Offshore oil cleanup activity off the Louisiana coast, parts of which are under a coastal flood watch, was halted as Tropical Storm Alex moved over southern Gulf waters.

The National Hurricane Center said Alex was close to hurricane strength and was expected to curl northwest away from major oil-extraction facilities.

The U.S. government also said it would accept 22 offers of foreign assistance from a dozen countries and international agencies to help clean up and contain the oil spill.

Authorities “have determined that there is a need for containment boom and skimming vessels that can be met by offers of assistance from foreign governments and international bodies,” the State Department said in a statement.

Vice President Joe Biden, visiting the Gulf region for the first time since the 71-day crisis began, emphasized the federal government’s commitment.

“We’re not going to end this until everyone is made whole,” Biden said in Pensacola, Florida.

With rough weather approaching, controlled burns of oil on the ocean, flights spraying dispersant chemicals and booming operations were all stopped, authorities said.

However, BP Plc’s oil-capture and relief well drilling continued.

About 8,475 barrels of oil were collected in the first 12 hours of Tuesday, BP said. Some 4,130 barrels of crude were flared, along with 28.7 million cubic feet of natural gas.

But BP officials said waves as high as 12 feet would delay for several days its plans to hook up a third system to capture much more oil.

U.S. government officials estimate 35,000 to 60,000 barrels are gushing from the blown-out well each day. The current containment system can handle up to 28,000 barrels daily. The planned addition would have raised that to 53,000 bpd.

BP’s market capitalization has shrunk by about $100 billion since its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank in 5,000 feet of water on April 22, two days after an explosion and fire killed 11 workers.

The company’s shares have lost more than half their value, but have seen sporadic bargain hunting on the way down. Tuesday was one of those days; BP’s U.S.-listed shares rose 2.3 percent to $27.67 although stock indices tumbled.

The stock’s slide since late April has also sparked talk of a possible takeover bid.

TOLL STILL MOUNTING

The economic and ecological costs to tourism, wildlife, fishing and other industries, already massive, were still mounting for four states along the U.S. Gulf coast.

As crude oil and dispersants float on the surface of the Gulf, crews are battling to keep it off beaches and away from wildlife breeding grounds.

The lucrative tourism industry in the Gulf could be hard hit for years by a false perception the spill has ruined all the beaches, tourism officials said.

Many businesses are on the verge of buckling. On Mississippi’s Gulf coast, beach umbrellas and sun chairs have been replaced with oil spill clean up crews wearing white plastic uniforms.

“This is so sad. We cannot swim or feel safe on our own beaches. Even if they are open we will not go near it because of the oil,” said Ethel Williams who lives in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Linda Horsby, who heads the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association said 2010 was supposed to be a comeback season.

“We have just started recovering from last year’s economy and now the oil hits the shores,” she said. “We have flatlined compared to last year’s hotel depression numbers.”

Senior U.S. officials continued to beat a path to the Gulf region, responding to criticism that President Barack Obama and his administration responded too slowly to the crisis.

Biden met with Louisiana governor, Republican Bobby Jindal, in New Orleans before heading to Florida.

“This region has been hit too hard by acts of God and now by an act of man,” Biden said. “We’re going to be feeling the effects and you’re going to be feeling the effects for some time to come.”

A U.S. appeals court set July 8 for oral arguments on the Obama administration’s request to stay a ruling that lifted its six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling.

A federal judge blocked it at the request of drilling companies, saying the suspension was too broad and arbitrary. The state of Louisiana has challenged the ruling, saying it is losing millions of dollars in the oil and gas industry.

Polls have given Obama low marks for his handling of the disaster, although not as low as those given to BP. ”

More at Reuters.

The first multi-century drought reconstruction that includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia shows frequent and severe droughts during the 13th and 16th centuries and the latter part of the 20th century.

An international research team figured out northwest Africa’s climate history by using the information recorded in tree rings. The oldest trees sampled contain climate data from the medieval period. One tree-ring sample from Morocco dates back to the year 883.

“Water issues in this part of the world are vital,” said lead researcher Ramzi Touchan of the University of Arizona. “This is the first regional climate reconstruction that can be used by water resource managers.”

In most of North Africa, instruments have been recording weather information for 50 years or less, too short a time to provide the long-term understanding of regional climate needed for resource planning, he said.

“One of the most important ways to understand the climate variability is to use the proxy record, and one of the most reliable proxy records is tree rings,” said Touchan, an associate research professor at UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

The team has developed the first systematically sampled network of tree-ring chronologies across northwest Africa, said co-author David Meko, also of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

The network allowed the researchers to analyze the patterns of past droughts over the whole region, said Meko, a UA associate research professor. The width of the annual growth rings on trees in semi-arid environments is highly correlated with the amount of precipitation.

The team found the region’s 20th-century drying trend matches what climate models predict will occur as the climate warms. The research is the first to compare projections from climate models with tree-ring-based reconstructions of the region’s past climate.

The region’s trees and dead wood needed to do such research are disappearing rapidly from a combination of a massive die-off of trees, logging and population pressures, Touchan said.

“We have a chance to do what we call salvage dendrochronology,” Touchan said. These are areas where we need to get this information now or it’s going to disappear.”

Pointing to a cross-section of an old tree from Morocco, he said, “This is from 883 — and this is from a stump. If we don’t take them, they’re gone. So this is a real treasure.”

The team’s paper is being published in the journal Climate Dynamics. The National Science Foundation funded the research.

The team sampled several different species of conifer and oak trees, because research indicates that testing several different species from the same region provides a better indicator of regional climate.

The current tree-ring chronology builds on previous work in northwest Africa by this team and by other researchers. The chronology incorporates samples from at least 20 trees from each of 39 different sites.

Persistent drought was more widespread across northwest Africa before the year 1500 than for the four centuries following, the researchers found. However, the pattern of widespread regional drought then seems to re-emerge in the late 20th century.

The spatial extent of the new regional tree-ring chronology revealed that drought in Morocco is not driven by the same kinds of oceanic and atmospheric conditions as drought in Algeria and Tunisia.

Drought in Morocco is strongly related to the north/south seesaw of air-pressure anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean called the North Atlantic Oscillation. However, drought in Morocco is only weakly related to El Nino. By contrast, drought in Algeria and Tunisia appears more linked to a warm tropical Atlantic Ocean.

Touchan hopes to expand the new network’s geographic reach to across North Africa, including Libya and additional parts of Algeria.

In addition, he wants to extend the chronology back in time to bridge the gap to archaeological material.

Tree-ring chronologies exist for centuries deep in the past, but they are “floating,” meaning that there is no continuous record linking those chronologies to ones that reach back from the present, he said.

“If we can bridge this gap, it will be a discovery for the world,” Touchan said.

Touchan and Meko’s co-authors are Kevin J. Anchukaitis of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.; Mohamed Sabir of the National School of Forest Engineering in Sale, Morocco; Said Attalah of the University of Ourgla in Algeria; and Ali Aloui of the Institute of Sylvo-Pastoral of Tabarka in Tunisia. “

Cathy Gulli, Macleans magazine, describes the harrowing experience of “two Canadians in Peru fac[ing] earthquakes, landslides, floods, near-death—and death”.

” “You’re cursed now,” the Peruvian guide chided. Nakita Haining had just picked up one of dozens of skulls and bones strewn across ancient burial grounds in Peru when the guide offered this ominous message. She looked over at her travel partner Daryl Buchanan, who had done the same. “You’re cursed now, too,” the guide said, nodding. Haining and Buchanan smiled nervously, set the skulls down, and carried on with their hike. But ever since that warning, recalls Buchanan, “All this stuff happened.”

“Stuff” is Buchanan’s characteristically unadorned way of describing what ensued: earthquakes, landslides, floods. Near-death, and death. A state of emergency declared in several regions of the country. At least 30,000 people affected. He and Haining had arrived in Peru from Edmonton on Jan. 14, for a two-week vacation that would culminate in a four-day trek through the Amazon jungle and along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. There, the pair, who describe themselves as best friends, bandmates and co-workers in a vinyl siding business, would celebrate Haining’s 23rd birthday.

Months earlier, they’d booked cheap flights online—only to realize while thumbing through a travel guide that it would be wet season. “We were warned,” says Buchanan. “It said if you go in January, expect heavy rain. Expect that train tracks will be covered with rocks, you might be stranded for a few days, and flights might be cancelled.” But after years of pining for a Peruvian adventure, they were undeterred. “We decided to take our chances.”

So when the pair landed in Lima, and were informed by airline officials that their luggage had been lost, “We laughed and looked at each other and said, ‘Who cares? We’re in Peru!’ ” recalls Buchanan. The next several days were idyllic. Warm, sunny, beautiful. They took a small aircraft high above the desert to see the mysterious Nazca lines, hundreds of geoglyphs or giant etchings in the earth of animals and humans. Buchanan and Haining, both surfers, sandboarded the world’s largest dune. And then they visited the ancient burial grounds—where they mistakenly handled the sacred skulls, and apparently touched off calamity.

Soon after, they headed to Cerro Azul, a coastal village immortalized in the Beach Boys song Surfin’ Safari. They checked into their hotel and settled in for the night. At about three o’clock in the morning, Haining roused suddenly. “The whole hotel just started shaking like crazy, ” she recalls. She scanned the room: there were no pictures threatening to crash down; the TV was bolted to a table. By the time she cast a glance at Buchanan, who was still snoozing, the shaking had stopped. “It was probably about five seconds long,” says Haining. “I wasn’t sure what it was. So I rolled over and went back to sleep.” The next morning, an explanation came by way of the locals: an earthquake had hit the area, and more were imminent. Fortunately, they were leaving the next day, says Buchanan. “We were hoping we would get out of there before there was another earthquake.”

