I had the great luck of sitting in on Diane Leafe Christian's Ecovillage slide show the other night -- and the great news is that she's giving another one right here in Berkeley, California, on Saturday night!.

Diane is the author of two groundbreaking books on the subject: Finding Community and Creating a Life Together.

If you're intrigued about the concept of an Ecovillage, but know little or nothing about them, like me, this is a great way for you to catch up, in a big way, in about 90 minutes, with one of the formost authorities on the subject -- and in a nice friendly party potluck atmosphere.

Now what could be better! :-)

What: Ecovillages: Where They Are, What They're Doing, Why They’re Important -- A Slide show and talk with Diana Leafe Christian

When: Saturday, August 23, 2008

Where: 2339 Parker Street, Berkeley 94704

(south campus close to Telegraph/Dwight) top floor lounge

TIME: 7:00 - 9:00 pm

Free But Donations Appreciated!!

RSVP encouraged but not required to: Freya Carol Hermanson: urherenow@sbcglobal.net

Here's the info straight from the source:

Diane Sez:
If you know anyone in the Bay Area who might like to see my Ecovillage slide show, described below, I'm showing it again on Saturday, Aug. 22nd at the Parker Street Co-op in Berkeley. Here's a description, below.

Ecovillages: Where They Are, What They're Doing, Why They’re Important Slide show and talk with Diana Leafe Christian

Saturday, August 23 2339 Parker Street, Berkeley 94704 (south campus close to Telegraph/Dwight) top floor lounge 7:00 - 9:00 pm Donation Appreciated

With over 200 photos, this hour-long slide show shows the ecological, economic, and social/cultural/spiritual aspects of sustainability in ecovillages worldwide. Diana shows how ecovillages use: * Permaculture design, natural building, off-grid power * Alternative technology, sustainable agriculture * Local currencies, on-site cottage industries * Cooperative decision-making, conflict resolution, and much more

Three kinds of ecovillages:
* Intentional communities in the Industrialized North

* Ecologically aware traditional villages in the Global South

* Sustainability education centers in both hemispheres.

Ecovillage examples include: * Findhorn in Scotland, Auroville in India, Crystal Waters in Australia

* Ecovillages in Italy, Germany, Russia, Israel, South Africa, Senegal, Brazil

* In North America, including Earthaven, Dancing Rabbit, Ecovillage at Ithaca, and Los Angeles Ecovillage

Diana Leafe Christian is author of "Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities" and "Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community" (New Society Publishers, 2003 and 2007). Editor of "Communities" magazine for 14 years, she now publishes “Ecovillages,” a free online publication (EcovillageNewsletter.org). Diana speaks at conferences, and leads workshops for and does consultations for communities in the U.S. and Canada. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina. www.DianaLeafeChristian.org.

Refreshments will be served.

RSVP encouraged but not required to: Freya Carol Hermanson: urherenow@sbcglobal.net

Diana@ic.org (new address)

www.DianaLeafeChristian.org

Author of Finding Community and Creating a Life Together

Sign up for "ECOVILLAGES," my free bimonthly newsletter: www.EcovillageNews.org

Jay and Ryanne came over to my place and interviewed Jamais a couple months ago.

Here's the end result:

I saw a show on Bill Moyers' Wide Angle a few months back that made me take notice of the Avian Flu virus. As Moyers made clear in his show (sorry I didn't tape it), our biggest problem right now is that if there was a pandemic, and we had a cure for it, there is currently no adequate system of distributing such an antedote or vaccine to the large numbers of people that will be in need of it.

Here's the scoop. Note #4 of the Quick Facts. I got all my information from the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control.

Quick Facts: 1) We're talking about the: "H5N1 avian influenza virus" per the who's update here:
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2005_09_29/en/index.html

some cases of H7 too: per:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/avian_influenza/en/

2) Why is the World Health Organization so concerned?

This is the closest we've been to a pandemic since 1968. All the prerequisites for a pandemic have now been met EXCEPT ONE: "The establishment of efficient human-to-human transmission." The virus is morphing, and has expanded its geographical range. Every new human case is another chance for the virus to adjust its structure to be more susceptible to humans. The trouble is, since this is a "Bird Flu," the carriers are literally flying all over the place spreading virus infected bird shit -- whether they appear to be sick or not. (I fear this is going to be bad news for birdies...)

