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AN asteroid discovered today will hit Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in a few hours but will burn up before it can hit the ground or endanger aircraft, astronomers say. The asteroid would create a large fireball about 10.46pm EDT (1.46pm AEST) as it burns up, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We want to stress that this object is not a threat," said Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at Harvard in Massachusetts. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's...

The US stock market could suffer a devastating crash with shares losing a third of their value this week if Hank Paulson’s financial bailout plan fails, US Treasury officials have warned. ---- The financial system could face a meltdown of 1929 proportions unless US politicians succeed in their efforts for a $700bn rescue scheme, experts added. The warning came as Republicans and Democrats met in Washington for a rare weekend debating session to attempt to seal agreement on the contentious plan, aimed at preventing a long-lasting recession in the US.

(CNN) -- Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, but it's been another chilling season for researchers who study Arctic sea ice. "It's definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below what used to be normal," said Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. This past summer, the Arctic sea ice dwindled to its second lowest level. Arctic sea ice is usually one to three meters, or as much as 9 feet thick. It grows during autumn and winter...

Antarctic winter ice gets bigger; Arctic shrinks 12 Sep 2008 13:56:24 GMT Source: Reuters By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, Sept 12 (Reuters) - The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has grown in recent Septembers in what could be an unusual side-effect of global warming, experts said on Friday. In the southern hemisphere winter, when emperor penguins huddle together against the biting cold, ice on the sea around Antarctica has been increasing since the late 1970s, perhaps because climate change means shifts in winds, sea currents or snowfall. At the other end of the planet, Arctic sea ice is...

Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse. According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now. This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the next century … And what may happen if we don't.

A "minor planet" with the prosaic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune. But this lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). The discovery of this remarkable object was reported today in Chicago, at an international symposium titled "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Asteroids to Cosmology." A...

<p>Billionaire vulture investor Wilbur Ross this morning told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that a thousand banks could fail before the financial crisis is over...</p> <p>And the impact on the credit crunch could be severe...</p>

On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinctionThere's no 'adaptation' to such steep warming. We must stop pandering to special interests, and try a new, post-Kyoto strategy We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never...

Comments: Getting concerned as McCain has not led since May. Even the electoral college tally on Rasmussen has had Obama solidly ahead like a rock. McCain is underperforming Bush in almost all Republican and swing states, including CO, NV, NM, OH, WI, MT, IA, IN, GA, NC, VA, and so on. Despite an impressive anti-Obama ad barrage, McCain has still not managed to demonstrate a winning electoral college mosaic so far.

See the video under "TOP VIDEO", they say it is going to be turned on THIS WEEKEND in the video, you might want to give your mom or other loved ones a call and tell them that you love them ;)

A warmer planet could mean we'll suffer more (and stronger) allergies As one of 40 million Americans who suffer from hay fever, Lewis Ziska carries an inhaler in his pocket and takes a whiff to clear his lungs on bad allergy days. But hay fever is more than a personal-health issue for Ziska. A weed ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Crop Systems and Global Change Laboratory, Ziska is a leading researcher in the fledgling field of allergies and climate change. His findings regarding ragweed, an invasive plant whose pollen is the leading trigger of fall hay fever, are...

Gallup's tracking poll which had been showing a close race between McCain and Obama until just a few days ago, is now showing McCain down by 9 points. Now, polls this far out don't mean much--but I think it's safe to say that Obama has gotten a bounce out his pandering trip overseas. McCain needs to counter quickly; if he loses his edge on national security, this election is over.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Barack Obama has stretched his lead over John McCain among national registered voters to seven percentage points, 48% to 41%, in Gallup Poll Daily tracking conducted July 23-25. This represents a continuation of Obama's frontrunner position in Gallup's Friday report, when he led McCain by six points, 47% to 41%. Earlier this week, Obama and McCain were separated by just two to four points, but that was before the extensive U.S. news coverage of the last leg of Obama's foreign tour. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that the bounce is continuing for Barack Obama. The presumptive Democratic nominee attracts 46% of the vote while John McCain earns 40%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 49% and McCain 43%. Just four days ago, the candidates were tied at 46% (with leaners). Obama is viewed favorably by 57% of voters, McCain by 55%.