They did. But the real danger was still ahead. Buchanan and Haining flew to Cusco, high in the Andean mountains, where they met their Peruvian guide before their four-day journey to Machu Picchu. Washington Huaraya Cusihuaman, 33, was tall, thin, and in good shape but with bad knees—he’d done this 45-km leg of the Inca Trail 300 times, earning $10 a day. The pair also got acquainted with the four other tourists making the trek, who instantly became known to one another as “Chicago,” “New York,” “Lima” and “Belgium,” after their places of origin.

Their day began at the crack of dawn. Cusihuaman’s voice, which was usually soft and gentle, would ring out like an alarm clock: “Coca tea! Coca tea!” and the sleepy tourists would emerge from their tents to find a steaming cup of steeped cocaine leaves, a Peruvian staple. The hike entailed hours of trudging along rugged terrain and under rainforest canopies, and enjoying gorgeous panoramics; five diligent and agile porters had been paid by the tourists to carry their heavy backpacks, cook meals and set up the tents.

On the last night of the hike, Buchanan and Haining arrived at the campsite and were stunned to see where they’d be sleeping: “The peg that was holding up one post at the front of the tent was one inch from the cliff,” says Buchanan. Below was a raging river. Above, jagged mountainside. It was terrifying but exhilarating. They both thought two things: We’ll have the best view in the morning. And, I better not walk straight out if I get up to pee during the night.

Despite its dubious location, the tent was welcome shelter from the torrential rain that had followed the group since they’d started the trek. But first, they assembled around a table under a canvas hut for dinner. “Chicken, spaghetti, soup, pizza,” says Haining. Everyone feasted on the high-caloric buffet. There were only two hours left to hike before they’d arrive at Machu Picchu, but this would be the toughest, most precarious stretch—a near vertical climb up crumbling paths and steps. Conversation turned to whether anyone had ever succumbed to the perils that lay before them. With the rain pounding down, the sky darkening, and wide-eyed tourists huddled, this felt akin to telling ghost stories around a bonfire. Cusihuaman, who wore the same lucky blue ball cap every time he set foot on the Inca Trail, didn’t hold back: several tourists had been killed in recent memory. There was the old man who had a heart attack halfway up. Another one contracted deadly bronchitis. One morning, a man just never woke up.

Unsettled and exhausted, Buchanan and Haining called it a night. The next day was her birthday. The thought of celebrating atop Machu Picchu helped buoy their spirits. They noticed that nearby, the tent of two young Argentinian women who were with another tourist group was also perched very close to the cliff’s edge. There was nothing to be done about it now—and besides, no one had the energy to worry. “We were tired from all that walking,” says Haining, and the rain was pummelling them so hard, “you could barely hear.”

That deafening, turbulent downpour continued through the night. At one point, Haining awoke briefly to a distant clanging and cracking, but it was a muffled noise, and it passed. It wasn’t until the next morning, while sipping coca tea, that Buchanan and Haining looked over to where the Argentinians’ tent had been hours earlier, and realized it had disappeared. A landslide, or avalanche of huge grey, mossy stones, had swept the tent off of the cliff—taking the two women, both in their early 20s, with it. One died; the other had her arm crushed by boulders. That’s what had stirred Haining: “You could hear them trying to break the rock with a sledgehammer,” she recalls, referring to rescuers. “They were trying to dig [the women] out.” No one heard cries for help. “I don’t think they had time to scream,” says Buchanan. “It was just poof, gone.”

Such news would have sent many of the tourists running back in the direction they’d come from—except heavy rains had washed out the route two days earlier. “There was no turning back,” says Buchanan. After arriving at Machu Picchu, the groups would funnel into the town of Aguas Calientes, where they’d be stuck for several days. “There are no trains out, no flights out, no roads out,” Cusihuaman said. He hatched a plan to take them “the back way” down the mountain to another town, which would be less overrun, and hopefully less devastated. The key to making this work, however, was to be the first group on the trail, explained Cusihuaman.

So the group donned their rain gear and began the ascent to Machu Picchu. “Everyone was talking about what had happened,” says Buchanan, “and saying to be careful.” The rocky, muddy path on which they trod was slippery and only three or four feet wide—and right on the edge of the cliff. Haining was near the front of the pack, while Buchanan lagged behind with Cusihuaman. About 20 minutes into the hike, “Lima” stopped to tie her shoelace. The guide waited with her, and Buchanan caught up with Haining.

Within minutes, “Chicago,” who was just ahead of the pair and carrying a massive backpack (she hadn’t paid the porters for this last stretch), slipped and fell. “She almost went over the cliff,” says Haining. “I grabbed her arm, and was holding her, and her friend grabbed the other arm. We pulled her up.” After all they’d been through, Haining could hardly keep it together. “I was freaked out.”

And yet there was nothing to do but keep going. Another 10 minutes passed. Then a thunderous rumbling sound echoed around the group. Before anyone could make sense of what they were hearing, Cusihuaman had already imagined the worst: “Run!” he yelled. That’s when Buchanan and Haining turned around and saw a sight neither can forget: four or five grassy, muddy, grey boulders “the size of a kitchen chair” barrelled down the steep mountainside, recalls Haining. “One came down and took [Cusihuaman] over” the cliff. But first, “the rock crushed his head,” adds Buchanan, “and both eyeballs popped right out and were hanging under his chin,” he recalls. “It was just horrific.”

Pandemonium erupted. “Lima,” who had been hiking with Cusihuaman and had bonded with him over their taste for Peruvian guinea pig, dropped to her knees and wailed. Then she and “Belgium” bolted, and weren’t seen again by Buchanan. “They ran the rest of the trail and off the mountain,” he speculates. “They wanted off that mountain.” Haining, “Chicago” and “New York” rushed to a clearing near the spot where Cusihuaman had gone over the cliff. “I wanted to stay in case he was alive,” she says, but the waiting to find out was paralyzing. “We were quiet. We weren’t crying. No one was praying. We had so much stuff going through our mind—what if it happens again? Should we go back?”

Meanwhile, Buchanan sprinted back to the campsite where the group had spent the night for help. “I was crying as I was running back,” he says. He stopped only to whisper a warning to the other guides about what had just happened. They repeated the same feverish message: “Run!” he recalls hearing. “They all said the same thing. Run.” When he got to the campsite and told the rangers what had happened, the Argentinians’ friends were still there. The news that Cusihuaman had gone over the cliff was unbearable for them, Buchanan says: “Are you kidding?” they were shrieking. “Someone else died?”

Buchanan raced back to the spot where Cusihuaman had disappeared with emergency workers, who devised an intricate pulley system and brought up the guide’s body. There was no doubt now. Cusihuaman had been killed. The tourists stole a look down the cliff. His backpack was sitting near the edge; his raincoat was 10 m down; and his lucky blue hat dangled another 15 m below.

By now, the rain had stopped. Buchanan, Haining and the others gathered for a group hug before resuming their trek—they followed a path to Machu Picchu worn in by previous hikers. Their arrival at the site couldn’t have been more disappointing. “It was closed,” says Haining, because the area was deemed too dangerous by officials. “They said their concern was just getting everyone off the mountain.” The group took a few pictures, and then headed toward Aguas Calientes.

On the way to town, they crossed a wooden bridge over the Urubamba River, which was overflowing and ripping out trees. “That’s when I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” admits Buchanan. The river was crashing up and over the bridge. People were crossing one at a time, and locals overseeing their attempts yelled “Run!” Buchanan kept thinking, “When is my luck going to run out?” They found out later that bridge was wiped out the next day.

By then the pair had followed demolished railroad tracks to Aguas Calientes. They weren’t alone: thousands of tourists had taken refuge in the town, which was rapidly disintegrating because the river ran beside it. “We spent four days filling sandbags with locals and placing them along the river,” says Buchanan. While some slept in churches and schools, he and Haining found a hotel. They made emotional calls to their families. “It took half an hour before Nakita and her mom could talk to each other,” they were crying so much, says Buchanan. “They couldn’t get any words out.”

Military helicopters took the foreigners to Cusco, from where Buchanan and Haining eventually arranged flights back to Canada—five days later than they’d planned. When they got home, the pair was inundated with media requests for interviews about their adventure. Haining was too traumatized to share her experience. Buchanan obliged with several brief interviews, but then the devastation they’d witnessed started to sink in and he too stopped talking.

Five days after arriving in Edmonton, the pair did what any adventurers might do in such a situation: they booked another vacation, to Mexico, laughs Buchanan. “We just wanted to lay on the beach for a week.” Now that they’ve recovered, they’ve also planned a November trip—to Peru. “To Machu Picchu,” says Buchanan. “But by train this time.” “

Scientists say the experiments are in the early stages and confined to the lab, but critics say they are laying the groundwork for a trial to whiten clouds in a 10,000-square-kilometre patch of the Pacific.

“Bill Gates and his cloud-wrenching cronies have no right to unilaterally change our seas and skies,” says Jim Thomas of the Montreal-based ETC Group, part of an international coalition calling for a moratorium on geoengineering experiments.

Gates, one of the world’s richest men, has given $4.5 million to climate researcher David Keith of the University of Calgary and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science to fund research on planet-cooling ideas. Keith is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

Caldeira says the money has gone to different researchers, including about $300,000 US to researcher Armand Neukermanns, who is also involved with the Silver Lining Project, which is working on plans to run the world’s first cloud brightening trial.

The Silver Lining Project would use “cloud” ships to blast tiny droplets of sea water about a kilometre into the atmosphere in a bid to create bright white clouds to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the atmosphere.

“David Keith and I allocated funds to Armand Neukermanns to use laboratory experiments to establish whether it would be technically feasible to produce sea water sprays,” says Caldeira. He stresses that Gates’ money is not going directly to the Silver Lining field trial.

