CYCLONE Tracy. Creedence Clearwater Revival. They have something in common and it's headed our way for the first time in 18 years.

IT'S not a bad moon rising, but it is a big one.

The question of whether trouble's on the way, however, is entirely up to what or who you believe.

In a fortnight Earth will experience the biggest moon it has seen in nearly two decades.

As well as providing some unique photo opportunities, some astronomers - well, one - are already predicting it may bring more worrying disruptions to the Earth’s climate patterns.

Earthquakes are not out of the question. More about that later.

For now, all you need to know is that on March 19th the moon will be at its closest point to Earth in 18 years, an event that is known as a “lunar perigee”.

Or the much more exciting “SuperMoon”, as one astrologer called it.

And before you scroll immediately down to the comments section in outrage, please note the use of the word "astrologer".

On March 19, the moon will be just 356,577km away from Earth, an event that has internet theorists a-quiver with the possibility of extreme weather, earthquakes and volcanoes.

Not all scientists are convinced, however.

Though throughout the last year the world may have seen birds falling from the sky and schools of dead fish washing up on the shore, Pete Wheeler of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy says we shouldn’t be running to our bomb shelters just yet.

“There will be no earthquakes or volcanoes,” Mr Wheeler said, “unless they are to happen anyway".

“(The Earth will experience) just a lower than usual low tide and a higher than usual high tide around the time of the event, but nothing to get excited about.”

But try telling that to anyone who suffered through the New England hurricane in 1938, or the Hunter Valley floods of 1955. Both happened during lunar perigrees.

Cyclone Tracy in 1974 and Hurricance Katrina in 2005 also coincided with distances that were close to SuperMoons.

Bah, says astronomer and lecturer David Reneke, who claims there’s more cause for alarm about the extent of human paranoia than any sort of impending apocalypse.

“If you try hard enough you can chronologically associate almost any natural disaster/event to anything in the night sky ... comet, planet, sun,” Dr Reneke said.

“Remember in the past, planetary alignments were going to pull the sun apart. It didn't. Astrologers draw a very long bow most times.

“Normal king tides are about all I would expect out of this SuperMoon prediction.”

So no luck, astrologers, voodoo priests and other assorted witches. It seems Science has all the answers this time.

But wait - this just in from Dr Victor Gostin, Planetary and Environmental Geoscientist at Adelaide University.

He said the predictions of weather and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters based on planetary configurations have not been successful, but there may be some correlation between near-equatorial large scale earthquakes and new and full moon situations.

“This is because the Earth-tides (analogous to ocean tides) may be the final trigger that sets off the earthquake,” he said.

And of course there’s always the possibility of getting that Creedence Clearwater Revival songstuck in your head, topping the list of terrifying events that make it hard not to become paranoid about the night of March 19.

Looks like we're in for nasty weather...

NASA PUSHING LIES ON OUR CHILDREN .

	Activities Appleman Chart Student Version (recommended for grades 5 and up) Teacher Version Crossword Puzzle Middle School High School Clues Key Word Search Recipe for Clouds and Contrails
Last Updated: 05/02/2006 20:52:51 Web Curator: Joyce D. Fischer, j.d.fischer@larc.nasa.gov Responsible NASA Official: Lin H. Chambers, GLOBE Contrail Scientist

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Little skywatcher

march 6th 2011 X marks the spot

Article:

Air Force's X-37B Space Plane Launching on Secret Mission Friday

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

Date: 02 March 2011 Time: 07:08 PM ET

Despite its robotic nature, the X-37B space plane received a warm welcome from Air Force crews at Vandenberg. Here, the vehicle appears to be undergoing safing procedures after landing on Dec. 3 at 1:16 a.m. PST (0916 GMT). Significant weathering, or discoloration, can be seen on the spacecraft's upper thermal blanket insulation. CREDIT: USAF/Vandenberg Air Force Base  View full size image

The U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane is poised to launch on its second mission Friday (March 4), though what exactly it will be doing once it leaves the ground remains a mystery.

The robotic X-37B mini-shuttle is slated to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday atop an Atlas 5 rocket, weather permitting. Its launch window opens at 3:39 p.m. EST (2039 GMT), according to the launch provider United Launch Alliance, which is overseeing the flight.

March 6th 2011 back at it again today

Why Waste your time GEOENGINERIING ? When you can just NUKE away GLOBAL WARMING !

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years

Regional war could spark "unprecedented climate change," experts predict.

Main Content

A nuclear bomb explodes in a test on the Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia in the early seventies.

Photograph from AP

Charles Q. Choi

for National Geographic News

Published February 22, 2011

Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models.

Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate.

During the Cold War a nuclear exchange between superpowers—such as the one feared for years between the United States and the former Soviet Union—was predicted to cause a "nuclear winter."

In that scenario hundreds of nuclear explosions spark huge fires, whose smoke, dust, and ash blot out the sun for weeks amid a backdrop of dangerous radiation levels. Much of humanity eventually dies of starvation and disease.

Today, with the United States the only standing superpower, nuclear winter is little more than a nightmare. But nuclear war remains a very real threat—for instance, between developing-world nuclear powers, such as India andPakistan.

