In a joint letter to the journals Science and Nature, 39 researchers from around the world emphasize that their laboratories are safe and secure but they nevertheless acknowledge that there is grave public concern about the accidental or deliberate release of an "airborne" strain of H5N1 avian influenza which could be transmitted easily between people.

Meteorologists can see a busy hurricane season brewing months ahead, but until now there has been no such crystal ball for tornadoes , which are much smaller and more volatile.This information gap took on new urgency after tornadoes in 2011 killed more than 550 people, more than in the previous 10 years combined, including a devastating outbreak in April that racked up $5 billion in insured losses. Now, a new study of short-term climate trends offers the first framework for predicting tornado activity up to a month out with current technology, and possibly further out as climate models improve, giving communities a chance to plan.

The study may also eventually open a window on the question of whether tornadoes are growing more frequent due to long-term climate warming. [sciday]

Firefighters were working to hold the line on a fast-moving brush fire that forced more than 10,000 people in Nevada to flee and destroyed more than 20 homes. Fire officials said one person was dead.

The blaze started shortly after noon on Thursday, and about 2,000 people remained under evacuation orders late on Thursday, Reno fire chief Michael Hernandez said. About 250 firefighters were battling the blaze.

Hernandez said that 20 homes were destroyed, but a full assessment might reveal even more damage. There was one death in the fire area, Hernandez said, but he declined to provide more details, saying an autopsy would be needed to determine the cause. [guardian]

The country's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, also said during his annual televised press conference that Russia would use its veto at the UN Security Council to block any resolution calling for military force to be used against Syria.

Mr Lavrov said that Russia is "seriously worried" that military action against Iran may be under consideration, and vowed that Moscow would do all it could to prevent it. "The consequences will be extremely grave," he said. "It's not going to be an easy walk. It will trigger a chain reaction and I don't know where it will stop." [independent]

The warning signs are all around us.  All we have to do is open up our eyes and look at them.  Almost every single day there are more prominent voices in the financial world telling us that a massive economic crisis is coming and that we need to prepare for the worst.  On Wednesday, it was the World Bank itself that issued a very chilling warning.  In an absolutely startling report, the World Bank revised GDP growth estimates for 2012 downward very sharply, warned that Europe could be on the verge of a devastating financial crisis, and declared that the rest of the world better "prepare for the worst."  

Obviously things have gotten bad enough that nobody is even really trying to deny it anymore.  Andrew Burns, the lead author of the report, said that if the sovereign debt crisis gets even worse we could be looking at an economic crisis that could be even worse than the last one: "An escalation of the crisis would spare no-one. Developed- and developing-country growth rates could fall by as much or more than in 2008/09."  Burns also stated that the "importance of contingency planning cannot be stressed enough."  In other words, Burns is saying that it is time to prepare for the worst.  So are you ready? [link]

Around 70 percent of the roughly 30,000 miles of levees in the U.S. are not trusted by government flooding officials to hold back flood waters.

Levees are as diverse in the United States as the people they guard. They're shaped like snakes, rings and spurs that can be tough, flimsy or a century old. No one knows for sure where all of these earthen walls are, who built them or what type of rocky mixture lies shrouded inside their bulk. Some help protect homes from flooding, while others ring industrial zones containing chemical plants and refineries. Many stop rivers from turning into lakes on farms that abut the riverfront.

They shadow the diverse landscapes they protect. But these widely disparate levees do share at least two common traits - they are all steadily weakening from water's efforts to go under, over or straight through their earthy embankment. Very few were built to protect against the more powerful storms expected by climate scientists and the flooding that will accompany them.

Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.

No email, Twitter or Facebook. No buying online. No stock trades. No just-in-time industrial shipping. No real-time tracking of diseases. It's gotten so that not just the entire Internet but individual websites such as Google are considered critical infrastructure, experts said.