The distinction is lost on Thomas. If Neukermanns succeeds in designing a working spray to brighten clouds, Thomas says the technology is likely to be used on the Silver Lining trial.

Robert Wood of the University of Washington is one of the scientists collaborating on the Silver Lining Project. He says the concept of whitening and brightening clouds has been around for years and is still unproven. But he and others say it may be one of the most benign ways of cooling the planet if governments cannot agree to cut the greenhouse gases warming the planet.

A study commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, a European think-tank, has estimated that for $9 billion, a wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships could be built to cruise the world’s oceans, spraying sea water from towers to create and brighten clouds.

Wood says the idea is still being tested in the lab, and it will likely take $25 million to $30 million to get the proposed 10,000-square kilometre Silver Lining trial up and running.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.”

Watch CNN’s video here or below.

A Heritage of Traditional Land Surveying

“From the very beginnings of our nation, surveying has been a vital and instrumental tool to promote commerce and land ownership. Before proving himself as our nation’s first military leader, George Washington served the people of Culpeper County, Virginia, as a land surveyor. And when an act of Congress created the Coast Survey in 1807, the first superintendent, Ferdinand Hassler, conducted a land-based survey of the New York City area as the basis for accurate nautical charts of New York harbor.

Traditional methods of land surveying, for both horizontal (latitude and longitude) and vertical (elevation) positioning, require a line-of-sight from one observation to the next. A network of positioning survey marks in coastal areas and across the country developed slowly using this time-consuming method. But over the course of the nation’s history, the network swelled to be large and dense, and indispensable to surveyors across the nation. Over 850,000 survey marks make up this network which is part of the National Spatial Reference System. (Note: The National Spatial Reference System is one of NOAA’s Top Ten Foundation Products.)

A Global Positioning System Revolutionizes Positioning

In the 1970s, the U.S. military began using satellites to position ships and submarines at sea. The promise of satellite-based navigation led the military to develop the Global Positioning System (GPS) of satellites. The first was launched in 1978. By the mid-1990s, the full constellation of 24 navigation satellites, which transmit radio signals from 11,000 miles above the Earth, was complete.

Although initially conceived as primarily a military program, civilian users quickly realized the potential of GPS for everyday positioning and surveying. With GPS receivers today costing less than $100, thousands of private users depend on GPS positioning for automobile, boat, and aircraft navigation; backcountry recreation; and emergency location.

A Parallel GPS Revolution for Even Greater Accuracy

NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey immediately recognized the potential of GPS for uses far more accurate than originally intended. Following the launch of the first GPS satellites, system engineers expected that the positional accuracy for civilian uses would be about 70 m (230 ft). (Military and aviation users would receive a special encrypted signal, enabling them to achieve 10 m (33 ft) accuracy.) While many scientists worldwide lauded a positioning system with 10-meter accuracy, scientists at NGS as early as 1979 were publishing papers on how to use the GPS signals for positioning accuracy down to the centimeter (0.4 in) level!

The National Geodetic Survey led the worldwide research to develop this highly accurate use of GPS, known by the lengthy title of “differential carrier phase positioning.” At first, this capability was limited solely to determining positions of two GPS receivers relative to one another, when both sat stationary for hours. Even this limited application was a revolutionary improvement over traditional surveying. No line-of-sight was required, and distances of hundreds of kilometers could be surveyed in hours, rather than the weeks or months required by traditional survey methods.

Within a few years, National Geodetic Survey scientists began developing “kinematic” methods of processing GPS data. Simply stated, this means that even with one of the GPS receivers moving, positioning accuracies within centimeters were possible. This new survey technique revolutionized land surveying even further, greatly multiplying surveyors’ productivity over traditional methods.

“Kinematic” Methods Revolutionize Aerial Photography

Kinematic GPS surveying also had a profound effect on aerial photography operations. Kinematic survey techniques positioned aerial photographs to within 30 centimeters–significantly better than traditional methods. This eventually meant that for airborne photogrammetric missions, the number of ground control points (large panels or marks that were required to be visible in a photograph to help accurately determine the airplane’s position) was greatly reduced or no longer necessary. Kinematic GPS allowed the location of the airplane to be determined precisely and the hours of pre-flight ground work to establish visible ground control markers by a ground support team were significantly reduced or became unnecessary!

Conclusion

From the beginning, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey led the way with high-accuracy GPS positioning applications. While GPS itself led its own revolution, the truly innovative scientists of NGS led a parallel revolution to improve the accuracy of GPS for civilian uses. Today, numerous applications for GPS exist which have been spun off of the initial National Geodetic Survey work, and GPS users can (with the right conditions, equipment, and software) determine their position to a centimeter in real-time. NOAA’s contribution to developing precision survey techniques with GPS has had a far-reaching impact on the national civilian survey community.”

Here are a few photos of what may become the worst environmental disaster ever. Full slideshow and captions are on Huffington Post.

Here are few sample images. A full slide show and captions can be found at National Geographic.

Boats patrolled coastal marshes early Friday looking for areas where the oil has flowed in, the Coast Guard said, and the state of Louisiana diverted thousands of gallons of fresh water from the Mississippi River to try to flush out the wetlands, though that effort was being hampered by wind.

The Louisiana National Guard prepared to send communication equipment, boats, all-terrain vehicles and other equipment to help.

The National Weather Service predicted winds, high tides and waves through Sunday that could push oil deep into the inlets, ponds and lakes that line the boot of southeastern Louisiana. Seas of 6 to 7 feet were pushing tides several feet above normal toward the coast, compounded by thunderstorms expected in the area Friday.

An animal rescue operation at Fort Jackson, about 110 kilometres southeast of New Orleans, had its first patient Friday, a young northern gannett found offshore.

The bird is normally white with a yellow head and long, pointed beak but was covered in thick, black oil. Workers with Delaware-based Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research used Dawn blue dishwashing soap to scrub it.

Volunteers started arriving in Venice, La., though there wasn’t much for them to do because the weather was so bad. About two dozen workers in hard hats and lifejackets were stuck on shore at a marina, lounging on small work boats, some laden with boom, ready to go to work. Some smoked cigarettes and spat sunflower seeds as they waited for assignments.

Volunteer Valerie Gonsoulin, a 51-year-old kayaker from Lafayette who wore an “America’s Wetlands” hat, said she hoped to help spread containment booms to hold back the oil.

“I go out in the marshes three times a week. It’s my peace and serenity,” she said. “I’m horrified. … I’ve been sitting here watching that NASA image grow and it grows. I knew it would hit every place I fish and love.”

President Barack Obama on Friday directed that no new offshore oil drilling leases be issued unless rigs have new safeguards. Obama ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to report within 30 days on what new technologies are needed.

“We are making sure any leases going forward have those safeguards,” said Mr. Obama at a White House Rose Garden event. He recently lifted a drilling moratorium for many offshore areas, including the Atlantic and Gulf.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon approved the use of two Air Force planes to dump chemicals on the oil spill, which civilian planes have already been doing.

The Navy also sent equipment for the cleanup, and Pentagon officials were talking with the Department of Homeland Security to figure out what other help the military could give.

Obama reassured Gulf Coast communities that the federal government is “fully prepared” to meet its responsibilities to them as the spill gets worse.

The leak from a blown-out well a mile underwater is five times bigger than first believed. More than 200,000 gallons of oil a day are spewing from the site of the rig, which was operated by BP and owned by Transocean Ltd. It sank two days after the explosion.

The Coast Guard is working with BP to deploy floating booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants, and has set controlled fires to burn the oil off the water’s surface.

Faint fingers of oily sheen began reaching the Mississippi River delta late Thursday, lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines. Thicker oil was farther offshore. Officials have said they would do everything to keep the Mississippi River open to traffic.

The Coast Guard defended the federal response so far. Asked on all three network television morning shows Friday whether the government has done enough to push oil company BP PLC to plug the underwater leak and protect the coast, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Sally Brice-O’Hara said the response led by the Coast Guard has been rapid, sustained and has adapted as the threat grew.

Rear Adm. Brice-O’Hara was also asked on ABC’s “Good Morning America” about the possibility of dispersing chemicals about a mile beneath the surface to break up oil. She replied: “That is a technology that is in new stages. We are working closely with our scientific support from NOAA, and there will be careful scrutiny. But if it has applicability, which we think it does, we want to get that in place very quickly.”

The oil slick could become the nation’s worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening to eclipse even the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the Exxon Valdez, the grounded tanker that leaked 11 million gallons in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. The sheen measured about 112 by 210 kilometres as of Thursday, and officials expected to update that figure Friday.

It imperils hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.

“This is a very, very big thing,” David Kennedy, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press about the spill. “And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

Volunteers were preparing to help wildlife that might be affected. Oil clumps seabirds’ feathers, leaving them without insulation — and when they preen, they swallow it. Prolonged contact with the skin can cause burns, said Nils Warnock, a spill recovery supervisor with the California Oiled Wildlife Care Network at the University of California-Davis. Oil swallowed by animals can cause anemia, hemorrhaging and other problems, said Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in California.

BP shares continued falling early Friday. Shares were down 2 per cent in early trading on the London Stock Exchange, a day after dropping 7 per cent in London. In New York on Thursday, BP shares fell $4.78 to close at $52.56, taking the fall in the company’s market value to about $25-billion since the explosion.

BP has requested more resources from the Defense Department, especially underwater equipment that might be better than what is commercially available. A BP executive said the corporation would “take help from anyone.” That includes fishermen who could be hired to help deploy containment boom.

