BREAKING: Martian avalanche caught in the act!

This is TOTALLY HAWESOME: an avalanche on Mars was caught in the act by the HiRISE camera.

This picture shows the billowing dust cloud from an avalanche of ice and dust along scarps — sheer cliffs — near the north pole of Mars. To give you a sense of scale, the cloud is about 180 meters across, and about the same distance from the base of the cliff.

Holy cow.

You can see the cliff in the middle of the picture. It’s 700 meters high (2300 feet!) and slopes at about 60 degrees; that’s pretty close to vertical. To the left you can see white carbon-dioxide frost (which is evaporating as spring ensues in the Martian northern hemisphere) at the top of the cliff.

If my (very) rough calculations are accurate, it would take a rock about 20 seconds to fall from the top of the cliff, and would hit the bottom at about 70 meters/second, or about 150 miles per hour. Look out below!

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Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'

TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose 'the fraud of global warming.'

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

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Cyber-Terrorists Spam the Eco-Terrorists

Was the Earth Liberation Front Web Site Hacked by Viagra?

Have cyber-terrorists attacked the eco-terrorists?

It appears so, based on a look at the Earth Liberation Front Web site, which should be getting a lot of traffic today after the group was implicated in the arson of a luxury Street of Dreams housing development near Seattle.

The apparently authentic Earth Liberation Front Web sites appear to be a mix of content about eco-terrorism and Viagra.

The meta title of the homepage is even "Viagra Sample Pack - Free Viagra Sample," which could reflect some misguided attempt to capture Web traffic from poor old men most likely uninterested in radical environmental terrorism. The "links" navigation at the top of the page links directly to a full-page Viagra ad, and there are Viagra ads all over the site.

But it doesn't appear to be purely a front site put out by some illicit Viagra purveyor. It's a fairly deep site with believable content about the organization, which is a loosely affiliated group of like-minded individuals hell-bent on bringing down environmentally destructive capitalistic business. Because the group is so shadowy, it's not hard to imagine oversight of the Web page being lax enough to allow for some effective hacking. It's not hard to imagine a sneaky Viagra salesman buying the domain name and content after the site was abandoned.

The domain appears to be for sale, but that doesn't explain who is maintaining the site now.

The ELF press office is, according to the Wikipedia page on the organization, defunct. The Daily Green has contacted the Web site seeking information. But that might well just result in a flood of erectile dysfunction spam.

Welcome to the 21st century.

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