telemetry seismic data readings from (top) Antarctica and Greenland (bottom).



Antartica Tremors
© The Extinction ProtocolAntarctica telemetry data.
Greenland Tremors
© The Extinction ProtocolGreenland telemetry data.


Bizarro Earth

New Zealand: Earthquake Magnitude 5.0 - Auckland Islands

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© USGS
Date-Time:
Friday, March 04, 2011 at 15:46:12 UTC

Saturday, March 05, 2011 at 02:46:12 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
49.828°S, 164.042°E

Depth:
20.4 km (12.7 miles)

Region:
AUCKLAND ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND REGION

Distances:
178 km (110 miles) WNW of Auckland Island, New Zealand

498 km (309 miles) SW of Invercargill, New Zealand

637 km (395 miles) SSW of Queenstown, New Zealand

1263 km (784 miles) SW of WELLINGTON, New Zealand

Sun

Aurora Borealis: Greatest Lights Show on Earth Snapped in Northern Ireland

Aurora Borealis
© Conor McDonaldThe aurora borealis dancing in the skies above Dunluce Castle.

Bathed in an eerie light, this strange image of Dunluce Castle hasn't been digitally enhanced - whatever you may think. The windswept fortification perched on the cliffs of the north Antrim coast isn't catching the dawn light nor the last of the evening sunshine.

The reason for its peculiar appearance is that the landmark site is drenched in the rarely sighted illumination of the aurora borealis - or the northern lights.

Indeed, this particular snap is the handiwork of Maghera photographer Conor McDonald, who waited patiently for hours to capture perfection.

"I was following the path of the aurora so I headed up to Dunluce Castle and waited for it to get dark," said the 21-year-old.

There have been sightings of the startling natural phenomenon in recent weeks as the Earth sweeps through clouds of electrically charged particles blasted out from the sun, just as we emerge from the slowest point of an 11-year Sun cycle.

Meanwhile, 25-year-old Reed Ingram Weir, a professional photographer from Ballycastle, also took some impressive pictures.

"I go around the world trying to shoot the northern lights, but these are the best shots I've ever taken in the UK because they don't normally come this far south," he said.

Bizarro Earth

Florida, US: Dead Dolphins Hit Panhandle Shores

A premature bottlenose dolphin was found dead on the beach at Perdido Key State Park this week, the third young dolphin found on local beaches since Jan. 1.

dead dolphin
© Pensacola News JournalStephanie Kadletz, animal care specialist with Bayside Hospital for Animals in Fort Walton Beach, examines a baby bottlenose dolphin that was found on Perdido Key earlier this week.
Scientists are trying to figure out what killed 83 bottlenose dolphins - 44 of them babies - found so far this year from the Panhandle to Louisiana, said Kim Amendola, a spokeswomen for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in St. Petersburg.

The number of deaths has peaked three times in the past 13 months for all dolphins and whales along the northern Gulf Coast. Normally, one to two dolphins wash up in each state in January and February.

"We don't know what the cause is," Amendola said. "Everything has an equal playing field, from a virus, weather to the oil spill."

Steve Shippee, Marine Mammal Stranding team coordinator, offered another possibility. He said the increase could be because more people have been monitoring beaches since April 20 spill.

Radar

Rare earthquake hits Arkansas

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© Unknown
A rare earthquake measuring 4.7 hit the southern US state of Arkansas late Sunday, the US government reported.

The epicenter of the tremor, which occurred at 11:00 pm local time (0500 GMT Monday), was located six kilometers (four miles) northeast from the town of Greenbrier, according to the US Geological Survey.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage. But KARK 4 TV said that callers to its newsroom from the Greenbrier area reported pictures and decorations being shaken off the walls.

The reading was based on the open-ended Moment Magnitude scale, now used by US seismologists, which measures the area of the fault that ruptured and the total energy released.

Arrow Up

Antarctica Is Growing From The Bottom Up

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© Zina Deretsky/NSF.Imaging the last unexplored mountains on the planet.
Studies of under-ice lakes in Antarctica first alerted scientists to the capability of pooled melt-water to refreeze on the bottom of ice sheets and deform the upper layers. But this accretion ice was considered an anomaly "a weird thing that happened over sub-glacial lakes," not over the entire ice sheet, Antarctic geophysicist Robin E. Bell of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told Discovery News.

But in examining bright spots found at the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet, Bell and colleagues have since discovered water is interacting with over a quarter of the bottom of the ice sheet - freezing and pushing the entire ice sheet up in a way that is surprisingly similar to the lake effect. "In fact, I'd forgotten the connection until last night," she said in an interview today.

The new discovery is adding an unknown dimension to the overall layer-cake growth model for ice sheets: that ice sheets gain height one layer at a time as the amount of snow falling on the top outpaces the amount of ice melting at the bottom. Bell and her team using ice-penetrating radar atop Antarctica have just turned this idea upside down.

"In some places up to half the ice thickness has been added from below," Bell and her international team of colleagues, reported in the new issue of the online journal Sciencexpress.

Radar

Flashback Earth's Lakes Heating Up

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© GettyResearchers used satellite data to measure the surface temperature of 167 lakes around the world and found some lakes warming as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
Satellite data from 167 lakes around the world reveal the impact climate change is already having.

The Earth's largest lakes have warmed up over the past 25 years in response to climate change, NASA said Tuesday, announcing the first such global study of its kind.

Scientists Philipp Schneider and Simon Hook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California used satellite data to measure the surface temperature of 167 lakes around the world, NASA said.

"They reported an average warming rate of 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, with some lakes warming as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit per decade," NASA said in a statement.

Sherlock

New Interpretation Of Antarctic Ice Cores

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© UnknownThus far many researchers have attempted to explain historical Earth climate data from Antarctica on the basis of Milankovitch's classic hypothesis. "To date, it hasn't been possible to plausibly substantiate all aspects of this hypothesis, however," states Laepple. "Now the game is open again and we can try to gain a better understanding of the long-term physical mechanisms that influence the alternation of ice ages and warm periods."
Helmholtz, Germany - Climate researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) expand a prevalent theory regarding the development of ice ages.

In the current issue of the journal Nature three physicists from AWI's working group "Dynamics of the Palaeoclimate" present new calculations on the connection between natural insolation and long-term changes in global climate activity. Up to now the presumption was that temperature fluctuations in Antarctica, which have been reconstructed for the last million years on the basis of ice cores, were triggered by the global effect of climate changes in the northern hemisphere.