The Coast Guard and BP have at least six remotely operated vehicles working to close an underwater valve meant to keep the oil from reaching the surface. Meanwhile, crews are drilling a relief well that will essentially suck the oil away from the original well, decreasing the pressure and slowing the leak, though that could take up to three months.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency and asked the federal government if he could call up 6,000 National Guard troops to help. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency for the state’s Panhandle.”

An Aeta, the wiry 45-year-old used to plant sweet potatoes and vegetables and hunt on the slopes of the long-dormant volcano before it rumbled to life in 1991 and belched millions of tons of ash and sulfur dioxide.

“It was OK,” Castillo says of his life before the eruption that killed 800 people and displaced 100,000. His cash crops had given him a good income.

The fine volcanic ash that Pinatubo spewed blanketed a wide expanse of the surrounding areas and obliterated the land he tilled.

The sulfur dioxide discharged into the atmosphere eased global warming for several years, scientists say. However, the continued emission of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution in the 18th century did little to arrest environmental damage.

Climate change is one of the major campaign issues in the May 10 elections, but it has grabbed little attention in the current debates. Candidates with “green agendas” are falling far behind in popularity surveys in the run-up to the balloting.

Storms heavily laden with rain last year and the current dry spell sweeping the country accentuate the environmental threats ahead, hounding people like Castillo, who had been moving from place to place to farm and hunt for survival.

Three years ago, the short and dusky Aeta with streaks of gray in his kinky hair found a small plot to cultivate in the resort town of Botolan at the edge of the South China Sea. But a series of storms beginning in August inundated the area and forced him to flee again.

Castillo’s hut was washed away, along with hundreds of other dwellings, as lahar-bearing floods breached a 6-kilometer dike and flooded wide areas of Botolan.

He sought refuge in an abandoned warehouse called “E-Cube”—one of the evacuation centers set up for the flood victims.

Roughly 3,400 people, or 678 families, whose houses were destroyed still crammed the encampments—two warehouses and several makeshift colonies of tents and plastic shelters. They included scores of Aeta, the nomadic group indigenous to Central Luzon.

More intense storms seen

Some 1 million victims of Storms “Ondoy” (international codename: Ketsana) and “Pepeng” (Parma) were still either in evacuation centers last month or were being assisted in their homes in Metro Manila and 19 provinces, mainly by the World Food Programme (WFP), six months after the storms struck.

They were evidence of the government’s inability over the long haul to deal with the caprice of climate change that, experts say, is likely to bring more violent typhoons that whip the country annually from the Pacific.

The prolonged drought now searing the country from Aparri to Zamboanga poses another challenge. It has dried up farmlands, reservoirs and waterways, shut down power plants and damaged 576,607 metric tons of agricultural crops officially estimated at P8.5 billion at last count.

Warm waters have killed tons of fish; steaming temperatures have caused fevers in pig farms.

The dry spell is blamed on El Niño, a weather phenomenon characterized by warmer-than-normal sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that trigger drought in Asia and Australia and wet winters in North America.

Shift in climatic conditions

“There has been a definite shift in climatic conditions,” says Nereus Acosta, a former Bukidnon representative who authored the ground-breaking Clean Air Act and, with a green agenda, is seeking a Senate seat in the May elections.

Already, says Acosta, the melting of polar ice caps and warming seas—outlined in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”—have submerged by two meters coastal areas in Malabon, Navotas, and Naga, among several dozen “hot spots.”

“The Philippines has very high vulnerability to climate change, but very low adaptive capability,” says Acosta, 43, who teaches environmental protection at the Asian Institute of Management.

In other words, he says, we are unprepared to deal with environmental catastrophes.

“At the height of Ondoy, when 80 percent of Metro Manila was in some form of inundation, we only had 17 lifeboats,” Acosta says. “It shows the very weakness of the adaptive capability of this country.”

Disaster prone

UN scientists see 20 to 30 percent of species being threatened with mass extinction if temperatures rise by 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. At a rise of 4 degrees, they say, few ecosystems will be able to adapt.

Half of the country’s more than 1,497 municipalities ring the coast of more than 7,000 islands, with half of the population depending on seafood as a primary source of protein.

A one-meter increase in sea levels could put 64 of the country’s 80 provinces, or 80 percent, in harm’s way, affecting 700 million square meters of coastal lands, says the environmental group Greenpeace.

The Philippines is already the world’s fourth most-disaster-prone country, according to the nongovernment Citizens’ Disaster Response Center. In 2006 alone, 3 million Filipinos, or about 3.5 percent of the population, were affected by disasters.

In the wake of the devastating storms last year, an international relief effort went under way to complement emergency assistance mobilized by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) that included massive donations from here and abroad.

The WFP dispatched two giant Antonov helicopters to ferry urgently needed relief aid for six weeks to storm-stricken areas, particularly in the Cordilleras hard hit by landslides that isolated villages.

WFP assistance

Today, the WFP still provides the poorest and most affected families a monthly food ration consisting of 25 kilos of rice, five liters of cooking oil, two kilos of high protein biscuits for malnourished children, and two kilos of canned fish. A special feeding program for children under 2 years of age has been mounted to help prevent malnutrition.

Beginning this month, the UN food agency is launching a “food for work” program, offering the poorest and most vulnerable families five kilos of rice a day for such tasks as repairing shelters, roads, irrigation and declogging drainage.

Stephen Anderson, the WFP’s country representative, says his agency has so far raised $33.5 million for its emergency relief and recovery program and is working on a target beneficiary of up to 1.5 million Filipinos as a result of the prolonged drought.

He says he is pleased with the progress of the relief effort so far and is grateful for the generous support from donors.

“The challenge is early recovery,” he says. “We want to help communities rebuild and, depending on circumstances, prepare for future disasters.”

The National Disaster Coordinating Center says the drought this year has so far affected 301,000 families—roughly 1.5 million people—mostly in the agricultural sector, where many of the country’s poor are found.

The poor—who are surviving on a dollar a day, the poverty threshold defined by the World Bank—comprise a third of the nation’s population of 90 million, according to a 2006 survey by the National Statistical Coordination Board,

The WFP aid is dispensed by the DWSD. Delivery and performance is monitored by staff of the DSWD, WFP and its NGO partners, such as the Community and Family Services International (CFSI) and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency.

UN’s protection concerns

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has dispatched a team to look into possible “protection concerns” of these people—shelter, sanitation and malnutrition.

In addition, the UNHCR has entered into a partnership with the CFSI to provide relief assistance to especially vulnerable individuals, like persons with disabilities, and quick impact projects that aim to help affected communities meet urgent needs, such as livelihood for women.

Unicef—the UN Children’s Fund—has responded to the disaster, with a particular focus on the psychosocial needs of children and immediate relief needs of affected families.

The United Nations describes the storm evacuees as “environmentally induced migrants.” Charity groups call them “environmental” or “climate refugees,” although the UN shies away from the label.

The term “refugees” exclusively applies, according to the 1951 Geneva conventions, to people who are fleeing “a well-founded fear of persecution” and are outside their country, thereby requiring UN protection.

But the term has entered the lexicon of international humanitarian discourse as ecological disasters struck many regions in Africa south of the Sahara badly needing assistance, according to Acosta.

The evacuees in Botolan are certainly no less miserable than the victims of wars, ethnic conflicts and disasters in Asia, Africa and the Balkans.

The tents housing the displaced people of Botolan are sizzling hot inside under the blazing sun. Many of the plastic sheets are worn out and badly need repairs. The displaced have no sources of steady income.

Relocation on bald mountain

Mayor Rogelio Yap of Botolan, concerned at the approaching typhoon season, is moving swiftly to relocate the flood victims and rebuild the breached dikes to prevent another disaster.

“Normally, the rainy season starts in June, but with this global warming, we really don’t know what will happen,” Yap says.

The municipality has allocated P65 million for the development of a 50-hectare relocation site on Bucao mountain overlooking the spectacular Botolan beach, but the evacuees are reluctant to move to the barren area.

They say engineers from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau who had investigated the place found cracks along the snaking dirt road being carved out of the mountain slopes by heavy equipment prior to cementing.

Boulders mixed with mud indicate the area could be prone to landslides, the land foundation was weak, water and electricity were nonexistent, according to site surveyors quoted by evacuee leaders.

“This area is not suited for settlement,” says Nestor Acuavera, a DSWD project development officer. “It’s very risky for the people.”

Ana Lisa Jaring, 41, says the evacuees had proposed three alternative sites in the lowland to the mayor, but were told the areas selected were prone to flooding as well.

“We will probably survive the flooding, but we could be buried alive in the mountain,” Jaring says.

Vulnerable to tailwinds

Yap scoffs at such talk. “I have been here for 65 years, I have not heard of an avalanche in the area.”

Bulldozers are compacting the site, he says. There will be a concrete road to the settlement before houses are built. He adds that a day care center, schools, and recreation center facilities will follow, making the place a veritable Shangri-la.

The houses will be built by the evacuees themselves as soon as the DSWD provides funding to purchase P70,000 worth of materials for each of the displaced families.

The question is: Will this type of low-cost housing on an elevated site, exposed to the elements, withstand the powerful tail winds of typhoons exiting the country into the South China Sea from the Pacific?

At a recent meeting, representatives of the DSWD and CFSI told the evacuees about possibilities of a better life in the resettlement site.

Castillo, clasping his hands behind his back, stood at the fringe, listening. “I never went to school. I don’t know what is happening. I only know that there is always the threat of storms wherever I go.” ”

Photo from World News.

The fireball was visible for about 15 minutes beginning about 10 p.m., said the National Weather Service in Sullivan, Wisconsin, just west of Milwaukee.

“The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east,” said the NWS in the Quad Cities area, which includes parts of Iowa and Illinois.

