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Global warming will change the weather, meaning farmers will have to move to new areas and learn to grow different crops. After a long period of denial, researchers are now looking closely at agricultural areas in the U.S. in order to predict the changes that will occur if carbon dioxide levels double by 2060, as expected. But for U.K. farmers, the future has already arrived.

In order to predict the future as global warming progresses, researchers have created a new, more complex, computer model. In Discovery News, Larry O’Hanlon quotes Linda Mearns, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as saying, “We’re finding that (the new model) certainly made a bigger difference than expected. Agriculture didn’t do as well.”
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There have been more sunspots since the 1940s than for the past 1150 years. Does this mean the Sun is changing?

Jenny Hogan writes in New Scientist that geophysicist Ilya Usoskin discovered this from reconstructing the history of sunspot activity for the past 1500 years. Sunspot observations date from the 17th century, when the telescope was invented. To study earlier sunspots, Usoskin studied radioactive isotopes from ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica.

These findings may add to the evidence that the Sun is partly responsible for global warming. Astronomer Mike Lockwood says, “We are living with a very unusual sun at the moment.”

We’ve survived tough times before and we will again.

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Those of us who love the thrill of space exploration are disappointed that so much recent NASA activity has centered on military and commercial projects. But now it looks like we may finally be returning to the Moon?so we can get there before China does.

Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut, recently returned to Earth after orbiting the Earth 14 times. Chinese officials say this is only the beginning?that they plan to send astronauts to the Moon next. Now a NASA report suggests that during the celebrations at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina on December 17, President Bush may announce that we’re returning to the Moon.
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U.S. Astronaut Ed Lu, who spent 6 months on the International Space Station, still doesn’t know what caused the mysterious flashes of light he saw while studying the Earth’s aurora from space.

He spent 100 hours watching the northern and southern lights while on the ISS, so he’s familiar with the way they look from space. But on July 11, September 24 and October 12, Lu saw something different: flashes as bright as the brightest stars, that lasted only a second. Fellow astronaut Yuri Malenchenko also saw them on one occasion.

Lu is familiar with flashes from cosmic dust and meteors, and he says these weren’t from a satellite or space junk. He checked weather maps, which showed no lightning storms in the vicinity.
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