Thames Barrier Should Protect for 60 More Years

Largely because climate change has not impacted the barrier as much as anticipated, the Thames Barrier is now estimated to protect the capital city for 60 or more years, well beyond 2030 when it was expected to become inefficient.

The Environment Agency (EA) came to this conclusion after completing a six-year investigation into flood-risk within the Thames Estuary.

In more good news, the study found that climate change will not cause as much of an increase in storm surge height in the North Sea as environmentalists had originally predicted.

The EA is recommending that officials plan to wait until around 2070, when a new barrier will need to be built.

Until then, they say, simple maintenance and upgrading of the current one will suffice.

Texas: Blizzard kills cattle

In the Panhandle, a blizzard brought as much as a foot of snow, providing moisture for fields and pastures but putting livestock at risk, particularly in the region's feed yards, reported David Graf, AgriLife Extension agent in Sherman County, north of Amarillo.

The feed yards have the biggest risk of death loss during a blizzard, Graf said.

"Those cattle tend to pile up on you when you get this kind of weather, and it sounds like (we had) about a half to 1 percent of death loss," he said. "They say you can sustain a 5 percent death loss or higher when you get this kind of weather. If you've got a 50,000-head yard, you're still generally seeing a loss of 500 head or so (at 1 percent), so they were generally pleased with these kind of numbers."

Disney and ABC to promote the greatest scientific hoax of all time to impressionable children

In "ABC's School House Rock! Earth" kids will enjoy learning about global warming from a Polar Bear's point of view, carbon footprints from an animated Sasquatch, the importance of tropical rain forests, the benefits of solar and wind power and other important "green" concepts.