The Doomsday Clock, which represents just how close the world is to a global catastrophe, has been moved closer to midnight – and no, it’s not because of an apocalyptic Mayan prophecy.

Yesterday the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which maintains the clock, shifted it from six to five minutes to midnight.

“Despite the promise of a new spirit of international cooperation, and reductions in tensions between the United States and Russia, the Science and Security Board believes that the path toward a world free of nuclear weapons is not at all clear, and leadership is failing,” the publication said.

It is now back to where it was in 2007, following North Korea’s nuclear weapons test.

“Failure to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by leaders in the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, and North Korea and on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material continues to leave the world at risk from continued development of nuclear weapons,” the Bulletin wrote on its website.

Other reasons for pushing the clock closer to midnight include the Fukushima disaster and the lack of action on climate change.

“The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere,” the group says.

“The International Energy Agency projects that, unless societies begin building alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, droughts, famine, water scarcity, rising sea levels, loss of island nations, and increasing ocean acidification.

“Since fossil-fuel burning power plants and infrastructure built in 2012-2020 will produce energy — and emissions — for 40 to 50 years, the actions taken in the next few years will set us on a path that will be impossible to redirect.”

The Doomsday Clock was started in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight. The closest it ever came to midnight was in 1953 after the US (2 minutes) and the Soviet Union both tested nuclear weapons within months of one another.

The furthest it has been from midnight was in 1991, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the signing of the START treaty and the end of the Cold War (17 minutes).

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The hardy souls who take a caravan holiday in North Wales at this time of year are well used to wet and windy weather.

But even they weren’t prepared for the 80mph tornado that ripped through their holiday park, throwing one mobile home 50ft.

Holidaymakers ran for shelter as the twister hit the Sandy Beach Caravan Park in Anglesey, destroying six caravans and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

John Seymour-Jones, who owns the park at Llanfwrog, said: ‘It was so sudden, the first we knew was when a staff member rushed in to say the caravans were being lifted in the air and bits flying all over the place.

‘We went out and could just see a line of vans knocked over and a static van with its roof ripped off. There was a straight line where the tornado had come through, nothing either side was damaged. No staff were injured, we were very lucky.’

Flooding and high winds also lashed nearby villages, in what the Met Office confirmed was some of the worst weather in the country.

Just hours later, an 84-year-old woman in Stockport, Cheshire, had a narrow escape as a ‘mini-tornado’ ripped through a residential street, felling trees and blowing tiles off roofs.

She was walking by a row of shops when she was struck by bricks from a chimney stack which collapsed on the pavement in front of her.

Eye witness Sheila Brady, 68, said: ‘All of a sudden the door flung open and the rain was lashing in and then there was this tremendous bang.

‘It was terribly loud and when I got outside there was the chimney stack and bricks and this lady on the floor.

‘She was very, very lucky – she had a cut hand and was complaining about her back.’

The woman escaped serious injury but was taken by ambulance to Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport as a precaution.

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Given a legitimate need to protect Earth from the most intense forms of space weather — great bursts of electromagnetic energy and particles that can sometimes stream from the sun — some people worry that a gigantic “killer solar flare” could hurl enough energy to destroy Earth. Citing the accurate fact that solar activity is currently ramping up in its standard 11-year cycle, there are those who believe that 2012 could be coincident with such a flare.

But this same solar cycle has occurred over millennia. Anyone over the age of 11 has already lived through such a solar maximum with no harm. In addition, the next solar maximum is predicted to occur in late 2013 or early 2014, not 2012.

Most importantly, however, there simply isn’t enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth.

This is not to say that space weather can’t affect our planet. The explosive heat of a solar flare can’t make it all the way to our globe, but electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles certainly can. Solar flares can temporarily alter the upper atmosphere creating disruptions with signal transmission from, say, a GPS satellite to Earth causing it to be off by many yards. Another phenomenon produced by the sun could be even more disruptive. Known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), these solar explosions propel bursts of particles and electromagnetic fluctuations into Earth’s atmosphere. Those fluctuations could induce electric fluctuations at ground level that could blow out transformers in power grids. The CME’s particles can also collide with crucial electronics onboard a satellite and disrupt its systems.

