December 15, 2015


News Clips For The Day


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohamed-elmenshawy/a-letter-from-isis-to-don_1_b_8785648.html

A Letter From ISIS to Donald Trump
Mohamed Elmenshawy, Alaraby TV
Posted: 12/14/2015


"Dear Donald Trump, leading candidate for the Republican nomination:

Thank you for your cooperation, we sincerely hope it continues.

You, and what you represent, make our job so much easier, and truly make our quest for war without end between Islam and the West a reality."

***

The above is how I imagine the Islamic State's leadership (Da'esh or ISIS) responded to Donald Trump's latest remarks calling for a ban upon all Muslims' entry to the United States. Little more than unadulterated racist hatred, Trump's anti-Muslim diatribe must have greatly pleased ISIS's delusional leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Billionaire Trump announced his pledge to prevent all Muslims from entering the United States only a few short days after terror attacks waged by an American-born Muslim and his Pakistani wife in San Bernardino, CA. Trump, who styles himself as an expert of public opinion, justified his proposal on the grounds that, as a matter of religious principle, all Muslims hate Americans.

Trump's remarks were so outlandish that fellow Republican presidential candidates, as well as senior party leaders felt, compelled to condemn them, stating that Trump's invectives contravened both American and GOP values. As of yet, Trump has neither rescinded nor apologized for his comments; if anything, he has only become more consistent in his vitriol. Though Trump clearly does not represent every American, his remarks have placed millions of American Muslims in danger, engendering hatred and stoking the flames of Islamophobia.

Since its foundation nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, Muslims have played a crucial role in American society. Originally arriving as African slaves, Muslims have consistently immigrated to the United States since the end of the Civil War. Today, Muslims work in such prominent industries as diverse as film, literature, sports, and space; thousands even serve in America's armed forces. Though the US Government does not account for religion when conducting its census, independent analysis estimate close to 7 million Muslims reside in the United States. There are about 3000 mosques spread across all 50 states.

Furthermore, most American Muslims enjoy a higher standard of living than the norm, with 66% earning more than the United States $50K median household average yearly income. Unlike their counterparts throughout Europe, American Muslims do not live in poor, isolated, and ghettoized neighborhoods; instead, Muslims in the US reside wherever they desire, in the exact same areas as their Christian, Jewish, or Hindu neighbors. Though few are politically active at the national level, two members of the House of Representatives are Muslim, Keith Ellison (D - MN) and Andre Carson (D - IN).

One day before Trump announced his xenophobic proposal, President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office about his strategy for confronting terror and defeating Da'esh, enlisting Muslims in the fight against Islamic extremism. During his address, Obama categorically rejected the notion that Muslims should be treated differently than other American, noting that "American Muslims [have long been] and are prepared to fight and die for their country." Despite Obama's repeated assurances that terrorists do not represent Islam or Muslims, as well as has continued to refusal to refer to Da'esh as "Islamic" so as to deny it any semblance of the religious legitimacy it so desperately craves, Trump's remarks were considered more important and more meaningful.

Trump's provocative sound bite proved far more resonant than Obama's conciliatory speech for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that Trump's message of religious intolerance echoes ISIS' strategic goals of initiating a sustained conflict with Western nonbelievers, most notably the US. Da'esh will exploit Trump's foolhardy remarks to deepen the divide between Muslims and the US and recruit more disaffected youths to its ranks, just as it did when criticizing America's hypocritical response to the Syrian refugee crisis; Trump's statements legitimizing hatred and causing more instances of anti-Muslim violence and harassment will only lead to similar results.

Lest Trump's recent statements be dismissed as an inarticulate slip of the tongue, we should remember that his campaign has been chock full of diatribes against nearly every other minority group, regularly insulting women, Mexicans, the poor, and the disabled. As of this writing, Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, garnering at least 30% of the vote in recent polls of likely voters in the Republican primary. Most troublingly, Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US does not seem all that dissonant with views of the American public; recent opinion polls conducted over the past several weeks indicated that 37% of Americans view Islam negatively and 28% of American's believe Islam is a religion that promotes violence.

