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More Americans Say Value Of Their Home Has Fallen Topics:Housing | Real Estate | Consumers | Economy (U.S.)By Reuters | 21 Sep 2007 | 10:48 AM ET Font size: A record 26% of U.S. homeowners say the value of their homes has fallen during the past year, above the previous peak of 24% seen in 1992, a survey released Friday showed. Reflecting the extent of the prolonged housing slump, 21% of homeowners polled in September expect the value of their home to decline in the year ahead, up from 18% in August, according to the data from Reuters/University of Michigan...

The temperature of the ocean has cooled 0.2 degrees C in the past few of years, and is now only 0.1 degrees C warmer than it was throughout much of 1944. This data set had been showing a general warming trend since the late 1970s, (as well as a warming trend from the 1910s through the mid 1940s) with the warmest time being recorded in the El Nino year of 1998. Despite temperatures peaking in 1998, it's been reasonable to describe the temperature trend as continuing, since 1998 at the time was a flukishly hot spell. Since 1998, the "normal"...

U.S. home construction starts fell 6.1% in July to their lowest in more than 10 years while building permit activity, a sign of future construction plans, sank to a nearly 11-year low, a government report on Thursday showed. The Commerce Department said housing starts set an annual pace of 1.381 million units in July, lower than Wall Street forecasts for 1.405 million units as well as the upwardly revised 1.470 million rate for June. It was the lowest pace for housing starts since the January 1997 rate of 1.355 million units. Building permits fell 2.8% in July to an annual...

Skeptics of manmade global warming have found further support in research linking solar output with the planet Neptune’s brightness and temperatures on Earth. The findings appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the article, H.B. Hammel and G.W. Lockwood from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Observatory since 1950. Those measurements indicate that Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980. And infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that Neptune has been warming steadily...

IT HAS long been known by police officers on the beat that cold winter nights keep criminals off the streets and crime levels down. But what happens when winter nights are no longer cold? Criminologists and police officers are now beginning to speculate that one of the hidden consequences of global warming will be an increase in street crime during mild winters. They are quick to point out that the picture is complex and largely unknown, as the vast demographic and social changes that will accompany climate change will also have a large impact on crime patterns. But as Britain...

OTTAWA–Fearing the effects of forest fires and tree-destroying insect infestations, the federal government has decided against using Canada's forests in the calculations for totalling up the country's greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead of forests being used as a credit to offset other emissions, the government is now afraid that including forests in the formula could drive up Canada's climate-change burden. Government scientists made the call after learning of the damage that could come to forests from 2008 to 2012 and realizing the forests could become another source of emissions, pushing Canada even further from its Kyoto targets. In addition to destroying trees,...

WHILE the international community readies itself for gradual global warming over the next century, a growing number of scientists are beginning to worry that climate change might come much sooner - and be much more catastrophic - than previously thought. They point out that, in the past, climate change has not been gradual. Europe's climate has switched from arctic to tropical in three to five years and, they warn, it can happen again. Fred Pearce, of the New Scientist, has spent the past two years speaking to climate experts who are studying the possibility of "type 2" climate change -...

As the Business & Media Institute reported last year, press reports of climate change have been going on since the 1800s. Over the weekend, I was sent a list of New York Times articles dating back to 1855 addressing the global warming and cooling that has been happening on this planet for the past 150 years. I have taken the liberty of adding a few pieces that I discovered in the Times’ archives to further illustrate the point. As you review the following, try to keep in mind just how sure global warming alarmists like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore are that...

An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday. Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036. Although the odds of an impact by this particular asteroid are low, a recent congressional mandate for NASA to upgrade its tracking of near-Earth asteroids is expected to uncover hundreds, if not thousands of threatening space rocks in the near future, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart...