3) What could cause efficient human-to-human transmission to take place?

Two ways: a "reassortment event" or an "adaptive mutation."

A "Reassortment Event," where genetic material is exchanged between human and avian viruses during co-infection of a human or pig, or an "adaptive mutation," a more gradual process, where the capability of these viruses to bind to human cells takes place gradually, advancing with every new infection.

The reassortment even scenario is pretty bleak. The WHO is hoping for an "adaptive mutation," a mutation that happens gradually over time, that might give everyone more time to prepare.

4) Who's getting it so far? So far, according to the WHO's instructions, "the vast majority of human cases have occurred in rural areas." So farmers, basically. One of the main problems seems to be that governments will not compensate farmers for lost birds that are killed after being reported. This makes farmers not want to report outbreaks. Also it's been tough getting the word out to farmers and/or getting medicine and assistance to them.

5) What can be done? Currently, there is no worldwide mass anti-viral drug distribution system. The WHO document suggests that this needs to be created immediately. It seems to me from the documents that antiviral drugs can help cure the disease, but it's unclear which ones or how well they work. It also *seems to me* that we can't create a vaccine until we have the exact virus that we're trying to stop, which hasn't been created yet due to #3 not happening yet. We hope that #3 never does happen, but we need to be ready for it so we can spring into action the moment it does -- because it's probably going to happen at some point with some disease.

6) How many people have died/been infected?

Around 100 people have been infected -- about half of them have died. The last person to die was only 27 years old.
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2005_09_29/en/index.html

Resources

1) The World Health Organization's PDF of Instructions about what to do. Available in six different languages:

"Responding to the avian influenza pandemic threat. Recommended strategic actions"

This document sets out activities that can be undertaken by individual countries, the international community and WHO to prepare the world for the next influenza pandemic and mitigate its impact once international spread has begun.

English

Arabic

Chinese

French

Russian

Spanish

2. World Health Organization - Avian Flu - Fact Sheet
"http://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_01_15/en/

3. World Health Organization - CSR Page - Avian influenza (CSR = Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response)
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/en/

4. Avian influenza – situation in Indonesia – update 32 29 September 2005
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2005_09_29/en/index.html

5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US Department of Health and Human Services) Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/

Glossary:

I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence. But I like to play fair with my blog posts. If I felt the need to look up a word during the course of my research, it is included here.

1. pathogenic: path·o·gen·ic ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pth-jnk) also path·o·ge·net·ic (-j-ntk) adj.

1. Capable of causing disease. 2. Originating or producing disease. 3. Of or relating to pathogenesis.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pathogenic

2. endemic:

en·dem·ic ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-dmk) adj. 1. Prevalent in or peculiar to a particular locality, region, or people: diseases endemic to the tropics. See Synonyms at native. 2. Ecology. Native to or confined to a certain region. n. Ecology An endemic plant or animal.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=endemic

I'm currently experiencing my first
Tsunami Warning.

The first earthquake, measuring a 7.4 on the Richter scale, struck at 6:50 p.m. San Francisco time, centering 90 miles northwest of Eureka, California. A second earthquake measuring a 5.1 struck at 7:57 p.m. 92 miles northeast of San Francisco...
A tsunami warning was issued for the western coasts of the U.S. and parts of Mexico and Canada after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of California, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in an e-mail alert. A second earthquake struck 76 miles west-northwest of Sacramento, the state's capital.

A tsunami warning was in effect for the coastal areas of the California-Mexico border to the northern tip of Vancouver, British Columbia, the West Coast Tsunami Warning Center said. A warning indicates that coastal locations in the warned area should be prepared for flooding, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

oh wait...it just got cancelled.

Well...that was exciting!

A tsunami warning initially issued along the Pacific coast has since been cancelled.

The 7.0-magnitude quake struck at about 7:50 p.m. southwest of the coastal community of Crescent City and 300 miles northwest of San Francisco, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Web site.

Witnesses felt buildings shaking along the California coast but there were no immediate reports of damage.

