Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

5.3 Earthquake Off Guatemala's Coast

The U.S. Geological Survey says an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.3 has been recorded in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Guatemala.

There was no immediate word on whether the earthquake was felt or caused any damage.

The quake was recorded just after midnight (2 a.m. EDT) at a depth of 47 miles and centered 65 miles south of Guatemala City.

Bizarro Earth

California: 2.3 Earthquake Strikes Near Milpitas

The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 2.3 struck this morning in Santa Clara County.

According to the USGS, the earthquake struck at about 5:55 a.m. and had a depth of 4.1 miles.

The quake was centered 7 miles east of Milpitas and 10 miles northeast of San Jose City Hall, according to the USGS.

Umbrella

Australia: Cyclone Hamish is heading for South Queensland

Cyclone Hamish 2
© Commonwealth of Australia 2009, Bureau of MeteorologyColour infrared image taken on 9 March 2009
The weather bureau expects Cyclone Hamish will remain a Category 4 system tonight as it continues moving along the central Queensland coast.

The Category 4 storm is located off the Capricornia coast and is estimated to be 255 kilometres east of Yeppoon and 245 kilometres north-north-east of Bundaberg, moving south-east at 17 kilometres per hour.

Magnify

Australia: Crocodile bites snorkeller at Lizard Island

Rangers are searching for a small crocodile that bit a man on the shoulder while he was snorkelling in Queensland's far north.

The Environmental Protection Agency says the man was snorkelling off Lizard Island, north of Cairns, on Sunday afternoon when a crocodile attacked him.

Blackbox

Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013

The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.

Cloud Lightning

US: Storms throw bus into Indiana building, damage homes

Strong winds from severe thunderstorms raked parts of the Midwest on Sunday, tossing a school bus onto a building, destroying or damaging homes, and cutting off power to thousands of customers in Indiana and Illinois.

Emergency management agencies reported a tornado in Lawrence County, said John Erickson, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. The National Weather Service has not confirmed the reports.

Footage from WTHR-TV in Indianapolis showed a school bus lying atop a flattened building in Fayetteville, about 70 miles south of Indianapolis, where the tornado was reported.

Lawrence County Sheriff Sam Craig said at least 19 houses had been damaged, including three that were leveled.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.4 in Oklahoma City

Image
© US Geological Survey

Sunday, March 08, 2009 at 13:06:39 UTC

Sunday, March 08, 2009 at 08:06:39 AM at epicenter

Location 35.447°N, 97.457°W

Depth 5 km (3.1 miles) set by location program

Distances:
* 1 km (0 miles) S (174°) from Smith Village, OK

* 1 km (1 miles) WNW (287°) from Del City, OK

* 5 km (3 miles) NNE (26°) from Valley Brook, OK

* 8 km (5 miles) ESE (119°) from Oklahoma City, OK

* 301 km (187 miles) NNW (348°) from Dallas, TX

Compass

Don't e-mail me the UKMET ideas

I have been getting a lot of e-mail on the UKMET center announcement which people email me, and I am not reading. Why? Because such agenda-driven agencies, and plainly they are, can distract me from the actual weather. I am aware of their position, I think it makes them helpless in the face of the obvious if its coming, and unlike me, I do respect the opposite side's argument. What I don't respect is a scientific agency that is driven more by government policy than the science. So, their agenda is plain.. Mine is also..,debate and let's get the right answer.

Succinctly put, I can't trust what they say given the things I know to be fact about past climate conditions that the Earth has experienced. They have ranged from ice fairs on the Thames in the time of Victoria to weather which inspired the tapestry's of orange trees around the time of the Tudors...which occurred at the last end of the warm cycle that predated the mini ice age that was ending around the time of the Victorian reign.

Bizarro Earth

Saving the Earth?

global warming snowman demonstration
© unknown

Every time I hear someone say something about "saving the Earth" I want to say, "Are you out of your mind?"

The Earth is some 4.5 billion - that's billion with a b - years old. How did it ever manage to exist without us? How did it survive ice ages, meteor impacts, and all the other stuff that went on before homo sapiens decided to climb down out of the trees and walk upright?

If human beings are responsible for "global warming" how did the Earth manage to get through various earlier stages such as the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, and our era, the Holocene which reaches back a mere 10,000 years; a period that matches up with the ending of the last major ice age.

Radar

New Report On The Lack Of Recent Global Warming

There is an interesting article on at MSNBC from the Discovery Channel titled, "Warming might be on hold, study finds Authors sense hibernation, but warn of 'explosive' rise later" (Link)

This article finally (although implicitly) acknowledges in the media that there a substantive issue with the predictions of the IPCC and CCSP models.

It includes the revealing comments that
"according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades."
and
"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970's was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."

Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."
First, these statements clearly indicate that the IPCC and CCSP global model predictions (which are being used as the basis for making expensive and difficult to implement government policies) are seriously flawed.