In an increasingly technological world, where almost everyone relies on cell phones and GPS controls not just your in-car map system, but also airplane navigation and the extremely accurate clocks that govern financial transactions, space weather is a serious matter.

But it is a problem the same way hurricanes are a problem. One can protect oneself with advance information and proper precautions. During a hurricane watch, a homeowner can stay put . . . or he can seal up the house, turn off the electronics and get out of the way. Similarly, scientists at NASA and NOAA give warnings to electric companies, spacecraft operators, and airline pilots before a CME comes to Earth so that these groups can take proper precautions. Improving these predictive abilities the same way weather prediction has improved over the last few decades is one of the reasons NASA studies the sun and space weather. We can’t ignore space weather, but we can take appropriate measures to protect ourselves.

And, even at their worst, the sun’s flares are not physically capable of destroying Earth.

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For a long time they were completely forgotten, and now suddenly rose from the ocean in front of El Hierro volcanic not only “makes bubbles” and magma particles, but also an old issue suddenly came back into consciousness. The question this time is not happening in front of volcanological El Hierro, but of a radioactive waste dump that was created in September 1982 in the Atlantic.

From 1967 to 1983, the mesoatlantische ridge, used about 700 miles off the coast of Galicia, as a disposal site for nuclear waste in OECD countries. The Dutch freighter “Scheldt Borg” took off to get rid of its controversial cargo on the high seas in international waters. In concrete-filled barrels, more than 140,000 tons of radioactive material in a water depth of 4,000 meters to the “eternal rest” embedded. But not only there but also at the Azores and about 20 kilometers off the coast of El Hierro are such maritime “repository” has been established. The radioactive substances were classified as mild to moderately bright.

In addition to the Canary seabed slumbers nor an abortive nuclear-powered submarine.Greenpeace environmental activists want to prevent this disposal at that time. Because the water pressure and the salty water, they predicted a shelf life of the barrels of a maximum of 50 years.Only been adopted in a 1993 London Agreement, the marine disposal of nuclear material is banned permanently. But with the sinking of the garbage at the same time the collective consciousness has been placed in sleep duration. You do not see anymore, you do not feel and perhaps because they are a particular threat. Then suddenly remembered with such drastic events, such as a volcanic eruption, because that was still there … what?

No one knows exactly

Environmentalists still remember the outcry then, but otherwise the drums seem to the authorities “out of sight and out of mind” came to be. The Spanish Office for Nuclear Safety gave to request information that they had no knowledge of such a disposal. But if there were actually radio-active material in front of El Hierro, it would definitely be tame compared to the radioactivity, which released the volcanic eruption now. A nice back door, which has since opened unexpectedly.

Government of the Canaries was no opinion at all, while aligning the German Office for Radiation Protection admitted that she knew nothing of radiant barrels. Simultaneously, a spokesman stressed, however, that if it were to be expected not to interact as part of the volcanic eruption would be. ”We know nothing of a radioactive waste disposal in the Atlantic in the 70s and 80s,” said H. and Fischer, spokeswoman of the OECD in Paris. Strangely, that environmental activists remember well what happened to some three decades. ”There was this dumping of El Hierro, but it has fallen into obscurity over time,” Julian acknowledged as an expert in the environmental activist Ben Magec in Tenerife.

It is unclear, and remains, whether the eruption of El Hierro have some effect on the barrels on the sea floor is. Is clear, however, that it was time to initiate scientific studies on the condition of the sunken nuclear waste. The only problem is that nobody, not even the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for this brilliant legacies feels. Let us hope that humanity is not roused by the forces of nature, not from the Swiss border trance state.

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IAEA Report on Ocean Disposal of Radioactive Wasete

A grim report authored by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (Minprirody of Russia) is warning today that the United States is facing a tree“apocalypse” on a scale not seen in modern history that could irrevocably change the entire North American Continent forever.

