Shocked driver escapes serious injury; vehicle rested on gas mainAssociated Press
Updated: 11:32 a.m. ET March 27, 2006
NEW YORK - A city street collapsed under a sport utility vehicle early Monday, leaving the vehicle nose down into a deep sinkhole that officials said was caused by a water main break.
The driver of the SUV escaped without serious injures but was taken to a hospital for treatment of shock, said Fire Department spokesman Brian Conlon.
The vehicle was barely visible from street level inside the 12-foot-wide hole, partially in a pedestrian crosswalk in Brooklyn. It was resting atop a gas main and crews had to wait for the gas to be turned off before removing it, said Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection.
Damage to the street was probably more extensive than was visible, since water leaking from the 8-inch main could have been washing away soil beneath the street for days, Michaels said.
“It’s unlikely that the only part of the roadway that was damaged was that car-shaped hole,” he said.
Adrianne Appel
for
National Geographic NewsMarch 27, 2006
Melting Arctic ice may be putting walrus pups in peril, researchers say.
A team of scientists working in the Arctic Ocean in 2004 says it encountered nine Pacific walrus pups struggling alone in the water far from shore.
Typically walrus pups live on ice close to shore and are inseparable from their mothers.
"I'm not a walrus expert, but we thought it was unusual,'' said Lee Cooper, a marine ecologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who led the team.
"The baby walruses would swim up to the boat. It was heartbreaking,'' he said.
Melting Arctic sea ice is the most likely explanation for the stranded pups, Cooper said. His team was in the region to study the intrusion of warm Bering Sea water into the Arctic Ocean.
"The sea ice has retreated, so it is only [now found] over the open ocean, where [the water] is about 12,000 feet [3,650 meters] deep. This is too deep for [a] walrus,'' Cooper said.
Walruses prefer shallow water, because they dive for food and can only reach depths of about 300 feet (90 meters).
Cooper believes the lone pups they saw had either followed their mothers far out into the ocean in search of solid ice or had floated out to sea on broken ice chunks that then melted.
Chadwick Jay, a walrus expert with the United States Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska, agreed that melting ice was the likely reason for the lone pups.
Pups are sometimes separated from their mothers by storms or hunting, he said, but neither of those appeared to be the case with the pups Cooper's team observed.
"Given the fact that these were so far offshore, [those causes] may be not as likely,'' Jay said.
continues...
Sunday, March 26, 2006
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It could hit 2 million near Bay area with magnitude 6.7, more
New cracks appear in Elke DeMuynck's ceiling every few weeks, zigzagging across her living room. Month after month, year after year, she patches, paints and waits.
"It definitely lets you know your house is constantly shifting," DeMuynck said. So do the gate outside that swings uselessly 21/2 inches from its latch, the bulges in the street and the geology students who make pilgrimages to her cul-de-sac.
continues...
Wed Mar 22, 2006 7:58 PM ET170
LONDON (Reuters) - About 40 percent of the Amazon's rainforests could be lost by 2050 unless more is done to prevent what could become one of the world's worst environmental crisis, scientists said on Wednesday.
Existing laws and preserving public wildlife reserves will not be enough. Measures are also needed to protect rainforests from the impact of profitable industries such as cattle ranching and soy farming, they added.
"By 2050, current trends in agricultural expansion will eliminate a total of 40 percent of Amazon forests, including six major watersheds and ecoregions," Britaldo Soares-Filho, of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, said in a report in the journal Nature.
A watershed is an area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains from it goes into the same place. It supplies water and habitats for plants and animals.
Soares-Filho and his colleagues used computer models to simulate what would happen to the Brazilian rainforests in the future under different scenarios.
"For the first time, we can examine how individual policies ranging from the paving of highways to the requirement for forest reserves on private properties will influence the future of the world's largest tropical forest," Soares-Filho said in a statement.
Without further checks, the scientists predict nearly 100 native species will be deprived of more than half of their habitats and nearly 2 million square kilometres (772,300 sq mile) of forest will be lost.
But if more is done to control expansion and increase protected areas, 73 percent of the original forest would remain in 2050 and carbon emissions would be reduced.
The scientists said better conservation of the rainforest would have worldwide benefits so developed countries should be willing to pay to make it possible.
"By building a policy-sensitive crystal ball for the Amazon, we are able to identify the most important policy levers for reconciling economic development with conservation," said Daniel Nepstad, a co-author of the study who leads the Amazon program of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.
LINK
Ice caps melting faster than forecast
`It's not a gradual change. It's like flipping a switch,' researcher says
New reports warn of sea levels rising up to 5 metres, extensive flooding
Mar. 24, 2006. 10:17 AM
PETER CALAMAI
SCIENCE REPORTER
Global warming of only a couple of degrees Celsius projected by the end of this century is enough to trigger widespread melting of the massive Greenland ice cap and the partial collapse of Antarctica's ice sheets, prominent climate researchers warn in two studies published yesterday.
The findings are a stunning about-face from previous expert forecasts that such massive melting would take millennia to kick in, even with rising global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This new research, based on a comprehensive look at global warming in the distant past, says melting the two icy domains could eventually raise sea level worldwide by as much as five metres, enough to flood low-lying regions like the Netherlands and most Pacific atolls, as well push half a billion people inland.
The full five-metre rise could take several centuries but the world's oceans could easily be a metre higher by 2100, the researchers said.
"The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already begun to happen," said University of Calgary ice researcher Shawn Marshall, the sole Canadian among the authors of the two studies published by the journal Science.
"We could be past the point of no return for Greenland this century," he said in an interview.
A 1998 federal government report rated most of P.E.I., the eastern coast of Nova Scotia and the Beaufort Sea shore in the Western Arctic as "highly sensitive" to a global sea level rise of under seven-tenths of a metre.
Marshall and the other researchers acknowledged they were taken by surprise by the breakneck escalation in the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in recent years. Since 1980 the portion of the Greenland ice cap experiencing annual melting has increased by 40 per cent.
"It's not a gradual change. It's like flipping a switch. Areas that haven't experienced melt in centuries suddenly do," said Marshall.
A widely quoted report in 2001 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that major melting was no threat in Greenland and Antarctica in this century.
But Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, said the new research shows these massive ice sheets are much more sensitive to global warming than originally suspected.
"Once we're above two times the pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide we're in the danger zone," said Overpeck, who is lead author on one of the studies.
`The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already
begun to happen.
We could be past the
point of no return for
Greenland this century.'
Shawn Marshall, University of Calgary
"Somewhere after that we'll pass a threshold where melting of the ice sheets and sea level rise is irreversible," he said.
Most experts agree that carbon dioxide concentrations double the pre-industrial level will be reached sometime after 2050 unless global emissions are at least cut in half. The current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million compared to 280 parts per million before widespread burning of fossil fuels began around 1870.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries have pledged to reduce their overall emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels starting in 2008.
But soaring emissions from China and other developing countries — and the Kyoto boycott by Australia and the United States — mean that global carbon dioxide levels are expected to continue rising steadily.
The new warning is based on using climate extremes from the last major global warming to check the reliability of future climate conditions projected by complex computer models.
A prolonged hot spell began 129,000 years ago because natural orbital variations caused the Earth's northern axis to tilt more toward the sun producing much higher temperatures in the northern hemisphere, especially the Arctic.
A decade-long international research project gathered an evidence of climate change from that period, including the disappearance of glaciers in Canada's Arctic archipelago, halving of Arctic sea ice coverage, major shrinking of the Greenland ice cap and a northward march of the boreal forest.
Examination of Australia's Great Barrier Reef also indicated that sea levels were four to six metres higher than today.