WASHINGTON - Beneath the snow, ice and bitter cold of Antarctica, scientists have discovered a network of lakes that fill and empty with rapidly flowing water. It's a finding that may improve understanding of the interaction between global warming and the melting of Antarctic ice, which could contribute to a worldwide rise in ocean level. Researchers studying data from satellites were able to measure rises and falls in the overlying ice as the lakes filled and emptied. More than 100 lakes have been found in West Antarctica, according to research published Thursday in the online issue of the journal Science....

verybody in the United States could switch from cars to bicycles. The Chinese could close all their factories. Europe could give up electricity and return to the age of the lantern. But all those steps together would not come close to stopping global warming.

The debate on global warming is over. That's the ultimate message from the report released in Paris today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body of leading researchers charged with analyzing climate science and producing the final word on what is happening — and will happen — to our planet. IPCC scientists now say that it is "very likely" that global warming is chiefly driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases caused by human activity, and that dangerous levels of warming and sea rise are on the way. Those two words...

PARIS - The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is "very likely" caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The scientists — using their strongest language yet on the issue — said now that world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution. The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes. "The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support...

Armageddon or Harmagedon: Revelations 16:16. "and in the Hebrew language it is called Armageddon." There is no word "Armageddon" in the Hebrew language; the word Armageddon is a contraction and mistranslation for the words,"Mount of the Congregation Zion". Ar / ma / ged / don. Also: Har / ma / ged / on. Har / edah / siyyon. Har: Mount or Mountain. Edah or Mowed: Assembly, Community or Congregation. Siyyon: Zion. Revelations 16:13-16. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and that beast, and out of the mouth of a false...

Earth's surface temperature could rise by 4.5 C (8.1 F) if carbon dioxide levels double over pre-industrial levels, but higher warming cannot be ruled out, according to a draft report under debate by the UN's top climate experts. The draft -- being discussed line by line at the four-day meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- grimly states that the evidence for man-made influence on the climate system is now stronger than ever. And carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution spewed out this century will stoke global warming and sea-level rise "for more than a millennium," given the time...

New data released Monday shows that the melting of mountain glaciers worldwide is accelerating, a clear sign that climate change is also picking up, the UN environmental agency and scientists said. Thirty reference glaciers monitored by the Swiss-based World Glacier Monitoring Service lost about 66 centimetres (two feet) in thickness on average in 2005, the UN Environment Programme said in a statement. "The new data confirms the trend in accelerated loss during the past two and a half decades," it added. The set of glaciers located around the world have thinned by about 10.5 metres (34.6 feet) on average since...

Are you afraid? Very afraid? Well, if you aren’t, you should be. And if you are, you aren’t scared enough. In just over a week, we are about to be treated to yet another Cassandra-style warning about the “fate of the earth,” this time from the International Panel on Climate Change. It has become part of the background noise in our daily lives: the constant refrain that the world is rushing headlong into certain doom. A doom, that is, that you will suffer unless you hand control of the economy and your daily lives over to the very elite that...

The world has nudged closer to a nuclear apocalypse and environmental disaster, a trans-Atlantic group of prominent scientists warned Wednesday, pushing the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. It was the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward, this time from 11:53 to 11:55, amid fears over what the scientists are describing as "a second nuclear age" prompted largely by atomic standoffs with Iran and North Korea. But the organization added that the "dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear...

Bird flu epidemic rumbles on around the world 12:31 11 January 2007 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie The H5N1 bird flu virus shows no signs of going away in 2007, with outbreaks in poultry and people flaring up across its heartland in east Asia and, most worryingly, in Africa. Other countries the virus reached in winter 2006, including Europe, are watching nervously for its return. And hitherto unaffected areas are anxiously testing mysterious bird deaths to see if they will be next. The biggest flare-up so far has been in Vietnam, where an outbreak in poultry that started in early...

Eruption May Have Been Bigger Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News Dec. 21, 2006 — One of the largest volcanic eruptions on record just got bigger. The Taupo Volcanic Zone of New Zealand appears to have had twin eruptions only 20 miles apart within days of each other a quarter-million years ago. Each eruption belched out more than 25 cubic miles (100 cubic kilometers) of rock and volcanic ash. This is the first evidence of twin supervolcanic eruptions. "It's possible one of these triggered the other," said geologist Darren Gravley of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. But exactly how the...

