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The US government has asked the scientific journals Nature and Science to censor data on a laboratory-made version of bird flu that could spread more easily to humans, fearing it could be used as a potential weapon. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked the two journals to publish redacted versions of studies by two research groups that created forms of the H5N1 avian flu that could easily jump between ferrets - typically considered a sign the virus could spread quickly among humans. The journals are objecting to the request, saying it would restrict access to information...

Here's a breaking news story about a huge discovery of methane gas reserves. The bad news is this methane is burping up into plumes from the arctic ocean into the atmosphere from holes in the ice that are 3,000 feet across. Russian scientists say they have discovered thousands of these holes emitting methane plumes from the arctic shelf. According to Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, methane gas is 20 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Semiletov has studied these methane plumes for years but most of that time they were only about 30 meters in diameter. Semiletov...

Never-Wrong Pundit Picks Obama to Win in 2012 By Paul Bedard , Lauren Fox Posted: August 30, 2011 Print * * * Allan Lichtman, the American University professor whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election, has a belated birthday present for Barack Obama: Rest easy, your re-election is in the bag. “Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose,” says Lichtman, the brains behind The Keys to the White House. Lichtman’s prediction helps to explain a quirk in some polling that finds that while Americans disapprove of the president,...

Did anybody feel that one, especially if you're in Maryland or Virginia?

------ snip World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show. The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

Mauna Kea, the highest island mountain in the world, is cloaked with snow--a sight you don't normally see during the early summer months. Video at the link

Video explaining that it is 'winter type' weather responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of lightning storms. It has been unusually cool for months. This is the current radar/satellite image. Kailua is drowning!

The fastest-ever rise in greenhouse gas emissions, revealed by the Guardian on Monday, is an "inconvenient truth" the world must face, the UN's climate change chief has said. But she added that the data should not lead to fatalism that the problem is impossible to tackle. The figures showing that efforts to control greenhouse gases have had little effect are likely to stretch already strained relations between developed and developing countries over climate change to breaking point in the next two weeks in rows over who is responsible for the fastest ever rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

On the heels of the pronouncement by one of the gurus of global warming that any decrease in the earth’s temperature could be a thousand years away, another scientist has stepped forward with the warning that a new Ice Age could be right around the corner. Professor Tim Flannery, the head of Australia’s Climate Change Commission, sparked the latest scandal in the global warming community when he recently declared, "If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow, the average temperature of the planet's not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years." As reported previously...

Just in: Explosion at Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi plant heard around 0630 GMT NHK footage shows steam-like smoke coming from Tepco's Fukushima plant

HONOLULU -- Snowfall and icy road conditions prompted officials at Haleakala National Park to close Wednesday morning. Snow fell overnight and could be seen from all around Maui. Many KITV viewers sent in photos of the snowcapped mountain.

From over 500 kilometres up, as TerraSAR-X looks down on its icy surface, the Antarctic's Nimrod Glacier looks like molten metal. During its flight over the Antarctic, the German Aerospace Centre's (DLR) radar satellite is one of the few that can direct its view over this glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. Researchers can use these images from space to determine the flow speed of the glacier.

RON ELIAS/SUN HERALD ARCHIVES/1996 Downtown Pass Christain, on the morning of Aug. 18, was a pile of rubble, as proven in this Daily Herald photograph. Some of the remaining buildings would later be destroyed in Katrina, for Pass Christian once again got the high-water mark. “Hurricane Watch Posted” warned the front page of The Daily Herald on Aug. 16, 1969. In a classic twist of irony, the Mississippi Coast newspaper advertised Pass Christian’s Moonlite Drive-In would, in a few days, show the film classic “Gone with the Wind.” That was Saturday. Hurricane Camille struck Sunday night — 40 years...

Last night Sean Hannity poked fun at the latest environmental doomsday prediction. As Hannity noted, the statement was so overblown, even Al Gore, America’s most famous prophet of doom, might be expected to roll his eyes. In his address to the Global Environment Forum in South Korea this week, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged delegates to December’s climate change summit in Copenhagen to “seal the deal”: We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet. Questions arise: if Ki-moon really believed this, wouldn’t he be hunkered down with his loved ones instead of...