A group of U.S. researchers then produced many of the same results by simulating increased sun on the northern hemisphere in an advanced climate model which Calgary's Marshall beefed up to handle glacier movements and ice melting.
"The model got it about right for the past which gives us more confidence in its forecasts," said Marshall.
A second research team, led by Overpeck, then used the souped-up model to project what would happen to the Earth's ice cover if global temperatures were raised by higher levels of carbon dioxide rather than a shift in the planet's tilt.
They found that tripling pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels by 2100 caused widespread melting in Greenland and the Arctic but didn't raise sea levels the five metres recorded in the Australia reefs. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet must also melt, the scientists concluded.
Even a two degree Celsius rise in global average temperature would cause thermometers to soar as much as eight or 10 degrees in the Arctic and Antarctic, a feedback process known as polar amplification.
"All the things we were worrying about happening did happen and it didn't take that much warming," said Overpeck.
LINK
Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:14 AM ET6
By Helen Popper
CHACALTAYA, Bolivia (Reuters) - Times are hard for the world's highest ski resort, a dizzy 17,388 feet (5,300 metres) above sea level in the Bolivian Andes. Its glacier is melting so fast synthetic snow is seen as the only way to save it.
Scientists say Chacaltaya's diminished piste could disappear altogether within five years due to climate change and, though this humble ski center is no Whistler or Chamonix, it is the only one the poor South American country has got.
"This has been the worst year we've had. It's quite sad to see," said Samuel Mendoza of the Bolivian Andean Club. "We want to bring in artificial snow so we can keep on skiing, so the sport does not die in Bolivia."
In the shady spots around the stone ski lodge, little patches of white survive while icicles drip steadily from the rafters. In the distance below, metal roofs in the sprawling slum city of El Alto glimmer under the fierce Andean sun.
The rudimentary ski lift at Chacaltaya dates back almost to the club's foundation in 1939, and the closest thing to apres ski is a tea made with coca leaves -- hastily prescribed to anyone suffering altitude sickness.
Breathing, as well as skiing, is difficult here, but hardened Chacaltaya skiers say the thin air is a plus.
"It's fantastic to ski at this altitude," said Franklin Mendoza, a former national champion, before heading out to the piste on a Sunday in March, near the end of the season. "People who come here say they feel like they've conquered nature."
"The altitude's not such a problem. It's mind over matter," said Alfredo Martinez, a sprightly 70-year-old club veteran dressed in a tracksuit and bobble hat. "I've skied in Chamonix (in France) and you don't get the powdery snow you find up here."
CLIMATE CHANGE
But not even Chacaltaya's lofty heights can save it from the ravages of climate change, though it is not clear whether its glacier is melting so fast because of global warming or its proximity to the growing cities of El Alto and La Paz, some 19 miles away across the Andean plateau. The heat emitted by the cities' vehicles, industry and other human activity is reaching the glacier.
"There is no doubt this is the result of the actions of man," said Alfonso Velarde, director of the Institute of Physical Investigation at La Paz's San Andres University.
Continued...
Published on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 by the Independent / UK
Oil Gushes into Arctic Ocean from BP Pipeline
by Leonard Doyle Across the frozen North Slope of Alaska, the region's largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of litres of crude pouring into the Arctic Ocean during the past week after a badly corroded BPO pipeline ruptured.
The publicity caused by the leak in the the 30-year-old pipeline could seriously damage BP's image, which has been carefully crafted to show it as a company concerned about the environment. Unlike other major oil companies, BP boasts that it is fully signed up to the dangers of global warming and it makes a conspicuous effort to flaunt its green credentials, tackling local environmental problems and erecting wind turbines above its petrol stations.
The first indication of the spill came in early March, when an oily patch was discovered near the elevated oil transmission pipeline, but the full scale of the accident is only becoming clear with time. Environmentalists who vociferously objected to the construction of the BP pipeline may now see their worst fears realised.
Clean-up crews have removed more than 190,000 litres of crude oil and melted snow off the frozen tundra but reports indicate that the leak is the second largest crude oil spill in Alaska - second only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
The oil gushed from the pipeline at a spot where it dips to ground level to allow caribou to cross, and has led industry critics and environmental groups to question whether BP is saving money on maintaining its network of wells, pumps and pipelines crisscrossing the tundra - a complaint the company vigorously denies.
As oil is increasingly transported through environmentally sensitive areas by pipeline, the dangers posed by poorly maintained rotting pipes has become increasingly clear.
Exploration Alaska, the BP subsidiary that operates the pipeline from which more than 910,000 litres of oil has leaked, has recently been fined more than $1.2m (£635,000) for its poor environmental safety record.
The company has now been told it cannot restart pumping oil until it the entire pipeline has been inspected and repaired. Employees claim that they repeatedly warned that money-saving cutbacks in routine maintenance and inspection had dramatically increased the chances of accidents or spills.
"For years we've been warning the company about cutting back on maintenance," Marc Kovac, a union official told the New York Times. "We know that this could have been prevented."
In the interview, Marc Kovac, an official of the United Steelworkers union which represents workers at the BP facility, said he had seen little change in BP Exploration Alaska's approach despite the warnings.
In an e-mail to a company lawyer in June 2004, Mr Kovac forwarded a collection of his earlier complaints to management. One of these, dated 28 February 2003, concerned "corrosion monitoring staffing levels". It began, "The corrosion monitoring crew will soon be reduced to six staff down from eight."
It added: "With the present staff, the crew is currently one month behind. The backlog is expected to increase with a further reduction in manpower."
Daren Beaudo, a company spokesman, said: "Whenever employees raise concerns about our operations we address them. When we inspected the line in September 2005, points of manageable corrosion were evident and all were within standards of operations integrity.
"Something happened to the corrosion rates in that line between September 2005 and the time of the spill that we don't yet fully understand."
LINK
Well this just gets more interesting everyday. An update for those following the Above top secret's cointelpro activities22 March 2006
Abovetopsecret.com EXPOSED!!!
Some of you may have noticed that signs of the times was down for awhile today. This was due to the actions of the website abovetopsecret.com. As I have speculated, they were given the task to run cointelpro on Joe Quinn's article:Evidence That a Frozen Fish Didn't Impact the Pentagon on 9/11 - and Neither Did a Boeing 757which was an analysis of the "catherder" article on abovetopsecret which essentially was support for the Bush Neocons conspiracy theory about the events of September 11.
As anyone who is familiar with copyright law knows, this is perfectly legal under standard copyright law.
However, abovetopsecret.com, like Bush and the Neocons, make up their own laws. As I have chronicled on this blog, their urgent demands that we remove this article because it was a violation of their "creative commons" copyright was absurd and simply evidence of their position as an active cointelpro/psy-ops propagator on the internet. It isn't copyrights they are concerned about, it is google bombing and running psy-ops. And now, they have proven it.
Here is the letter we received from our server people after being notified by about a hundred people via email that the signs of the times site was down:
From: "James" ****
To: Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Subject: FW: Notice of Copyright Infringement
Date sent: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:55:32 -0500
Date forwarded: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:38:12 -0600
Hi, we received the following complaint from your site. Please investigate this and let us know.
James
From: Jaeschke, Jr., Wayne [mailto:WJaeschke@****.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 2:35 PM
To: dmca@velcom.com
Cc: mark@abovetopsecret.com; skepticoverlord@abovetopsecret.com
Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement
Sirs:
Our firm represents AboveTopSecret.com LLP ("ATS"). ATS is the owner of numerous copyrighted articles being displayed in an infringing
manner on a website hosted by your company. That website is http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/>
http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/.