When the Obama camp announced that it was going to make a play for North Dakota, a lot of people scoffed. I, for one, was skeptical. But then we all started taking a look at the ROI — the fact that the Obama camp could throw relative pennies at the state and win enough votes to make it competitive — and started thinking that maybe it was a smart choice to at the very least annoy McCain there. Well, now the polls are suggesting that maybe the Obama team was on to something. A new Research 2000 poll released today...

Gallup now has Obama ahead 47-41 and Rasmussen has Obama leading by a 46-40 percent margin. Media bias is certainly a factor but McCain is running a campaign as thrilling as watching paint dry.

Fortunately, the odds are good that the next one will fall over one of our oceans, which take up more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, or the planet’s still-vast stretches of uninhabited lands. How much in taxpayer dollars should be invested to pinpoint such hazards is one of the toughest risk-management exercises around.

Global Intrigue + More Will Escalate Food Prices Drastically: What Will A Loaf Of Bread Cost Next Year? RFFM.org Guest Commentary by Joyce Morrison The mere thought of a food shortage in America is unthinkable…or is it? Headlines read, “Planting season weather perplexing for farmers.” “Weather may cut yields,” “Further spike in food costs feared due to floods,” “Food shortages,” -- these are headlines preparing us for the fact we will no longer have the cheapest, safest food in the world. All spring the breadbasket of America has been deluged with floods, wind storms, tornados, heavy rain and hail. Illinois...

That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments — those of you who still have them. A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be...

WASHINGTON - Droughts will get drier, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with a warming climate across North America, U.S. government experts said in a report billed as the first continental assessment of extreme events.

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter. Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007. But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss. Scientists on the project say that much of the ice is so thin that it melts easily, and the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within five to 10 years. I think we're going to...

Abstract: The heat generated inside our planet is predominantly of radionic (nuclear) origin. Hence, Earth in its entirety can be considered considered a slow nuclear reactor with its solid ”inner core” providing a major contribution to the total energy output. Since radionic heat is generated in the entire volume and cooling can only occur at the surface, the highest temperature inside Earth occurs at the center of the inner core. Overheating the center of the inner core reactor due to the so-called greenhouse effect on the surface of Earth may cause a meltdown condition, an enrichment of nuclear fuel and...

The world's largest particle collider is designed to do its job largely under the surface-and that under-the-surface status also applies to much of the progress in the legal case challenging whether the collider should actually be allowed to do its job.

PANJIM, JUNE 16 (Agencies) — Manmade chemicals have damaged the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere that shields Earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, each summer creating a hole over the South Pole that expands to nearly the size of Antarctica. But in 1996, an international treaty banned the chemical refrigerants and propellants (known as CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons), and the hole has been shrinking. Scientists predict it may stop forming by the end of this century. But that’s not necessarily good news. A new study published in ‘Science’ says that the closing of the ozone hole...

Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse? A dramatic preview of an unprecedented ABC News event called "Earth 2100." According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now. This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the...

Climate report offers a dire look at next 50 years. Get used to it -- and be ready for water shortages, too, says a sweeping new scientific report rounding up likely effects of climate change on the United States' land, water and farms over the next half-century. Some effects already can be felt, says the report released Tuesday, which synthesizes results of more than 1,000 individual studies. And it's not just humans' food that's at risk, said witnesses at a congressional field hearing in Seattle on Tuesday. An intense and sudden acidification of the Pacific resulting from climate change presages...

Everywhere I go these days... I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned. I say this because I detect... the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things --...

The price of oil futures, passing through the $130 level as they have this morning, likely headed far north of $200, is really secondary to the Bigger Picture of how the economy and oil are tied together. But is $800 oil in the cards? Oh, yeah... A conversation with ... petroleum geologist Jeffrey J. Brown ... explains the concept of oil going nonlinear from here: "In my opinion, we are looking at an accelerating net oil export decline rate, combined with a requirement for an accelerating rate of increase in oil prices, in order to balance supply & demand, as...