Raising the concerns of Minprirody officials is a little insect known as the Asian long-horned beetle [photo 2^nd left] that is native to eastern China, Japan, and Korea that was accidentally introduced to the United States in 1996, as well as Canada and several countries in Europe, including Austria, France, Germany, and Italy.

Unlike Europe, however, this report warns that the United States has over 12 species of trees these dangerous beetles attack and kill, with Maple trees being their favorite food. The beetles chew into tree bark to lay their eggs and then young insects feed on trees from the inside before emerging from round holes slightly smaller than a coin. [Photo bottom left.]

The recent discovery of these beetles in Bethel, Ohio has caused both the State and US Federal governments to impose a large quarantine area around the estimated 10-20 trees found infested, but in a shocking plan have announced they will begin destroying over 50,000 trees next week in order to contain this outbreak.

Bill Skvarla, owner of Harmony Hill Vineyards, just west of Bethel, in commenting on the plan to destroy so many trees stated, “We were deceived.” He said he’d been told by the authorities that only infested trees would be removed.

Minprirody officials in their report question these latest methods being used by the US in the containment and eradication of this insect by clear-cutting huge numbers of trees noting that Russia, China, South Korea and Japan for decades have successfully limited the destruction of this dangerous pest by the use of the pesticide DDT.

DDT, however, is banned from use in the United States due to its dangers upon the environment, and due to the Americans forbidding funding for its use in malaria-hit African nations has been blamed for the killing of over 20 million children.

Minprirody officials further state in their report that the use of Imidacloprid insecticides (which are legal to use in the US) have proven successful in eradicating these beetles and note this is exact method used in President Obama’s hometown of Chicago when under quarantine in 2006, and facing the loss of hundreds of thousands of trees, then US Senator Obama advocated for this method of containment instead of clear-cutting.

To how potentially catastrophic this beetle infestation could be Minprirody officials concur with their US counterparts that nearly one-third of all trees would have to be destroyed in the United States if this outbreak isn’t contained.

To understanding why the US has suddenly shifted its method of containment and eradication of this outbreak from selected destruction of infested trees and using insecticides on those remaining trees surrounding the infected ones, Minprirody officials in their report state that the cause by be “social-control”instead of environmentally based.

Minprirody notes with distinction in their report that in the US regions populated with those backing the Obama regime: 6,000 infested trees have been cut down and destroyed in New York, over 1,550 trees in Chicago, almost 23,000 trees in New Jersey and 18,000 trees have been removed in Massachusetts.

Bethel, Ohio, however, is a rural region whose population is strongly family oriented and Christian based who oppose the Obama regime and whose lives will be destroyed by the wholesale destruction of their living environment by the US government.

Not just to the rural peoples of Ohio either has the Obama regime been attacking but also those of the Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks region where thousands of people in this region have been ordered by the US government to abandon the homes they have lived in for generations because they live in an area coveted by the elites.

In its chilling conclusion to their report Minprirody officials warn that the Obama regimes actions in regards to this tree “apocalypse” can only be compared to the catastrophic environmental damage done by the Soviet Union madman and dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) caused famines that killed tens of millions, but was successful in destroying all rural opposition to this Communist regime.

To if Obama is walking down the same path Stalin did in order to gain total control over his people by destroying their rural way of life it is not in our knowing…other than to note…in the world we live in today…the Obama regime last week refused to allow the placement of a Christian prayer given by President Franklin Roosevelt to the nation on D-Day at their countries World War II Memorial, while at the same time Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the  revival of Christianity in Russia for the last 20 years “a miracle.”

Those few who are old enough to remember the days when the West prayed for the children of Russia that somehow they would be able to find God in their lives has now been answered…unfortunately the times we live in today call for those same prayers being said for the children of America and Europe, whose parents have forgotten to their peril what evil truly looks like.

November 7, 2011 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com. Freebase content licensed under CC-BY and GFDL.

An unsettling report prepared by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (Minprirody of Russia) on the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the world’s third largest energy company, British Petroleum (BP), is now stating that they have won approvalfrom the US Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in this region since the blowout of its Macondo Prospect well a year and a half ago touched off that country’s worst ever offshore environmental disaster.