The infringing articles appear at:
http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/Above_Top_Secret_article.htm>
http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/Abo … rticle.htm ("the 757
article") And
http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/signs/signs20050909.htm>
http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/signs … 050909.htm ("the FEMA article") The original articles appear on the Abovetopsecret.com website at:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread167902/pg1>
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread167902/pg1
And
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread79655/pg1>
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread79655/pg1
The republication of each of these articles is governed by the Creative
Commons 2.5 Deed ("the CC Deed").
The 757 article may be republished in accordance with the terms and conditions specified here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/cc.php?tid=79655&pid=816414>
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/cc. … pid=816414 The FEMA article may be republished in accordance with the terms and conditions specified here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/cc.php?tid=167902&pid=1685907>
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/cc. … id=1685907 Pursuant to the CC Deed, these articles, each of which is owned by ATS and is the subject of a registration in the United States Copyright Office 1) may not be published on sites/pages with commercial advertisements; 2) may not be used to make "derivative works"; and 3) must provide proper attribution to the author and a link to the original article.
In each instance of content owned by ATS appearing on the "signs-of-the-times.org" website, all three of these conditions of the terms of use is violated. The owners/operators of ATS have attempted to contact the operator of signs-of-the-times.org and have this situation corrected by either removing the articles or republishing them in a manner that complies with the CC Deed. The operators of the Signs-of-the-times.org websites, Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Arkadiusz Jadczyk, have failed to comply.
We must therefore request that Velcom.com, as hosts for the Signs-of-the-times.org website, remove these pages from publication.
Moreover, this letter constitutes notice to the operators of Velcom.com that ATS believes that have a right to enforce their copyright under Canadian and U.S. law and reserves the right to take further action in the U.S., Canada, or both without further notice.
As well, this letter is also to serve notice on Velcom.com that the owners of ATS have rescinded all rights to the operators of signs-of-the-times.org under the CC Deed, in view of their continued non-compliance with the terms and conditions of use of original, copyright content appears on the abovetopsecret.com website.
Please contact me at ******* if you have any questions with regard to this matter. Otherwise, we look forward to the prompt and amicable resolution of this matter.
Regards,
Wayne Jaeschke
Wayne C. Jaeschke, Jr.
Morrison & Foerster LLP
********************
McLean, VA 22102
phone: ****
fax: ****
wjaeschke@****.com
================================================
To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, Morrison & Foerster LLP informs you that, if any advice concerning one or more U.S. Federal tax issues is contained in this communication (including any attachments), such advice is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein.
For information about this legend, go to
http://www.mofo.com/Circular230.html
=
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail @mofo.com, and delete the message.
Now folks, come on, how many websites that were just started by an ordinary guy who took on a couple of "ordinary" partners, and is just a hobby and sharing on the internet, are able to afford a copyright attorney in McLean Virginia???
This action also is highly suggestive of the idea that the Pentagon Issue is a LOT more sensitive than anyone has thus far suspected! Do take note of THAT!
I hope that everyone who reads this will spread this information far and wide because these people are EVIL Bush supporters, Cyber Nazi Brown Shirts.
See the blog posts:
Is Is the Above Top Secret Forum COINTELPRO?COINTELPRO Updates: Above Top Secret Forum -- this post is most pertinent to the current Simon Grey issue.
Abovetopsecret.com COINTELPRO UpdateAboveTopSecret.com COINTELPRO Update 2More Inside Scoops on Abovetopsecret.com!
The Spider and The Fly: SkepticOverlord and COINTELPRO
Abovetopsecret: Ethics and Google BombsSee also forum threads on abovetopsecret.com and project SERPO:
LINKand
LINKMore details
here
'Sentries for the rest of the world' report massive changes to Arctic life
Pangnirtung, a village on Canada's Baffin Island, had rain and temperatures in the 40s last month, when minus-20 degrees is normal.By Doug Struck
The Washington Post
Updated: 8:33 a.m. ET March 22, 2006
PANGNIRTUNG, Canada - Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.
Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.
The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists believe will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.
The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.
In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."
‘It's getting very strange up here’
In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform."
Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.
In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.
"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it," said one resident, Donald Mearns.
LINK
March 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Argentina coast guard was astonished to find icebergs floating along the Atlantic coast.
``It's the first time icebergs of such size reached Buenos Aires,'' Miguel Angel Reyes, 44, chief of maritime traffic at the coast guard, said in an interview. ``The police escorted the icebergs until they were out of the danger zone.''
For scientists, the icebergs' migration underscored how global warming is disrupting weather patterns and threatening agriculture. The coast guard rerouted ships after the pair of icebergs measuring 250 meters (820 feet) long and 30 meters high broke off from the melting Antarctic ice cap in early January and drifted 4,400 kilometers (2,700 miles) north. A month later, two more icebergs headed up the coast.
`
`The higher temperatures are causing this,'' said Juan Carlos Leiva, 56, a geophysicist at the Argentine Institute of Snow and Glaciers in Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes. ``The situation has gotten worse.''
The implications are worrisome for farming-dependent countries such as Argentina, the world's third-largest exporter of beef, corn and soybeans. Rising temperatures prompt flooding in some areas and dry up rivers in others, said Vicente Barros, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Warmer weather is evaporating water from rivers in northern Argentina at a faster pace than in previous years, curbing hydroelectric power and cutting the water supply to crops, Barros said. It also is bringing more rain to the central provinces of Cordoba, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, flooding fields of soybeans, wheat and corn, he said.
Flooded Highways
Wire fences jut out of some lakes in the area, showing that the land had been arable before it was engulfed in recent years. Flooding has left some of Argentina's main roadways under water, including Route 7, a 1,000-kilometer highway that runs from the country's western border with Chile to the Atlantic Ocean in the east.
``The flooding has forced us to redesign routes,'' said Carlos Avellaneda, 49, a manager in Empresa de Transporte Don Pedro SRL in Buenos Aires, which has more than 500 cargo trucks. ``We thought it would be for a short period of time, but it has been almost six years.''
Global warming is a phenomenon some scientists say is caused by human-generated emission of greenhouse gases that gather in the atmosphere and prevent heat from escaping.
Rising Temperatures
Sea- and land-surface temperatures from January to November last year averaged 0.48 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) more than the global mean temperature in the three decades from 1961 to 1990, according to the Exeter, England-based Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.
The Geneva-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts that global temperatures will rise as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Antonio Pirillo, a 68-year-old dairy farmer, said stretches of Route 7 are under about 2 ½ feet of water near his farm in Villa Saboya, a town on the pampas of central Argentina, after heavy rains caused nearby Lake La Picasa to overflow years ago, flooding 40,000 hectares of land.
Pirillo said his land was ruined even though town officials pumped off the water, because the salt left behind burned the grass's roots so it wouldn't grow. He said he had to rent other pasture to graze his 120 cows for three years until he restored enough grass on his land to feed them.
`Wasted Land'
``Land underwater is wasted land and that's very sad,'' Pirillo said. ``Farming is the engine that drives the economy in this country, but farmland is not taken care of and protected.''
Agriculture generates 12 percent of Argentina's $152 billion gross domestic product. In the U.S., agriculture makes up just 1.2 percent of GDP.
continues...
Monday March 20th 2006, 12:38 pm
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
I don't know how much more evidence we need to demonstrate there is a plot underway to dismantle the Bill of Rights. Now we learn that soon after "the dark days" of nine eleven, "lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack," according to US News & World Report. "Meeting in the FBI's state-of-the-art command center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the lawyers talked with senior FBI officials about using the same legal authority to conduct physical searches of homes and businesses of terrorism suspects–also without court approval," that is to say in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.
continues...
