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NBC’s John Yang reports on the extreme weather in the Midwest and East Coast.

Video camera captures a car leaping over a heat-buckled road near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. NO AUDIO

Workers in Anchorage, Alaska, are still working to clear snow from last winter’s record snowfall. KTUU’s Ted Land reports.

Denver (Reuters) – Investigators probing the cause of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history have located the point of ignition but have not concluded how the blaze started, officials said on Thursday.

At its height, the 12-day-old blaze forced the evacuation of some 35,000 people in and around Colorado Springs, the state’s second most populous city, and threatened the campus of the U.S. Air Force Academy before fire crews gained an upper hand late last week. It destroyed more than 300 homes and killed two people.

Since it was first reported on June 23, the blaze has burned more than 14,000 acres of drought-parched timber and brush, mostly in the Pike National Forest about 50 miles south of the Denver metropolitan area. But as of Thursday, ground crews had managed to carve containment lines around 90 percent of the fire’s perimeter, said incident commander Rich Harvey.

Harvey said he anticipates full containment by late in the week as crews work to extinguish flames in a few stubborn areas. “When there’s been no smoke visible and no heat detected for 24 hours, we’ll be comfortable there will be no further growth and we’ll call it 100 percent contained,” Harvey said.

Investigators, led by U.S. Forest Service experts, have identified the spot where the so-called Waldo Canyon fire began. But Lieutenant Jeff Kramer, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, said he was “not at liberty” to reveal the location because the investigation was continuing. “The cause has not yet been determined,” he added.

A task force consisting of wildfire specialists from several agencies is taking part in the investigation, including local police and fire departments, the FBI and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, police in Colorado Springs said in a statement issued on Thursday. The Colorado Springs fire follows a recent string of suspected arson fires in a neighboring county, but officials have said they had no indication that the Waldo Canyon blaze was deliberately set.

“We’re still investigating whether this is suspicious,” Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Barbara Miller said. The blaze initially gained media attention as it erupted near some of Colorado’s best known landmarks, including the famed Pikes Peak mountaintop whose panoramic summit vistas inspired the song “America the Beautiful.”

Stoked by strong, erratic winds and record triple-digit air temperatures, the fire turned deadly last Tuesday as it suddenly roared through containment lines into a residential subdivision that rests in the bluffs of the city’s western fringe. The wall of flames reduced 346 houses to ash, marking the biggest single loss of property ever from a Colorado wildfire, and President Barack Obama paid a visit to the Waldo Canyon fire zone last Friday.

The bodies of an elderly couple, William Everett, 74, and his wife, Barbara, 73, were found in the ruins of one home, raising to six the overall death toll from a state fire season authorities are calling the worst on record. Most of the residents displaced by the fire have since been allowed to return to their homes.

Meanwhile, Colorado Springs Police Chief Peter Carey said an anonymous donor has offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone who looted the homes of evacuees, following dozens of looting reports.

© NOAA

The prolonged heat across the Midwest has not only set temperature records, it is also expanding and intensifying drought conditions — and relief isn’t on the horizon for most areas, the National Weather Service reported Thursday.

Drought conditions are present in 56 percent of the continental U.S., according to the weekly Drought Monitor.

That’s the most in the 12 years that the data have been compiled, topping the previous record of 55 percent set on Aug. 26, 2003. It’s also up five percentage points from the previous week.

The drought hasn’t been long enough to rank up there with the 1930s Dust Bowl or a bad stretch in the 1950s, David Miskus, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center, told msnbc.com.

“We don’t have that here yet,” he said. “This has really only started this year.”

But for a single year it’s still pretty significant, not far behind an extremely dry 1988.

While 1988 saw much drier conditions and an earlier start to the drought than this year, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 has its own interesting qualities.

“This year the high temperatures have certainly played into this drought,” he told msnbc.com. “There’s a lot more evaporation … and crop demands for water.”

The Drought Monitor noted that the drought is starting to “take a significant toll” on food supplies. “In the primary growing states for corn and soybeans, 22 percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, as are 43 percent of the nation’s pastures and rangelands and 24 percent of the sorghum crop.”

“July 4 – 8, 2012, doesn’t look promising in terms of relief,” it added. “Modest improvement is forecast for most areas that have endured the recent heat wave, but most locations from the Plains eastward are still expected to be warmer than normal.”

