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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (272031)	2/4/2006 4:23:09 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1575604

Let’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is on its third atmosphere. The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissolved early on, because the planet was so hot. Then as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out. Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago. And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one. And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes and an eruption every two weeks. Earth quakes are continuous: a million and half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months. Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land. The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate. The reality is, they run from the storms. Michael Chrichton – State of Fear – p.618 - 619

To: American Spirit who wrote (272031)	2/4/2006 4:24:53 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575604

Everything goes back to Bush right? Do you drive a car?

To: American Spirit who wrote (272031)	2/4/2006 4:26:30 PM
From: Taro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575604

What global warming? Nothing but a myth, AS. taro

To: American Spirit who wrote (272031)	2/4/2006 4:31:48 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575604

Blizzard decimates several seal herds in Canada Fri Feb 3, 8:19 PM ET OTTAWA (AFP) - Several herds of grey seals were nearly wiped out by a freak blizzard after coming ashore in eastern Canada to escape an unusually mild winter and deliver their offspring this week, officials told AFP. The seals, which usually give birth on icebergs floating in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, came ashore on Canada's Atlantic coast because warmer than usual weather had melted the ice, fisheries officials said. But they received a cool welcome. Some 2,000 to 3,000 seals on tiny Pictou Island were struck by a "severe" storm that buried Canada's eastern Maritimes region in snow and kicked up high waves and strong winds Wednesday and Thursday. Island resident Jane MacDonald told AFP by telephone that she awoke Thursday morning to see "wall to wall seals" and their puppies on four kilometers (2.5 miles) of beaches "decimated" by the storm. "It was traumatizing," she said."The seal puppies were literally swept away into the water because their mothers couldn't get them to higher ground." Mothers nudged their newborn babies to try to keep them afloat. Grey seal pups can swim from birth, but their muscles are weak. "A wave would hit and the pup went under. The mother pushed it up with her nose, and then another wave would hit. After the sixth or seventh wave, the pup didn't come up," MacDonald said. "The more you watched, the worse it got. The mothers struggled so hard to save their babies and it just couldn't be done," she said. "I'd never seen anything like that." Michel Therien, a Canadian fisheries and oceans department spokesman, said "thousands more" seals had landed on a dozen other local islands and Nova Scotia province coasts and suffered the same fate. He estimates that 75 percent of the grey seal pups born in the region in recent days perished. Many who survived have been orphaned. But the mass mortalities would likely have little impact on the total grey seal population, which has increased by 10 to 12 percent each year "despite calamities" to about 400,000 animals, Therien said. The "confused" Pictou Island survivors are now scattered on roads and in ditches, hiding under buildings and in the woods all over the tiny island, some eight kilometers (five miles) long, MacDonald said. "We can't even plow the fresh snow off the roads now because they're in the way," she said. Last year, some 200 grey seals came ashore under similar odd weather conditions. It was the first time the island's 18 inhabitants had ever seen them on land. Most of Canada, well-known for its frosty and long winters, saw a mild winter this year, marked by record-breaking high temperatures across the country. In Winnipeg, in central Canada, usually one of the coldest cities in the world, the average January temperature was minus 7.3 degrees Celsius, some 10 degrees warmer than normal. Meteorologists blame the unexpected retreat of cold Arctic air, which normally blankets much of the country in late December through March, allowing warm southern air to circulate. The exception was Canada's Maritimes region where a blizzard dropped 55 centimeters of snow in just a few hours Thursday morning. Jane MacDonald's husband is a fisherman who competes with the seals for fish. Both support government-sanctioned culls of harp seals -- about 300,000 killed each March or April -- but this was "a horrible way for (seals) to die," she said. "It is disturbing to see their remains, a sea of furry white puppies replaced by carcass after carcass all along the beach," MacDonald said. Fisheries officials noted that grey seals are not usually harvested, but they had planned to allow hunters to kill 2,100 in the coming weeks. Those numbers are being reviewed in light of "this tragedy," Therien said