Baghdad Burning
Riverbend
It has been three years since the beginning of the war that marked the end of Iraq's independence. Three years of occupation and bloodshed.
Spring should be about renewal and rebirth. For Iraqis, spring has been about reliving painful memories and preparing for future disasters. In many ways, this year is like 2003 prior to the war when we were stocking up on fuel, water, food and first aid supplies and medications. We're doing it again this year but now we don't discuss what we're stocking up for. Bombs and B-52's are so much easier to face than other possibilities.
I don't think anyone imagined three years ago that things could be quite this bad today. The last few weeks have been ridden with tension. I'm so tired of it all- we're all tired.
OONTINUES...
Coastal residents between Cairns and Townsville are specifically warned of the dangerous storm tide. (Bureau of Meterology)
Areas along the far north Queensland coast have been evacuated as one of the most severe tropical cyclones in recent history continues to track towards Innisfail.
Tropical Cyclone Larry is expected to intensify to a category 5, with winds up to 280 kilometres an hour, before crossing the coast between Innisfail and Mission Beach on Monday morning.
Evacuation centres have been set up between Ingham and Innisfail as Cyclone Larry tracks towards the coast at about 25 kilometres an hour.
Hundreds of people have voluntarily left coastal areas.State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers have been doorknocking advising other residents to leave.
Bruce Gunn from the Queensland cyclone warning centre says the cyclone is expected to make landfall about 8am AEST, coinciding with a high tide.
"We are talking seawater a couple of metres above the high-tide mark, possibly more than that, with waves on top, so this is a very serious situation we are talking about," he said.
Mr Gunn says severe weather will be experienced several hours before the cyclone reaches the coast.
"While we are saying the coastal crossing will be between 7am and 9am [AEST], the few hours leading up to that will be rather bumpy - not very nice to experience," he said.
Hospitals have been evacuated and Cairns port and airport have been closed, with all flights suspended until further notice.
Most schools are expected to be closed tomorrow.
The cyclone is expected to retain its intensity until at least Tuesday morning as it continues to push hundreds of kilometres inland.
Coastal residents between Cairns and Townsville are specifically warned of the dangerous storm tide as the cyclone crosses the coast.
Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has officially declared a disaster situation, allowing authorities the legal power to forcibly remove any reluctant evacuees.
Mr Beattie says authorities are also worried about hospitals and other buildings in the cyclone's path.
Send us your pictures. Email your pictures and video to ABC News Online or send them via MMS to 0448 859 894 (+61 448 859 894 if you're overseas.)
Sunday, March 19, 2006; Posted: 8:28 a.m. EST (13:28 GMT)
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Residents along stretches of Australia's northeastern coast were ordered out of their homes Sunday as a powerful tropical cyclone bore down on them packing damaging winds and the threat of a devastating storm surge.
Tropical Cyclone Larry was a category four storm, on a scale that tops at five, and Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said it could pack wind gusts up to 280 kilometers per hour (174 mph). The bureau did not give a reading for the storm's sustained winds.
Queensland state Counter Disaster and Rescue Services executive director Frank Pagano compared the potential force of Larry to Katrina, which ravaged the United States' Gulf Coast in August last year, killing more than 1,300 people.
"This is the most devastating cyclone that we could potentially see on the east coast of Queensland for decades ... there is going to be destruction," Pagano told reporters in Brisbane.
"Katrina was a category five -- this is currently a category four that can develop similar to the American one," he added.
National flag carrier Qantas canceled a scheduled morning flight to Cairns and another to Townsville -- the two largest cities in the cyclone's possible path. Cairns has a population of 125,000 while Townsville is home to 160,000 people.
Brisbane Tropical Cyclone Warning Centre Web site advised: "People in the path of this very dangerous cyclone should stay calm and remain in a secure shelter -- above the expected water level -- while the very destructive winds continue."
The stretch of coast the storm was heading toward includes the tourist city of Cairns, popular with international travelers and the start point for many Great Barrier Reef boat cruises.
"Coastal residents between Cairns and Townsville are specifically warned of the dangerous storm tide as the cyclone crosses the coast," the bureau warned. "The sea is likely to steadily rise up to a level which will be significantly above the normal tide, with damaging waves, strong currents and flooding of low-lying areas extending some way inland."
Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie declared a disaster situation, giving local governments the power to enforce mandatory evacuations.
Authorities ordered residents living south of Cairns to flee their homes if they live close to the coast.
"There have been mandatory evacuations of coastal shires south of Cairns ... and emergency shelters set up for people who feel at risk with nowhere to go," a Cairns City Council Disaster Coordination Centre spokesman told Australian Associated Press.
"It's most likely thousands of people are evacuating to avoid the high tide," he added.
Larry was expected to cross the coast early Monday morning.
Peter Rekers, a spokesman for the Queensland state Counter Disaster and Rescue Service, said he was worried about the cyclone's size -- with strong winds expected along up to 400 kilometers (250 miles) of the coast.
"The big concern for us -- if one town is hit by devastation then towns from the surrounding area can come down to assist -- (but) in this case, we're likely to see four or five towns across being devastated at much the same time," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. "So they're not going to be as easy to get to each other and look after each other."
Pagano warned residents to stay away from areas likely to become flooded, saying water often posed a much higher danger than gale force winds during cyclones.
"Buildings themselves may withstand the force of the winds because of our building codes, however, a category four and category five will be devastating," Pagano said.
By Cathryn Curtis
As the threat of bird flu spreads around the world, the big question on the minds of scientists around the world is if — and when — the virus might mutate to allow it to be transmitted from birds to humans. This is what some scientists in the U.S. are predicting:
Bird flu has now been confirmed in more than 40 countries around the world, and health officials are scrambling to prevent the virus from spreading.
Nearly 200 people have been diagnosed with bird flu and more than half have died from it so far. They caught the virus from exposure to chickens and ducks and birds. The bird flu virus can't spread among humans...yet.
Dr. Robert Webster collects and studies samples of the virus in his Memphis, Tennessee lab. He says chances are good that the virus will mutate and jump from birds to humans. "[There are] about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human."
If that happened, a deadly pandemic could quickly spread around the world.
Dr. Webster says we need to be prepared. "We can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. I think we have to face that possibility. I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."
Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, says there is a frightening historic precedent from 1918. "The risk of the current bird flu is that this virus might be actually going down the same path as the 1918 virus."
Dr. Taubenberger led a team of researchers who decoded that virus. They determined it mutated from a bird flu, but they're not sure where or when that happened. He says today's bird flu virus, called H5N1, shows some similarities to the 1918 virus. He adds, "The H5 viruses, especially some of the more recent ones, share some of those mutations, suggesting that they might be acquiring some changes that would make them more easily adapted to humans. So that's a very worrisome situation for us."
No one knows how many mutations it would take for the virus to jump to humans, when it would happen, or the biggest question of all -- if it will happen.
Dr. Anne Moscona
Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Moscona spends her days searching for new types of anti-virals that would prevent and slow the spread of a human-transmitted bird flu and says there is a chance that the virus may not be able to jump to humans.
"It may not do it. There may just be too many changes. The virus may not be able to be a human virus,” but adds, “I don't think that once we have human to human transmission, it's going to be possible to contain it."
So the scientists work around the clock, hoping the virus doesn't mutate, but preparing for the worst.
LINK
Adrianne Appel
for
National Geographic March 17, 2006
For the second year in a row a large amount of Arctic sea ice did not refreeze during the winter as it normally does, a team of scientists reports.
This trend may indicate an overall shrinking of Arctic ice cover due to rapid global climate change.
