Without hot rock, much of North America would be underwater

“If you subtracted the heat that keeps North American elevations high, most of the continent would be below sea level, except the high Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascade Range,” says study co-author Derrick Hasterok, a University of Utah doctoral student in geology and geophysics.

“We have shown for the first time that temperature differences within the Earth’s crust and upper mantle explain about half of the elevation of any given place in North America,” with most of the rest due to differences in what the rocks are made of, says the other co-author, David Chapman, a professor of geology and geophysics, and dean of the University of Utah Graduate School.

From EurekaAlert

A bad explanation is better than none at all

This week Sydney had the perfect storm: the one that didn't happen. The Bureau of Meteorology said we should have been struck by a gale of 100kmh winds about 5am Wednesday. It didn't happen. The experts were wrong.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, says our lives are surrounded by a miasma of false predictions and forecasts. As a result, much of the medium- or long-term planning done by individuals, companies and governments is of dubious value.

Taleb, once a trader on the finance markets, now has one of the best job descriptions I've heard. He is a professor in the sciences of uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

From the Sydney Morning Herald

The world's habitable spaces are under pressure

"Once you cut off the water from the marshes, they die a slow death," Alwash said. "Saddam could not wait for the marshes to die slowly. He started burning the reeds to flush out the resistance and kill all the wildlife so people would not have an ability to survive."

Reflooding of some Iraqi wetlands began immediately after Hussein was ousted in April 2003, and local and international scientists started planning the reconstruction. This attempt has been more successful than anticipated; in December 2006, satellite photos revealed that nearly 50 percent of the marshes had been restored.

From Seed Magazine

Antarctic To Cover Global Water Shortage

" The WMO regards drinking water shortages among principal obstacles to sustainable development. Even now, one third of humanity experiences permanent water shortages. Two thirds will share the plight by 2025 if the trend persists."

" Antarctic ice offers a remedy..." From Terra Daily

84 Siberian Tigers Born at China Center

Fewer than 400 Siberian tigers -- also known as Amur, Manchurian or Ussuri tiger -- are believed to survive in the wild, about 20 of them in China and the rest in Russia.

From PhysOrg

Full moon’s light has a warming effect on Earth

"One explanation is that moonlight can warm the Earth slightly at full moon, although only at night, of course.

I'm speechless. No, wait, one word:

Lunatic.

From the Times of London

Surge in hurricane activity is only a return to normal: study

Okay. I am baffled.
Ten days ago we had Kerry Emanuel quoted as saying "There has been a large upswing in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes, beginning in 1995," Emanuel said on his Web site, http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/anthro2.htm. "This corresponds to an upswing in tropical North Atlantic sea surface temperature, which is very likely a response to increasing anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases." Source

Now PhysOrg has this " Investigators believe the greenhouse effect cannot be blamed for a surge in hurricane activity since the mid-1990s."
and
"The phase of enhanced hurricane activity since 1995 is not unusual compared to other periods of high hurricane activity in the record," they report on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

Here's PhysOrg

Sediment core links monsoons to global climate evolution

"Monsoons, the life-giving, torrential rains of Asia and Africa, have an ancient, unsuspected connection to previous Ice Age climate cycles, according to scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Kiel University in Germany."

Climate (along with Brain Science) is the most complex subject human beings have ever attempted to comprehend.

Remember the sequence: Data>Information>Knowledge>Wisdom.

I think we're at information or wisdom. I'm sure we're not at wisdom.

From UC Samta Barbara

El Nino And African Monsoon Have Strongly Influenced Intense Hurricane Frequency In The Past

“The processes that govern the formation, intensity, and track of Atlantic hurricanes are still poorly understood,” said Donnelly, an associate scientist in the WHOI Department of Geology and Geophysics. “Based on this work, we now think that there may be some sort of basin-wide ‘on-off switch’ for intense hurricanes.”

From ScienceDaily

And from Reuters by way of Planet Ark:

" Intense hurricanes hit when local sea surface temperatures were warm or cool. In fact, "the Caribbean experienced a relatively active interval of intense hurricanes for more than a millennium when local sea surface temperatures were on average cooler than modern," the study said."