WASHINGTON — U.S. scientists were pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration’s skepticism, in some cases at the behest of a former oil-industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday. ‘Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out,’ Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents. ‘Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications,’ Grifo said. Rick Piltz, a former U.S. government scientist who said he resigned in 2005 after pressure to soft-pedal findings on global warming, told the committee in prepared testimony that former White House official Phil Cooney took an active role in casting doubt on the consequences of global climate change. Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before becoming chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigned in 2005 […]
The US wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be ‘important insurance’ against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a UN report on climate change, the first part of which is due out on Friday). The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, which the US opposes. The final report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise an emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment. The US response says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included […]
Billions of people will suffer water shortages and the number of hungry will grow by hundreds of millions by 2080 as global temperatures rise, scientists warn in a new report. The report estimates that between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will be suffering from water scarcity problems by 2080 and between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry. The assessment is contained in a draft of a major international report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released later this year, Australia’s The Age newspaper said. Rising sea levels could flood seven million more homes, while Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef, treasured as the world’s largest living organism, could be dead within decades, the scientists warn, the newspaper said. The Age said it had obtained a copy of the report, believed to be one of three prepared for release by the IPCC, which is highly regarded for its neutrality and caution. Some 500 experts are meeting in Paris this week ahead of the release on Friday of the IPCC’s first report since 2001 on the state of scientific knowledge on global warming. The report will […]
If Moses, after spending 40 days and nights with the Almighty, had come down from Mount Sinai today bearing two tablets with the Ten Commandments, he would have been hard pressed to find a publisher. The pornographic movie business rakes in yearly more than Hollywood ($12 billion vs. $10 billion). ‘Zoo,’ not a pornographic movie, according to director Robinson Devor, pushes the envelope of today’s latest norms by breaking down ‘the last taboo on the boundary of something comprehensible.’ It’s sex between men and animals. ‘Spring Awakening’ is Broadway’s latest hit musical, hailed by reviewers as ‘tastefully erotic’ and ‘a straight shot of eroticism.’ Its sex scenes range from masturbation and sadomasochism to abortion, homosexuality and abuse. Television and mobile phones have pornified the Western world’s popular culture at an alarming rate, making sex more violent. An Internet search for ‘sex + toy + torture’ yielded results by the thousands. Beginning in the raunchy, anything-goes 1960s, the Ten Commandments quickly became multiple choice. Coveting something that belongs to another is now de rigueur. ‘Filthy Lucre for Dummies’ would be a […]
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addresses dignitaries on Monday during the opening of the 8th African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. An African Union summit opened in Ethiopia Monday, with Sudan coming under increasing international pressure to resolve the worsening violence in Darfur./AP UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cited the success story of Korea during a speech urging African leaders to put an end to suffering caused by regional conflicts and to strive for economic development. Delivering an address at the African Union Summit in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Secretary-General Ban spoke of his childhood growing up in a war-torn country plagued by starvation, disease and suffering. He stressed that settling conflicts is a prerequisite for improving the lives of Africa’s people. The Secretary-General told of old women scavenging for scraps, children suffering from malnutrition and rice paddies abandoned after the fratricidal Korean War. Ban said that he still has flashbacks of these memories. He called on African leaders to learn a lesson from South Korea, which rose from the ashes of the Korean War to become a productive economy. Africa could turn the world’s poorest continent into another example of economic success, he […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