Mark Serreze is a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who monitors Arctic sea ice.
"Some calculations say that by 2070 we will have no sea ice left," he said.
"It's always dangerous to make predictions, but we are right on schedule" for this to occur.
The ice that floats on top of the Arctic Ocean typically melts a bit in the spring and builds up again in the winter.
Animals such as polar bears, seals, and walruses make their homes on the ice, and people living in the region rely on the ice pack for fishing and travel. (Read how ice melt may be killing polar bears.)
But this year and last year the winters were too warm for the ice to re-form normally, the scientists say.
"It's getting so warm in the Arctic now that the ice is not growing back in winter the way it used to," Serreze said.
Ice-Loss Loop
The Arctic region made the news last September when the same team of researchers reported that a very warm winter followed by a warm summer had resulted in less ice on the ocean than had ever been recorded.
If this spring and summer are also warmer than average, "come this September we could be in really bad shape," Serreze said.
article continues
Thu Mar 16, 2006 09:50 AM ET
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The deadly bird flu virus, which has hit Asia, Europe and Africa, may spread to the United States late this year and risks mutating dangerously there, Russia's top animal and plant health inspector said on Thursday.
"We think that H5N1 (strain of bird flu virus) will reach the United States in autumn," Sergei Dankvert told Reuters.
"This is very realistic. We may be almost certain this will happen after this strain is found in Great Britain, before autumn, as migrating birds will carry it to the United States from there."
He said there was also an opportunity of the virus spreading by fowl migrating from Siberia's Tyumen region to Alaska and mixing there with birds flying to Canada and to other parts of the United States.
article continues..
reuters
Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:40 PM GMT167
By Amer Amery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.
Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.
The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".
"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.
"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.
RUBBLE
Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.
"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.
Another policeman, Major Farouq Hussein, said all the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.
Pictures of the house targeted in the raid showed it had been reduced to rubble, while next to it lay the burnt-out wreckage of a truck.
Iraqi police said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders.
Photographs of the funeral showed men weeping as five children were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row next to freshly dug graves.
Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.
In January a U.S. air strike on a house in Baiji, further north, killed several members of a family. In December U.S. fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on a village, also in the region, killing 10 people. The U.S. military said the people targeted had been suspected of planting roadside bombs.
article continues
reuters.co.uk
Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:40 PM GMT167
By Amer Amery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.
Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.
The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".
"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.
"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.
RUBBLE
Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.
"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.
Another policeman, Major Farouq Hussein, said all the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.
Pictures of the house targeted in the raid showed it had been reduced to rubble, while next to it lay the burnt-out wreckage of a truck.
Iraqi police said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders.
Photographs of the funeral showed men weeping as five children were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row next to freshly dug graves.
Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.
In January a U.S. air strike on a house in Baiji, further north, killed several members of a family. In December U.S. fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on a village, also in the region, killing 10 people. The U.S. military said the people targeted had been suspected of planting roadside bombs.
article continues
American Free Press
RADIATION FROM IRAQ WAR DETECTED IN UK ATMOSPHERE
By Leuren Moret
A shocking new scientific study by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan asks: “Did the use of uranium weapons in Gulf War II result
in the contamination of Europe?”
High levels of depleted uranium (DU) have been measured in the atmosphere in Britain, transported on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia. Scientists cited the U.S. bombing of Tora Bora, Afghanistan in 2001 and the “Shock and Awe” bombing during Gulf War II in Iraq in 2003 as one of the main reasons.
In the 1950s the British government had established an air monitoring facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.
Ironically, AWE was taken over three years ago by Halliburton, which at first refused to release key data as required by law to Busby.
An international expert on low-level radiation, Busby serves as an official advisor on several British government committees. He recently co-authored an independent report on low-level radiation with 45 scientists with the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) for the European Parliament.
Busby was eventually able to get Aldermaston’s air monitoring data from Halliburton by filing a freedom of information request using a new British law that became effective Jan. 1, 2005. Critical data from 2003 was missing, however, so he had to obtain the information from the Defence Procurement
Agency.
Aldermaston is one of many nuclear facilities throughout Europe that regularly monitor atmospheric radiation levels transported by sand, dust storms and air currents from radiation sources in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
After the “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq in 2003, very fine particles of depleted uranium were captured along with larger sand and dust particles in filters in Britain. These particles traveled in seven to nine days from Iraqi battlefields as far away as 2,400 miles.
The radiation measured in the atmosphere quadrupled within a few weeks after the beginning of the 2003 campaign, and at one of the five monitoring locations, the levels twice required an official alert to the British Environment Agency.
In addition, according to Busby, the Aldermaston air monitoring data provided a continuous record of depleted uranium levels in Britain from other recent wars.
Extensive video news footage of the 2003 Iraq war, including Fallujah in 2004, provided evidence that the United States has illegally used depleted uranium munitions on civilian populations. These military actions are in direct violation of not only international conventions but also violate U.S. military law because the United States is a signatory to The Hague and Geneva conventions and the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol.
Depleted uranium weaponry meets the definition of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) in two out of three categories under U.S. Code Title 50, Chapter 40 Sec. 2302. After action mandates have also been violated such as U.S. Army Regulation AR 700-48 and TB 9-1300-278, which requires treatment of radiation poisoning for all casualties, including enemy soldiers and civilians.
In the mainstream press, British officials have attempted to counter the study by blaming the elevated uranium levels on “local sources.” Anonymous statements by government scientists used by the media thus far, however, have been contradicted by evidence disclosed in the report.
Naturally occurring uranium in the crust of the Earth is only 2.4 parts per million and could not become concentrated to the high levels measured in Britain. As far as nuclear power plants are concerned, the lowest levels of uranium measured at monitoring stations around Aldermaston were actually taken at the facility, which designs and tests nuclear weapons—meaning this could not possibly be a source.
Atomic weapons facilities would be more likely to produce plutonium contamination, which was not reported as a contaminant.
This wasn’t the first time a noted scientist has discussed global pollution from the use of DU.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, an expert on radiation, exposed a World Health Organization (WHO) cover-up on depleted uranium. Baverstock leaked an official WHO report that he had written for the organization but was never published. He warned in the report about the environmental contamination from tiny DU particles formed from U.S. munitions.
In addition, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, a Japanese physicist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, estimated that the atomic equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs has been released into the global atmosphere since 1991 from the use of DU munitions. He said it is mixed in the atmosphere in one year.
DU PROFITS
As if Busby’s report is not bad enough, a new book by a leading scientist notes who is making billions from nightmare armaments.
Dr. Jay Gould revealed in his book The Enemy Within that the British royal family privately owns investments in uranium holdings worth over $6 billion through Rio Tinto Mines in Australia. The mining company was formed for the British royal family in the late 1950s by Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland, who was known as the queen’s banker and the master financial manipulator behind billionaire Robert Maxwell’s fortune.*
The Rothschilds are also profiting enormously from their control of the price and supply of uranium globally.
The ubiquitous Halliburton just recently finished construction of a 1,000-mile railway from the mining area to a port on the north coast of Australia to transport the ore.
The queen’s favorite American buccaneers, Dick Cheney and the Bush family, are tied to her through uranium mining and the shared use of DU munitions in the Middle East, Central Asia and Kosovo.
The role that such diverse groups and individuals as the Carlyle Group, George H.W. Bush, former Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci, Los Alamos and Livermore labs, and U.S. and international pension fund investments have played in proliferating depleted uranium weapons is not well known. God save the queen from her complicity in turning planet Earth into a death star.
Leuren Moret is an international expert on the environmental
effects of depleted uranium and has worked at two U.S. nuclear
weapons laboratories.
