"A devastating drought deepened over the last week in many areas, spreading through more of the Plains and going into the Midwest as triple-digit temperatures baked already thirsty crops and livestock."
"The first six months of 2011 have brought image after image of human misery and ecological upheaval. Droughts, wildfires, twisters, floods, heat waves, extreme blizzards — just about every natural disaster you can imagine has hit just about every place on the planet."
"The sun may warm the Earth more during waning solar cycles, new satellite data has shown, turning scientific understanding on its head and helping to explain extreme local weather patterns, scientists said on Wednesday."
"Fires across Russia, record floods in Pakistan, a huge Greenland iceberg -- this current unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events 'matches' scientific projections of more frequent and intense extreme weather events due to global warming, says an organization of meteorologists from 189 countries."
"U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he has never seen anything like the flood disaster in Pakistan, and urged foreign donors to speed up assistance to the 20 million people affected."
"Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia's heatwave match predictions of extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists say."
The vast deposits of deepwater methane hydrates may have been a major factor in the Deepwater Horizon blowout and explosion. Methane hydrates expand 164 times in volume when destablilized by heat and reduction in pressure. Such conditions may have existed the night of the explosion, causing a quickly expanding bubble of methane gas to shoot up the drill column before exploding on the platform on the ocean's surface.
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