Health care protesters (a.k.a. “angry mobs” trying to shut off debate) have been spotted carrying signs sporting the P.J. O’Rourke quote, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” Equally popular is some form of the famous observation by columnist Carol Platt Liebau that, “A government bureaucracy controlling your medical care is likely to combine the efficiency of the Post Office with the compassion of the IRS” — which has been misattributed to Ronald Reagan among many others, and has been repeated and adapted ad infinitum. Now comes Barack Obama...

--- snip The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable. We have the power to change course. But we must do it now. As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I'm glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won't charge them loyalty. Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the...

Bismarck, N.D. (AP) Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May.

Global tropical cyclone activity is at historically low energy levels — not seen since the late 1970s. Using a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short (Bell and Chelliah 2006), which has been used by Klotzbach (2006) and Emanuel (2005) (the Power Dissipation Index is analogous to ACE), and most recently in Maue (2009), simple analysis shows that 24-month running sums of global ACE or hurricane energy have plummeted to levels not seen in 30 years. --------------------------------------------- Accumulated Cyclone Energy equation; v is maximum one-minute sustained wind speed

Associated Press WASHINGTON — The sun has been unusually quiet lately, with fewer sunspots and weaker magnetic fields than in nearly a century. A quiet sun is good for Earth: GPS systems are more accurate, satellites stay in orbit longer; even the effects of manmade global warming are marginally reduced, though just by three-tenths of a degree at most...

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no...

South Mississippi residents interested in weather now have a way to help experts gather rainfall amounts that will be used to give more accurate rain, snow and hail data for the entire country. The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network is made up of volunteers from across the country and regional coordinator Robert Ricks said the more people who participate, the more accurate the information. “It’s a national grass-roots effort,” he said. “We try to target weather enthusiasts. The only requirements are a rain gauge, an Internet connection and an e-mail address.” The network, known as CoCoRaHS, started in...

Why are the dems not dancing the jig with the Obama Meltdown of our economy. Hasn’t this been their goal for the last 40 yrs. Haven’t they and their fellow commies been trying to destroy every major American company for decades? Hasn’t everything they’ve passed in congress or distorted on ABDNC for decades been to destroy our most strategic industries? Their targets have been Big Oil, Big Banking and the Auto Industry so now are all pretty much destroyed. Why are they not the happiest people in the world? Oh yeah, they need to get re-elected. No matter which, DNCBS...

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the "Forecast Earth" environmental program during the middle of NBC's "Green Week," as well as several on-camera meteorologists. The layoffs totaled about 10 percent of the workforce, and are among the first major changes made since NBC completed its purchase of the venerable weather network in September. The layoffs affected about 80 people, but left the long-term leadership of the network unclear, according to a source who requested anonymity due to the continuing uncertainty at the...

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

Abstract: Recent historical Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclone inactivity is compared with the strikingly large observed variability during the past three decades. Yearly totals of Northern Hemisphere ACE are highly correlated with boreal spring sea-surface temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean and are representative of an evolving dual-gyre, trans-hemispheric correlation pattern throughout the calendar year. The offsetting nature of EPAC and NATL basin integrated energy and the strong dependence of combined Pacific TC activity upon ENSO suggest a hypothesis that overall Northern Hemisphere TC behavior is largely modulated by global-scale, non-local climate variability. Fact: There has been one Category 5 Tropical...

BERN (AFP) – Some 5,000 years ago, on a day with weather much like today's, a prehistoric person tread high up in what is now the Swiss Alps, wearing goat leather pants, leather shoes and armed with a bow and arrows. The unremarkable journey through the Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail 2,756 metres (9,000 feet) above sea level, has been a boon to scientists. But it would never have emerged if climate change were not melting the nearby glacier. So far, 300 objects dating as far back as the Neolithic or New Stone Age -- about 4,000 BC in Europe...

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility. "The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season. In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that...