LINK
Last Updated Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:36:07 EST
CBC News
Harmful ground-level ozone may play a greater role in Arctic temperature increases than previously thought, climate change researchers say.
Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York say ozone in the atmosphere may have contributed from one-third to one-half of the temperature increase in the Arctic zone in the last 100 years.
The study's authors used computer modelling to try to determine what role ozone played in global temperature increases in the last 120 years.
Ozone in the upper atmosphere protects the planet from harmful ultraviolet radiation; but the ozone researchers are referring to in the study is closer to the ground, and is created by vehicle emissions and the northern hemisphere's industrial infrastructure.
This ground-level ozone, a major contributor to the smog found in cities in summer, is harmful to plants and animals.
The effect was greatest in the winter and spring, when ozone is transported from industrial centres to the Arctic more efficiently than in the summer.
Scientists said they were surprised to find the role ozone may have played in heating Arctic regions.
"Instead of being this tiny player, [ozone] can be more like 30 or 40 or even 50 per cent of the cause of warming that we're seeing in the Arctic now," lead author Drew Shindell said. "It's very dramatic."
Shindell also said the results have uncovered an unexpected benefit of ozone pollution control efforts around the world. "We now see that reducing ozone pollution can not only improve air quality but also have the added benefit of easing climate warming, especially in the Arctic."
March 15, 2006
A Continent Splits Apart
By Axel Bojanowski
Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed -- at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.
Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed -- and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.
Normally changes to our geological environment take place almost imperceptibly. A life time is too short to see rivers changing course, mountains rising skywards or valleys opening up. In north-eastern Africa's Afar Triangle, though, recent months have seen hundreds of crevices splitting the desert floor and the ground has slumped by as much as 100 meters (328 feet). At the same time, scientists have observed magma rising from deep below as it begins to form what will eventually become a basalt ocean floor. Geologically speaking, it won't be long until the Red Sea floods the region. The ocean that will then be born will split Africa apart.
The Afar Triangle, which cuts across Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, is the largest construction site on the planet. Three tectonic plates meet there with the African and Arabian plates drifting apart along two separate fault lines by one centimeter a year. A team of scientists working with Christophe Vigny of the Paris Laboratory of Geology reported on the phenomenon in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. While the two plates move apart, the ground sinks to make room for the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur
A third crevice cuts south, splitting not far from Lake Victoria. One branch of the rift runs to the east, the other to the west of the lake. The two branches of this third crevice are moving apart by about one millimeter a year.
The dramatic event that Ayalew and his colleagues witnessed in the Afar Desert on Sept. 26, 2005 was the first visual proof of this process -- and it was followed by a week-long series of earthquakes. During the months that followed, hundreds of further crevices opened up in the ground, spreading across an area of 345 square miles. "The earth has not stopped moving since," geophysicist Tim Wright of the University of Oxford says. The ground is still splitting open and sinking, he says; small earthquakes are constantly shaking the region.
Scientists have made repeated trips to the area since the drama of last September. Locals have reported a number of new cracks opening in the ground, says geologist Cynthia Ebinger from the University of London, and during each visit, new crevices are discovered. Fumes as hot as 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) shoot up from some of them; the sound of bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur rise from others. The larger crevices are dozens of meters deep and several hundred meters long. Traces of recent volcanic eruptions are also visible.
In a number of places, cracks have opened up beneath the thin layer of volcanic ash that covers the region. As there is no ash in the fissures, it's clear that they opened up after the volcanic eruptions, most of which took place at the end of September or in October, 2005. A number of locals who fled the eruptions have reported that a black cloud of ash -- spewed out of the Dabbahu volcano -- darkened the sky for three days.
A new ocean floor on the Earth's surface
Basalt magma has risen into some of the crevices. For the moment, Ayalew explains, the lava seems not to be rising further. A number of recent eruptions, though, have left layers of new basalt lava on the Earth's surface. And it's the exact same kind of lava that spews out of volcanic ridges deep under the ocean -- a process which slowly pushes older lava sediments away on either side. The process has only just begun in the Afar Triangle -- and scientists for the first time can witness the birth of a new ocean floor.
The source of the African magma looks to be a gigantic stream of molten rock rising from beneath the Earth's crust and slicing through the African continental plate like a blow torch. It's a process that began thirty million years ago when lava broke through the continent for the first time, separating the Arabian Peninsula from Africa and creating the Red Sea.
Now, it's the Afar Triangle's turn and it's sinking rapidly. Large areas are already more than 100 meters (328 feet) below sea level. For now, the highlands surrounding the Denakil Depression prevent the Red Sea from flooding these areas, but erosion and tectonic plate movement are continually reducing the height of this natural barrier. The Denakil Depression, which lies to the east of Afar, is already prey to regular floods -- each flood leaving behind a crust of salt.
Africa to lose its horn
The chain of volcanoes that runs along the roughly 6,000 kilometer (3,730 mile) long East African Rift System offers further testimony to the breaking apart of the continent. In some areas around the outer edges of the Rift System, the Earth's crust has already cracked open, making room for the magma below. From the Red Sea to Mozambique in the south, dozens of volcanoes have formed, the best known being Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Nyiragongo.
These fiery mountains too will one day sink into the sea. Geophysicists have calculated that in 10 million years the East African Rift System will be as large as the Red Sea. When that happens, Africa will lose its horn.
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 14 March 2006
A burst pipeline in Alaska's North Slope has caused the Arctic region's worst oil spill, spreading more than 250,000 gallons of crude oil over an area used by caribou herds and prompting environmentalists again to question the Bush administration's drive for more oil exploration there.
The leak was first spotted by a British Petroleum worker 11 days ago, and was reported to have been plugged a few days later. Initial hopes expressed by BP that the spill was limited to a few tens of thousands of gallons proved to be over-optimistic. Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation has steadily increased its estimate of the size of the spill, the latest estimate putting it at around 265,000 gallons.
The leak, whose cause is unknown, occurred in a remote part of the most sparsely populated state in the United States, and it remains to be seen what damage, if any, it has done to ecosystems. It does, however, give grist to groups who have challenged Washington's assertion that oil can be prospected and shipped while leaving only the gentlest of "footprints" on the landscape.
"This historic oil spill is a catastrophe for the environment," Natalie Brandon, of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement. "Tone-deaf politicians in Congress should now stop trying to push for more drilling through sneaky manoeuvres ... The fact that the oil spill occurred in a caribou crossing area in Prudhoe Bay is a painful reminder of the reality of unchecked oil and gas development across Alaska's North Slope."
The biggest battle has been over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, also on the North Slope, which the White House wants to open up. The initiative, championed from the moment the Bush administration took office in 2001, has been consistently blocked by Congress but is periodically revived.
A second battle, meanwhile, is taking place in a previously untouched corner of the National Petroleum Reserve on the North Slope. The Bush administration has allowed oil companies to prospect for oil and gas in an area covering 389,000 acres. Environmental groups have responded with a federal lawsuit, filed last Friday, in which they contend that the Department of the Interior has violated the Endangered Species Act and other laws in an area noted for its flocks of migratory geese.
It is not just environmentalists who oppose the administration's plans. Several prominent energy analysts, as well as Washington politicians, argue that the likely yield in unexplored areas of the North Slope is not large enough to justify the intrusion.
Alaskan politicians and industry lobby groups are heavily in favour of expanding exploration as it would bring jobs and other benefits to the state economy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, argues that further domestic exploration is essential if the United States wants to decrease its dependence on oil and gas from the Middle East.