Rain and cooler temps are forecast for many areas in mid-July but over the summer “drought is likely to develop, persist or intensify” across much of the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the Corn Belt region, the Mississippi Valley and much of the Great Plains, the weather service said Thursday in its latest Seasonal Drought Outlook.

© NOAA

In Tennessee, the severity of the drought has been reported by county farm agents sending comments to the National Agricultural Statistics Service office in Nashville, the Associated Press reported.

“Crops have really begun to suffer and go backwards this week. Rain is needed yesterday,” wrote agent Richard Buntin in Crockett County.

Crops and pastureland are “burnt to a crispy crunch,” wrote Kim Frady of Bradley County.

“Need rain,” in Loudon County, added John Goddard. “Saw a farmer digging a waterline about 4-5′ deep. Nothing but powder!”

The weather service on Thursday did say there’s a better chance that the El Nino weather system would return by winter.

If it’s a typical El Nino, that would mean better than average rainfall for the southern tier of the U.S., Miskus noted.

“Maybe there’s some hope,” said Rippey, “but that’s way on out in the future. That’s not a short term relief.”

Torrential rain is causing disruption, with up to a month’s rain expected to fall in parts of the UK within a day.

The number of flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected, is steadily rising in England, and more than 120 flood alerts are in place in the UK.

A caravan park in North Yorkshire is being evacuated amid flooding, and sporting fixtures are being affected.

Meanwhile, Prince Charles has visited flood-hit Hebden Bridge, in West Yorkshire, which is seeing more rain.

The Environment Agency has issued 124 flood alerts, which warn people to be prepared for possible flooding.

The town of Darwen in Lancashire, which was evacuated last month when rivers burst their banks – is among 35 places in the North East, the North West, the Midlands and the Anglian region of England, that are subject to a flood warning.

At Cayton Bay caravan park in North Yorkshire, Filey lifeboat crew rescued four disabled people and two carers from their caravan.

In other developments:

• Fourteen tourists, including a baby, were rescued after flash flooding on the Isle of Mull, on the west coast of Scotland, on Thursday
• In parts of Wales, fire crews are dealing with localised flooding
• National Rail is reporting disruptions to some train services due to flooding
• People in north-east England are warned to be vigilant with heavy rain forecast
• Heavy rainfall is causing flooding and travel problems across parts of Nottinghamshire
• An outdoor pursuits festival due to take place at the weekend in South Yorkshire has been cancelled
• Businesses in Lancashire are being evacuated over fears a wall could collapse due to heavy rain
• Part of the M50 motorway is closed in both directions, while 20 elderly people were moved from their sheltered housing in Ross-on-Wye due to flooding
• A flotilla of hundreds of boats marking the 800th anniversary of York receiving its Royal Charter was cancelled
• Parts of Derbyshire have been hit by flash flooding, with pupils from one school sent home

• In County Durham, heavy rain is causing problems for events and businesses

• There has been severe flooding in parts of County Down in Northern Ireland

• Some sporting fixtures, including cricket, horse racing and tennis, have been affected

Meanwhile, traffic outside Silverstone was gridlocked as the first practice session for the British Grand Prix took place.

Some visitors were stranded in their cars on the A43 because they could not get into car parks which had been converted into campsites because of flooding.

And festival-goers heading for T in the Park festival, in Balado, Kinross-shire, meanwhile, were warned to come prepared for heavy rain.

The Met Office has issued an amber warning of severe weather urging people to “be prepared”, while the Environment Agency warns flooding could be the worst of the year so far with transport links and homes likely to be “severely affected”.

The BBC Weather Centre said the North West was among parts of northern England, as well as northern and central Wales, the Midlands and East Anglia, to have the most rainfall.

Between 20mm and 40mm of rain is expected to fall in central and northern areas of England, while the worst-hit places could see 60mm of rain, the average monthly fall for July.

‘Think ahead’

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has issued six flood alerts.

There is no flood warning system in Northern Ireland although the Met Office has issued a yellow warning – urging people to be aware – for its south-eastern tip.

The Environment Agency’s Pete Fox told the BBC that five million homes in the UK are deemed to be at risk of flooding.

He said that, as the rain lands, the agency is using its monitoring stations and river gauging stations to predict more specifically where the weather would be worst.