Despite the fact that the US is by far the most religious society in the West, its constitution is purely secular, as is its executive branch, legislature, and judiciary. In fact, the words "God" and "Christianity" never appear in the entire document, even more than 70% of Americans identify as Christian. The constitution only discusses religion as it pertains to the First Amendment's prohibition upon religious-based discrimination as well as its decree that Congress may make no law based in nor impugning upon religion, in addition to that, no religious test may be administered to anyone seeking federal employment. Accordingly, because the president is legally obligated to "preserve, protect, and defend," the Constitution, the White House asserted that Trump's anti-Muslim comments "disqualify" him from seeking the Presidency.

When political theorist Samuel P. Huntington published his seminal work, "the Clash of Civilizations" in 1993, it was met with nearly universal derision. Years after his death in 2008, the Clash of Civilizations remains highly controversial for how it depicts relations between the Muslim world and the West. Today, Da'esh and other like-minded terrorist groups, as well as hateful individuals like Donald Trump, give credence to Huntington's contentious and conflict-provoking theories long since discredited my mainstream thinkers and politicians.

In sum, ISIS' letter to Trump could only conclude as follows:

"Dear Trump, we wish you all the best.

We sincerely hope that you become the next President of the United States in order to strengthen our shared ties.

Happy Holidays,
ISIS"

*Mohamed Elmenshawy is Washington Bureau Chief for Alaraby Television Network, and a columnist for the Egyptian Daily Alshorouk.

Follow Mohamed Elmenshawy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ElmenshawyM




As are so many things I read in Huffington Post, the above is so apropos, so clever, and so sad that I had to present it as one of the news articles. I am ever so glad to say that it is pure fiction!




http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-to-roll-out-changes-to-terror-alert-system-on-wednesday/

DHS to roll out changes to terror alert system on Wednesday
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS
December 14, 2015

Photograph -- Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson CBS NEWS


The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expected to announce changes to the government's terror alert system on Wednesday, multiple government officials told CBS News on Monday.

Sources reiterated the the administration is not scrapping the current system, but is making modifications.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson previewed the alert system last week and explained the U.S. needs a system that better informs the public about terror threats.

The first terror alert system after 9/11 consisted of color codes, which was replaced in 2011 by the National Threat Advisory System (NTAS), which has never been activated.

In order to trigger the current system, there must be a credible and specific threat. DHS now seeks a lower threshold that will allow officials to notify and inform the public. The modified alerts will be similar to intelligence bulletins the FBI and DHS share with law enforcement agencies around the country, and not currently with the public.

President Obama mentioned the upcoming changes to the terror alert system at the Pentagon Monday after he huddled with his national security team for an update on the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

CBS News' Jeff Pegues contributed to this story.



"The first terror alert system after 9/11 consisted of color codes, which was replaced in 2011 by the National Threat Advisory System (NTAS), which has never been activated. In order to trigger the current system, there must be a credible and specific threat. DHS now seeks a lower threshold that will allow officials to notify and inform the public. The modified alerts will be similar to intelligence bulletins the FBI and DHS share with law enforcement agencies around the country, and not currently with the public.President Obama mentioned the upcoming changes to the terror alert system at the Pentagon Monday after he huddled with his national security team for an update on the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)."

I'm happy that the terror alert system will be changed because the current color codes are not obvious or clearcut and they aren't broadcast on the TV or in any other way being frequently publicized. In addition I really want some specifics to give me a real picture of what's going on. I think even government bodies need more information and not less. The shootings around the world could have been prevented or blocked even after they started if people were told that a certain site had been threatened. Otherwise those color codes just tend to make everybody anxious without informing us of anything useful. If I heard a report like that on TV or radio, I would avoid the place.