The worrying shrinkage of Arctic sea ice could accelerate dramatically in coming decades, leaving the planet's most northerly ocean virtually devoid of ice in summer by 2040, according to a study published on Tuesday. The paper, which appeared in the US journal Geophysical Research Letters, mainly points the finger at greenhouse-gas emissions. It warned that if carbon pollution continues to increase at present rates, the Arctic's normal cycle of freezing and thawing faces catastrophic disruption. A simulation run by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Canada's McGill University predicted that the area covered by ice in...

Ice is melting so fast in the Arctic that the North Pole will be in the open sea in 30 years, according to a team of leading climatologists. Ships will be able to sail over the top of the world and tourists will be able visit what was, until climate change, one of planet’s most inaccessible landscapes. Researchers assessing the impact of carbon emissions on the world’s climate have calculated that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier - well within a lifetime. Some ice would still be found on coastlines, notably Greenland and Ellesmere...

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Global warming and a rise in sea levels could dramatically affect South Carolina's coast, according to scientists and environmental officials meeting at a conference in Charleston this week. The rising ocean is "going to shave off a ton of landscape along the coast," which could drown marshes that act as buffers for storm surge, raising the likelihood of major flooding when the next hurricane hits, said Jim Morris, marine studies professor at the University of South Carolina and director of its Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences. Morris was at the Southeast Regional Workshop...

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The world's stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050 at present rates of destruction by fishing, scientists said yesterday.A four-year study of 7,800 marine species around the world's ecosystems has concluded that the long-term trend is clear and predictable.   If the rate of over-fishing continues, the world's currently fished seafoods will have reached what is defined as collapse by 2048 By 2048, to be exact, catches of all the presently fished seafoods will have declined on average by more than 90 per cent since 1950.The study, by an international group of ecologists and economists, says the loss of...

Thousands of people have gathered in Trafalgar Square in London to urge the Government to take dramatic action to combat climate change. Organisers put the number of people at today's event at about 14,000 The rally's organisers, the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, want Britain to take the lead at the UN global warming conference which begins in Nairobi next week. They are urging the Government to negotiate an international deal to make sure that global temperatures do not rise more than two degrees centigrade from their current levels, and to introduce a Climate Change Bill that demands annual reductions in...

OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists said on Monday that they had found the first direct evidence linking the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica to global warming widely blamed on human activities. Shifts in winds whipping around the southern Ocean, tied to human emissions of greenhouse gases, had warmed the Antarctic peninsula jutting up toward South America and contributed to the break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, they said. "This is the first time that anyone has been able to demonstrate a physical process directly linking the break-up of the Larsen Ice Shelf to human activity," said...

A study warns that the Earth's temperature is approaching a level not seen in a million years, implying that we are getting close to "dangerous" levels of human pollution. The study finds that, while the world warmed slowly during the century to 1975, it has warmed at a more rapid rate of about 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade thereafter. The researchers say the global mean temperature is now within one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of the maximum mean temperature of the past million years. Based on a 0.2-degree-Celsius increase per decade, that high point could be...

European scientists voiced shock on Wednesday as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself. The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said. Vast patches of ice-free sea...

Natural Selections: The Potential Pandemic You've Never Heard Of How the connections between pigs, bats, and people could threaten your health. By Mary C. Pearl DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 09 | September 2006 | Medicine Budding particles of Nipah virus assemble near the surface of a cell. The mystery began when pigs on large farms in Malaysia began hacking so loudly that their owners called it a "one-mile cough." Nerve damage was also cropping up in some of the animals. No one knew why. Up to 5 percent of pigs in affected herds were dying, and the illness was spreading...