April 16, 2008, 9:30 a.m. Like Lemmings to the SeaWill President Bush join in the chorus of dead-end energy proposals? By Roy Spencer Today’s announcement by President Bush on strategies to limit global warming has yet to come, but unless he is ready to unveil a new and miraculous source of energy that produces no carbon dioxide, one can only assume that he will simply be adding his voice to the many other lemmings who are calling for a mass migration to the nearest cliff from which we can all jump. The fact is that there is simply nothing...

The last months of a presidential administration are often dangerous. Presidents -- looking to their legacies -- go to desperate lengths to try to enhance their reputations for posterity. A pungent example of such practices by the Bush administration was reported above the fold on the front page of The Washington Times Monday: "Bush prepares global warming initiative." Oh, dear. Just as an increasing number of scientists are finding their courage to speak out against the global warming alarmists and just as a building body of evidence and theories challenge the key elements of the human-centric carbon-based global warming theories,...

In a significant shift on global warming, President Bush will propose stopping growth in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025 and signal that he is open to lawmakers reining in pollution from power companies. The stance, set to be unveiled Wednesday at a White House speech, indicates Mr. Bush's willingness to grapple with the growing legislative debate over global warming. It marks an acknowledgment by the Bush administration that the U.S. likely will adopt some sort of broad new legal system to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in coming years. Mr. Bush has opposed comprehensive legislation to curb emissions. But like an increasing...

(The Politico) President Bush has laid out a new global warming policy that seeks to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, but the lack of a mandated cap on carbon emissions has led Democrats to blast the proposal as falling well short. The reaction from Democrats _ in advance of the Bush announcement on global warming this afternoon _ comes as no surprise. Democrats have used climate change as a bludgeon to bash Republicans, yet have been unsuccessful in pushing legislation with mandatory caps on carbon emissions. "After seven years of denying the seriousness of the climate...

WHO Director-General warns vulnerable populations at greatest risk of projected impacts7 APRIL 2008 | GENEVA -- Scientists tell us that the evidence the Earth is warming is "unequivocal." Increases in global average air and sea temperature, ice melting and rising global sea levels all help us understand and prepare for the coming challenges. In addition to these observed changes, climate-sensitive impacts on human health are occurring today. They are attacking the pillars of public health. And they are providing a glimpse of the challenges public health will have to confront on a large scale, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan warned...

SHARPSBURG - Antietam National Battlefield is one of the 10 most endangered battlefields in the United States, according to a list released Wednesday by the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT). The battlefield is "threatened with a 120-foot-tall cellular tower that would be visible from all of the battlefield's most famous vantage points," according to a CWPT press release. Monocacy National Battlefield near Frederick, Md., also is on the list, which also includes sites in several states from Virginia to Oklahoma. National Park Service officials were notified in December 2007 of a proposal to erect a stealth cell tower south of...

It’s not a script for the next science-fiction thriller, but renowned British scientist James Lovelock is giving human civilization less than 32 years before all hell breaks loose because of the effects of global warming. Lovelock said the impact of climate change is irreversible regardless of what mankind does. “By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine,”

OSLO (Reuters) - After the coldest start to a year in more than a decade, spring will bring relief to the northern hemisphere from Thursday. Bucking the trend of global warming, the start of 2008 saw icy weather around the world from China to Greece. But despite its chilly start, 2008 is expected to end up among the top 10 warmest years since records began in the 1860s. This winter, ski resorts from the United States to Scandinavia have deep snow. Last year, after a string of mild winters, some feared climate change might put them out of business. In...

The relatively warmer temperatures and sunshine of the last several days have caused areas of ice that had been affixed to the western shore of Lake Michigan off the Racine and Kenosha areas to break away from the shore. The blustery west winds on Tuesday have carried these floating ice "bergs" several miles away from shore. Here is a high resolution visible satellite image from 102 pm CDT from March 10th.