“Well before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight,” the service said. “Several reports of a prolonged sonic boom were received from areas north of Highway 20, along with shaking of homes, trees and various other objects including wind chimes,” it said.

It said the fireball was seen across parts of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. CNN affiliate WISN-TV said that people in Ohio also saw it.

Video from WISN showed a massive ball of light exploding across the sky. The Doppler Radar from the Quad Cities weather service appeared to capture a portion of the smoke trail from the fireball at just after 10 p.m., the NWS said. It appears as a thin line extending across portions of Grant and Iowa Counties in Wisconsin.

There has been no official determination as to what caused the fireball, the NWS in Sullivan said.

However, it said there is a meteor shower called Gamma Virginids that occurs from April 4 to April 21, with peak activity expected on Wednesday and Thursday.

“A large meteorite could have caused the brilliant fireball that has been reported,” the National Weather Service said.

The NWS in Quad Cities said that it was unknown if any part of a meteorite hit the ground.

According to NASA, a meteor appears when a meteoroid — a particle, chunk of metal or stony matter — enters the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. ”

Photo from Mission Britain.

You might think that marginal climates such as the Champagne region are the frontiers in these weather-beaten times. And they could well be – if the Champagne region heats up, all that fresh zesty ping that makes its fizz so elfish and bright could become sugary and plump, creating a completely different drink.

Of course, English vineyards producing fizz, which tend to be just a few degrees cooler than the Champagne region, could benefit.

According to Greenpeace’s document, Impacts Of Climate Change On Wine In France, ‘We are on a path towards an increase in temperature of 4 degrees centigrade or even 6 degrees centigrade between now and 2100. Such a climate scenario would lead to the displacement of vineyards 1,000km beyond their traditional boundaries. At the same time, a large section of traditional vineyards, such as the Mediterranean vineyards, could disappear.’

Put simply, that means we could, in theory, be drinking vino from Glasgow. I recently spoke to one winemaker in France’s Burgundy region who complained of rising temperatures, who finds he is increasingly picking early, in September. With a delicate grape variety like Pinot Noir, a rise in temperature could be nothing short of catastrophic.

And it’s not just France that’s engaging-with the prospect of climate change. Australia is in the grip of a drought that has clobbered its crop. Livelihoods are on the line – but the Aussies are planning for the future. Already the focus is shifting and there is a buzz developing about regional diversity and cooler regions such as Victoria and Tasmania.

In Chile too I have found winemakers escaping the heat of the Central Valley, venturing high up into the Andes – such as Marcelo Retamal’s project in the vineyards of Elqui Valley, where the huge difference in temperature between day and night slows ripening and allows the grapes to retain freshness.

Casablanca is already established as a cool-climate region in Chile, defying the heat of the day thanks to a blanket of morning sea mists. You find a similar phenomenon in California’s Russian River Valley. In South Africa, winemakers are looking to new regions such as Elim and Elgin for cooler climates.

There is talk of modifying grapes, but climate change may mean not just a rise in temperature but intense and unpredictable weather. There’s no doubt we have had freakishly hot years, such as 2003, which gave us the European heatwave (and some impressive reds from England). But then again 2009 is reputed to be one of the greatest vintages in France’s Bordeaux, along with 2005 and 2000 in recent years.

A rise in temperature on a global scale could forever change regions such as New Zealand, with its cool climate. Who knows if in the future we’ll still be seeing fewer deft, graceful New Zealand wines and more full-on high alcohol whoppers. Or, for that matter, Chateau Inverness! Start the countdown. Time will tell. ”

Photo from Wine Wine Wine.

According to UPI.com, “scientists in India said a Bay of Bengal island claimed by both India and Bangladesh has been completely submerged by rising waters.

The School of Oceanographic Studies at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University said the island, known in India as New Moore Island and in Bangladesh as South Talpatti Island, appears completely underwater on recent satellite images, and scientists said other islands could soon follow, the BBC reported Wednesday.

“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” the school’s Professor Sugata Hazra said of the ownership dispute.

He said the island, which never hosted a permanent settlement and previously reached only 6 feet above sea level, could be only the first of many in the region to disappear. Hazra said his research indicates the speed of the rising water has increased during the past decade.

“We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water,” Hazra said.  “

The Environmental Defense Fund claims that  “the climate crisis is nearer – and scarier – than we believed. New evidence has emerged that underscores the global climate threat and the need for an effective climate bill. These are just the 10 most startling global warming facts we learned in 2009.

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher today than at any time in measurable history.

1. A study published in the journal Science reports that the current level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere — about 390 parts per million — is higher today than at any time in measurable history — at least the last 2.1 million years. Previous peaks of CO₂ were never more than 300 ppm over the past 800,000 years, and the concentration is rising by around 2 ppm each year.
2. 2000-2009 was the hottest decade.

The World Meterological Organization reported that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record, with 8 of the hottest 10 years having occurred since 2000.

3. 2009 will end up as one of the 5 hottest years.

2009 will end up as one of the 5 hottest years since 1850 and the U.K.’s Met Office predicts that, with a moderate El Niño, 2010 will likely break the record.

4. Arctic ice cover – already perilously thin – is vulnerable to further melting.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that while a bit more summer Arctic sea ice appeared in 2009 than the record breaking lows of the last two years, it was still well below normal levels. Given that the Arctic ice cover remains perilously thin, it is vulnerable to further melting, posing an ever-increasing threat to Arctic wildlife, including polar bears.

5. The Arctic summer could be ice-free by mid-century — sooner than scientists expected.

The Arctic summer could be ice-free by mid-century, not at the end of the century as previously expected, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

6. The East Antarctica ice sheet – thought to be colder and more stable that the West – is also shrinking.

Recent observations published in the highly respected Nature Geosciences indicate that the East Antarctica ice sheet has been shrinking. This surprised researchers, who expected that only the West Antarctic ice sheet would shrink in the near future because the East Antarctic ice sheet is colder and more stable.

7. Climate changes are already observed in the United States and are projected to grow.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program completed an assessment of what is known about climate change impacts in the U.S. and reported that, “Climate changes are already observed in the United States and…are projected to grow.” These changes include “increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.”

8. Slight changes in the climate may trigger abrupt threats to ecosystems.

According to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey, slight changes in the climate may trigger abrupt threats to ecosystems that are not easily reversible or adaptable, such as insect outbreaks, wildfire, and forest dieback. “More vulnerable ecosystems, such as those that already face stressors other than climate change, will almost certainly reach their threshold for abrupt change sooner.” An example of such an abrupt threat is the outbreak of spruce bark beetles throughout the western U.S. caused by increased winter temperatures that allow more beetles to survive.

9. Coastal wetlands from New York to North Carolina could be lost.

The EPA, USGS and NOAA issued a joint report warning that most mid-Atlantic coastal wetlands from New York to North Carolina will be lost with a sea level rise of 1 meter or more.

10. U.S. production of corn, soybeans and cotton could decrease as much as 82%.

If we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century, some of the main fruit and nut tree crops currently grown in California may no longer be economically viable, as there will be a lack of the winter chilling they require. And, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. production of corn, soybeans and cotton could decrease as much as 82%. “

 

Photo from ShipBright.com

Tropical cyclones typically don’t form in the Southern Atlantic because the waters are usually too cool.

However, forecasters at the Naval Research Laboratory noted on Tuesday that a low pressure system off the coast of Brazil appeared to have tropical storm-force winds. The storm has been dubbed Tropical Storm 90Q.

The first known South Atlantic tropical cyclone (the collective name for tropical storms, hurricanes and typhoons) was seen in 2004 and called “Catarina.”

“The only other tropical cyclone known to have occurred in the Southern Atlantic Ocean developed in March, 2004,” said Hal Pierce, meteorologist on the TRMM satellite team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “That’s when a hurricane called “Catarina” made landfall on March 28, 2004 near the town of Torres in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina (thus, the storm’s name). It was the first “hurricane” ever observed by satellite in the south Atlantic.”

While tropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere spin counterclockwise, those in the Southern Hemisphere spin clockwise.

Two NASA satellites have now confirmed that the storm is moving away from Brazil’s coast.

At 0845 UTC (3:45 a.m. ET) today, Tropical Storm 90Q had maximum sustained winds near 46 mph (40 knots). It was located about 325 miles east of Puerto Alegre, Brazil in the waters of the South Atlantic Ocean near 30.0 South latitude and 45.8 West longitude.

Tropical Storm 90Q will continue moving in a general easterly direction away from the Brazilian coast and weaken before being absorbed by a mid-latitude cold front this weekend, meteorologists predict.

Hurricane season in the North Atlantic basin and Caribbean officially begins on June 1.”

Watch this tornado here or below.

ABC News and Reuters are reporting that “large amounts of a powerful greenhouse gas are bubbling up from a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia, raising fears of far bigger leaks that could stoke global warming, scientists said.

It was unclear, however, if the Arctic emissions of methane gas were new or had been going on unnoticed for centuries — since before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century led to wide use of fossil fuels that are blamed for climate change.

The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world’s oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost below the seabed north of Russia.

“Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap,” Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement. She co-led the study published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The experts measured levels of methane, a gas that can be released by rotting vegetation, in water and air at 5,000 sites on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf from 2003-08. In some places, methane was bubbling up from the seabed.

Previously, the sea floor had been considered an impermeable barrier sealing methane, Shakhova said. Current methane concentrations in the Arctic are the highest in 400,000 years.

GLOBAL WARMING

“No one can answer this question,” she said of whether the venting was caused by global warming or by natural factors. But a projected rise in temperatures could quicken the thaw.

“It’s good that these emissions are documented. But you cannot say they’re increasing,” Martin Heimann, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany who wrote a separate article on methane in Science, told Reuters.