"Far from normal". Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand. The...

Rising global temperatures could lead to an increase in kidney stones, according to research presented at the 103rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA). Dehydration has been linked to stone disease, particularly in warmer climates, and global warming will exacerbate this effect. As a result, the prevalence of stone disease may increase, along with the costs of treating the condition. Using published data to determine the temperature-dependence of stone disease, researchers applied predictions of temperature increase to determine the impact of global warming on the incidence and cost of stone disease in the United States. The Intergovernmental...

Global warming is causing significant changes to the Earth's natural systems and it is highly unlikely that any force but man-made climate change can be blamed . Researchers who analysed 30,000 academic studies dating back to 1970 said man was responsible for changes that ranged from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse in numbers of many species of wildlife. "Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The effects on living things include the...

Is M3 1 really gone? After reading this little known press release a few weeks ago, I started to wonder… and the surprising result is that (except for the Eurodollars element of M3), the data is still available with which to reconstruct M3.

Dr. Khurana says there may be broader health ramifications than asbestos or smoking. What? Now just think about that. Again, I foresee a huge higher tax on cell phone use and a higher health and life insurance premium. And maybe people (like me) that don't use cell phones unless its an emergency, would rather not be seated in bars and restaurants where cell phones are in use. Ah, can you say ban?

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation left-wing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

Verbal bouquets are being thrown by presidential candidate Barack Obama at the ideals of bipartisanship, nonpartisanship, post-partisanship. You may want to consider some recent handiwork before buying in. Take last month's fuel-economy legislation, deemed "a nice little Christmas present" for the American people by Nancy Pelosi. President Bush wore himself out singing the bill's praises. Mr. Obama, who has been hell on the auto makers, practically called it America's salvation. But its only redeeming feature is that it's unlikely ever to take effect, at least in current form. We won't try to list all the built-in fudge factors. No two...

You don't have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don't immediately change our carbon polluting ways. One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. And so it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, according to the Washington Times, "are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...

Seattle - In an open letter to Santa last week and a speech to children at Seattle’s Annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Westlake Center, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels last week offered a Grinch-like tone, grumbling about climate change threatening Santa, telling kids “I hope the reindeer can swim,” and blaming them and their energy-sucking video games for melting Arctic ice. As Nickels spoke, his assistants handed out stickers admonishing the crowd to “Save Santa.”

Here are those 11 corrections to Gore's film - and many will be familiar to readers of this column: Gore presents Mt Kilimanjaro's melting snows as proof of global warming. In fact, the snows are vanishing thanks to local factors, including deforestation. Gore suggests Antarctica's ice cover is melting. Most studies says it is increasing or stable. Gore shows scary graphics of cities drowning in seas that rise 7m, causing millions of refugees. But the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the seas will rise at worst by 59cm this century. Gore uses images of Hurricane Katrina and...

Conveniently, the American media is largely ignoring a significant statement from a UK High Court judge who said Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” promotes “partisan political views” and the schools should treat it as such. As a result the British government was forced to rewrite their website and their “guidance” and will need to issue a warning before showing the film.As NewsBusters reported, truck driver, part-time school official and father of two Stewart Dimmock brought a High Court action to ban the film from UK schools, claiming it is “unfit for schools” because it contains scientific inaccuracies, “sentimental mush” and is politically biased....

European, Asian and Canadian companies are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy their U.S. counterparts at a record pace, increasing investment in the United States but also raising fears about a potential loss of jobs and autonomy. "We could be looking at the world's largest tag sale if we continue to see declines in the dollar," said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners. In the latest large deal aided by a weak dollar, Commerce Bancorp, which is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, agreed Tuesday to be acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank of Canada in a cash-and-shares deal...

The temperature of the ocean has cooled 0.2 degrees C in the past few of years, and is now only 0.1 degrees C warmer than it was throughout much of 1944. This data set had been showing a general warming trend since the late 1970s, (as well as a warming trend from the 1910s through the mid 1940s) with the warmest time being recorded in the El Nino year of 1998. Despite temperatures peaking in 1998, it's been reasonable to describe the temperature trend as continuing, since 1998 at the time was a flukishly hot spell. Since 1998, the "normal"...