“We don’t want people to worry right now but we want people to take a look at our website to work out if they are at risk of flooding,” he added.

The Environment Agency has opened incident rooms and has teams out checking on flood defences and clearing any blockages to reduce risks as much as possible.

The latest flood warnings follow the UK’s wettest June since records began in 1910, according to provisional Met Office figures.

BBC Weather’s Chris Fawkes said that, for the past three months, the UK had found itself underneath an accelerating part of the 6-mile high Jet Stream – a fast wind blowing around the planet.

An accelerating Jet Stream causes air to rise upwards through the atmosphere and creates low pressure centres and a greater likelihood of rain, he said.

Over the weekend, further heavy rain is forecast for parts of northern England and central and southern Scotland which will again introduce the risk of localised flooding.

And BBC weatherman Darren Bett said there was “no sign of warm dry weather for a month”.

06.07.2012

Flash Flood

USA

State of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Flash Flood in USA on Friday, 06 July, 2012 at 15:13 (03:13 PM) UTC.

© Facts Not Fantasy Blog

Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it’s not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it’s because of “global warming.”

I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, “Jack doesn’t believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that – to put it in scientific terms – it’s summer and the sun is hot.”

On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that “If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.”

It’s summertime, Seth! It gets hot in the summer!

It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There’s a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It’s about trends and cycles.

It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that “more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States.” The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that “The US is less than 10% of the globe” while ignoring that “Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter.”

What we should all know by now is that the Warmists all use trickery to advance their hoax.

The simple fact is that heat waves are nothing new. In 1936 a North American heat wave was the most severe in the modern history of the continent. It occurred in the middle of the Great Depression, killing more than 5,000 Americans and desiccating vast amounts of crops. To put it in perspective, there were no home air conditioning appliances at the time. People depended on fans to circulate the air.

The sun surely is hot, but its heat – solar radiation – has not been sufficient to avoid cyclical ice ages and short term periods of intense cold because the sun itself goes through cycles of increasing and diminishing solar radiation.

There was a “Little Ice Age” that lasted between 1550 and 1850. Temperatures dropped to the point that the Thames River in England froze over and “frost fairs” were held on its surface. It was felt through Europe and parts of North America.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley noted that “Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods,” adding that “this warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end.”

The average length of interglacial periods is 11,500 years.

In the 1970s, prior to the global warming hoax, many scientists were convinced that a new ice age had begun. In January 2012, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Habibullo Abdusamatov, predicted that the next ice age will begin in 2014 and will last at least two centuries. Regarding the timing, he could be right. He could be wrong. One thing is sure. The Earth is overdue another ice age.

My friend, Robert W. Felix, the author of Not by Fire, But by Ice, is an expert on ice ages and magnetic reversals. It is the latter that accompanied mass extinctions such as the dinosaur’s fate and many other species at the end of the Cretaceous period. In ice ages, the Earth’s water doesn’t disappear, it turns to ice. The current growth of the planet’s glaciers is an indicator of what is actually occurring.

© Facts Not Fantasy Blog

Another indicator, of course, is the sun. On January 29, 2012, writing in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, David Rose noted that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.”

“After emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters, and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.”

“We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24′…but sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th century.” Oddly, despite the obvious and documented effect of the sun on the planet’s average temperature, there remain scientists who are unconvinced of its essential role. Only a relative few even understand the role of magnetic reversals on the planet’s history.

Actually, the diminishing number of sunspots has been known for a while. In June 2010, Stuart Clark, writing in The New Scientist, observed that “For the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

The obvious often catches people by surprise. The last Ice Age came on very swiftly and the next is likely to do so as well. In the meantime, the current heat wave will capture everyone’s attention.

The map is rare and it is truly remarkable that it survived the Second World War unscathed.

The American continent was “christened” by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.

Now, a previously unknown variant of the famous world map from the mapmaker’s workshop has unexpectedly turned up in the collections in the University Library in Munich.

When Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel officially handed over the famous map of the world printed by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470 — 1522) to the Library of Congress In Washington in 2007, she referred to it as “a wonderful token of the particularly close ties of friendship between Germany and America.”

And indeed, the gesture had great symbolic weight, for the chart — then exactly 500 years old — can be seen as America’s birth certificate.

On this map, the New World appears for the first time under the name “America,” chosen to honor the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451 — 1512), whom Waldseemüller erroneously regarded as the discoverer of the continent.