Going deaf is not a problem that most of us would automatically associate with global warming. For coral reef fish, however, hotter seas could pose a real threat.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks and weakened bridges may be the wave of the future with continuing global warming, a new study says. Climate change will affect every type of transportation through rising sea levels, increased rainfall and surges from more intense storms, the National Research Council said in a report released Tuesday. Complicating matters, people continue to move into coastal areas, creating the need for more roads and services in the most vulnerable regions, the report noted. "The time has come for transportation professionals to acknowledge and confront the challenges posed by climate change...

Aftermath: Population Zero investigates what would happen if every single person on Earth simply disappeared. Explore an interactive world without humans.

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us? I’D LIKE TO SAY that the writing that had the most profound effect on me this year was some classic novel I picked up in my spare time, but in fact it was an Associated Press article. Last June, AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe wrote a fascinating, harrowing story about large holes dug in beach sand that can collapse "horrifyingly fast" and cause a person in the...

Federal Reserve Report Shows Homeowner Equity Dipping Below 50 Percent, Lowest on Record NEW YORK (AP) -- Americans' percentage of equity in their homes has fallen below 50 percent for the first time on record since 1945, the Federal Reserve said Thursday. Homeowners' percentage of equity slipped to a revised lower 49.6 percent in the second quarter of 2007, the central bank reported in its quarterly U.S. Flow of Funds Accounts, and declined further to 47.9 percent in the fourth quarter -- the third straight quarter it was under 50 percent. That marks the first time homeowners' debt on their...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Pizza delivery company Domino's Pizza Inc. will cut 55 jobs in the U.S. as part of a restructuring meant to reduce costs, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Tuesday.

Gasoline prices, which for months lagged behind the big run-up in the price of oil, are suddenly rising quickly, with some experts saying they could approach $4 a gallon by spring. Diesel is hitting new records daily, and oil settled at a record high of $100.88 a barrel on Tuesday. The increases could not come at a worse time for the economy. With growth slowing, energy increases that were once easily absorbed by consumers are now more likely to act as a drag on household budgets, leaving people with less money to spend elsewhere. These costs could worsen the nation’s...

Arctic 'Doomsday' Seed Vault Opens Doors For 100 Million SeedsThe Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened February 26 on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. (Credit: Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust) ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2008) — The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened February 26 on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum...

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has...

Has An Ocean Circulation Collapse Been Triggered?Geoscientists warn that there can be a considerable delay between the triggering of a collapse of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and the actual collapse. (Credit: iStockphoto/Emmanuelle Combaud) ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2008) — Predictions that the 21st century is safe from major circulation changes in the North Atlantic Ocean may not be as comforting as they seem, according to a Penn State researcher. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is very unlikely that the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) will collapse in the 21st century. They predict a probability...

As we all know but are sometimes reluctant to contemplate, oil is a finite, non-renewable resource. This automatically means that its use is not sustainable. If the use of oil is not sustainable, then of course the added carrying capacity the oil has provided is likewise unsustainable. Carrying capacity has been added to the world in direct proportion to the use of oil, and the disturbing implication is that if our oil supply declines, the carrying capacity of the world will automatically fall with it. These two observations (that oil has expanded the world's carrying capacity and oil use is...

PHOENIX – Climate change and a growing demand for water could drain two of the nation's largest manmade reservoirs within 13 years, depriving several Southwestern states of key water sources, scientists warn. Researchers at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography said last week that there's a 50 percent chance that lakes Mead and Powell will dry up by 2021, and a 10 percent chance the lakes will run out of usable water by 2013. ~~snip~~ Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border and the West's largest storage reservoir, and Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, have been hit hard by a...

As Hong Kong shivers through its second-longest cold spell since 1885, scientists point to global warming to explain the abnormal cold weather phenomenon worldwide. "We are seeing extremely unusual weather across the world," said polar researcher Rebecca Lee Lok-sze.

The National Geographic Channel (NGC) will begin airing on February 10 a new environmental show titled Six Degrees. NGC in a statement on the man who inspired the show says, "In possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming yet published, noted science writer and 2006 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Mark Lynas explains in his latest book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, how Earth’s climate will be impacted with every degree of increase in temperature—and what we need to do about it, now, to avert disaster." If Katrina bothered you not just because of the environmental issues...