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Europe set to trial biometrics at land, sea and air borders
Non-EU nationals are to be asked to provide their facial, fingerprint images – and even iris scans – at numerous border locations across the European Union, as part of a “smart borders” package now being implemented.
According to euobserver, half-dozen major airports will be included initially, although at this stage passengers can refuse to give the data.
Draft internal EU documents (subject to change) say the program is to start in March and run until September.
It is understood that the following airport locations will be used: Arlanda (Sweden), Charles de Gaulle (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal), Madrid (Spain), and Schiphol (Netherlands) as participating airports.
According to euobserver, Frankfurt and Schiphol will ask between four to ten fingerprint sets. Madrid will ask for four and Charles de Gaulle eight. Arlanda, Charles de Gaulle, and Madrid airports will Read more…
Crazy! China Showing A “Mushroom Cloud” Over Europe/Russia in Rover Pictures!
Arctic Sea Ice Melt May Trigger Extreme European Winter
Image: Jenny Downing/Flickr
By Stephen Leahy, the Guardian
The record loss of Arctic sea ice this summer may mean a cold winter for the UK and northern Europe. The region has been prone to bad winters after summers with very low sea ice, such as 2011 and 2007, said Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University.
“We can’t make predictions yet … [but] I wouldn’t be surprised to see wild extremes this winter,” Francis told the Guardian.
This year’s ice melt has broken the 2007 record by an an area larger than the state of Texas.
Polar ice experts “thought that it would be many years until we again saw anything like we saw in 2007″, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.
The unprecedented expanse of ice-free Arctic Ocean has been absorbing the Read more…
Sunspots Can Trigger Frigid Winters in Europe
A major part of the climate change that scientists have documented over the past few decades comes from human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Not all of it, however. Natural climate cycles haven’t magically disappeared — the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, for example, is entering a phase that will likely boost global temperatures temporarily — and scientists are still discovering new ones.
Credit: flickr/mrbeany
The latest comes in a new report published in Geophysical Research Letters. It’s well known that the Sun varies slightly in brightness every 11 years, and while those changes pale beside the effect of human-generated greenhouse gases, according to the report, they’re enough to trigger unusually cold winters in Central Europe.
The smoking gun is the freezing of the Rhine river, something that doesn’t happen often because it’s difficult to freeze such a large, free-flowing volume of water. Those unusually cold winters might come along at random, but by looking back at records dating to all the way back to 1780, a Read more…
Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy UK winters
This winter brought snow as far south as GreeceThe progressive shrinking of Arctic sea ice is bringing colder, snowier winters to the UK and other areas of Europe, North America and China, a study shows.
As global temperatures have risen, the area of Arctic Ocean covered by ice in summer and autumn has been falling.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a US/China-based team show this affects the jet stream and brings cold, snowy weather.
Whether conditions will get colder still as ice melts further is unclear.
There was a marked deterioration in ice cover between the summers of 2006 and 2007, which still holds the record for the lowest extent on record; and it has not recovered since.
The current winter is roughly tracking the graph of 2007, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
The new study is not the first to propose a causal relationship between Read more…
Fears for lambing season as deadly virus arrives in West
A deadly virus sweeping across Europe which could be ‘a catastrophe’ for the farming industry has reached the West, Government scientists revealed last night.
The Schmallenberg virus causes stillbirths and birth defects in sheep, goats and cattle and is so new there is no treatment and no cure.
Yesterday, the Government’s vet agency confirmed that the first case has been reported in Wiltshire, leading to fears that this year’s lambing season could be badly hit.
The chairman of the NFU’s livestock board, Alistair Mackintosh, said the virus, which is named after the German town where it was first spotted and discovered only last year, has “the potential to become a catastrophe in the UK”.
It is believed to be spread by midges and is not thought to be a danger to humans, but farmers have little or no defence against it for their livestock. After the first cases last year in Germany, it quickly spread to Read more…
Officials: Eastern Europe’s cold snap kills more than 600
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — More than 600 people in Eastern Europe have died during a record-breaking cold snap that has brought the heaviest blizzards in recent memory and trapped thousands behind walls of snow, officials said Wednesday.
Authorities in Russia said 205 people have died in the deep freeze that began in late January, while in Ukraine there have been 112 fatalities, and in Poland 107 people lost their lives due to the frigid weather. There were 35 deaths in Hungary, 20 in Serbia, and 10 in Kosovo.
In hard-hit Romania, some 23,000 people remain isolated in 225 communities where more than week of heavy snowfall has blocked roads and wreaked havoc on the rail network.
Nearly 4,000 people cut off for more than a week said Wednesday they were short of food water, and medicine. Authorities said seven people have died in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 86 deaths.
Euro crisis and global downturn
Two latest forecasts, one by the UN and another by the IMF, warn of the threat of global downturn and recession in both 2012 and 2013. Unlike the IMF estimates of 3.3 per cent, the UN forecasts show that the growth will be 2.6 per cent only in the current year 2012. The previous forecasts of UN and the IMF for this year were 3.6 and 3.9 per cent respectively. Both predict growth in developed capitalist countries will be 1.2 to 1.3 per cent only amidst very high unemployment and extreme income inequality. They also reveal that countries like China and India will now face economic slow down which have been the locomotive of the global economy, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. These projections, however, do not assess the likely severe adverse effect of steep rise in the prices of petroleum products recently due to increased tensions in the Iranian Peninsula.
Nonetheless, there is broad consensus that despite abrupt withdrawal of fiscal stimulus and bail-outs playing some role in dampening the growth, the major culprit has been the Read more…
Death count rises as big freeze shuts down eastern Europe
Frozen fish … fishermen’s tents on the Moscow River, where the temperature has fallen to minus 21 degrees as eastern Europe suffers a severe cold spell. Photo: AP
BELGRADE: Rescue helicopters have evacuated dozens of people from snow-blocked villages in Serbia and Bosnia and airlifted in emergency food and medicine as a severe cold spell kept eastern Europe in its icy grip.
The death toll from the cold rose to 83 on Wednesday and emergency crews worked overtime as temperatures sank to minus 32.5 degrees in some areas. Parts of the Black Sea froze near the Romanian coastline and rare snow fell on Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea. In Bulgaria, 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records started 100 years ago as four more people were reported dead from hypothermia. In Russia, temperatures fell to minus 21 in Moscow.
In central Serbia, choppers pulled out 12 people, including nine who went to a funeral but then could not get back over icy, snow-choked roads. Two more people froze to death in the snow and two others are missing, bringing that nation’s death toll to five.
”The situation is dramatic. The snow is up to five metres high in some areas, you can only see Read more…
Global warming: European species lag in habitat shift
PARIS — Fast-track warming in Europe is making butterflies and birds fall behind in the move to cooler habitats and prompting a worrying turnover in alpine plant species, studies published Sunday said.
The papers, both published by the journal Nature Climate Change, are the biggest endeavour yet to pinpoint impacts on European biodiversity from accelerating global temperatures.
A team led by Vincent Devictor of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that from 1990 to 2008, average temperatures in Europe rose by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
This is extremely high, being around 25 percent greater than the global average for all of the last century.
In order to live at the same temperature, species would have to shift northward by 249 kilometres (155 miles), they calculated.
But during this period, butterlies moved only Read more…
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