Worldwide Wicked Weather
Conn. Gets 3 Feet of Snow; Gov Seeks Federal Help
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says five deaths in Connecticut apparently are related to the storm that dumped as much as 3 feet of snow on the state.
The deaths included a woman in her 80s who was killed in Prospect by a hit-and-run driver as she was clearing snow after the storm began Friday.
Shelton police said a 49-year-old man died after apparently suffering a "medical event" while shoveling snow. A 73-year-old man also died when he was apparently cleaning up and fell in Danbury, and a man was found dead in a driveway in Bridgeport. Details were not immediately available on the fifth death. -Source
Raining Spiders in Brazil
A video taken shows a massive amount of spiders seemingly flying over San Antonio Platina, in Brazil. Upon a closer look, however, the spiders are actually weaving a giant web.
A local biologist told Gawker that the "social spider" species is known for its very big colonies and "sheet webs," and said such a mass dangling is "normal." According to an earlier report by The Epoch Times, this is not the first time "raining spiders" has seemingly happened. In 2007 a man in Argentina captured pictures of a spider rain. At the time, these images were considered a rarity to catch this phenomenal experience on camera.
It isn't immediately clear why these spiders are congregating in such a manner, but it's worth noting several species of arachnid cooperate in colonies and weave (ahem) fairly extensive social networks. -Source
Peru, Chile and Bolivia Hit by Floods After Heavy Rain
Torrential rain has been creating havoc along the Pacific coast side of South America, with flooding causing the deaths of at least six people in Peru.
In the southern city of Arequipa, thousands of people were left without electricity and drinking water. In Bolivia, nearly 9,000 families across the country were affected by flooding, said the authorities.
A downpour in the Andean region of Chile has also led to fresh water shortages in the capital, Santiago. Authorities say four million people were affected by the cuts to freshwater supplies caused by landslides near San Jose de Maipo. They reportedly contaminated two rivers that supply the city's water plants.
Aguas Andinas water company said it would start restoring the supply on Saturday night and expected to bring it back to normal by Sunday afternoon. -Source
Birds Fall from Sky in Seymour Tennessee
SEYMOUR — Residents and those passing by near Dogwood Hills subdivision on Boyd Creek Highway Sunday afternoon were met with an unusual scene. Dozens of dead birds littered the highway and surrounding fields after falling from the sky.
Sgt. Robert Stoffle of the Sevier County Sheriff's Department said a call about the birds came in around 1:15 p.m. He said a witness reported seeing the birds in flight before turning back around to see them on the ground.
"It covered one lane of traffic," Stoffle said of the bodies of the birds. Estimates of the number of birds varied from between 30 and 60 up to 300. They appeared to be starlings.
While the vast majority of the birds were dead by the time The Mountain Press photographer arrived, several were still alive, convulsing and flopping their wings on the ground.
A count of the birds on the scene stopped at around 50, when not even half of the visible birds were tallied. Perhaps dozens more were scattered in a nearby field, which was flooded from the recent rainfall. As far as 60 yards from the main site of the birds, individual starlings were found. -Source
Here’s What a Map of 114 Years of Earthquake Epicenters Looks Like
I've been looking at really general sources of existential risk and visualizing them via the kitchen sink school of thematic mapping. So the earthquakes map was just a matter of time.
Here, data from NCEDC.org and the USGS and UC Berkeley have been sliced out into veneers based on magnitude, then glued onto and image that began it's life at NASA's Visual Earth and wrung into the Times projection (centered at the interesting bits). The result looks an awful lot like a fleet of Nickelodeon tankers spilled the world's supply of floam.
We only started recording hard core in the late 1960's. Also, you'd be right to assume that areas with more sensors record more earthquakes (but that's why they are there, so round and round we go), though they can pretty well pinpoint epicenters from all over.
Alternatively, here is the same data set duplicated in both north and south polar projections. -Source
Climate Watch: 2012 Figures Confirm Global Warming Still Stalled
The two major US temperature databases have released their consolidated results for 2012, and as had been expected, global warming has failed to occur for approximately the fourteenth year running. One of the US agencies downgraded 2012 to tenth-hottest ever: it had been on track to rank as 9th hottest.
The tenth-hottest result comes from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the three main global databases used to assess planetary temperatures and the only one of the three not so far linked to political climate activism*.
The NOAA says that the 2012 average was 14.47±0.08°C, which makes it the tenth hottest in its records. Preliminary figures released last November ahead of the Doha carbon talks by the World Meteorological Organisation, which averages all three datasets, suggested that the year would be ninth hottest and NASA agrees. However the difference is not a big one: the projected WMO figure was 14.45°C. -Source