To see what climate effects such a regional nuclear conflict might have, scientists from NASA and other institutions modeled a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, each packing the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT—just 0.03 percent of the world's current nuclear arsenal. (See a National Geographic magazine feature on weapons of mass destruction.)

The researchers predicted the resulting fires would kick up roughly five million metric tons of black carbon into the upper part of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere.

In NASA climate models, this carbon then absorbed solar heat and, like a hot-air balloon, quickly lofted even higher, where the soot would take much longer to clear from the sky.

(Related: "'Nuclear Archaeologists' Find World War II Plutonium.")

Reversing Global Warming?

The global cooling caused by these high carbon clouds wouldn't be as catastrophic as a superpower-versus-superpower nuclear winter, but "the effects would still be regarded as leading to unprecedented climate change," research physical scientist Luke Oman said during a press briefing Friday at ameeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Earth is currently in a long-term warming trend. After a regional nuclear war, though, average global temperatures would drop by 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) for two to three years afterward, the models suggest.

At the extreme, the tropics, Europe, Asia, and Alaska would cool by 5.4 to 7.2 degrees F (3 to 4 degrees C), according to the models. Parts of the Arctic and Antarctic would actually warm a bit, due to shifted wind and ocean-circulation patterns, the researchers said.

After ten years, average global temperatures would still be 0.9 degree F (0.5 degree C) lower than before the nuclear war, the models predict.

(Pictures: "Red Hot" Nuclear-Waste Train Glows in Infrared.)

Years Without Summer

For a time Earth would likely be a colder, hungrier planet.

"Our results suggest that agriculture could be severely impacted, especially in areas that are susceptible to late-spring and early-fall frosts," said Oman, ofNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"Examples similar to the crop failures and famines experienced following the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 could be widespread and last several years," he added. That Indonesian volcano ushered in "the year without summer," a time of famines and unrest. (See pictures of the Mount Tambora eruption.)

All these changes would also alter circulation patterns in the tropical atmosphere, reducing precipitation by 10 percent globally for one to four years, the scientists said. Even after seven years, global average precipitation would be 5 percent lower than it was before the conflict, according to the model.

In addition, researcher Michael Mills, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, found large decreases in the protective ozone layer, leading to much more ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth's surface and harming the environment and people.

"The main message from our work," NASA's Oman said, "would be that even a regional nuclear conflict would have global consequences."

Global Warming LOL

Can Geoengineering Save the World from Global Warming?

Is manipulating Earth's environment to combat climate change a good idea and where, exactly, did the idea come from?

By David Biello  | February 25, 2011 | 26

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STARFISH PRIME: This nighttime atmospheric nuclear weapons test created an electromagnetic pulse, seen creating an aurora here in Earth's magnetic field, that blew out streetlights in Honolulu and is seen as an early instance of  geoengineering by science historian James Fleming.Image: Courtesy of US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency

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• MP3 fileAudio World's Craziest Geoengineering Scheme

As efforts to combat climate change falter despite ever-rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, some scientists and other experts have begun to consider the possibility of using so-called geoengineering to fix the problem. Such "deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment" as the Royal Society of London puts it, is fraught with peril, of course.

For example, one of the first scientists to predict global warming as a result of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius—thought this might be a good way to ameliorate the winters of his native land and increase its growing season. Whereas that may come true for the human inhabitants of Scandinavia, polar plants andanimals are suffering as sea ice dwindles and temperatures warm even faster than climatologists predicted.

Scientific American corresponded with science historian James Fleming of Colby College in Maine, author of  Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, about the history of geoengineering—ranging from filling the air with the artificial aftermath of a volcanic eruption to seeding the oceans with iron in order to promote plankton growth—and whether it might save humanity from the ill effects of climate change.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What is geoengineering in your view?
Geoengineering is planetary-scale intervention [in]—or tinkering with—planetary processes. Period.

As I write in my book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, "the term 'geoengineering' remains largely undefined," but is loosely, "the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering."

As of June 2010 the term has a draft entry in the Oxford English Dictionary—the modification of the global environment or the climate in order to counter or ameliorate climate change. A 2009 report issued by the Royal Society of London defines geoengineering as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change."

But there are significant problems with both definitions. First of all, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by its stated purpose (environmental improvement), by any of its currently proposed techniques (stratospheric aerosols, space mirrors, etcetera) or by one of perhaps many stated goals (to ameliorate or counteract climate change). Nuclear engineers, for example, are capable of building both power plants and bombs; mechanical engineers can design components for both ambulances and tanks. So to constrain the essence of something by its stated purpose, techniques or goals is misleading at best.

Geo-scale engineering projects were conducted by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1962 that had nothing to do with countering or ameliorating climate change. Starting with the [U.S.'s] 1958 Argus A-bomb explosions in space and ending with the 1962 Starfish Prime H-bomb test, the militaries of both nations sought to modify the global environment for military purposes.

Project Argus was a top-secret military test aimed at detonating atomic bombs in space to generate an artificial radiation belt, disrupt the near-space environment, and possibly intercept enemy missiles. It, and the later tests conducted by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, peaked with H-bomb detonations in space in 1962 that created an artificial [electro]magnetic [radiation] belt that persisted for 10 years. This is geoengineering.