Connecting the Dots, Plane Madness, redux and looking glass weather

The monthly dot connector from the Signs of the Times team

Mother Nature revealed its awesome beauty this month as our Big Blue Marble continues to open up in breathtaking fashion. The sight of Eyjafjallajokull coming to life, while beautiful to behold, may set a terrifying trend as volcanoes wake from their slumber and impact our climate in a sudden and system-changing way. Perhaps it is not without meaning that the first significant volcanic eruption to draw people's attention to our rapidly cooling climate took place in IceLand... the harbinger of IceWorld?

April witnessed deluge after deluge of torrential rains bringing flooding, landslides and misery to many in the Americas and China where large cities are underwater. Arctic-cold weather in the least expected places, more frequent earthquakes and hailstorms of unusual ferocity have extended winter in the northern hemisphere into May, raised seabeds and pelted homes with ice.

Dramatic and significant though it was, did the volcanic eruption in Iceland really merit the unprecedented shutdown of European airspace for a week, with knock-on effects across the world? Who made the call, and on what basis? These are important questions to ask because Eyjafjallajokull's wandering ash cloud now apparently holds the near-term fate of international air travel in its plume, so to speak. With cosmic bombardment underway and magma erupting from the oceans' floor, wrangling over the immediate fiscal losses detract from necessary preparations for the approaching ice age.

As always, the stresses and strains in our environment are mirrored back at us in the political and social events of which we play a more immediate role. We will analyse the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Polish government air crash, the political and corporate back-room manipulation of "Tea Party" activism and the psychopaths on Wall Street's engorgement upon humanity through economic terrorism. We'll observe how The Big Brother Surveillance State and naked scanner racketeering expand unchecked, and consider the geopolitical chess moves behind the Kyrgyz and Thai "Red Shirt" revolutions.

And, of course, we couldn't connect the dots in April without acknowledging the high strangeness of the global UFO wave...

Copious amounts of rainfall hit Rio de Janeiro early in the month while Brazil's second largest city experienced the biggest deluge in its history. Around 150 people were swept to their deaths in the initial flooding and soon 200 more were buried when a devastating landslide hit the Morro Bumba slum. Meanwhile a landslide in northern Italy killed 11 when a train was knocked clean off its tracks. A severe cyclone in eastern India that killed at least 140 people also left over 500,000 homeless. Tornado season arrived in the western hemisphere with The Bahamas and then the southeastern US seeing twisters level homes and wreak "utter obliteration" in Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. Further north Tennessee experienced sudden record-breaking flooding late in the month as storms dumped up to 16 inches of rain over two days, turning highways into rivers and prompting mass evacuations from Nashville. In fact, the scale of the flooding in Nashville is only becoming apparent as we go to press:

Read the rest of the dot connector here..