Accidents and leaks have periodically occurred on the North Slope, and along the trans-Alaska pipeline that takes crude from Prudhoe Bay across two mountain ranges to the port of Valdez on the shores of the North Pacific. Saboteurs blew up a section of pipeline shortly after it opened in the 1970s, starting a major spillage. A hunter accidentally fired into the pipeline five years ago, causing $7m (£3.6m) worth of damage.
A burst pipeline in Alaska's North Slope has caused the Arctic region's worst oil spill, spreading more than 250,000 gallons of crude oil over an area used by caribou herds and prompting environmentalists again to question the Bush administration's drive for more oil exploration there.
The leak was first spotted by a British Petroleum worker 11 days ago, and was reported to have been plugged a few days later. Initial hopes expressed by BP that the spill was limited to a few tens of thousands of gallons proved to be over-optimistic. Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation has steadily increased its estimate of the size of the spill, the latest estimate putting it at around 265,000 gallons.
The leak, whose cause is unknown, occurred in a remote part of the most sparsely populated state in the United States, and it remains to be seen what damage, if any, it has done to ecosystems. It does, however, give grist to groups who have challenged Washington's assertion that oil can be prospected and shipped while leaving only the gentlest of "footprints" on the landscape.
"This historic oil spill is a catastrophe for the environment," Natalie Brandon, of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement. "Tone-deaf politicians in Congress should now stop trying to push for more drilling through sneaky manoeuvres ... The fact that the oil spill occurred in a caribou crossing area in Prudhoe Bay is a painful reminder of the reality of unchecked oil and gas development across Alaska's North Slope."
The biggest battle has been over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, also on the North Slope, which the White House wants to open up. The initiative, championed from the moment the Bush administration took office in 2001, has been consistently blocked by Congress but is periodically revived.
A second battle, meanwhile, is taking place in a previously untouched corner of the National Petroleum Reserve on the North Slope. The Bush administration has allowed oil companies to prospect for oil and gas in an area covering 389,000 acres. Environmental groups have responded with a federal lawsuit, filed last Friday, in which they contend that the Department of the Interior has violated the Endangered Species Act and other laws in an area noted for its flocks of migratory geese.
It is not just environmentalists who oppose the administration's plans. Several prominent energy analysts, as well as Washington politicians, argue that the likely yield in unexplored areas of the North Slope is not large enough to justify the intrusion.
Alaskan politicians and industry lobby groups are heavily in favour of expanding exploration as it would bring jobs and other benefits to the state economy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, argues that further domestic exploration is essential if the United States wants to decrease its dependence on oil and gas from the Middle East.
Accidents and leaks have periodically occurred on the North Slope, and along the trans-Alaska pipeline that takes crude from Prudhoe Bay across two mountain ranges to the port of Valdez on the shores of the North Pacific. Saboteurs blew up a section of pipeline shortly after it opened in the 1970s, starting a major spillage. A hunter accidentally fired into the pipeline five years ago, causing $7m (£3.6m) worth of damage.
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
14 March 2006
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.
Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.
Article Continues
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
13/03/2006
With American troops sinking ever further into the "Iraq quagmire", Bush's job approval ratings hitting new lows and a growing list of respectable officials using the word dictatorship in reference to the White House, the apparent plans for a U.S. attack on Iran can reasonably be taken as evidence that many members of the U.S. government have in fact gone literally, clinically insane. At the very least, anyone still in possession of the alleged human capacity for independent, critical thought is surely asking the big question:
Why?
How exactly has it served the Bush administration to bloody-mindedly continue to push forward, to this day, with a plan that over 2 years ago was already identifiable as containing the seeds of its own downfall and the trashing of America's previously good (if undeserved) image on the world stage? Is it perhaps the case that Colin Powell enjoyed being ridiculed at the U.N.? Does Donald Rumsfeld derive some satisfaction from the fact that he is considered the architect of the torture of innocent Iraqi detainees? (Actually, maybe we shouldn't go there).
Now, we all know that most governments engage in all sorts of illegal and scurillous activities, but generally they go to considerable lengths to conceal these from the general public and usually hide behind the cover of plausible excuses, for example, the 'Communist threat' that was used during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. But even in those wars, once the real goal had been achieved, the U.S. government withdrew. In the case of the 'war on terror' and the Iraq invasion, the plausible excuse of Saddam's WMDs was from the outset extremely weak, and it was always going to be just a matter of time before Bush et al were exposed as a bunch of liars. Despite this, there is not even a hint of a withdrawal from the endless 'war on terror' - quite the opposite in fact.
In looking deeply at the entire debacle then, we arrive at the tentative conclusion that there is something, some threat, that is driving the Bush administration to risk their political lives - the means to power and wealth that they live and breathe for - for very little in return.
So what is that "something"? Paradoxically, yet somehow very logically, that "something" is their political lives and the threat of a very dishonorable discharge from political life, the possibility of long jail terms and, depending on the circumstances, even execution.
To understand the why, we need to go back to that defining moment that, as we were told ad nauseum at the time, "changed the world forever".
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by John Atcheson
Over the past several months, the normally restrained voice of science has taken on a distinct note of panic when it comes to global warming.
How did we go from debating the "uncertainty" behind climate science to near hysterical warnings from normally sober scientists about irrevocable and catastrophic consequences? Two reasons.
First, there hasn’t been any real uncertainty in the scientific community for more than a decade. An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on global warming.
But the second reason is that the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.
In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun on December 15th, 2004 this author outlined one such tipping point: a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which higher temperatures caused methane – a powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) – to escape from ice-like structures called clathrates, which raised the temperature which caused more methane to be released and so on. Even though there was strong evidence that this mechanism had contributed to at least two extreme warming events in the geologic past, the scientific community hadn’t yet focused on methane ices in 2004. Even among the few pessimists who had, we believed – or hoped – that we had a decade or so before anything like it began happening again.
We were wrong.
In August of 2005 a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk University in Russia announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined was melting, releasing billions of tons of methane as it did.
The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover.
It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event. At a recent meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences in St. Louis, James Zachos, foremost expert on the PETM reported that greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the atmosphere at thirty times the speed with which they did during the PETM.
We may have just witnessed the first salvo in what could prove to be an irreversible trip to hell on earth.
There are other positive feedback loops we’ve failed to anticipate. For example, the heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000 people in 2003 also damaged European woodlands, causing them to release more carbon dioxide, the main GHG, than they sequester – exactly the opposite of the assumptions built into our models, which treat forests as sponges that sop up excess carbon.
The same thing is happening to a number of other ecosystems that our models and scientists have treated as carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest, the boreal forests (one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks in the planet), and soils in temperate areas are all releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, due to global warming-induced droughts, diseases, pest activity, and metabolic changes. In short, many of the things we treat as carbon sponges in our models aren’t sopping up excess carbon; they’re being wrung out and releasing extra carbon.
The polar ice cap is also melting far faster than models predict, setting off another feedback loop. Less ice means more open water, which absorbs more heat which means less ice, and so on.
Even worse, we’ve substantially underestimated the rate at which continental glaciers are melting.
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Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
11/03/2006
There are approximately 6 billion of us on this planet, the lives and fortunes of whom are directed in various ways by a relatively small group of elected, or unelected, individuals who together make up what is called 'government'.
No individual or group alive today can lay claim to having come up with the idea that an individual or a small group should possess inordinate power over the majority of humanity. Almost all peoples throughout recorded history were born into a world where some form of government or another already existed, including those individuals who, during their lifetime, became part of this ruling class.
There are two possible explanations as to why some form of government or other - a ruling class in opposition to the masses of humanity - has existed now for countless generations.
