Hurricane Lorenzo hits Mexican coast

Lorenzo made landfall early Friday after strengthening rapidly into a Category 1 hurricane as it bore down on Mexico's Gulf Coast with powerful winds and rain, forcing authorities to evacuate low-lying coastal communities.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said the hurricane made landfall along the east-central coast of Mexico, southeast of Tuxpan.

Officials canceled classes and opened more than 60 shelters on the coastline of Veracruz state Thursday, as Mexico's government issued a hurricane warning from Palma Sola to Cabo Rojo.

At least 30 communities near several rivers were ordered to evacuate late Thursday. Residents scrambled to move furniture and belongings to higher ground even as roads began to flood.

"We never expected the hurricane would hit here," said Ribay Peralta, a 33-year-old lawyer who was packing his car with televisions sets, DVD players and other appliances in the town of San Rafael, a low-lying community about 9 miles from Veracruz's coast.

"San Rafael is a town that gets flooded easily," he said by telephone.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said late Thursday that Lorenzo was forecast to strengthen further before hitting land in the "next several hours" near the small port of Tuxpan. It warned that "preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion."

Giant ocean-based pipes could curb global warming

Two of Britain's best known scientists proposed Wednesday to curb global warming by sowing the world's oceans with thousands, perhaps millions, of giant vertical pipes 100-to-200 meters deep.

"We need a fundamental cure for the pathology of global heating," wrote James Lovelock and Chris Rapley in a letter to the British journal Nature. "Emergency treatment could come from stimulating the Earth's capacity to cure itself."

As the planet's atmosphere heats up, they explained, certain cyclical processes that normally regulate climate are beginning to amplify the process of warming rather than holding it in check.

When Arctic sea ice recedes further each year, for example, sunlight falls on heat-absorbing blue water rather than white snow and ice which reflects heat back into space, accelerating the warming process.