A Rise in Deadly Storms Since '95 Has Researchers Worried About the Future.
A pair of scientific papers published this year detected an unexpected spike in storm intensity over the past several decades, suggesting that global warming might already be having an effect.
CNNFri, 25 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
Bogota, Colombia -- A volcano erupted Thursday in southwestern Colombia, spewing smoke and ash, and raising fears for the safety of nearby villagers, officials said.
Police and emergency officials were on high alert after the 14,110-foot Galeras volcano became active at dawn and dumped heaps of ash on the city of Pasto, 12 miles away.
"It was a brief eruption of ash for 30 minutes that was not preceded by a temblor inside the volcano," said Marta Lucia Calvache of Colombia's Volcanology Institute. "But there is still a thin plume of ash leaving the crater, and we can't rule out the possibility of further eruptions."
The government this month ordered the preventive evacuation of thousands of people living in the shadow of the volcano amid signs of an imminent eruption. But many farmers are believed to have defied the order and stayed behind, fearful of losing their livelihoods by leaving crops unattended.
Paris - Levels of carbon dioxide, the principal gas that drives global warming, are now 27 percent higher than at any point in the last 650,000 years, according to research into Antarctic ice cores.
The study, adding powerfully to evidence of human interference in the climate system, appears in the runup to a key conference on global warming which opens in Montreal next Monday.
The evidence comes from the world's deepest ice core, drilled at a site called Dome Concordia (Dome C) in East Antarctica by European scientists who battled blizzards and an average year-round temperature of minus 54 Celsius (minus 65 Fahrenheit) and made a thousand-kilometer (650-mile) trek to bring up supplies.
Scientists monitoring earth movements in Antarctica believe they have found a singing iceberg.
Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of around 0.5 hertz, too low to be heard by humans, but by playing them at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up, the scientists said.
For more than 30 years the 980 people living on the six minute horseshoe-shaped Carteret atolls have battled the Pacific to stop salt water destroying their coconut palms and waves crashing over their houses. They failed.
Yesterday a decision was made that will make their group of low-lying islands literally go down in history. In the week before 150 countries meet in Montreal to discuss how to combat global warming and rising sea levels, the Carterets' people became the first to be officially evacuated because of climate change.
Global warming is doubling the rate of sea level rise around the world, but attempts to stop it by cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be futile, leading researchers will warn today.
The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres, the researchers claim. Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by the surge in greenhouse gas emissions produced by the development of industry and introduction of fossil fuel burning.
UPIThu, 24 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
ST. LOUIS - A geologist from the stable heart of North America caused a stir in the Big Easy when he urged on national television that New Orleans be abandoned.
Timothy Kusky of St. Louis University has received hundreds of angry e-mails.
Michael Perry
ReutersThu, 24 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
The Carteret Islands are almost invisible on a map of the South Pacific, but the horseshoe scattering of atolls is on the front-line of climate change, as rising sea levels and storm surges eat away at their existence. For 20 years, the 2,000 islanders have fought a losing battle against the ocean, building sea walls and trying to plant mangroves.
Each year, the waves surge in, destroying vegetable gardens, washing away homes and poisoning freshwater supplies. Papua New Guinea's Carteret islanders are destined to become some of the world's first climate change refugees. Their islands are becoming uninhabitable, and may disappear below the waves.
APWed, 23 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
St. Louis - No major damage was reported after a minor earthquake shook the St. Louis region.
The tiny quake, centered 10 miles southeast of St. Louis, struck around 11 p.m. Tuesday in East St. Louis, Ill., said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver.
It had a magnitude of 2.5 and probably doesn't signify a larger quake to come, Person said.
Four people called the center and said they felt the quake, Person said. Such quakes happen about two or three times a year in the area, which sits near the New Madrid Fault.
Thousands of people in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were without electricity Wednesday morning as winds of up to 100 km/h swept through through Atlantic Canada.
Nova Scotia Power said electricity was restored to about 100,000 customers overnight, but roughly 25,000 were still without service.
As many as 11,000 P.E.I. residents also lost power, Maritime Electric reported. Another 8,500 homes and businesses were in the dark in southeastern New Brunswick, but only 650 remained without power by late Wednesday morning.
High winds and up to 70 mm of rain knocked out power across mainland Nova Scotia overnight. Winds were still gusting at 77 km/h in parts of Cape Breton Wednesday morning.
Margaret Murphy, a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Power, said the winds were especially severe in the Windsor and Bridgewater areas.