As it is, I heed the warning "If you see something, say something." That tells me there is a specific problem, and perhaps I'd better stay out of the shopping mall or concert hall or restaurant. Also, I need to simply be very alert and ready to decide on an action and rapidly take it. That's how I always was when I walked down the dark streets of DC as a young woman. I wasn't exactly afraid, in fact I love being out in the fresh air at night, but I did look at every bush or wall which could hide a would be robber. The tendency of ISIS to hit the "soft" sites is worse than if they were concentrating on military targets. Al Qaeda's running planes into the Twin Towers was simply malicious -- though there were probably government related offices there -- but hitting the Pentagon made more sense.




http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-high-school-coach-pleads-guilty-in-player-sack-on-referee/

Texas high school coach pleads guilty in player sack of referee
CBS/AP
December 14, 2015

Photograph -- Still image from video of two football players hitting a referee. KENS
Photograph -- 635805243690726358-20151015-coach-breed-testimony.jpg
Mack Breed. CBS AFFILIATE KENS
Play VIDEO -- High school football players who tackled ref in hot water


BURNET, Texas -- A former assistant high school football coach has pleaded guilty to assault for an attack on a game referee by two of his players.

Mack Breed, former assistant football coach at John Jay High School in San Antonio, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge Monday in a Burnet County court. County Court-at-law Judge Linda Bayless sentenced Breed to 18 months of probation, fined him $1,500 and ordered him to serve 120 hours of community service and pay restitution to referee Robert Watts.

Burnet County Attorney Eddie Arredondo says Breed also must forfeit his Texas teaching certificate permanently and attend anger management sessions.

Breed resigned from his job at Jay High School on Sept. 23, CBS affiliate KENS reported.

The two players hit the referee during a Sept. 4 game at Marble Falls. They said they did so at Breed's direction, but Breed denied the allegation.

As CBS affiliate KENS reported, this update comes after the University Interscholastic League suspended Breed for the remainder of the 2015-16 school year and gave him two years of probation.

Based on the UIL's decision, Breed will not be allowed to coach at a UIL school until the start of the 2016-17 school year.

The hit on umpire Robert Watts came near the end of a heated game that included multiple unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and a player ejection. Video of the hit, which Watts has said caused a concussion, created a national stir when it was posted online.

One of the players is seen on video running into the back of the referee as he watched a play, and the other dove into the official. Both took running starts.

Breed has previously denied allegations that he ordered the players to smash Watts. He admitted using harsh profanity on the sideline and saying out loud that Watts should "pay the price," but insisted it was never meant as an order and wasn't directed to any players to take action.

"I never told any players to hit or take out" the umpire, Breed said. "I said a lot of things to my players to get them motivated because they were letting the officiating get the better of them."

But Breed also previously said he realized after the game his comments could have unintentionally instigated the hit.

The UIL held three public hearings on the incident. Watts, who had been accused of directing racial slurs toward players before he was hit, denies the allegations.

"One hundred percent not true," Watts previously said. "I did not make any racial slurs toward anyone (and) can't speculate why they would make something like that up."

An investigation by the Texas Association of Sports Officials found the claims of racial slurs could not be confirmed. Watts previously said he was "not well" since the incident but declined to elaborate.




We really are a sick society. People who do well in school are called “pointy-headed intellectuals” –- Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese -- and winning or losing a football game becomes grounds for a violent assault on the referee. Our values are seriously misguided. Even if the referee had made racial slurs, which he denies of course, the appropriate way to handle that is to report it and get him kicked out of the game if it can be proven. There must be some organization that is responsible for overseeing referees. University Interscholastic League is the organization in Texas, while the Florida High School Athletic Association does the same thing in our state. It is a member of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS).




http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/28/oceans/

That’s heavy

Climate-change warnings include rising seas and wild weather shifts. But giant flying boulders?

Photograph -- The giant boulders known as “the Cow and the Bull” on the Bahaman island of Eleuthera.


Standing atop a 60-foot cliff overlooking the Atlantic, James Hansen — the retired NASA scientist sometimes dubbed the “father of global warming” — examines two small rocks through a magnifying glass. Towering above him is the source of one of the shards: a huge boulder from a pair locals call “the Cow and the Bull,” the largest of which is estimated to weigh more than 1,000 tons.

The two giants have long been tourist attractions along this rocky coast. Perched not far from the edge of a steep cliff that plunges down into blue water, they raise an obvious question: How did they get up here?

Compounding the mystery, these two are among a series of giant boulders arranged in an almost perfect line across a narrow part of this 110-mile-long, wishbone-shaped island.

