Watchman Newsletter

Erratic global weather threatens food security

Google News (Link) - AFP - Nina Larson (September 7, 2010)

The drought in Russia and floods in Pakistan are part of a global trend of unpredictable weather patterns and rainfall that threaten food security, experts gathered in Stockholm said.

“We are getting to a point where we are getting more water, more rainy days, but it’s more variable, so it leads to droughts and it leads to floods,” Sunita Narain, the head of the Centre for Science and Environment in India, told AFP on the sidelines of the World Water Week conference.

“That is leading to huge amounts of stress on agriculture and livelihoods,” she said, adding that “climate change is making rainfall even more variable.”

Narain was one of around 2,500 experts from 130 countries gathered in Stockholm for the 20th edition of the World Water Week, which opened Sunday and is set to run until Saturday.

Her comments came as eight million people in Pakistan remain dependent on handouts for their survival after monsoons caused devastating floods throughout the country.

Mayor: Quake hit city ‘like an iceberg’

New Zealand Herald (Link) - Jarrod Booker (September 4, 2010)

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker is thankful there has been no loss of life but there had been considerable damage across the city and outlying areas.

The city has been left devastated after a massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck 30km west of the city at 4.35am this morning.

The quake was at a depth of 33km and was centered near Darfield, and has left large parts of the area without power, water or telephones.

Mr. Parker said he did not want to overstate the level of damage “but I think it’s like an iceberg. There is, in a sense, below the visible line significant structural damage.”

“There would not be a house or a family in our city that has not in some way had damage done to their person and or their property,” Mr. Parker said.

“Our thoughts are with our people.

“We know that a lot of people will be very nervous, deeply disturbed.”

Scientists have described this morning’s earthquake as the most significant since the 1931 magnitude 7.8 Hawke’s Bay earthquake.

Indonesian volcano erupts again

Breitbart (Link) - AFP (September 3, 2010)

An Indonesian volcano spewed ash thousands of metres into the air Friday in its most violent eruption since rumbling back to life earlier this week for the first time in 400 years.

Thousands of people have fled their homes since the 2,460-metre (8,100-foot) Sinabung in northern Sumatra started to erupt on Sunday after centuries of inactivity.

“The volcano erupted at 04:38 am which has lasted for 13 minutes and sending a column of ash as high as 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) into the air. This is the biggest eruption,” government volcanologist Agus Budianto told AFP.

“We recorded continuous tremors since 7:00 pm Thursday that indicated an intense magma movement inside the volcano,” he said.

Police had evacuated people from the danger zone in a six-kilometre (four-mile) radius from the volcano peak.

“We’re afraid that some locals had returned back to their village from emergency shelters,” he said.

Budianto said the eruption was felt about eight kilometres (five miles) away.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity. It has more active volcanoes than any other country.

Indonesian volcano wakes up after 400 years

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - AP (August 29, 2010)

A volcano in western Indonesia spewed hot lava and sand high into the sky early Sunday in its first eruption in 400 years.

Government volcanologist Surono, who uses only one name, said Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra province started rumbling a few days ago and the minor morning eruption has mostly stopped.

It sent sand and ash up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) high but lava only moved near the crater. It caused no major damage “but only dust covered plants and trees,” he said.

He said Mount Sinabung last erupted in 1600, so observers don’t know the volcano’s eruption pattern and are monitoring it closely for more activity.

Evacuations on the volcano’s slopes started Friday at the first signs of activity. Up to 10,000 people who fled are staying in government buildings, houses of worship and other evacuation centers in two nearby towns.

Loss of 25 percent of Russian wheat crop worries international grain markets

MinnPost (Link) - Miriam Elder (August 17, 2010)

The deadly forest fires ravaging the Russian countryside have wiped out a quarter of Russia’s grain crop, prompting the country to ban all wheat exports as of Sunday and inflaming worries of a global food crisis.

A similar food crisis in 2007-08 provoked riots around the developing world, from Bangladesh to Yemen and from Haiti to the Ivory Coast. Is the world in store for a similar fate this year? Not necessarily, analysts say.

This time around, global reserve stocks are stuffed, and healthy grain crops in countries like the U.S. and Argentina are expected to mitigate Russian shortfalls. This year, a crisis will likely be avoided, analysts say.

Yet with Russia already making predictions that its fall and winter planting will likely be disrupted, bigger problems could lie ahead. And analysts warn that a heavy reliance on this year’s record U.S. crop means that if the weather stateside changes, all predictions would go out the window.