California, Finland, Canada, Australia Hit By Radiation

The University of California at Berkeley detected cesium levels in San Francisco area milk above over EPA limits … and even higher than they were 6 months ago. Finnish public television says that cesium from Fukushima has been detected in lichens, fungi and elk and reindeer meat in Finland. The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency confirmed a radiation cloud over the East Coast of Australia. The West Coast of Canada is getting hit by debris from Japan … and at least some of it is likely radioactive.

The U.S. Congress is about to censor the Internet!!!

CONTACT CONGRESS TODAY & VOICE YOUR OPPOSITION TO THESE BILLS! - Contact Congress! - Contact Congress!!!

WARNING: IF THESE BILLS PASS YOUR FAVORITE WEBSITES WILL BE FORCED OFF THE INTERNET FOREVER! GET OFF YOUR ASS AND CONTACT CONGRESS NOW!!!

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Flu pandemics have been linked to fluctuations in climate, and new research connects the world's four most recent pandemics to the cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean near the equator.

The connection? Changes in ocean temperature affect migrating birds, which are major contributors to the spread and mixing of flu viruses.

An earlier study had linked flu pandemics to ocean warming, rather than cooling, but public health researchers Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University dispute these findings, saying this analysis relies on flawed data, such as records of older pandemics and climate fluctuations, which are less precise and reliable.

Imagine that, as you sit at your desk or in your living room reading this story, your entire city suddenly snaps a foot to the south.

That's what happened to the city of Kohat, Pakistan, in 1992. A magnitude-6.0 earthquake moved a 30-square-mile (80-square-kilometer) swath of land one foot (30 centimeters) horizontally in a split second, leveling buildings and killing more than 200 people.

The area hadn't experienced many temblors before, making the earthquake an unusual occurrence. Now, 20 years later, geologists have used satellite and seismic data to track down the cause of that rare quake — an equally rare type of fault. [msnbc]

La Nina events may make flu pandemics more likely, research suggests.

US-based scientists found that the last four pandemics all occurred after La Nina events, which bring cool waters to the surface of the eastern Pacific.

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say that flu-carrying birds may change migratory patterns during La Nina conditions. However, many other La Nina events have not seen novel flu strains spread around the world, they caution. [bbc]

The minute-hand on the 64-year-old concept clock has edged forward to show that "inadequate progress" has been made on containing the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, said scientists. It now shows five minutes to midnight (the zero hour).

"Two years ago it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), said.

In a list of reasons for raising the danger bar, the BAS said it finds the current potential for nuclear conflict in the Middle East, north-east Asia and south Asia alarming. It accuses the US, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt and Israel for failing to act on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and North Korea for its nuclear weapons program.

2012 has begun where 2011 left off with weird weather in Europe and the Americas, Arctic ice at almost its lowest extent ever recorded in midwinter, disastrous droughts and searing heat in Africa and Latin America, and one of the world's biggest insurance companies warning that climate change will increase damages.

Thousands of people in Austria, France and Germany were on Thursday still digging themselves out of some of the heaviest snowfalls seen in 30–50 years. After Europe's driest and warmest autumn for nearly 150 years, a massive storm dumped nearly 18ft of snow in two days this week, cutting off ski resorts and villages and leaving people and animals stranded. The summit of the 9,718ft Zugspitze mountain in Germany which had only 7.5 inches of snow a few weeks ago, now has 150 inches. [guardian]

The news that a failed Russian Mars probe will come crashing back to Earth in the next few days reinforces a growing public perception that the sky is falling — that huge pieces of space junk could rain down on us at any moment.

Russian officials estimate that the 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which became stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, will re-enter the atmosphere sometime between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16). It will be the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months, following NASA's defunct UARS craft in September and the dead German ROSAT satellite in October.

These high-profile events have helped put space junk on the map for many people who had never worried about the possibility, however remote, of getting conked on the head by a satellite shard. For example, insurance giant State Farm saw fit to address the issue just ahead of the UARS crash.