Especially unnerving about this Minprirody report is its stating that the approval given to BP by the Obama regime came less than a week after a “suspected”whistleblower to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak catastrophe named George Thomas Wainwright [photo 2^nd left] was reported killed after a shark attack in Australia.

Wainwright, according to this report, was a marine systems engineer who graduated from Texas A&M University and was employed by BP to help control remote-operated vehicles, or ROVs, that worked 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico to cap the oil spill.

Six months ago, this report continues, Wainwright “suddenly” left the United States travelling to Australia where he lived until his untimely death last week on a work visa, a “situation” Russian officials familiar with US whistleblowers say is “more than common” for those seeking to hide from American government-corporate retribution for telling the truth about what they know.

Unbeknownst to the American people about whistleblowers in their country is that Obama, who promised while running for President that he would be “more open” than anyone before him, has, instead, already outdone every previous President in pursuing leak prosecutions…and that was after only 17 months in office.

Where candidate Obama said in 2008 that “whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal,” he is widely reported to now be targeting them as “enemies of the state.”

Making this situation even more frightening, especially for purported whistleblowers like Wainwright, is Obama now claiming for himself the power to assassinate any American citizen he so chooses, anywhere in the world without trial or evidence.

Conditions have become so dangerous in the US that respected Congressman Ron Paul blasted the Obama regime this past week warning Americans that a“sinister military-style crackdown” by the Obama regime was currently underway threatening all of the American people’s freedoms and liberties.

In a recent poll taken by the New York Times the American people overwhelming agree with Congressman Paul after it showed a staggering 89% of these people have now become afraid of their own government.

Should Wainwright’s death, at some future date, be conclusively linked to his purported whistleblowing activities against BP this report notes he would not be alone as the following “insiders” into the full knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe have, as of this date, also been “neutralized” and include:

US Senator Ted Stevens who was the recipient of a whistleblower’s communication relative to the BP oil disaster blow-out preventer was killed in a plane crash.

Matthew Simmons, the only inside oil executive to speak the truth about the BP oil spill was found dead in this hot tub.

LSU scientist Gregory Stone an outspoken critic against BP who died suddenly of an “unknown illness.”

Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officer Antony Tremonte who after exposing the full extent of the BP oil spill was arrested on child porn charges.

Former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation Dr. Thomas B. Manton who began exposing the truth of BP oil spill was imprisoned then murdered while in jail.

Former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons John P. Wheeler II was beaten to death in an assault and his body was dumped in a landfill after he began investigating the BP oil spill.

The incident commander for BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, and Wainwright’s superior, James Patrick Black was killed in a small plane crash.

Dr. Chitra Chaunhan who worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research studying the effects on humans of the BP oil spill was found dead by an apparent suicide by cyanide capsule leaving behind a young daughter and husband.

One of the world’s most renowned researchers into swans Dr. Jeffrey Gardner disappeared in November, 2010 and has never been heard from again after he began investigating unexplained bird deaths related to the BP oil spill.

Roger Grooters who began a 3,200 mile cycle trip across America to raise awareness of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe was killed by a hit and run driver.

US Scientist Joseph Morrissey who was studying the effects of the BP oil spill on cells was shot to death during a home invasion robbery, no one was ever arrested.

To if these deaths, including Wainwright’s, that are related to the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe will ever be fully investigated their appears no hope as Obama has already become the largest recipient of campaign donations from this British oil giant they have made in the past 20 years…and as we all know…in America the “almighty” US Dollar is the only thing that matters.

May these poor souls Rest in Peace in the hope that “someday” their fellow citizens will awaken before all is lost.

October 27, 2011 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com.

Millions of people are likely to become trapped in places that are extremely vulnerable to environmental change in the course of this century, according to a British government study released on Thursday.

Prepared by the Foresight group, a think tank that advises the government on planning for the future, the report explores the complex relationship between human migration and changing environmental conditions and argues that the issue must become a top policy priority on national and international agendas.