Russia is the world’s third largest grain producer, taking roughly a 13 percent share of the global wheat trade. Much of Russia’s wheat is exported to the Middle East. Egypt is its largest market, followed by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Libya, according to reports.

Powerful quake rattles Ecuador, Peru

Breitbart (Link) (August 12, 2010)

A strong 7.1-magnitude earthquake rocked Ecuador and parts of Peru Thursday, but its epicenter was deep underground in a remote Amazonian region and only one injury and light damage was reported.

The quake, which experts from the US Geological Survey said hit at 6:54 am (1154 GMT), 110 miles (175 kilometers) southeast of Quito, lasted for about 40 seconds and was felt around the country and in neighboring Peru.

One person in a southwestern fishing port was injured by a crumbling wall, Ecuador Red Cross spokesman Jorge Arteaga told AFP.

“So far that is the only victim,” he said, adding that a handful of buildings including a firehouse had their walls crumble as a result of the quake.

The epicenter of the quake was deep, some 210 kilometers under the Amazonian jungle, which Ecuadoran officials said was the reason for the lack of damage above ground. No tsunami was generated.

The USGS said the nearest urban center was some 145 kilometers to the west -- Ambato -- an Ecuadoran city high in the Andes mountains which is home to a volcano of the same name and suffered a devastating quake back in 1949.

Solar System Warming–and its implications

Dregs of the Future (Link) (August 7, 2010)

Solar System is warming

According to:

• MIT News: “Pluto is undergoing global warming. . . . The average surface temperature of the nitrogen ice on Pluto has increased 2 degrees Celsius over the past 14 years.” [Surprisingly, Pluto is warming despite currently moving further away from the sun.]
• MIT News: Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher reported that observations obtained by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager space probe visited it in 1989.
• National Geographic: “The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars.”
• NASA JPL Labs: “One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age.”
• Nature: “Prediction of a global climate change on Jupiter . . . global temperature change of about 10 degrees K.”
• Max Planck Institute: “The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures,” said Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research.
• The Whole Solar System is Undergoing Global Warming

Study Links Climate Change To Cosmic Rays (Source)

Our solar system is entering a photon belt area.

Benny Peiser, at Liverpool John Moores University asks: “Global warming on Neptune’s moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets … Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”

Residents flee as acrid smog blankets Moscow

Google News (Link) - AFP - Stuart Williams (August 7, 2010)

Residents began fleeing Moscow Saturday as the worst smog in living memory smothered the city and forced people to don protective masks against pollution over six times higher than safe levels.

The wildfires that have killed 52 people were still spreading in central Russia, with 290 new fires in the last 24 hours as weather forecasters said Russia’s worst heatwave in decades would continue for the next days.

“Unfortunately the number of fires have doubled in the Moscow region in the past 24 hours because of people playing with firecrackers near forests,” said Vladimir Stepanov, a senior official with the emergency situations ministry.

The ministry said 1,000 extra firefighters had been dispatched to tackle fires in peat bogs around 100 kilometres (62 miles) southeast of the capital.

Moscow landmarks including the Kremlin and golden church cupolas disappeared behind a layer of smoke as many Muscovities remaining in the city wore protective masks or simply clutched wet rags to their faces.

Huge ice island breaks from Greenland glacier

BBC (Link) (August 7, 2010)

A giant block of ice measuring 260 sq km (100 sq miles) has broken off a glacier in Greenland, according to researchers at a US university.

The slab of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland.

It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962, said Prof Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware.

The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada.

If the iceberg moves south, it could interfere with shipping, Prof Muenchow said.

Cracks in the Petermann Glacier had been observed last year and it was expected that an iceberg would calve from it soon.

The glacier is 1,000 km (620 miles) south of the North Pole.

More than 800 killed in Pakistan floods

The Jerusalem Post (Link) (July 31, 2010)

Flooding in Pakistan has killed more than 800 people in a week, a government official said Saturday as rescuers struggled to reach marooned victims and some evacuees showed signs of fever, diarrhea and other waterborne diseases.

The flooding caused by record-breaking rainfalls caused massive destruction in the past week, especially in the northwest province, where officials said it was the worst deluge since 1929. The UN estimated Saturday that some 1 million people nationwide were affected by the disaster, though it didn't specify exactly what that meant.

The information minister for the northwest province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said reports coming in from various districts across the northwest showed that more than 800 people had died due to the flooding. Many people remain missing.