The 1507 world map is a wall map, with an area of three square meters. But the much smaller maps, the so-called globe segments, that Waldseemüller also produced were at least as important for the dissemination of geographical knowledge in his own time.

These depict the world in twelve individual segments, or rather surface wedges, which taper to a point at each end and are printed on a single sheet, like cut-outs on construction paper. When correctly arranged, they form a small globe of about 11 cm in diameter. And in the three rightmost wedges, one sees a huge, boomerang-shaped landmass in the middle of an immense ocean.

The globe places America in the remotest West, seen from Europe and Africa, on the far side of a wide, wide sea.

The surprise find in the stacks at Munich University Library: The segmented world map made by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1507). (Credit: Source: Munich University Library)A “packaged tour” of a new world

The wall map was only a part of a carefully designed package put together by the cartographer Waldseemüller and his colleague Matthias Ringmann in their workshop in the monastery of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges — a combination with which they no doubt hoped to revolutionize how the world was perceived. In addition to the large map, the package included an introduction to the principles of geography or “cosmography” (the Cosmographiae Introductio) — and the segmental maps.

Only a handful of the perhaps 100 sets printed from the original woodblocks are known to have survived. The copy now in Washington, which belonged to the princely House of Waldburg-Wolfegg and Waldsee in Germany, is the sole copy of the large world map that has come down to us. A copy of the Cosmographiae Introductio is among the treasures kept in the Munich University Library (MUL).

Four copies of the segmental maps were previously known to researchers. Three of them are now in Minneapolis, Offenburg and in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, respectively. The fourth was sold at auction for the handsome sum of 1 million dollars by Christie’s in 2005. Members of the staff of the University Library have — quite by accident — now discovered a fifth.

“The newly discovered sheet differs in a number of details from the copies that were already known, and can therefore be regarded as unique,” says Sven Kuttner, Curator of the Library’s Department of Early Printed Books. For one thing, the outlines of the upper halves of the lanceolate sections are much less distinctively incised. The position of Calicut on the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama (1469 — 1523) had made landfall in May 1498, is shown on the fourth, not the fifth, segment of the global map. The style of hatching and the forms of certain letters also differ from their counterparts in other copies. Furthermore, according to Kuttner, the watermark impressed in the paper suggests that “this version may have been printed at some time after the first edition of 1507, somewhere in Alsace.”

The time traveler

The “new” Munich copy of the segmented map itself has obviously followed a tortuous course to reach its present haven. And the story of this voyage is at least as fascinating as that of the discovery and exploration of the New World. Its latest chapter began only a few days ago in the Munich University Library. While working on an ongoing revision of the catalogs, a bibliographer came across something quite sensational in an otherwise unremarkable volume that had been rebound in the 19th century. Tucked in between two printed works on geometry from the early 16th century was the unsought map — a double-page spread in roughly A4 format. The three prints obviously date from the same period, but is there a direct connection between the not entirely disparate subjects? The 19th-century librarians, at any rate, had failed to recognize the significance of Waldseemüller’s map, Kuttner remarks. The first copy of the segmental maps to be discovered only turned up in 1871, in the Hauslab-Liechtenstein Library in Vienna. “And the Munich copy was returned to the obscurity of the stacks.”

But it survived the Second World War unscathed, although the University Library itself was devastated by air raids. In November 1942, large portions of the holdings of older books, including the unassuming volume containing the two geometry treatises, had been transferred to a safer rural location. Stefan Kuttner has ascertained that the book was among the contents of deposit box No. 340, which was first stowed away in Burghausen, and later transported to Niederviehbach near Landshut. The box was returned to Munich in 1955, and provisionally stored in the Northeastern Repository at LMU.

Credit: Source: Munich University LibraryRegrettably, according to Kuttner, the origins of this copy of the segmented world map remain mysterious. One of the works on geometry with which it was bound belonged to the Monastery Library in Oberalteich. The contents of that collection, some 1,400 volumes in all, came into the possession of the University Library, then located in Landshut, during the secularization phase after the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803.

On the other hand, the map could also be directly related to the copy of the Cosmographiae Introductio in the University Library’s own collection. This is a unique early edition with a two-page colored map of the world, sketched in a rather cursory fashion with pen and ink. It was originally part of the collection assembled by the Swiss humanist and polymath Heinrich Loriti Glareanus (1488 — 1563).