Hansen and Paul Hearty — a wiry, hammer-slinging geologist from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has joined him here as a guide — have a theory about these rocks. It’s so provocative — and, frankly, terrifying — that some critics wonder whether the man who helped spawn the whole debate about the dangers of climate change has finally gone too far.

The idea is that Earth’s climate went through a warming period just over 100,000 years ago that was similar in many ways to the warming now attributed to the actions of man. And the changes during that period were so catastrophic, they spawned massively powerful superstorms, causing violent ocean waves that simply lifted the boulders from below and deposited them atop this cliff.

If this is true, the effort kicking off in Paris this week to hold the world’s nations to strict climate targets may be even more urgent than most people realize. Hearty, an expert on Bahamas geology, first published in 1997 the idea that Cow and Bull were hurled to their perch by the sea. Since then, Hansen has given the work much added attention by framing the boulders as Exhibit A for his dire view of climate change — which has drawn doubters in the scientific community. But as Hansen examines the rocks on a recent morning, Hearty explains some of the evidence. In particular, Hearty points out that the tiny grains that constitute the boulder rocks are more strongly cemented together and less likely to crumble than other rocks nearby, a sign that the boulders are older than what’s beneath them.

“Yeah,” Hansen says with a nod, rubbing the younger rock and watching it crumble a little. He sees the difference. It’s a key point the two use to argue that the placement of these boulders indicates a dramatic hurling of the rocks by the sea. Even on a calm day, the deep blue waters of the Atlantic slam against the cliffs below with audible force and huge plumes of spray. But could waves have lifted these massive stones?

While there is a suggestion in the scientific literature that the boulders were simply left behind after surrounding rocks eroded away, Hearty and another leading Bahamas geology expert, Pascal Kindler of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, agree that the boulders are older than the surface upon which they rest and, thus, probably were moved by the sea. Even the tourist placard near here takes their side, saying the ocean “lifted them atop the ridge.” But exactly how it could have done that is another matter.

Scientists have tended to attribute odd boulders such as these to tsunamis — there’s little doubt they have the power to move large rocks. One recent study found that in the Cape Verde islands, 73,000 years ago, a 300-foot-high mega-tsunami carried boulders as large as 700 tons atop a cliff almost as high as the Eiffel Tower.

But more recent studies have also attributed large boulder movements to storms. And now into the fray has stepped Hansen, who, in 1988 testimony before Congress, put the climate issue on the map by contending — correctly, as it turned out — that global warming had already begun. If he is also right about the boulders, Earth could be in for a rough ride.

And even if not, one thing is clear: Cow and Bull present a scientific mystery whose solution may serve as a reminder of just how violent and dynamic a planet we live on.

Eleuthera in the Eemian

Hansen says he first encountered Hearty’s extensive Bahamas research — on the boulders and much more — eight years ago.

The two began to collaborate, and the result, once Hansen pulled in 15 other specialists as co-authors, was a 121-page paper presenting a dire reinterpretation of much of modern climate science.

In it, the researchers contend that there was a catastrophic storm event here 118,000 years ago. This would have occurred at the turbulent close of a climatic period sometimes dubbed the Eemian, which was moderately warmer than our own but featured considerably higher seas — especially at its end, when oceans appear to have risen quickly and then fallen again.

That period was one where, in Hansen’s interpretation, “all hell breaks loose”: a collapse of polar ice, quickly rising seas, a shutdown of heat-transporting ocean circulation, and then superstorms spawned by a greater temperature contrast between warm tropics and cold poles.

All of this is contested. While Hearty’s many geological studies of the Bahamas and its boulders have all been peer reviewed and published, the broader study remains under public peer review by a “discussion” journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions. It has been the most downloaded paper the journal has ever considered, receiving one positive peer review and one skeptical one — and many assorted challenges.

Meanwhile, as the scientific debate continues, Hansen and Hearty last weekend met up in Eleuthera, accompanied by Hansen’s wife, Anniek, and his 17-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan. Along with 21 other young people, Sophie is plaintiff to a lawsuit against the U.S. government — with Hansen playing the dual role of their guardian and scientific expert — demanding protection of their generation’s fundamental rights in the face of climate change.