Floodwaters were receding in the northwest, officials said, but fresh rains were expected to lash other parts of the country in the coming days.

Iran quake injures 274; new tremor further south

Reuters (Link) (July 31, 2010)

An earthquake in northeastern Iran injured 274 people on Friday, the semi-official ILNA news agency reported, and a slightly stronger tremor struck central Iran on Saturday.

The first quake with a magnitude of 5.7 hit the city of Torbat-e Heydariyeh, about 700 km (435 miles) east of Tehran, at 6:20 p.m. (1350 GMT) on Friday, and had its epicentre around 7 km from the city.

Many people spent the night outdoors in the city's parks fearing aftershocks. No deaths were reported.

Further south, a quake of 5.8 magnitude hit the Kerman region at 11:22 a.m. (0652 GMT) on Saturday, Tehran University's seismological centre reported. There were no initial reports of casualties or damage.

Earthquakes are common in Iran. In 2003, about 30,000 people were killed in a quake that devastated the southeastern city of Bam.

Three major earthquakes rattle Philippines

Gulf News (Link) (July 24, 2010)

Manila: Three major earthquakes measuring between magnitude 7.3 and 7.4 hit the southern Philippines early on Saturday, seismologists said, but there were no reports of damage and no tsunami warning was issued.

The underwater quakes struck at a depth of between 575 and 605 kilometres, just over 100 kilometres southwest of Cotabato, in Mindanao, said the US Geological Survey.

The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said no destructive tsunami was generated by the quakes, the first of which hit at 6:08am (2208 GMT Friday).

“It was kind of mild,” said Monisa Tulawie, a staff member at the Cotabato city mayor’s office, who told AFP she felt one of the quakes.

Other residents contacted by phone were unaware of what had happened, saying they had not been woken by the tremors.

Sun surges: Yet another apocalyptic theory to worry about

Macleans (Link) - Kate Lunau (July 19, 2010)

In March 1989, six million Quebecers lost power for nine hours after a massive solar flare—an explosion of magnetic energy from the sun—created electric ground currents here on Earth, collapsing the power grid. Another geomagnetic storm, in 1921, brought ground currents 10 times as strong. But the fiercest one ever recorded, called the Carrington Event of 1859, electrified telegraph lines—even setting telegraph papers on fire—and created northern lights visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. If such a storm were to strike today, the consequences would be devastating. But NASA researchers say severe space weather could be on the way.

Every 11 years, for reasons that aren’t completely understood, our sun hits what’s called its solar maximum: an especially active period when sun spots, solar flares and “coronal mass ejections—these clouds of plasma that flow out of the sun at millions of kilometres an hour,” as astronomer Sten Odenwald puts it, are more likely to occur. The resulting streams of particles and pulses of electromagnetic energy create what’s called space weather, which can have all sorts of impacts here, throwing the Earth’s magnetic field into disarray and disrupting everything from GPS systems to the power grid. We’re now coming out of a quiet period for the sun, as it wakes up and moves toward the next solar maximum, expected in 2013, and experts say we should be preparing for the worst.

A freight train? Thunder? ‘Holy cow ... earthquake!’

MSNBC (Link) (July 16, 2010)

The largest earthquake ever recorded near the capital rattled Washington, D.C., early Friday, waking many residents but causing no reported damage.

The quake hit at 5:04 a.m. ET with a magnitude of 3.6, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was centered near Rockville, Md., the USGS said.

NBC News reported that the quake was felt in the D.C.-area, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Amy Vaughn, a spokeswoman for USGS, told NBC station WRC that the quake was the largest recorded within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Washington since a database was created in 1974.

The previous record within that time period was a 2.6 magnitude temblor in 1990.

“So this is pretty significant for your area,” Vaughn told WRC-TV.

The area’s last quake — with a magnitude of 2.0 — occurred in May 2008.

1,000 missing in Brazil floods

Breitbart (Link) - AFP (June 21, 2010)

More than 1,000 people are missing after days of heavy rain and flooding, the governor of Brazil’s northeastern Alagoas state said, voicing fear that the death toll of 35 could skyrocket.

“Up until the early afternoon we had 22 confirmed dead in Alagoas (state) and more than 1,000 people missing,” Alagoas governor Teotonio Vilela Filho said, quoted on the official Agencia Brasil news agency.

“We are praying for the missing to be found alive. But we are very worried because bodies are starting to turn up on beaches and on riverbanks,” Vilela told reporters at a press briefing before meeting with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Earthquake rocks South Pacific region

BBC News (Link) (May 27, 2010)

An earthquake of magnitude 7.2 has struck off the nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific.