“These leaks could have been occurring all the time” since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, he said. He wrote that the release of 8 million tonnes of methane a year was “negligible” compared to global emissions of about 440 million tonnes.

Shakhova’s study said there was an “urgent need” to monitor the region for possible future changes since permafrost traps vast amounts of methane, the second most common greenhouse gas from human activities after carbon dioxide.

Monitoring could resolve if the venting was “a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive release period,” according to the scientists, based at U.S., Russian and Swedish research institutions.

The release of just a “small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming,” they wrote.

The shelf has sometimes been above sea level during the earth’s history. When submerged, temperatures rise by 12-17 degrees Celsius (22-31 F) since water is warmer than air. Over thousands of years, that may thaw submerged permafrost.

About 60 percent of methane now comes from human activities such as landfills, cattle rearing or rice paddies. Natural sources such as wetlands make up the rest, along with poorly understood sources such as the oceans, wildfires or termites.

Most studies about methane focus on permafrost on land. But the shelf below the Laptev, East Siberian and Russian part of the Chuckchi sea is three times the size of Siberia’s wetlands. ”

Photo from Planet Earth.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Those famous lyrics by Bob Dylan may have been about political radicals but they also ring true for those people whose migraines are triggered by changes in the weather. Temperature, wind and barometric pressure (the overall pressure in the atmosphere) are among the environmental factors that can bring on auras, nausea and debilitating head pain.

Recent studies show that as much as 50% of migraines may be weather-related, which means, unfortunately they cannot be managed as well as those brought on by diet, dehydration and fatigue.

Yet there seems to be a wide margin of error in the way people perceive their triggers. One 2004 study in the journal Headache found that 62.3% of people with migraines thought their episodes were weather-sensitive, but an analysis of headache calendars and weather data suggested that only about 50.6% of the study participants actually had migraines that seemed to be clearly associated with weather patterns.

Researchers are still trying to understand more about the weather patterns or factors that may prompt migraines in susceptible individuals. Some of the factors being studied include:

Temperature

Humidity

Changing weather patterns

Barometric pressure

Wind speed

Air ion concentrations (other kinds of particles bound to the oxygen in the air)

The same study previously mentioned also demonstrated that of those participants whose migraine journals revealed weather triggers, nearly 34% were sensitive to absolute temperature and humidity, about 14% were sensitive to changing weather patterns, and nearly 13% were sensitive to barometric pressure.

A Canadian study explored the response of individuals susceptible to migraines during periods of time in which the so-called “Chinook winds” were blowing. This study showed that these warm air winds, which blow into the province of Alberta from the West, increase the frequency of migraines in a subset of people. The study was unable to determine what specific factors actually influenced the onset of headache, because Chinook winds involve a number of weather characteristics.

Still another factor being investigated is called “sferics.” This term refers to pulses of electromagnetic radiation that travel from distant weather and atmospheric situations. Studies that compared information from sferic recording stations with the study participants’ headache diaries have seen some overlap, suggesting that migraine episodes can be triggered by sferic variability.

The association between weather and migraine episodes underscores the importance of keeping a headache diary to help identify and track potential triggers. Such a diary could make note of the prevailing weather patterns on days when you develop a migraine. Over time, you may be able to predict when you’re especially vulnerable. ”

Photo from MargHamp.com

Wikipedia describes rogue waves as follows. “Rogue waves (also known as freak waves, monster waves, killer waves, and extreme waves) are relatively large and spontaneous ocean surface waves that are a threat even to large ships and ocean liners. In oceanography, they are more precisely defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record. Therefore rogue waves are not necessarily the biggest waves found at sea; they are, rather, surprisingly large waves for a given sea state. “Rogue waves are not tsunamis, which are set in motion by earthquakes [and] travel at high speed, building up as they approach the shore. Rogue waves seem to occur in deep water or where a number of physical factors such as strong winds and fast currents converge. This may have a focusing effect, which can cause a number of waves to join together.”

We have rare video of rogue waves here or below.

According to The Australian, “two huge waves have dragged dozens of people from a sea wall to a rocky beach hosting the world’s richest big-wave surf contest, leaving some with broken bones.

A total of 13 spectators at Mavericks Surf Contest in California had significant injuries, including broken legs and hands, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection battalion chief Scott Jalbert said yesterday. At least three were taken to hospital.

Mr Jalbert estimated “a couple (of) hundred” people were on the seawall at the southern tip of Mavericks Beach when the waves struck, upstaging the competition that draws some of the world’s top surfers for a $US150,000 ($169,000) prize.

“Nobody was swept away into the water. They were just swept on to the beach area pretty hard,” he said. “It’s pretty rocky.

“We were very lucky that nobody was swept out to sea.”

The surfing contest is held only when conditions are right. It got the go-ahead when forecasts predicted record-breaking waves, despite warnings that strong winds could make the breakers dangerously unpredictable.

The waves knocked out barricades, a spectator platform and a large scaffold holding speakers broadcasting the contest, held in the harbour town 40km south of San Francisco. “

“Indolent cows languidly chewing their cud while befuddled motorists honk and maneuver their vehicles around them is an image as stereotypically Indian as saffron-clad holy men and the Taj Mahal. Now, however, India’s ubiquitous cows — of which there are 283 million, more than anywhere else in the world — are assuming a more menacing role as they become part of the climate-change debate.

By burping, belching and excreting copious amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas that traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide — India’s livestock of roughly 485 million (including sheep and goats) contributes more to global warming than the vehicles the animals obstruct. With new research suggesting that methane emission by Indian livestock is higher than previously estimated, scientists are furiously working at designing diets to help bovines and other ruminants eat better, stay more energetic and secrete smaller amounts of the offensive gas.

Last month, scientists at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad in western India published a pan-India livestock methane-emission inventory, the first ever, which put the figure at 11.75 million metric tons per year — higher than the 9 million metric tons estimated in 1994. This amount is likely to increase as higher incomes and consumption rates put pressure on the country’s dairy industry to become even more productive.

Already the world’s largest producer of milk, India will have to yank up production from the current 100 million metric tons to 180 million metric tons by 2021-22 to keep pace with growing population and expanding disposable incomes. Livestock such as cows, buffalo, goats, sheep, horses and mules are indispensable to India’s rural economy — whether the animals are yoked to plow land, raised for milk and manure or harnessed to pull carts to move goods and people. The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that livestock contribute 5.3% to total GDP, up from 4.8% during 1980-81. But, says K.K. Singhal, head of dairy cattle nutrition at the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal in northern India, “while livestock plays a crucial role in the economy, global warming is becoming a huge worry. We’re trying to find indigenous solutions, because our realities are very different from the West.”

For starters, most Indian livestock is underfed and undernourished, unlike its robust counterparts in richer countries. The typical Indian farmer is unable to buy expensive dietary supplements even for livestock of productive age, and dry milch cattle and older farm animals are invariably turned out to fend for themselves. Poor-quality feed equals poor animal health as well as higher methane production. Also, even when Western firms are willing to share technology or when Western products are available, these options are often unaffordable for the majority in India. For instance, Monensin, an antibiotic whose slow-release formula reduces methane emission by cows, proved too expensive for widespread use in India. So the emphasis for Indian scientists is on indigenous solutions. “We know we cannot count on high-quality feed and fodder,” says Singhal. “No one will be able to afford it. What we have done instead is develop cheaper technologies and products.” One example is urea-molasses-mineral blocks that are cheap, reduce methane emission by 20%, and also provide more nutrition, so they’re easier to sell to illiterate farmers who don’t know a thing about global warming but want higher milk yields.

Most dietary interventions work by checking methogens — microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments like cows’ guts, where they convert the available hydrogen and carbon (by-products of digestion) into methane, a colorless, odorless gas. “We encourage well-to-do farmers to use oilseed cakes, which provide unsaturated fatty acids that get rid of the hydrogen,” Singhal says. Another solution is herbal additives. Some commonly used Indian herbs such as shikakai and reetha, which go into making soap, and many kinds of oilseeds contain saponins and tannins, substances that make for lathery, bitter meals but block hydrogen availability for methogens. Singhal says the herbs are used in small quantities and the cows don’t seem to mind the taste. “Imagine how much potential they’d have in the international market,” he says.

Several other institutions, like the National Institute of Animal Nutrition and Physiology (NIANP) in Bangalore, are also researching herbs. “We’re studying the effect of tannin compounds from various easily-available sources like tea leaves. We’re also studying prebiotic and probiotic feed supplements,” says K.T. Sampath, director of NIANP. Other institutes, like the New Delhi–based Energy Research Institute (TERI), are working on methane-capture strategies. One long-running project has been biogas production — cow dung utilized to make biogas for use in kitchens, and even compressed biogas for use in vehicles. “Biogas plants have been very successful,” says R.K. Rajeshwari, a fellow at TERI. “Farmers are able to use biogas in their kitchens, to light lamps and to even drive vehicles.” Such projects, she says, have been particularly successful at gaushalas, cow shelters supported by donations from the devout and by government grants, of which there are 4,000 across India. Most gaushalas are for abandoned, dry and aged cattle, of which there are many, since killing cows is illegal in all but two states (the communist-ruled West Bengal and Kerala). “This way they are put to some use at least,” says Rajeshwari. “And by replacing conventional sources of energy, they help prevent global warming.” ”

Photo from India Travel Guide.

When the heat in her car stopped working one day in high school, Brooklyn Ramos’ legs began to itch to point that she could no longer focus on the road. She had no idea why.

When Ramos later told her friends that she was diagnosed with an allergy to cold weather, they thought she was kidding.

She wasn’t.

“It’s an allergic reaction, and I get hives,” Ramos said of her allergy to the cold, known as anti-cholinergic urticaria, or cold urticaria.

