Earth Changes
Denver is gearing up to fight global warming, and residents may soon be asked to make personal sacrifices to help save the planet.
The new plan is aimed at making Denver a national leader in reducing gas emissions that have been linked to global warming, giving a major push to alternative energy, stepping up recycling and changing building codes to encourage energy conservation.
Comment: And you can bet your bottom dollar that it won't include any significant improvements to mass transit. After all, if they really think that automobiles are a primary source of emission that leads to global warming then it stands to reason that mass transit is an obvious solution.
But that solution isn't likely to happen because of special interest groups, such as lobbies for construction-related industry, who would (cue the wimpering) lose a lot of profits from less road construction and maintenance. That's the exact reason why Houston hasn't stopped remodeling I-10 West (and several other freeways) for the last 30 years! In fact, they tore up train tracks along side I-10 West to make room for a wider freeway! Go figure!
Did you have frost on your windows this morning? It felt more like March or early April along the Front Range.
The temperature at Denver International Airport fell to 31 degrees at 5:44 a.m. Friday, setting a new record low for the date.
This shattered the old record of 37 degrees, last set in 1974.
The new record low will also become the latest freeze on record for the city of Denver. The previous date of latest freeze ever recorded was June 2, 1951.
Temperatures have only dropped below freezing two other times during the month of June; in 1919 and 1951.
The coldest June temperature ever recorded was 30 degrees on June 2, 1951.
Every time there is a new weather record set for the city of Denver, the debate about where the official weather station is located arises.
A series of earthquakes, including one with a preliminary magnitude of 5.0, jolted Ishikawa Prefecture and neighboring prefectures early Monday, AFP quoted the Japan Meteorological Agency as saying.
No tsunami warnings were issued.
Daniel Bardsley and Emmanuelle Landais
GulfnewsMon, 11 Jun 2007 09:51 UTC
Swimmers were banned from the sea yesterday after lifeguards spotted jellyfish they say have never been seen before in Dubai.
Staff at Jumeirah Beach Park speculated that the tiny purple and white creatures had been blown here by Cyclone Gonu.
Red flags were hoisted at the beach park yesterday as well as the Open Beach due to a large number of jellyfish spotted in the morning. However swimmers were seen in the late afternoon at Umm Suqeim Beach.
Barbara Scocci, 31, an Italian tourist visiting family in Dubai said an hour after she had arrived at the beach yesterday morning a Dubai Municipality jeep cruised up and down the shoreline calling everybody out of the water with a megaphone.
Days of torrential rain in southern China have killed 66 people and left 12 missing by last night, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Nearly 9 million people have been affected.
Floods caused by heavy rains damaged 94,000 houses and destroyed 48,000 in the region; and forced the evacuation of about 591,000 people, a ministry spokesman said.
About 294,800 hectares of crops were affected, of which 53,000 hectares were completely destroyed, he said.
Scott Thill
AlternetMon, 11 Jun 2007 05:53 UTC
It may sound like urban legend but it's not. A frightening trend of bee colony collapses could lead to everything from a radically transformed diet to an overall wipeout of the world's food supply.
Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
LA TimesMon, 11 Jun 2007 05:55 UTC
The dead bees under Dennis vanEngelsdorp's microscope were like none he had ever seen.
He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.
"The more you looked, the more you found," said VanEngelsdorp, the acting apiarist for the state of Pennsylvania. "Each thing was a surprise."
DHAKA - At least 22 people were killed and several missing after landslides triggered by heavy rains buried hillside homes in Bangladesh's Chittagong port city on Monday, police and witnesses said.
The dead included five from one family, they said.
America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.
From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.
Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists, describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global warming.
Comment: And you can bet your bottom dollar that it won't include any significant improvements to mass transit. After all, if they really think that automobiles are a primary source of emission that leads to global warming then it stands to reason that mass transit is an obvious solution.
But that solution isn't likely to happen because of special interest groups, such as lobbies for construction-related industry, who would (cue the wimpering) lose a lot of profits from less road construction and maintenance. That's the exact reason why Houston hasn't stopped remodeling I-10 West (and several other freeways) for the last 30 years! In fact, they tore up train tracks along side I-10 West to make room for a wider freeway! Go figure!