A tsunami warning was issued to the Solomon islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, but has now been lifted. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said the quake - which was initially reported of 7.4 magnitude - did not pose a threat.

Vanuatu lies on the Ring Of Fire, a zone of volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches encircling the Pacific basin.

The earthquake struck 300 miles (485 km) northwest of Port Vila on Vanuatu at 1714 GMT at a depth of 22 miles.

“Sea level readings do not show any tsunami signals,” the tsunami centre told AFP.

“If a tsunami was generated it does not pose a threat to any areas outside the epicentral region. The tsunami warning is now cancelled for all areas covered by this centre.”

The centre had earlier alerted the islands of the threat.

The so-called Ring of Fire has one of the world’s most active fault lines and is notorious for frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

More than half of the world’s active volcanoes above sea level are part of the ring.

Whoops! CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming, discovers top US meteorologist

Telegraph UK (Link) - James Delingpole (May 4, 2010)

The other night I had a nightmare in which a general election was approaching and all three main competing parties had the same suicidal policy. They all believed in this thing called the Big Bad Fairy and were convinced that the only way to drive off the BBF and her evil hordes was by spending huge sums of taxpayers’ money – £18 billion a year was, I believe, the figure quoted in the nightmare – and by ruining the country with ugly, spinning Fairy Towers for the bad fairy hordes to nest in.

Then I woke up and found…

Seriously, though, what do we do? How we can possibly stop the environmental and energy policy of our next government being based on what US meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer calls “the worst case of mass hysteria the world has known?”

Dr Spencer, formerly senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, now leads the US science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSRE) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He’s just the kind of egghead the IPCC claims to represent when it tells us the world is getting dangerously warmer, it’s man’s fault – the result of CO₂ emissions – and it must be urgently addressed.

Except Dr Spencer doesn’t agree with any of that. He thinks it’s all nonsense, based on a very elementary error he describes in his new book The Great Global Warming Blunder. I summarise his arguments in this article.

The $10 Trillion Climate Fraud

Investor’s Business Daily (Link) (April 28, 2010)

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore’s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.

“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

Low supplies slow China earthquake rescue efforts

Yahoo! News (Link) - AP - Anita Chang (April 15, 2010)

Earthquake survivors shivered through a second night outdoors in a remote Tibetan corner of western China with rescuers fighting altitude sickness and dealing with a lack of supplies as the death toll rose to 760.

People with broken arms or legs cried in pain as medical teams could offer little more than injections. A doctor at the Qinghai provincial hospital, where the severely injured were being flown, said she had no idea how many were being treated because there was no time to count them all.

Stunned survivors wandered the dusty streets of Jiegu, where relief workers estimated 70 percent to 90 percent of the low-slung town of wood-and-mud housing had collapsed. Hundreds gathered to sleep in a plaza around a 50-foot (15-meter) tall statue of the mythical Tibetan King Gesar, wrapped in blankets taken from homes shattered by Wednesday morning’s quakes.

“There’s nothing to eat. We’ve just been drinking water,” said Zhaxi Zuoma, a 32-year-old camped with thousands of others on a rocky field. They asked a reporter to bring them food the next day.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 760 people had died, 243 people were missing, and 11,477 were injured, 1,174 severely. The worst of the quakes measured magnitude 6.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey and 7.1 by China’s earthquake administration.

Iceland volcano eruption melts glacier, causes floods

Yahoo! News (Link) - AFP (April 14, 2010)

Iceland’s second volcano eruption in less than a month melted part of a glacier and caused heavy flooding on Wednesday, forcing up to 800 people to evacuate and grounding some flights over Norway.

“We have two heavy floods coming out from the melting of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier,” local police spokesman Roegnvaldur Olafsson told AFP from near the site of the eruption in the south of the country.

So far, “no lives are in danger but we have evacuated the area and all roads are closed,” he said, adding that the ongoing eruption was bigger than the blast at the nearby Fimmvorduhals volcano last month.

Police said earlier Wednesday that following the eruption, which began around 1:00 am (0100 GMT), between 700 and 800 people had been evacuated from their homes in the remote, lightly populated area 125 kilometres (75 miles) east of Reykjavik.

“There were a lot of earthquakes in the area,” police spokesman Baldur Sigurdsson told AFP.