Better cancel those holidays. We now have a date for Armageddon, and it's a week on Tuesday - August 22. This information comes from no lesser source than the Wall Street Journal, where Bernard Lewis, President Bush's favourite historian, provides the details. "In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity," the professor writes, "there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time - Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long-awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. "Mr...

Rare, mother-of-pearl coloured clouds caused by extreme weather conditions above Antarctica are a possible indication of global warming, Australian scientists have announced. Known as nacreous clouds, the spectacular formations showing delicate wisps of colours were photographed in the sky over an Australian meteorological base at Mawson Station on July 25. The clouds can only form in temperatures lower than minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 Fahrenheit). Meteorologist Renae Baker who photographed the clouds, said a weather balloon sent up about 12 miles above the Earth's surface measured temperatures as low as minus 87 Centigrade (minus 124.6 F). "They reveal extreme...

'Global dimming' is darkening the globe: experts Updated Sat. Jul. 29 2006 10:07 AM ET Andy Johnson, CTV.ca News Global dimming may be the yin to global warming's yang. The theory is that the amount of sunlight, or solar energy, falling on the earth has been dropping steadily over the past 50 years or so. That could mean, scientists believe, that global dimming is actually mitigating the effects of global warming. That sounds quirky and intriguing at first, but a closer investigation turns up some frightening results. One of the first people to observe the phenomenon was an English scientist...

July 27, 2006 La Jolla, California - Last month, the June 22, 2006, issue of the science journal Nature, published recent detailed research of the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in Southern California. The data shows the San Andreas so stressed that its next quake release of energy could be a magnitude 8 on the Richter scale. The San Andreas Fault is considered the main boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates that are slowly moving past each other. Some day in the far distant future, those moving plates might even break off sections of the Pacific...

STEELE, N.D. (AP) -- More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. An area stretching from south central North Dakota to central South Dakota is the most drought-stricken region in the nation, Svoboda said. "It's the epicenter," he said. "It's just like a wasteland in north central South Dakota." Conditions aren't much better a little farther north. Paul Smokov...

Quick — think fast. What do you do when your life is in danger? If someone else is threatening your life, do you have the right to end theirs? You do now. On July 20, the Self-Defense Act was signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. The package of bills protects the rights of people using deadly force against an aggressor. In other words, if you kill someone in the act of self defense, you are legally protected. For law-abiding citizens, this may seem like a sound piece of legislation. In actuality, however, the act has the potential to promote violence. Although...

MELLEN - "There are too many people in the world. It's not sustainable." That is what the chairman of the Backwoods Anti-Social Social Club said. We were sitting in a little bar working on hamburgers thick enough to make the cholesterol count jump just by looking at them. The chairman was saying something he wished he had said at a recent conference on sustainability, but he's not the type to stand up in front of a crowd. He likes to work the edges and lead from behind, so to speak. Not being the religious sort, he has never been admonished...

LAHORE: The vast Amazon rainforest is on the verge of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year. Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce, writing for The Independent on Sunday, quote studies conducted by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre in Amazonia as concluding that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down. “Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences,...

An asteroid that's about one-half-mile wide is hurtling toward Earth, expected to narrowly miss the planet early Monday. Astronomers say the space rock, called 2004 XP14, will pass "exceptionally close" to Earth in astronomical terms -- 268,624 miles away at its closest approach, The Scotsman reported. That's a little more than the moon's average distance from Earth. The asteroid, discovered in December 2004, at first produced concerns that it could hit Earth later in the century but subsequent studies ruled out such a collision. However, 2004 XP14 has been classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, or PHA, by the Minor...

(Washington, DC) The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to classify water vapor as a pollutant, due to its central role in global warming. Because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accounting for at least 90% of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, its emission during many human activities, such as the burning of fuels, is coming under increasing scrutiny by federal regulators. ...

The World Health Organization has detailed the first evidence that the deadly bird flu virus mutated and spread from person to person within a family, but experts said Friday the genetic change does not increase the threat of a pandemic. The investigation said the H5N1 mutation occurred in a 10-year-old Indonesian boy who was part of the largest cluster ever reported. The index case is believed to have been infected by poultry. She then likely passed it to the boy and five other blood relatives. The boy is then thought to have infected his father, whose samples showed the same...