It’s public moves such as this, or getting arrested protesting the Keystone XL oil pipeline, that have led some to contend that Hansen, scientific luminary though he is, has also become an “activist,” a label that makes many scientists uncomfortable.

Yet Eleuthera itself, and the large body of evidence Hearty presented as they toured it together, certainly implies that something dramatic happened in this landscape more than a hundred millennia ago.

Eleuthera, in the northeastern Bahamas, is home to about 11,000 people. There’s some tourism on the island, but it is also a geologist’s dream — a testament to the natural process that, over vast periods, generated layer upon layer of island rock from the simple sands formed offshore.

As seas rose here during warm interglacial periods such as the Eemian, the shallow coastal waters formed particles called “ooids,” tiny, egg-shaped sand grains of calcium carbonate. When seas fell again, these ooids rapidly hardened into limestone rock, preserving a detailed geologic record in the process. “Hot wax,” Hearty likes to call it.

Ooids from the Eemian formed much of present day Eleuthera, Hearty explains, and left behind hardened dunes and seashores considerably higher than current ocean levels. They also formed the rocks at the base of Cow and Bull, but the boulders themselves, he says, appear consistent with a far older cliff face that is well beneath them.

One simple demonstration: Hearty hits the boulders with his hammer. They ring loudly at the blows; the rocks beneath them sound more muffled — a hint, he says, that the boulders have had more time to harden than the younger formation below.

Another dating technique, called “amino acid racemization,” has also suggested the rocks’ older age. And then there are their “bedding planes,” or angular alignment of sediments within the rock. “The rock is tilted from any natural inclination, which means it was transported,” Hearty says.

Although the world of Bahamas geology is relatively small and sometimes contentious, Hearty is not the only researcher who thinks these rocks were moved by the ocean. The University of Geneva’s Kindler, who has examined the boulders and published with Hearty in the past — but also, notably, criticized his paper with Hansen — agrees that the boulders were put in their present location by giant waves.

“These boulders are much more weathered than the underlying substrate. The underlying substrate consists of very well-preserved limestone,” Kindler says. “They are partly dissolved, so they are older than their substrate.” However, Kindler holds that a localized tsunami, caused by an undersea landslide that would have occurred as the seafloor off the coast collapsed, is the most likely cause of the waves that threw the rocks.

The ‘rages’

Seeing the boulders in their setting also makes it clear that along this stretch of coast, the deep Atlantic flings a tremendous amount of energy.

Slightly to the north of here, a high bridge connecting two parts of Eleuthera shows signs of repeated battering by huge waves (locals call them “rages”) that have shoved concrete barriers entirely off the road. Circa 1885, Winslow Homer painted this spot showing a high rock arch that framed a windowlike view of the sea. But now the arch is gone, “destroyed by a raging hurricane,” the tourist sign says.

Then, in addition to Cow and Bull, Hearty has documented five other boulders of similar size. Two lie in a curious, nearly straight line from Cow and Bull across a roughly 500-foot-wide stretch of the island. First comes another 1,000-ton boulder that Hearty calls Maverick. Entirely across the island, meanwhile, lie a pair of large rocks dubbed the Twin Sisters, sitting pristinely in the shallow and calm green waters of Eleuthera’s protected side. And there are three other large boulders nearby of similar sizes and features.

So what could have caused this? In his original 1997 paper, Hearty proposed three possible explanations: a tsunami, superstorms and Kindler’s preferred “bank margin collapse.” A tsunami could have come from afar or from a fluke event such as a meteor strike in the Atlantic, but a sub-sea landslide right off Eleuthera’s coast could also have displaced a large volume of water that surged back and threw boulders.

Hearty agrees there probably was such a collapse but asserts there is no evidence that it happened suddenly, rather than slowly or in smaller stages. Moreover, he sees other evidence of superstorms across Eleuthera and other parts of the Bahamas.

Farther inland in areas not protected by large cliffs, he thinks, the storms created curious chevron ridges, large V-shaped walls of rock sometimes extending several miles and always pointing to the southwest.