Western China quakes kill at least 400

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - AP (April 14, 2010)

A series of strong earthquakes struck a far western Tibetan area of China on Wednesday, killing at least 400 people and injuring thousands as houses made of mud and wood collapsed, trapping many more, officials said.

Paramilitary police were forced to use shovels to dig through the rubble in a Qinghai province township where most of the homes had been flattened, footage on state television showed. Officials said excavators were not available and with most of the roads leading to the nearest airport damaged, equipment and rescuers would have a hard time reaching the area.

Downed phone lines, strong winds and frequent aftershocks also hindered rescue efforts, said Wu Yong, a local military chief.

Workers were racing to release water from a reservoir in the disaster area where a crack had formed after the quake to prevent a flood, according to the China Earthquake Administration.

The magnitude-6.9 temblor struck Wednesday morning in an area in the south of Qinghai province, near Tibet, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The quake was centered on Yushu county, with a population of about 100,000, mostly herders and farmers.

Magnitude 7.1 Quake Shakes Solomon Islands

Fox News (Link) - AP (April 11, 2010)

A major earthquake has struck off the Solomon Islands, but a tsunami was not expected.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 7.1-magnitude quake struck at Sunday evening. Its epicenter was about 130 miles southeast of the capital, Honiara, in the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center says a destructive wave is not expected.

The Solomon Islands is a country of nearly 1,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean, east of Papua New Guinea.

Earthquake hits southern Spain; damage said unlikely

CNN (Link) (April 11, 2010)

A strong earthquake struck near the Spanish city of Granada early Monday, but at a depth that made damage to the medieval Moorish capital unlikely, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

The magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck at 12:08 a.m. local time Monday (6:08 p.m. Sunday ET), the USGS reported.

It was centered about 24 kilometers (15 miles) southeast of Granada and about 370 kilometers (230 miles) south of Madrid, Spain’s capital.

There was no immediate report of damage or injuries from the temblor. The quake’s recorded depth of 616 kilometers -- nearly 400 miles -- means little damage is likely, geophysicist Susan Potter told CNN.

“When an earthquake is deeper, the seismic energy is absorbed by the Earth,” Potter said. “So there will be less damage expected in the epicenter area.”

ROTHBARD & RUCKER: Global warming’s weak links

The Washington Times (Link) - David Rothbard and Craig Rucker (April 10, 2010)

Delegates from around the world gather in Bonn this weekend to chart the future of a new global-warming treaty they hope to sign in Mexico this fall or in South Africa in 2011 at the latest. This treaty would lock our nation into massive new taxation, regulation, subsidies and redistribution; take unprecedented control of our economy; and radically alter our way of life. Laws and regulations that increase the power of government are seldom repealed. Treaties are tougher still. The costs and burdens of the treaty these delegates hope to sign are so extraordinary, they cannot be justified unless every link in the chain of logic supporting the treaty is beyond reproach.

A chain, we all know, is only as strong as its weakest link. We must have extraordinary confidence in the integrity of every link before we trust it. Has the process been sound? Has the globe warmed? Are we humans to blame? Will any warming continue? Would the impacts be terrible? Would the proposed solutions do any meaningful good? Will the benefits exceed the costs? Let any link in this chain of questions fail, and the treaty cannot be justified. It would be all pain, no gain and should be scrapped.

The public’s trust in the supposed scientific consensus took a blow when a vast body of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia came to light in what has been dubbed “Climategate.” Climate scientists derided their critics, blocked access to peer-reviewed literature, withheld data from examination, planned to “hide the decline” in past temperatures and generally revealed themselves to be shaping their science to their politics rather than the other way around. Anyone who tells you climate science is settled is selling something. The climate is a vastly complicated system. The science that studies it is prone to error and was politicized before it could mature.

Magnitude 7.8 quake shakes Indonesia’s Sumatra

Yahoo! News (Link) - Reuters - Ed Davies (April 6, 2010)

A major earthquake of 7.8 magnitude struck off the coast of Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday, but there were no immediate reports of a tsunami or casualties.

A Reuters photographer on Simeulue island, south of Aceh, said there was panic and electricity was cut off after the quake. Metro TV reported that people rushed to higher ground in some areas.

The quake was centered 204 km (127 miles) west-northwest of the coastal town of Sibolga and was at a depth of 46 km (28.6 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said. It had initially reported the quake’s magnitude at 7.6.

The Reuters witness said there were at least three aftershocks.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami. However, it added: “There is the possibility of a local tsunami that could affect coasts” no more than 100 km (62 miles) from the epicenter of the quake.