Winter in Ohio can be an unpleasant time for Ramos, a third-year student at Ohio State. According to the AccuWeather.com,

Columbus, Ohio has an average temperature of 38 degrees between January and February.

“It’s really, really bad when I’m walking in the cold,” Ramos said. “It gets to the point that my face is breaking out because I have hives, and it looks like I have acne.”

While many students begrudge walking to campus through snow and sludge, the consequences are often too serious for Ramos to risk.

“It prevents me from walking to the library because I live off campus, and there’s no way I’m walking all the way over there,” said Ramos, who lives near 13th Avenue and Summit Street.

To prevent hives, Ramos now takes a daily dose of Loratadine, a prescription medication.

The symptoms appeared suddenly during the winter of her junior year of high school.

“When we went to the doctor, we had to find what the common trend that caused the hives was,” she said.

Symptoms include fatigue and headaches, said Maggie Lopacki, a

registered nurse at the OSU Medical Center. But the diagnosis is simple, requiring only an ice cube.

“Cold urticaria can be diagnosed by placing an ice cube on exposed skin for several minutes,” according to the Mayo Clinic Web site. “If you have cold urticaria, a raised red bump will form after the ice cube is removed.”

In addition to cold weather, cold water can cause serious outbreaks, according to Mayo Clinic, and swimming in cold water is the most common cause of severe, widespread reaction.

The allergy is uncommon, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine Web site, with two to three cases per 100 people.

Ramos said she has met only one other person with the allergy.

While in class, Ramos was scratching her legs, which caught her teacher’s attention.

“I had just gotten there and my teacher thought I had something so she asked why I was itching,” Ramos said. “I had to tell the class and there was a kid in the lecture room that was like ‘Oh my God, I have that too!’”

Some treatments for the allergy require a doctor, Ramos said.

“People manage it at home by taking antihistamines, rest and an increased amount of fluids,” Lopacki said. “If you don’t take care of it, you could probably get bronchitis, pneumonia or a severe sinus infection.”

But the allergic reaction can also be fatal.

Allergy sufferers “can go into anaphylactic shock, which can lead to cardiovascular collapse and death,” said third-year Alainna Ipjian, a student nurse assistant at OSU Medical Center.

Lopacki said the elderly, children and those with weak immune systems should speak with a doctor about treatment if their symptoms last for a long period of time.

“There’s not a way to really protect yourself,” Ramos said. “But I would definitely recommend that people find an alternative form of transportation to walking.”  ”

Photo from SheKnows.com.

The NewYork  Post

A Park Slope pooch was left shivering in the buff after a coldhearted mugger stole his coat just days before a raging winter storm bore down on the city.

Donna McPherson, 42, says she tied up Lexie, her 10-year-old Westie, in front of Ace Supermarket “for two minutes” so she could buy milk.

When she returned, his $25 green wool coat with leather trim and belt was gone.

Fortunately, she said, Lexie wasn’t wearing his pricier Burberry.

“How could anyone steal a coat off someone’s back in the freezing cold?” McPherson railed to The Post. “I asked him, ‘Where’s your coat?’ like he could answer me. I looked all over and could not find it.”

McPherson, an investment banker, canvassed the neighborhood in search of clues. She assumed police would not take her seriously so she wrote about it on the blog Effed in Park Slope.

She normally doesn’t leave Lexie outside stores, but thought it would be a quick stop. As she paid for the milk, she remembers hearing a “funny bark.”

“I stuck my head out and everything was OK — he was just looking at me,” she said. “I was so angry, but in the end I was grateful that it was just the coat and not him.”

McPherson said she knew she had to find a way to make it up to the traumatized Lexie.

“I felt so bad, I bought him two new coats,” she said.

She still hopes to collar the crook.

“I walked around Park Slope sort of to see if I could see anyone with the coat and I didn’t. It’s totally bizarre,” she said.

At Ace Supermarket on Seventh Avenue and Berkeley Place, employees insisted the neighborhood is normally safe for all mutts.

“This is highly unusual for the area,” said one. “

Using three sophisticated instruments that will collect enormous amounts of data over short time scales, scientists hope to improve their ability to predict the onset of major flares and other phenomena that can disrupt communications, satellite navigation, and power grids.

“SDO will observe the sun almost continuously for more than five years, sending back data at an astounding rate of 1.5 terabytes per day,” said Project Manager Elizabeth Citrin at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “That’s almost 500,000 music downloads per day.

“With this wealth of data, we will learn how solar activity is created and how it will affect space weather. And space weather is what affects us humans here on Earth, our satellites, communications, power grids.”

Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead scientist with NASA’s Living with a Star program, said modern society’s increasing dependence on satellite communications means “that any variability caused by the sun has an impact.”

“Solar variability can affect human spaceflight, satellite operations, smart power grids, GPS navigation, emergency radio communications, air travel, financial services,” she said.

SDO “will observe the sun faster, deeper and in greater detail than any previous observatories,” she said, “breaking barriers of space, time and clarity that have long blocked progress in solar physics.”

Running one day late because of high winds at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off at 10:23 a.m. EST.

After a smooth climb out of the atmosphere, the rocket’s Centaur second stage propelled the 8,800-pound solar-powered satellite toward geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles up.

It will take the spacecraft about three weeks to reach its final parking slot above a ground station in New Mexico, where two 60-foot dish antennas were built to take in the torrent of data from SDO’s instruments–the equivalent of 300 movie downloads per day.

SDO builds on the successes of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint project between the European Space Agency and NASA, and a fleet of more modest satellites that have revolutionized solar physics in recent years.

But the difference between SDO’s output and previous sun-study satellites is a bit like the difference between a movie and a cartoon flip book.

“SDO is the crown jewel of a fleet of NASA satellites that are designed to study the sun,” said Michael Luther, deputy associate administrator for programs. “SDO is the most advanced spacecraft of its type ever designed and flown. It will give higher quality, more comprehensive, and faster data rate than any spacecraft of its kind before.”

One of its instruments, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, will snap multi-wavelength full-disk images of the sun every three quarters of a second. It will study on the sun’s corona–the origin of the solar wind, flares, and coronal mass ejections–taking 4096-by-4096 pixel pictures spanning 1.3 solar diameters.

“On the Earth, we have these things called earthquakes,” said Principal Investigator Alan Title. “Earthquakes occur on tectonic plates. That’s where big masses of the Earth move across each other and create shears, and these plates break and release a lot of energy. On the sun, the magnetic fields are the logical equivalent of tectonic plates. And as they move and create shear, they have the potential of releasing huge amounts of energy.”

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly was built to “develop real physical understanding of what goes on so we can make more sophisticated predictions of what’s happening.”

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment will monitor changes in the sun’s ultraviolet output, a critical factor in how the sun heats and energizes Earth’s upper atmosphere. Changes in ultraviolet radiation can cause Earth’s atmosphere to swell slightly, increasing drag on satellites in low-Earth orbit and triggering changes that reduce the accuracy of satellite navigation signals.

SDO’s third instrument, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, will measure magnetic fields at the sun’s surface. It also will look into the star’s interior by monitoring low-frequency sound waves, generated by convection, that cause the surface to pulsate, moving up and down several hundred yards every few hours.

By analyzing the vibrations at the surface, researchers can infer details about the sun’s interior.

“The variability of the sun is predominantly caused by magnetic fields,” said Principal Investigator Phil Scherrer. “So if we want to be able to predict that variability, we have to start with predicting the magnetic fields.”

All postal operations — collection, delivery and retail — in the Washington area, including the Northern Virginia suburbs and suburban Maryland, were canceled on Saturday.

“There is a point where we have to think about the safety of our employees and our customers,” said Patrick Murphy, a United States Postal Service spokesman. “It’s very difficult to move the mail between the plants right now.”

Yet the band of snow that traveled up the coast through New Jersey and southern parts of Staten Island had stopped short of New York City by late morning.

The force of the storm swirled around Washington and its environs, the second powerful weather event in six weeks.

While buses and above-ground subways were closed in the city, it appeared that the District of Columbia would not surpass the 1922 record of 28 inches of snowfall.

“We’re calling for 25 inches, which is still high on the rankings,” said Matthew Kramer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Baltimore-Washington region.

Mr. Kramer said that an upper low pressure system would dump another four to eight inches on the region before the day was over.

Elkridge, southwest of Baltimore, reported the highest snowfall totals — 32 inches — and counting. Nearby, at the Baltimore Washington International Airport, virtually all flights were canceled.

That was the scene throughout all the area airports, but Dulles Airport suffered the worst of the snow damage.

In a hangar separate from the main terminal at Dulles Airport, one portion of a roof collapsed at 8:15 Saturday morning. “As of this morning, the structural integrity was still in question,” said Courtney Mickalonis, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, who added that fire crews were on the scene.

She said that some planes were damaged, but there were no injuries to employees,

Some commercial, international flights were still scheduled to leave later Saturday afternoon, but crews were struggling to clear the runways faster than the snow could accumulate, Ms. Mickalonis said. All flights Saturday were canceled at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and because they had been canceled by Friday, hardly anyone was in the terminal, Ms. Mickalonis said.

Latest reports have more than 196,000 without power in the region. Pepco, the primary power company in the Washington area, as well as Montgomery and Prince George’s County reported there were 92,000 customers without power, roughly 11 percent. Dominion, another power company, reported 73,827 outages in northern Virginia, (9 percent of all customers). BG&E in Anne Arundel and Howard County in Maryland reported 34,587 customers without power. About 28,484 other customers were out earlier in the storm but have been restored.

The snow storm was so powerful that it sounded more like summer time for some people in its wake. Periodically after midnight in Baltimore, residents trying to sleep were astonished to hear rare winter thunder, as lightning accompanying the blizzard illuminated a landscape already transformed by snow.

