Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.:
At least 19 people died, many others were injured, hundreds lost homes and thousands remained traumatized this morning after a vicious swarm of thunderstorms and predawn tornadoes ripped through Central and Northeast Florida early Friday.CNS/MiamiHerald 02.Feb.07
-Guardian/CommonDreams 02.Feb.07
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
-AP/SunHerald 02.Feb.07
Since 1886, Phil has seen his shadow 96 times, hasn't seen it 15 times and there are no records for nine years, according to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. The last time Phil failed to see his shadow was in 1999.
[...]
"It's just kind of fun seeing people go so crazy about a groundhog," Richard Gainor said.
-DerSpiegel 02.Feb.07
James Lovelock is attracting attention again with his provocative ideas. The former hero of the environmental movement has called for an end to "green romanticism." The only way to delay climate catastrophe, says the environmental guru, is through the massive expansion of nuclear energy.
-ScienceDaily 02.Feb.07
The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its report at a Friday morning press conference Webcast around the world, also said global warming could not be reversed.
The rising sea levels and higher temperatures that accompany global warming "would continue for centuries ... even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized," the panel's report said.
Friday "will perhaps one day be remembered as the day when the question mark was removed from the question of whether human activity has anything to do with climate change on this planet," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program, the Chicago Tribune reported. "Those who have doubts can no longer now ignore the evidence."
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In its strongest language to date, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Environmental Climate Change is predicting melting glaciers, rising temperatures and higher sea levels.
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And, from over there in the corner:
Scientific evidence for human-induced global warming will receive a significant boost Friday when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the summary of a key report, according to environmental activists and top Democrats in Congress.CNSNews 02.Feb.07
But wait...
primarily the work of political appointees, not of scientists
"These people are openly declaring that they are going to commit scientific misconduct that will be paid for by the United Nations," Harvard University physicist Lubos Motl wrote on his website last week.
"If they find an error in the summary, they won't fix it," Motl said. "Instead, they will 'adjust' the technical report so that it looks consistent."
In a statement Inhofe slammed what he termed the "systematic and documented abuse" of the scientific process by the IPCC and called for changes that would mitigate against relevant scientific evidence from being excluded from its reports.
"far outside current scientific understandings."
Bonner Cohen, author of "The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences," said in an interview he had similar concerns with what he views as an overly narrow perspective on the science of global warming.
He described geology as the "dog that is barking but being crowded out."
Cohen also said the political summary available on Friday, which precedes the release of the actual scientific data by three months, will overshadow the most important findings in the full report.
"It is safe to assume the summary will have the usual buzzwords, it is going to talk about 'dire consequences' and this is going to be for the media," he said.
But the actual report - when it comes out later this year - will be read by less than one percent of the world's journalists and will be treated accordingly in the media, Cohen predicted.
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There's more than one inviolable taboo operating in American public affairs. Aside from the unmentionable "Lobby" and its tentacles and grasp, there's the secondary logical connect that comes right after the "We're running out of resources" and the "Mankind is causing global warming which is going to doom us all".
That logic's about at the 10-12 year-old level.
Too many people, not enough water, energy etc. - running out of stuff.
Too many people burning too much fuel etc. - global warming.
Ding!
The inevitable outfall from the next part is how to get rid of a bunch of people without destabilizing the socio-economic architecture. Public discussion of this won't further, so it's not happening. But every redneck in his pickup, every retired working guy, every halfway intelligent high school kid, even the middle-class middle-aged stay-at-home moms of America have got it at least that far.
And that's when the herd instincts start to take over - get into the center and hold still, don't run too fast unless you're out at the margins, things like that.
What's most irritating about it all is its obviousness, the disgusting manipulation, the touchie-feelie candy-ass duplicity that serves so readily as a mask for something that's as treacherous and inhuman as anything's ever been.
People are being convinced of their failure, unwitting but selfish and wrong, the wrongness of having caused global warming, of having blindly driven over the edge of some unseen cliff, and will thus be vulnerable to further accusation and attack, more vulnerable to, more accepting of massive cutbacks in the population.
Someone whose self-esteem has been lowered will be much less likely to fight back with everything they have when threatened.
Whereas someone who feels violated, innocent, especially someone who feels violated and innocent and at the same time sees their children threatened, will fight back hard.
People are being convinced of their wrongness, and thereby prepared for their removal.
Lovelock's "only way to delay climate catastrophe" is premised on all other variables remaining relatively constant - population, energy demand, lifestyles based on available energy etc. In that particular frame nuclear power makes sense. There are many other scenarios. Obviously the immediate extinction of the human race would "delay climate catastrophe".
Just as obviously an immediate return to feudal agrarianism worldwide, total reliance on local technologies etc would "delay climate catastrophe".
You could say that a combination of bizarrely selfish economic practices combined with bizarrely selfish technologies and bizarrely selfish religious dogma and bizarrely selfish political doctrine have created this "climate catastrophe". Bizarre selfishness being the unifying feature.
More of the same is being suggested as the cure, which seems a little...incomplete, somehow.
There are undoubtedly miracles available, if we only knew where to look for them.
Meanwhile the lacuna's the tectonic plates, the way the shift of polar ice into the world's seas will alter the bearing stress and the earth's rotation, and what that will cause.