Carry trade unwinds as yen hits one-year high An anonymous investor has placed a bet on an index of Europe's top 50 stocks falling by a third by the end of September, as world equity markets plunged for a third day and volatility hit a three-year high. The mystery investor has bought put option contracts on the DJ Eurostoxx 50 index that will result in a profit if it plunges to 2,800 or below by the end of September. Based on the 2,800 strike price, the position covers a notional €6.9bn, and potentially even more using a market price of...

<p>The last politician who took advice from the bond market was Bill Clinton. When he pushed for a tax hike back in 1993 to cut the budget deficit, it was under the assumption that bond investors would respond by bringing down interest rates. (The theory here is that deficits are inflationary. Inflation is bad for bonds.) Yet long-term interest rates surged from 6.45 percent when Clinton signed his tax-hike bill on Aug. 10, 1993, to 8.16 percent on Nov. 7, 1994, the day before the midterm congressional election where Republicans won back the House and Senate.</p>

As the stalemate over the budget continues into its seventh week, taxpayers are troubled over mischaracterizations in the mainstream media about who is responsible. The negative attention is focused on Senate Republicans who are being portrayed as the obstructionists. But viewed fairly, their position is both reasonable and mainstream. They want to see a balanced budget -- rather than saddle future generations with a massive debt load – and they want to ensure that the $42 billion dollars of bond financing for infrastructure just passed by voters last November is actually spent on infrastructure. Moreover, the position which these Senators...

Cerberus Capital Management may be celebrating its historic acquisition of Chrysler after turmoil in the credit markets delayed the deal, but no champagne is flowing for the private-equity firm's other landmark purchase in Detroit. GMAC, the finance arm of General Motors (GM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) that is 51%-owned by Cerberus, is facing worries in the derivatives markets about bankruptcy at its mortgage-lending unit. The price of credit protection for GMAC's mortgage business, Residential Capital, or ResCap, soared by more than $100,000 a year on Friday, as measured by the credit default swaps market. "ResCap is trading like it...

Jim Cramer today angrily called on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to lower interest rates, saying he "has no idea how bad it is out there" in the nation's credit markets. In his "Stop Trading" segment on Street Signs today, Cramer said the nation's central bank is "asleep" and should immediately "relieve the pressure" on financial firms and the nation's home owners who are facing big increases in their mortgage payments as 'teaser' rates expire. Many thousands will "lose their homes," he warned. "This is not the time to be complacent." About an hour later, he made a return appearance...

<p>The series of Live Earth concerts, organised in nine cities to raise awareness of climate change issues, began in Sydney.</p> <p>Among those playing in Sydney were rockers Wolfmother, with the reformed Crowded House rounding off the show.</p> <p>Live Earth was inspired by former US Vice-President Al Gore, who appeared as a hologram as the Tokyo gig began.</p>

Skeptics of manmade global warming have found further support in research linking solar output with the planet Neptune’s brightness and temperatures on Earth. The findings appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the article, H.B. Hammel and G.W. Lockwood from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Observatory since 1950. Those measurements indicate that Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980. And infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that Neptune has been warming steadily...

Serious drought may strike western US 19:00 05 April 2007 From New Scientist Print Edition. Michael Reilly The western US may be heading towards a return to the dustbowl landscape that devastated the prairies of the 1930s, climatologists warn. The horror of that period in the US was vividly described in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath: thousands of people migrated from the parched American prairie – a dustbowl – and travelled west towards the "promised land". But the once-greener pastures are heading towards a drought more severe than the one that created the dustbowl of the 1930s.For the...

As the Business & Media Institute reported last year, press reports of climate change have been going on since the 1800s. Over the weekend, I was sent a list of New York Times articles dating back to 1855 addressing the global warming and cooling that has been happening on this planet for the past 150 years. I have taken the liberty of adding a few pieces that I discovered in the Times’ archives to further illustrate the point. As you review the following, try to keep in mind just how sure global warming alarmists like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore are that...