In December 2004, a magnitude 9.15 quake off the coast of Sumatra’s Aceh province triggered an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed about 226,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries.

6.9-Magnitude Quake in Baja California Felt on West Coast

The New York Times (Link) - Randa C. Archibold (April 4, 2010)

An earthquake centered in Baja California in Mexico shook buildings as far north as Los Angeles Sunday afternoon.

The earthquake was centered in the Baja California, about 108 miles east-southeast of Tijuana, the United States Geological Service said. The quake had a magnitude of 6.9.

High-rise buildings in Los Angeles and San Diego rocked back and forth as the quake hit. The earthquake shook houses in Los Angeles for roughly a minute, and aftershocks then followed.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injury. KABC-TV reported some people were stuck in an elevator at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

The Los Angeles Fire Department went on earthquake alert and began inspecting overpasses for damage.

Earthquakes! Are They Increasing?

Bible Prophecy Today (Link) - Prophecy In The News - Gary Stearman (March 31, 2010)

Recent events in Haiti and Chili have caused many Christians to ask, “Are earthquakes increasing in the way that Jesus said they would in the period leading up to the Tribulation? His words are among the most forthright and unequivocal ever spoken. There can be no mistake about what He said:

“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. “All these are the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24:7,8).

In January and February of this year, those who search the Scriptures and watch for His return marked those words well, wondering with renewed interest whether His coming was being foreshadowed by the prophesied global events.

On Tuesday, the 12th of January, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti. Its magnitude was officially listed at 7.0 on the Moment Magnitude Scale [MMS]. Its epicenter was 16 miles west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. By January 24, scientists had recorded some 53 aftershocks of magnitude 4.5 or greater. By mid-February, an staggering three million people had been affected by the quake. Most of them were homeless, living in tent cities without sanitation, running water, electricity or the necessary food and supplies.

Almost a quarter of a million dead had been identified, and that toll is still rising. Three hundred thousand were injured and over a quarter of a million buildings had been listed as irreversibly damaged. Rescue efforts were sporadic in the area, since communications, hospitals, electrical power grids and air, sea and land transportation were almost at a standstill.

Strong quake hits north of Andaman islands

Reuters (Link) - Sanjib Kumar Roy (March 30, 2010)

A strong 6.4 magnitude quake struck on Tuesday north of the Andaman Islands, an area devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The quake, earlier put at 6.9 magnitude, struck 135 miles (215 km) north of Port Blair, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The quake was 28.2 miles deep. There was no danger of a destructive tsunami, it said.

The earthquake triggered a panic among residents of several northern islands of the Andaman chain, and sent them running out of their homes.

“We were inside our house when this earthquake struck, and we all ran out of our house out of panic,” said Srinivasan, a businessman on one of the islands.

Indian officials also said there was no threat to the Indian coast.

A mild tremor was felt in Orissa. A witness in the state capital Bhubaneswar said people felt their beds rattling and those living in high-rise buildings left their homes as a precaution.

Undersea volcano threatens southern Italy: report

Google News (Link) - AFP (March 29, 2010)

Europe’s largest undersea volcano could disintegrate and unleash a tsunami that would engulf southern Italy “at any time,” a prominent vulcanologist warned in an interview published Monday.

The Marsili volcano, which is bursting with magma, has “fragile walls” that could collapse, Enzo Boschi told the leading daily Corriere della Sera.

“It could even happen tomorrow,” said Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).

“Our latest research shows that the volcano is not structurally solid, its walls are fragile, the magma chamber is of sizeable dimensions,” he said. “All that tells us that the volcano is active and could begin erupting at any time.”

The event would result in “a strong tsunami that could strike the coasts of Campania, Calabria and Sicily,” Boschi said.

Bees in more trouble than ever after bad winter

Google News (Link) - AP - Garance Burke and Seth Borenstein (March 24, 2010)

The mysterious 4-year-old crisis of disappearing honeybees is deepening. A quick federal survey indicates a heavy bee die-off this winter, while a new study shows honeybees’ pollen and hives laden with pesticides.

Two federal agencies along with regulators in California and Canada are scrambling to figure out what is behind this relatively recent threat, ordering new research on pesticides used in fields and orchards. Federal courts are even weighing in this month, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overlooked a requirement when allowing a pesticide on the market.

And on Thursday, chemists at a scientific conference in San Francisco will tackle the issue of chemicals and dwindling bees in response to the new study.

Scientists are concerned because of the vital role bees play in our food supply. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini.