There’s new evidence for global warming from the top and the bottom of the world.  Of course, there really is no top and bottom; a sphere doesn’t have sides.  But if the sphere is consistently spinning, it becomes possible to designate the spin points.  Of course which point you designate as top and which one you designate as bottom is purely arbitrary.  I have a world map in my office given to me by a friend who lives in Australia.  It says “Australia.  No longer Down Under” and as you can see, things look significantly different in this worldview. MORE>>

One of the saddest stories I ever heard came from John Mosley, one of the employees at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles.  They had a basin-wide power outage as the result of an earthquake, and several people called the Planetarium to ask if all those lights in the sky were somehow related to the earthquake.  Mr. Mosley was confused since he saw no lights in the sky, except the stars.  Then he realized that the people who were calling had lived in the Los Angeles basin all their lives and had never seen the stars. MORE>>

In reality, there is NO Pacific Ocean and there is no Atlantic Ocean and there is no Caribbean or Mediterranean or Arctic or Indian Ocean or any South China Sea or Philippine Sea or any of the other literally hundreds of designations for the lapping salt water waves.  There is the Ocean.  Period.  One world Ocean that laps every single saltwater beach.  It covers ¾ of this planet and our world is misnamed.  Its name is not Earth; it is Ocean. We are all connected by this heaving mass of liquid as the people who live on the east coast of Africa discovered in December of 2004 when their coastlines were inundated by a gigantic wave generated thousands of miles away.  That tsunami generated a tidal bore in the Thames River in England and indeed, in nearly every river on the planet. MORE>>

Have you noticed that it’s been raining a lot?  If you look at the satellite photo, you’ll see that our whole area is completely covered with clouds.  The reason is complex, but that cloud band is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, also referred to as the ITCZ and as the equatorial convergence zone.  And what generates it is something you probably won’t be able to see this week; the Sun. This weeks discussion is on weather patterns and the sun. Welcome aboard! MORE>>