At very high heights on the islands, meanwhile, Hearty suggests that the huge waves left sediment layers featuring telltale beach bubbles, or fenestrae, suggesting waves reaching as much as 80 feet above the current sea level.

All of these features taken together, Hearty contends, are best explained by gigantic storms. He likes to invoke the principle of “parsimony,” meaning that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. “It’s really the parsimony between the trilogy of evidence that makes this story hold together,” Hearty says.

Kindler disagrees that giant waves made the chevrons, however; he thinks they were assembled by winds. Hearty is “a good scientist, a good observer,” Kindler says. “But, yeah, I just do not agree with his interpretation.”

He is not the only skeptic. Mississippi State University’s John Mylroie, who has also conducted extensive research in the Bahamas, previously published the idea that Cow and Bull are remnant towers whose surrounding rock has eroded (an idea that Kindler and Hearty both reject). Mylroie is also skeptical of the storm interpretation. “The boulders on Eleuthera, if the result of wave-water action, represent a very narrow footprint that apparently occurred only once, which is not what you would expect for an increase in number of storms or storm intensities,” Mylroie says.

Hansen, though — the man who has helped make Hearty’s ideas famous — seems quite confident in them.

“We looked at those criticisms,” he says. And “it became all the clearer that the He is not the only skeptic. Mississippi State University’s John Mylroie, who has also conducted extensive research in the Bahamas, previously published the idea that Cow and Bull are remnant towers whose surrounding rock has eroded (an idea that Kindler and Hearty both reject). Mylroie is also skeptical of the storm interpretation. “The boulders on Eleuthera, if the result of wave-water action, represent a very narrow footprint that apparently occurred only once, which is not what you would expect for an increase in number of storms or storm intensities,” Mylroie says.

Hansen, though — the man who has helped make Hearty’s ideas famous — seems quite confident in them.

“We looked at those criticisms,” he says. And “it became all the clearer that the interpretation that we’re making is right, and that the boulders are wave-deposited, and highly likely that they’re deposited by the same storms that are causing the other obvious features in the Bahamas.”

The debate comes not only at a turbulent time in the climate discussion but also when growing evidence suggests that even today’s storms can move large boulders, an effect previously attributed more exclusively to tsunamis. On Ireland’s Aran Islands, geologist Rónadh Cox of Williams College found that in intense North Atlantic storms in the winter of 2013 and 2014, more than 2,000 boulders moved, based on GPS mapping. Many were pretty small, but the biggest was over 400 tons.

Cox has not studied the Bahamas, but from her own work infers that Hearty’s ideas are a “valid hypothesis and one that can’t just be thrown out.”

Hearty contends that on Eleuthera, smaller boulders have moved within the past 12,000 years and may still be moving today. Not far from the mega-boulders, he shows Hansen a rocky plain strewn with boulders closer to 100 tons than 1,000. Hearty thinks this is the most storms can do in the modern era, which is why he thinks Eemian storms must have been stronger.

There is also the Philippine island of Samar, struck in 2013 by the extraordinarily intense super-typhoon Haiyan. Max Engel of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues used satellite imagery to document the transport of numerous onshore boulders after the storm, including one that weighed 180 tons.

Storms, Engel says, “can create a boulder pattern that is very similar to what we would expect for tsunamis.”

People skeptical that ocean waves can move boulders are not thinking about the physics right, said Robert Weiss, a geophysicist at Texas A&M University. “The density of air is about a thousand times smaller than the density of water,” Weiss said. He added that a simple cubic meter of water, a cube that is a meter long on every side, already weighs a ton.

So when you start thinking about waves that are 25 or more feet high, traveling at speeds of over 10 mph, it’s not so odd to think of rocks moving. “That will cause significant damage. That will cause the movement of boulders,” Weiss said.

But for storms to fling boulders as big as those in the Bahamas, that would probably require an epic unleashing of energy. Hansen looks at the clues assembled by geologists such as Hearty and thinks that is what is in store for the planet if warming trends continue. That suggests not just a decades-long problem of rising ocean levels but also the potential for massive destruction.

“Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that we are right,” Hansen said. He clearly believes it — and what is so troubling is that even many scientists who are skeptical can remember when he was right before.




“…. they spawned massively powerful superstorms, causing violent ocean waves that simply lifted the boulders from below and deposited them atop this cliff. If this is true, the effort kicking off in Paris this week to hold the world’s nations to strict climate targets may be even more urgent than most people realize. …. But more recent studies have also attributed large boulder movements to storms. And now into the fray has stepped Hansen, who, in 1988 testimony before Congress, put the climate issue on the map by contending — correctly, as it turned out — that global warming had already begun. If he is also right about the boulders, Earth could be in for a rough ride. …. On Ireland’s Aran Islands, geologist Rónadh Cox of Williams College found that in intense North Atlantic storms in the winter of 2013 and 2014, more than 2,000 boulders moved, based on GPS mapping. Many were pretty small, but the biggest was over 400 tons. …. So when you start thinking about waves that are 25 or more feet high, traveling at speeds of over 10 mph, it’s not so odd to think of rocks moving. “That will cause significant damage. That will cause the movement of boulders,” Weiss said. …. Hansen looks at the clues assembled by geologists such as Hearty and thinks that is what is in store for the planet if warming trends continue. That suggests not just a decades-long problem of rising ocean levels but also the potential for massive destruction.”


Search Results:

Mystery solved: The sliding stones of Death Valley. - Slate
www.slate.com/.../mystery_solved_the_sliding_stones_of_death_val...
Slate
Sep 2, 2014 - When I was a kid, one of the coolest mysteries going was the moving stones of Racetrack Playa. This is a dry lake bed in Death Valley, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_rock
Balancing rock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A balancing rock, also called balanced rock or precarious boulder, is a naturally occurring geological formation featuring a large rock or boulder, sometimes of substantial size, resting on other rocks, bedrock or on glacial till. Some formations known by this name only appear to be balancing but are in fact firmly connected to a base rock by a pedestal or stem. There is no single scientific definition of the term, and it has been applied to a variety of rock features that fall into one of four general categories:

A glacial erratic is a boulder that was transported and deposited by glaciers to a resting place on soil, on bedrock or on other boulders. It usually has a different lithology than the other rocks around it.

A perched block, also known as a perched boulder or perched rock, is a large, detached rock fragment that most commonly was transported and deposited by a glacier to a resting place on glacial till, often on the side of a hill or slope. Some perched blocks were not produced by glacial action but were the aftermath of a rock fall, landslide or avalanche.[1]

An erosional remnant is a persisting rock formation that remains after extensive wind, water and/or chemical erosion.

A pedestal rock, also known as a rock pedestal or mushroom rock, is not a true balancing rock but is a single continuous rock form with a very small base leading up to a much larger crown. Some of these formations are called balancing rocks because of their appearance. The undercut base was attributed for many years to simple wind abrasion but is now believed to result from a combination of wind and enhanced chemical weathering at the base where moisture would be retained longest. Some pedestal rocks sitting on taller spire formations are known as hoodoos.


In a final Wikipedia section called “Famous Balancing Rocks,” this article lists 21 cases widely spread around the globe of this amazing phenomenon, with some effort to explain them. On one of my many Discovery Channel videos from the TV I did see a desert, probably Death Valley as mentioned in the snippet from above, in which sizable boulders had literally left a trail in the sand where they had moved. It had to have been recent movement, because otherwise the trail they produced would have disappeared due to more wind action. The scientist stated that it seems to be a wind that moved them, because there was no dry riverbed there. On a pliable and slick surface like the sand they are apparently not too difficult to move.

If as a result of global warming we are due to have massive storms capable of whipping up waves that are some 50 or so feet high, those of us who are now living in Florida are going to have to move away. There are parts of Jacksonville right now that flood whenever we get the 4 to 6 inches of rain over the span of a day. I am glad of one thing. I think I will be dead of old age before really catastrophic effects of global warming happen. The young people will have to handle it. I am doing my part right now by writing repeatedly about certain subjects that need attention from our society and some new laws made to correct them. The greenhouse gases are one of those problems.