The first explanation is that it is fundamental to human nature to look to a leader or leaders to take and enact decisions on behalf of the rest. The argument goes that, due to another fundamental aspect of human nature - the tendency towards service to self - leadership by an individual or small group is necessary to ensure that a structured society, even the most primitive, can succeed without descending into anarchy, violence and survival of the fittest, and that even those humans who wish that it were not so, innately understand this and therefore willingly embrace a hierarchy as a necessary evil. Leadership, or government, then, is a structure that is put in place essentially to protect the people from themselves while maintaining the structure of society for the benefit of all, and places power into the hands of the few who present themselves as most able to do the job.
Let us notice this important fact: by and large in recent history, those that have presented themselves, or have been presented by others, as being fit for the job of leadership, have been elected or selected as a result of their own claims, or the claims of their associates, as to their competence rather than due to any apparent and innate leadership qualities that could be verified by the citizens to be governed. That is to say, society is too large for direct contact and intimate knowledge of the leaders by all of the people, so we end up having to trust the leaders' claims or the claims of their associates, as to their eligibility to hold positions of power over us.
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From the New YorkerThe President and the Scientists
Issue of 2006-03-13
Posted 2006-03-06
This week in the magazine, Michael Specter writes about the uneasy relationship between science and government in the Bush Administration. Here, Specter discusses the article.
THE NEW YORKER: In your article this week, you write about the Bush Administration’s hostility to science. Broadly speaking, what does that mean?
MICHAEL SPECTER: I’m not sure I would use the word “hostility.” The Administration simply doesn’t seem to rely on the advice of scientists on a wide range of issues: climate change, pollution, and biomedical research, for example. Previous Administrations have taken science as an area that is above the political fray—this one does not seem to operate that way.
The opposition to science seems to have a number of strains, many religious. You write about how the Administration is vehemently opposed to “any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex.” Do policymakers have some other rationale, or is this more of a straightforward agenda?
Well, the Bush Administration is squarely on the record in favor of abstinence as the main approach to issues such as H.I.V. and abortion. Few groups, by the way, oppose abstinence as an approach, and many see it as an excellent first line of defense. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t always work, and, when it does, it rarely works for long. Nonetheless, the Administration—and many of its allies among conservatives and the religious right—places far more emphasis on abstinence than on teaching children other methods of birth control and protection against sexually transmitted diseases.What are some of the other branches of science that are suffering? For instance, you write about stem-cell research in your article.
Stem-cell research is considered by many to be the most exciting area of biomedical research. But, because it relies on human embryos, President Bush decided in 2001 that public funding for the work would be limited to those lines of cells that already existed. There are other difficult issues in the current Administration, though. The scientific recommendations of the Environmental Protection Agency have often been ignored by this Administration, and sometimes decisions on environmental policy have been heavily influenced by former, or even current, allies of industry. Climate change is another area, and so, in many ways, is nasa. President Bush has said he wants to send people to Mars. But critics say that such a program would simply take money away from more useful research.
How much of this is a response to lobbying forces, such as fundamentalist Christian pressure?
It’s not so easy to disentangle the Administration and the Christian right. The President is an evangelical Christian and so are many people in his Administration. On many issues, though, industrial lobbyists hold sway. It must also be added that stem-cell research poses moral dilemmas that many Americans find hard to resolve—so to say that it’s blindly immoral to even question stem-cell research is, in my opinion, not fair.
What are the issues of federal funding in stem-cell research? Are they so prohibitive that they have essentially hamstrung a generation of scientists?
Well, the government does not fund research that involves stem cells, because you have to destroy an embryo to carry it out. Many people feel that destroying an embryo is akin to killing a living person—and the Bush Administration has drawn a moral line at that. Such research—all major biomedical research these days—is complex, and expensive. If you are at a university and you want to do embryonic stem-cell work, you could do so only with private funds; nothing from the government can pay for the work. This can get tricky even for rich institutions like Harvard, since equipment in labs can be very expensive and groups routinely share equipment. When stem-cell research is involved, the equipment needs to be accounted for in a different way and often bought with segregated funds.
Your article also touches on a number of personnel and staffing issues—scientists who have quit in protest over the Administration’s decisions, advisory boards that have been dismantled or remain unstaffed as a result of new vetting procedures. Does the Bush Administration require that its scientists agree with its political goals? How do past Administrations compare in this regard?
No Administration is eager to hire people who are virulently opposed to its goals. Yet, in the past, there has usually been a general feeling that scientists are above—or at least on the sidelines of—politics, and that they should be given jobs based purely on their ability to carry them out. That is a little utopian, and, of course, it doesn’t always work that way. But this Administration, more than any in memory, seems very aggressive about making certain that its scientific advisors support its ideas. And, if they don’t, their advice is often ignored.
Many of the scientists and public-health officials in your article talk about science as being apolitical. But is it? Ethics and science go hand in hand, and scientists are faced with moral questions all the time. Is there such a thing as a disinterested scientist, in this sense?
It’s naïve to assume that science is apart from, rather than a part of, society. Still, there is such a thing as a man or a woman pursuing an idea solely for the intellectual fruit it might bear, and trying to work it out without regard to who votes for whom or what the ethical implications might be. (This, by the way, is not necessarily a good thing. We do need scientists to think about the possible implications of their work—which these days can touch on the most fundamental issues in life.)
Are we losing ground in science as a nation? Are other countries doing better science, and doing more of it? Are there economic as well as medical costs?
We are still immensely powerful, successful, and full of talent. Yet the sense that we are invincible as a nation of scientists is starting to fade. If the investments that China, South Korea, India, and the European Union make in research and education continue to grow at such a rapid rate, then it is hard to see how the result can be anything but a loss of prominence, innovation, and prestige.
How do you think America will compare with India and China ten years from now?
It depends. We still have the largest and most sophisticated institutions and lots of smart people. We just need to keep open the lines of education and the ability to pursue intellectual solutions to basic problems.
There have been some recent victories for science—most notably, the defeat of intelligent-design instruction in Dover, Pennsylvania. Are there signs that there may be a backlash against anti-science sentiment, and a resurgence of science?
Except for Dover, which was driven by an unusually thorough, cogent, and powerful federal-court decision, I can’t say that I see many signs of a resurgence of support for science.
What about global warming? What does the science tell us, and how is this Administration responding to it? How is the American population responding to it?
Global warming is coming—or is already here, depending on your interpretation of the data. The government has responded by worrying about its economic place in the world rather than about the physical future of the world. It’s complicated, because we need not just to burn fewer fossil fuels, but to be sure China and India do the same. Still, America needs to lead, and it has stopped doing that. We need to develop alternative sources of energy, and that is well within the intellectual and technical abilities of this country. Still, most Americans will worry about global warming seriously only when it affects their wallets in a demonstrable way, or when their health, or that of their children, becomes measurably worse. We are not exactly known for our foresight on these issues.
What are the costs of an anti-science Administration like this one, in both the short term and the long term? Is it possible that we’re witnessing the beginning of a major shift away from Enlightenment thinking, or is that too alarmist a reading of the effect of one Administration’s policies?
That’s a little alarmist, I hope. We are in an age when almost anything is technically possible in science. We can break humans down to the smallest component parts. We can mix parts and grow new ones (or soon will). We can manipulate nature and, soon enough, we will even be able to choose the genetic components of our children. None of this is easy to take, and a reaction is understandable. The job of the Administration, and of educators, is to convince people that these powerful new tools can help immensely and not just cause harm. In the short term, that is not happening and we are probably losing some good young people who might otherwise enter science. But a few years from now—maybe 2008, to take a random date—the situation could improve markedly.
