Informant38

...this year the winds were extraordinarily weak and the cold water did not well up in spring as usual. Water temperatures soared to 7C above normal, which delighted bathers but caused the whole delicate system to collapse. The amount of phytoplankton crashed to a quarter of its usual level.
"In 50 years this has never happened," said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, in Newport, Oregon.
Record numbers of dead seabirds soon washed up on beaches along the coast. There were up to 80 times more dead Brandt's cormorants, a fishing bird, than in previous years.
Tests showed the birds died of starvation. "They are not finding enough food, and so they use up the energy stored in their muscles, liver and body fat," said Hannah Nevins, who investigated similar mass deaths in Monterey Bay.
Many fear the ecological collapse is a portent of things to come, as the world heats up. A Canadian Government report noted that ocean temperatures off British Colombia reached record levels last year as well, blaming "general warming of global lands and oceans".

Geoffrey Lean/Independent UK 13.Nov.05
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The elephant in the room is the strength this news gives the Christian fundamentalists and their handlers. The world is supposed to end in fire. It says so in the book.
Somewhere back in the 70's I had an image come of some MesoAmerican priests, having figured out the cycle of eclipses, using that knowledge to maintain themselves at the apex of their society.
A leg up, by virtue of threatening to darken the sun if the people displeased their proprietary deities.
It wouldn't take much, the common people have an inherent need to understand, or to have things explained to them, and they'll defer that to anyone with confidence and what seems like a logical explanation who can hold their attention.
That holding of attention is what the super-churches are about, television, the bombastic preachers and their vivid oratory.
No earthly power is necessary to darken the sun when it's the shadow of the moon falling on us, regularly, predictably. Prayer doesn't enter into it.
This is different. But how much? What we know about time is like what the people knew about the sun, obvious on the basics, sketchy to non-existent on the whole.
Ignorance and superstition are one thing - understandable, forgivable, expected - but the bigotry and smugness of many of the believers is something I would give much to see erased for good.
What was scary to me was the thought that there was no way to know without dying, if all that they said were true, or just some of it. I could feel the heat coming, but why, and to what end, was and is a mystery.
The rationalist version is incompetence, with a strong element of self-fulfilling prophecy - the set-up being in order to get to heaven you have to want the world to end in fire.
I don't believe the god of Pat Robertson is good or worthy of love or even respect, but I don't necessarily believe he doesn't exist.
What I keep coming back to is the message of the Gospels, not the words but the vibe, the color and tone - love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, inclusion.
Nothing of that is in Revelations or the Old Testament. It makes me wonder.
The world's on fire, this is pretty much irrefutable now.
What happens when people die is still open to discussion.