Will we ever find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, so we can justify our invasion of Iraq? Now we’ve learned that those elusive WMDs may have been buried in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. However, the area is guarded by Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians and Hizbullah operatives, so we may never be able to get to them.
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We recently wrote about a huge underwater bulge in a lake in Yellowstone National Park that’s getting ready to blow. Three years ago, the BBC ran a story about supervolcanoes in Yellowstone. Only a few of these exist, hidden deep beneath the Earth’s surface. If one erupts, the explosion will be heard around the world, creating dark skies with the effect of a nuclear winter. A past eruption may be the reason the North American continent was relatively empty when Europeans arrived.
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Human beings are rapidly killing off the world’s coral, just like we’ve been doing since prehistoric times. Paleoecologist John Pandolfi says, “No coral reef system in the world is pristine, and they haven’t been for a long time.”
“It didn’t matter if we were looking at the Red Sea, Australia or the Caribbean,” says researcher Karen Bjorndal. “As soon as human exploitation began, whether in the 1600s in Bermuda or tens of thousands of years ago in the Red Sea, the same scenarios were put into play.”
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The hellish heat wave is finally breaking in Europe, and being replaced with severe storms. Now Europe is wondering if hot summers may become permanent, due to global warming. If this is the case, they’ll need to find new places to grow food.
Andy Coghlan writes in New Scientist that the European Commission (EC) has issued a bulletin saying that the recent drought caused major changes in agricultural output, especially in southern Europe. These changes fit earlier predictions about the effects of global warming.
In the U.S. new weather forecasts predict wetter weather over the next century on the East and West coasts, while the center of the country, our traditional breadbasket, will become too dry to support agriculture.
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