Free Republic

There have been times in our geological history when CO2 levels were 10X what they are today, yet warming was only slightly higher. Unlike what you often read in simplistic media accounts, there are a lot of variables in climate and weather and temperature. It takes a lot of things going wrong to turn Earth into Venus and we have never come close. At the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, geochemists discussed one such period, but they say we just got lucky - a vast mountain range formed in the middle of the ancient supercontinent, Pangea.

SAN FRANCISCO - The international Cassini spacecraft spotted a nearly mile-high mountain range shrouded in hazy clouds on Saturn's giant moon Titan, scientists reported Tuesday. The mountains, which stretch for nearly 100 miles, surprised researchers who re-analyzed the images to double-check that they were real and not shadows of other surface features. Robert Brown, a Cassini scientist from the University of Arizona, said the mountains reminded him of California's Sierra Nevada range. "You can call this the Titan Sierra," said Brown, who unveiled the new infrared images at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The mountains are the...

ALISO VIEJO, Calif. - Traffic is so bad along the eastern rim of Los Angeles' suburban ring that regional planners are considering the once unthinkable — an 11-mile tunnel through a mountain range in earthquake country. Critics question the logic of building a multibillion-dollar project in a region so prone to earthquakes that an alternate proposal for a double-decker highway was deemed too dangerous. The tunnel would begin barely a mile from a fault that produced a 6.0-magnitude earthquake about a century ago. "It's absolutely absurd to have a tunnel 700 feet below ground in earthquake country," said Cathryn DeYoung,...