The contents of Glarean’s library were acquired by Johann Egolph von Knöringen (1537 — 1575), a later Bishop of Augsburg, when he was still a student at Freiburg University. In 1573, he stipulated in his will that his books, more than ,6000 volumes in all, were to be donated as an endowment to the University Library of Ingolstadt, the forerunner of the Munich University Library.

“Even in our digital age, the originals have lost none of their significance and unique fascination. Treasures like the newly discovered map can only be brought to light by people who work directly with originals,” says Klaus-Rainer Brintzinger, the Director of the University Library, and adds: “We intend to make the map accessible to the public in digital form in time for the Fourth of July — Independence Day in the USA.”
MessageToEagle.com. via Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU)

See also:
Mysterious Ancient Signs In The City Of David Remain Unexplained

Thousands Unknown Ancient Structures Seen From Space:
Puzzling Aerial Archeology In The Middle East   MessageToEagle.com – Thousands of huge ancient structures made of stone are clearly visible from the air.

Their age is estimated to thousands of years and their purpose remains unknown.

These puzzling wheel-shapes, and straight lines, stretch all the way from Syria to Saudi Arabia.

Some call this area the Middle East’s own version of the Nazca Lines.

It is only recently, with help of satellite images that archaeologists have been able to explore this region in more detail.

Since the launch of Google Earth in 2005, archeologists have begun to use the satellite imagery publicly, particularly since its gradual incorporation, beginning in 2007, of high-resolution images. As a result, over some Arab countries-Jordan, Syria and Lebanon particularly-the resolution of available images is now generally high enough to conduct reliable, general archeological surveys.

The Shuway-mas site south of Hayil, Saudi Arabia, which is not even mentioned in the 1998 edition of the Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art is the home of one of the four best collections of ancient rock art in the world. Here we find, numerous ancient stone kites, mounds, and tails.

Arabian Peninsula: The dark lines are the remains of stone walls barely visible on the ground.In the Harrat Khaybar region of Saudi Arabia, however, “kites” take on entirely different shapes-most notably the “square pocket” and “barbed arrow”-and the low walls of many of them show ruler-straight lines, raising new questions for archeologists.Some of these low walls of stone-many long known to archeologists inside Saudi Arabia-are newly visible from any computer in the world. The high-resolution image swaths reveal stunningly well-preserved evidence of widespread human activity in the distant past.

Arabian Peninsula: The dark lines are the remains of stone walls barely visible on the ground.

In the Al-Hayit region, keyhole and pendant shapes vary in size from a few meters to dozens of meters, and they are often found arranged along “avenues” that are invisible to builders of modern highways.Who created these structures and for what purpose?In the 1920′s when British Royal Air Force pilots flew over the northern Harrat Harrah, they were struck by the numbers and variety of archeological remains visible in that rugged, thinly populated landscape.In Jordan, there are similar structures visible for the air. The Bedouin say the structures and walls are “the works of the Old Men”.

In the barren desert landscape, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, there are thousands upon thousands of elaborate stone wheels, measuring up to 70 metres wide and visible only from the sky.

Or you can just see a jumble of boulders that don’t make any sense. But you go up a small distance and they are extraordinary.”

Giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis. CREDIT: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0237 A close-up of one of the mysterious circles. Credit: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0257 This drawing reveal the various shapes these structures can take. Credit: Stafford Smith The stone circles’ age is unknown. They are at least 2,000 years old, but could have been built up to 9,000 years ago.

Compared to the Peruvian desert’s Nazca drawings – which date as far back as the year 400, number in the hundreds and have a maximum breadth of about 270 metres – the Middle East patterns are more numerous, bigger and much older.

“These volcanic lava fields are the last place you’d expect to find these kinds of structures,” Dr Kennedy said. “The landscape is not hospitable. It looks bleak and barren. They’re so unusual.”

At least 3,000 structures have been found in Jordan and Dr Kennedy’s recent research has documented nearly 2,000 in Saudi Arabia.

As seen, there are a huge number, variety and forms of figures in different regions. Unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions. We do not know why they were built. Neither do we know when they were constructed or by whom….
@ MessageToEagle.com.

See also:
Mysterious Ancient Signs In The City Of David Remain Unexplained