Residents awoke Saturday morning to find the heavy snow had bent bushes and small trees low, with some 10-foot evergreens transformed into six-foot mounds of white. Some people plunged into thigh-deep drifts to try to shake the snow off and save the trees before they were permanently distorted or broken.

“There’s plenty of time to dig out this weekend, so take it slow,” Frank Roylance, a science reporter for The Baltimore Sun who blogs on the weather, advised readers Saturday morning. “This is very dense, very heavy snow.“

With big flakes still falling steadily after 9 a.m., Mr. Roylance predicted that the could be the second or third biggest in Baltimore history.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was sworn in as mayor Friday as the first snow flakes began falling. She succeeded fellow Democrat Sheila Dixon, who resigned last week after a plea deal on corruption charges.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake presides over a city with a $100 million deficit that has already been hammered with heavy snowstorms this winter. She said dealing with the snow would be her first priority.

“I am committed to ensuring that Baltimore’s streets are safe and accessible no matter how much snow falls over the weekend,” she told The Baltimore Sun.

Amtrak had canceled many trains in its Northeast corridor from Richmond to New York.

Kirby Barnes was in Union Station, returning from a visit to Connecticut, and trying to get home to Newport News. But trains from Washington to Newport News had been canceled since the storm began on Friday.

“They are telling me might have to go back up to Connecticut,” he said. “There is nothing going south, nothing.”

Dennis Hakemain of Virginia Beach who caught a Greyhound Bus up to Washington on Thursday said he had been stranded for two days after the bus and then his train was canceled.

“I was planning to stay one night, but ended up having to pay another night for a hotel,” Mr. Hakemain said. “I’m hoping to get out today, but they are telling me that It might be late today or Sunday before I can get home.” ”

 Full story in The New York Times.

Here is a video from CNN, showing how bad it is:

Reuters

“It’s not that the ice keeps melting, it’s just not growing very fast,” said Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.

Arctic ice cover is important to the rest of the world because the Arctic is the globe’s biggest weather-maker, sometimes dubbed Earth’s air-conditioner for its ability to cool down the planet.

More melting Arctic sea ice could affect this weather-making process; it is unlikely to lead to rising sea levels, any more than an ice cube melting in a glass of water would make the glass overflow.

If Arctic ice fails to build up sufficiently during the dark, cold winter months, it is likely to melt faster and earlier when spring comes, Serreze said by telephone from Colorado.

“We’ve grown back ice in the winter, but that ice tends to be thin and that’s the problem,” he said. “You set yourself up for a world of hurt in summer. The ice that is there is also thinner than it was before and thinner ice simply takes less energy to melt out the next summer.”

With less of the Arctic sea covered in ice in winter, and with the existing ice thinner and more fragile than before, “you’ve got a double whammy going on,” Serreze said.

This more perishable thin ice is prone to early melting, and when it does, the heat-reflecting light-colored sea ice is replaced by heat-absorbing dark-colored ocean water, which accelerates spring and summer melting in the Arctic.

This winter, there were unusually warm December temperatures in the Arctic due to a weather pattern known as the Arctic oscillation, so ice grew more slowly than normal.

In January, that pattern shifted to produce cooler Arctic temperatures. The ice extent — the area the ice covers — was below normal over much of the Atlantic sector, including the Barents Sea, part of the East Greenland Sea and in the Davis Strait.

There was above-average ice extent on the Pacific side of the Bering Sea, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported.

The last three years — 2007, 2008 and 2009 — had the lowest level of ice extent since satellite records began in 1979. ”

Photo from The Guardian.

“Here is a timeline of some of the worst natural disasters to batter Haiti:

1770: Strong earthquake devastates Port-au-Prince in then French colony.

1842: Earthquake destroys Cap-Haitien and other cities in northern Haiti and Dominican Republic.

1935: Unnamed storm kills more than 2,000 in Haiti before moving on to Florida as hurricane, where 400 die.

1946: Magnitude-8.1 quake strikes Dominican Republic and Haiti, causing tsunami that kills 1,790 people.

1954: Hurricane Hazel kills hundreds in Haiti.

1963: Hurricane Flora leaves more than 6,000 dead in Haiti and Cuba.

1994: Hurricane Gordon blamed for hundreds of deaths in Haiti.

1998: Hurricane Georges destroys 80 percent of Haiti’s crops while killing more than 400.

May 2004: Three days of heavy rains cause floods that kill more than 2,600.

September 2004: Tropical Storm Jeanne causes flooding and landslides that kill 1,900 and leave 200,000 homeless in Gonaives, Haiti’s third-largest city.

October 2007: Tropical Storm Noel triggers mudslides and floods, killing at least 57 Haitians.

August and September 2008: Three hurricanes and tropical storm kill some 800 in Haiti, devastate crops and cause $1 billion in damage.

Jan. 12, 2010: Magnitude-7.0 quake levels buildings in Port-Au-Prince, raising fears of tens of thousands of deaths. ”

Photo from The Register-Guard.

The U.S. space agency also found that 2009 was the second-warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. Last year was only a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest yet, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with the other hottest years, which have all occurred since 1998.

According to James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, global temperatures change due to variations in ocean heating and cooling. “When we average temperature over five or 10 years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated,” Hansen said in a statement.

A strong La Niña effect that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean made 2008 the coolest year of the decade, according to the New York-based institute.

In analyzing the data, NASA scientists found a clear warming trend, although a leveling off took place in the 1940s and 1970s. The records showed that temperatures trended upward by about 0.36 degrees F per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have increased a total of about 1.5 degrees F since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with the institute. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Last year’s near-record temperatures took place despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America and a warmer-than-normal Arctic, with frigid air from the Arctic rushing into the region while warmer mid-latitude air shifted northward, the institute said.

The analysis was based on weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations worldwide, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends,” Hansen said. “In the last decade, global warming has not stopped.” ”

Photo from CarbonSimplicity.

Cliff Bryant, 52, had placed two 5-pound accumulator bets that snow would fall on 24 towns and cities across the north of England on Christmas Day.

“We have apologized to the customer for any confusion and for mistakenly accepting an accumulator bet when our own rules state that only single bets are available on a market of this nature,” said a Ladbrokes spokesman.

“We are happy to void the bets and to pay the customer his winnings on the relevant singles.”

They however amount to just 31.78 pounds, rather than the 7.1 million Bryant was expecting.

The graphic designer from Southampton, who told the local Southern Daily Echo newspaper he was “gutted” and would seek legal advice, claims the first accumulator would have won him 4.9 million pounds, with the second adding 2.2 million.

“If I make a mistake in my work like that it costs me dearly and I think the offer should be a lot more generous than they have made,” he told the paper.

Ladbrokes should have made their rules clearer, he added.

“They are one of the leading bookmakers in the country and I think they ought to do their homework a bit better in future.”

Ladbrokes gave Bryant details of the Independent Betting Adjudication Service (IBAS), an impartial adjudicator on disputes that arise between gambling operators and their customers.

Danny Cracknell, a manager of the IBAS, told Reuters that Bryant had been in contact and they would be investigating the issue once he had completed the relevant forms. ”

More on Reuters.

Kenya’s Daliy Nation

The rains came in November; farmers were happy and sowed, based on the quantitative forecast. But within no time, the rains subsided, throwing the whole nation into a quagmire of confusion.

Politicians saw a window of opportunity to gain some mileage by threatening to collaborate with wheat farmers in suing the weatherman for issuing a false forecast. But while the dust was still in the air, the skies yielded. So huge was the deluge that it swept away a bus, drowned livestock and claimed several lives in the very town where complaints were loudest.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable aspect of life, but one that pushes humanity to act. To overcome it, man has sought various interventions from soothsayers, astrologers, prophets, magicians and scientists to forecast what the future holds.

Science remains the most credible way of predicting the occurrence of phenomena. It is based on empirical study of phenomena, using laws and principles that have stood the test of time. Meteorology is an example of a scientific discipline, which attempts to explain atmospheric conditions and has found a useful application in forecasting weather.

In developed countries, extreme weather conditions are accurately predicted to the day, hour, and in magnitude. The advance in computer technology and its convergence with the weather satellites have played an immense role in this. But in developing countries, this has remained a big challenge due to a number of problems that are worsened by public ignorance on what weather forecast is and is not.

Our Meteorological Department can attest to this judging by the chronic harsh verdicts from the public despite its dedicated team that gives daily weather forecasts. But why is this so?

FORECASTING SEVERE WEATHER and extreme climatic events is one of the major challenges facing meteorological services worldwide, more so in the tropics. This is worsened by ignorance, technological challenges, complex physical features and lack of appropriate data.

Weather forecasting basically uses atmospheric properties deemed conducive for the occurrence of a given phenomenon using collated data, computer models, satellite images and observations. The predictions only give probability of possibilities of occurrence, intensity and areas likely to be affected.

Like any other scientific method, weather prediction is nowhere near 100 per cent in direction and depth. Unfortunately, weather predictions are normally taken by the public as the gospel truth, and used as the rope to hang the weatherman when these predictions fail. We don’t consider that the predicted conditions are still subject to myriad other factors that are out of control of scientists.

A major objective of forecasting is to unmask fate and inform the current on timely strategic interventions that will mitigate the adverse events of the predicted phenomenon, by informing policies and supporting the end user of such information to adopt accordingly.

When the weatherman announced that El Niño rains were in the offing, the government swung into action with ministries likely to be affected putting in place measures to alleviate its severity.

It is important for all to understand what weather forecast is all about. A forecast that doesn’t translate into light but heat is useless. An accurate forecast that induces no action is worse than an inaccurate forecast with action.”

Photo from Paths To Knowledge (Dot NET).