The Earth is running a slight fever from greenhouse gases, after enjoying relatively stable temperatures for 2,000 years. The National Academy of Sciences, after reconstructing global average surface temperatures for the past two millennia, said Thursday the data are "additional supporting evidence ... that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Other new research showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a research lab sponsored...

New earthquake research confirms the southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is overdue for a Big One. The lower section of the fault has not produced a major earthquake in more than three centuries. ADVERTISEMENT The new study, which analyzed 20 years of data and is considered one of the most detailed analyses yet, found that stress has been building up since then, and that the fault could rupture at any moment. "The southern section of the fault is fully loaded for the next big event," said geophysicist Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography...

The Perth metropolitan area has shivered through its coldest night on record. The bureau of Meteorology says records tumbled overnight. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1665308.htm

The medical community has gained a better understanding of cancer after a half-century of enormous investments and research, but the disease is still winning the battle. The cancer mortality rate has barely changed in this century compared to 50 years ago, while the death rates of cardiac, cerebrovascular and infectious diseases have declined by about two-thirds, said Harold Varmus, a Nobel medicine prize laureate. "Despite large federal and industrial investments in cancer research and a wealth of discoveries about the genetic, biochemical, and functional changes in cancer cells, cancer is commonly viewed as, at best, minimally controlled by modern medicine,...

Norway has began construction of a "doomsday vault", a vast top-security seed bank in a mountain near the North Pole to ensure food supplies in the event of environmental catastrophe or nuclear war. Built with Fort Knox-type security, the depository will preserve some three million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops at sub-zero temperatures. "This facility will provide a practical means to reestablish crops obliterated by major disasters," Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said in a statement. He said crop diversity was imperilled not just by a cataclysmic event, such as a...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Starbucks Corp. may be next on the target list of a consumer-health group that this week sued the operator of the KFC fried chicken restaurant chain for frying foods in oils high in harmful trans fat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest said it is planning to campaign against the global cafe chain because of the increased risk of obesity, heart disease and cancer associated with high-calorie, high-fat products it sells. And the possibility of legal action against Starbucks, similar to the case it is taking against KFC owner Yum Brands Inc., has not...

Toxic Tides: Another reason to worry about hurricanes Sid Perkins When Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne struck Florida in the summer of 2004, they killed 116 people, left thousands homeless, and caused billions of dollars in damage. Now, scientists suggest that the storms may also have triggered an intense, widespread Gulf of Mexico algae bloom that afflicted the state's western coast throughout 2005. DANGER ZONE. The red-and-yellow patch of Gulf of Mexico water off Tampa Bay shows the origin of last year's huge red tide, which may have been fueled by nutrient-rich groundwater discharges boosted by 2004 hurricanes. Hu,...

Al Gore is trying to resurrect his environmentalist crusade--and, perhaps, his political career--with a new film that depicts him as a courageous voice in the wilderness, speaking up for "an inconvenient truth" that challenges the entrenched political establishment. This is, of course, laughable. Everyone knows that the global warming theory is the dogma of the entrenched establishment. We know this because we are relentlessly barraged with global warming hysteria from political leaders, the mainstream media, and the government-scientific complex. We are constantly told that we are in imminent danger of dying from everything as catastrophic as massive flooding or as...

Are there really more hurricanes? 06 June 2006 NewScientist.com news service AS THE season for hurricanes cranks up, so do the arguments about what is causing them. Now a meteorologist claims that the apparent increase in recent years - blamed on global warming - is an illusion. The supposed rise in hurricane frequency can be explained by better measurement techniques, says Philip Klotzbach of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Klotzbach analysed the frequency and intensity of hurricanes over the past 20 years. The study that linked hurricanes to global warming used data going back over 35 years, but he...