The study, titled “Migration and Global Environmental Change,” warns that trying to block migration will result in increased poverty and ultimately, potentially unmanageable waves of movement.

It therefore recommends planning for and financially aiding some migration, both within and between countries.

“Reduced options for migration, combined with incomes threatened by environmental change, mean that people are likely to migrate in illegal, irregular, unsafe, exploited or unplanned ways,” it warns.

The Foresight study cautions that it is often impossible to distinguish “environmental migrants” from people who move for any number of other related factors.

One of the report’s messages is that environmental change is just as likely to trap people as it is to make them flee — or that it can cause them to flee to even more vulnerable areas. Imagine a Nigerian farmer who can no longer grow enough food because of persistent drought and moves to Lagos, a sprawling, overcrowded city built on a floodplain.

By 2060, as many as 552 million people across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean could be affected by flooding related to climate change, and immigrant populations may be more likely to live in the most dangerous areas, the group’s research indicates.

“Human survival may depend on unplanned and problematic displacement,” the report says.

The study also cautions that urban planning must begin to focus on the vulnerability of migrants. Across the planet, 150 million people live in cities with “significant” water shortages; by 2015, Africa’s urban poor will number 400 million.

The Foresight study involved the work of about 350 people who generatedmore than 70 research papers over two years that inform the final report.

Geoffrey Dabelko, who heads the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center and was not directly involved with the research, said the report demonstrated that previous estimates of migration are nothing more than “very fuzzy aggregate global figures that have weak to no methodology behind them.”

He said the study departed from what he called “old methodologies” like seeking “to overlay sea-level-rise maps with population distribution maps and say everybody who’s flooded moves.”

“As we saw in New Orleans, not everybody moves,” Dr. Dabelko said. “It was people who are fairly empowered who moved.”

The World Bank plans to discuss migration and related risk at a summit meeting in London in December.

TOKYO — A strong earthquake jolted on Sunday the same area of northeastern Japan that was hit by a massive quake in March, but there was no sign of further damage along the coast or to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, officials said.

The Japan Meteorological Agency lifted a tsunami alert for the region before noon after initially urging residents in the disaster area to stay clear of the coast.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the magnitude of the earthquake at 7.0 and said it had occurred about 130 miles off the northeastern coast of Japan at a depth of 11 miles just before 10 a.m. local time.

Four months ago, the same area was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami that left at least 21,000 dead and missing. The March 11 disaster cut power to the Fukushima power plant and triggered a radiation crisis.

“It started as a small side-way tremble, then it grew gradually stronger,” said Nobuyuki Midorikawa, an official at Iwaki City, Fukushima prefecture.

“Having experienced that much devastation in March, this latest earthquake and tsunami alert made me feel we cannot let our guard down against tsunami,” Midorikawa said.

Tokyo Electric Power said workers closest to the coast at the Fukushima power plant were briefly evacuated to higher ground before returning to work.

The utility said there was no immediate sign of further damage at the nuclear plant, where workers have been struggling to keep an improvised cooling system operating to stabilize the reactors and control radiation. The cooling system was not interrupted by the quake, the company added.

Tokyo Electric said there was also no damage to the massive barge moored just offshore from the Fukushima nuclear power plant that has been used as a temporary storage depot for radiated water for any damage.

The March 11 earthquake that struck off the coast of northeastern Japan had a magnitude of 9.0 and caused a tsunami that caused extensive damage along the coast and measured about 14 meters at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The resulting loss of power at the Fukushima nuclear plant took out cooling systems and caused fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors to melt down. Subsequent hydrogen explosions scattered radioactive debris over a wide area.

About 80,000 nearby residents have been forced to evacuate because of the radiation and Japan’s government has come under fire for its handling of the disaster, putting pressure on unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan to resign.

One concern has been the strength of the building supporting what remains of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima, and a Tokyo Electric spokesman said the utility expects that the structure would hold up in an earthquake stronger than the one that struck Sunday.

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