A tsunami warning was briefly in effect from the California-Mexico border all the way north to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, but was called off about an hour after the quake hit.

KCBS radio reported that residents were being evacuated from low-lying areas of Crescent City, which was struck by a tsunami after an earthquake four decades ago.

Stuart Weinstein, a geologist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, said that if a tsunami were generated, it would not be as strong as the Dec. 26 killer wave in the Indian Ocean.

"We're not expecting anything huge from an event this size," added Charles McCreery, the center's director.

two stories on this page

1. Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=abFBiZWGRk7Y&refer=top_world_news

Tsunami Warning Issued for Western Coast of U.S. (Update1)

June 14 (Bloomberg) -- A tsunami warning was issued for the western coasts of the U.S. and parts of Mexico and Canada after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of California, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in an e-mail alert. A second earthquake struck 76 miles west-northwest of Sacramento, the state's capital.

A tsunami warning was in effect for the coastal areas of the California-Mexico border to the northern tip of Vancouver, British Columbia, the West Coast Tsunami Warning Center said. A warning indicates that coastal locations in the warned area should be prepared for flooding, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The first earthquake, measuring a 7.4 on the Richter scale, struck at 6:50 p.m. San Francisco time, centering 90 miles northwest of Eureka, California. A second earthquake measuring a 5.1 struck at 7:57 p.m. 92 miles northeast of San Francisco.

A tsunami watch was issued for the coastal areas of Vancouver to Sitka, a town of southeast Alaska. A tsunami watch means a tsunami has not been confirmed, though a recent earthquake may have generated large waves that could affect the area.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Jessica Brice in San Francisco at jbrice1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 14, 2005 23:55 EDT

2. http://www.ktvu.com/earthquakes/4610090/detail.html

POSTED: 8:07 pm PDT June 14, 2005
UPDATED: 9:33 pm PDT June 14, 2005

EUREKA -- A major earthquake with a prelimenary magnitude of 7.0 has occurred off the coast of Northern California approximately 90 miles west of Eureka. A tsunami warning initially issued along the Pacific coast has since been cancelled.

The 7.0-magnitude quake struck at about 7:50 p.m. southwest of the coastal community of Crescent City and 300 miles northwest of San Francisco, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Web site.

Witnesses felt buildings shaking along the California coast but there were no immediate reports of damage.

A tsunami warning was briefly in effect from the California-Mexico border all the way north to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, but was called off about an hour after the quake hit.

KCBS radio reported that residents were being evacuated from low-lying areas of Crescent City, which was struck by a tsunami after an earthquake four decades ago.

Stuart Weinstein, a geologist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, said that if a tsunami were generated, it would not be as strong as the Dec. 26 killer wave in the Indian Ocean.

"We're not expecting anything huge from an event this size," added Charles McCreery, the center's director.

Scientists were waiting for signs of any powerful ocean waves to reach tide gauges placed up and down the West Coast, Weinstein said.

"We're monitoring our sea gauges pretty carefully," he said.

In the spring of 1964, a magnitude-8.4 quake in Alaska generated tsunamis that caused damage there and in British Columbia, and in the states of Washington, California and Hawaii. More than 120 died.

Hardest hit was Crescent City, where 11 people were killed after waves reaching as much as 20 feet destroyed half of the waterfront business district.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This is from the November 10, 2004 program.

Note that there is a zip file of all 4 clips also available for download.

Daily Show Clips From November 10, 2004

Included in these clips:
Ashcroft's resignation and hand written resignation letter

Ed Helms on Florida's disenfranchisement ploy of a checkbox in which
voters had to affirm that "I have not be adjudicated mentally incapacitated
with respect to voting, or, if I have, my competency has been restored.

Science Scope - finding the 18,000 year-old remains of a man-like "hobbit"
Global Warming creating a lovely "Northern Sea Route" in Russia
(Makes global warming worth it all!)

Tom Wolfe interview about his new book: "I am Charlotte Simmons."

This is from the October 29, 2004 program of "Real Time" on HBO.

Bill Maher Explaining Why You Should Vote for the Environmentally-friendly candidate!
(That means Kerry!)

Maher explains:

President Bush has quietly built up the worst environmental record of any president since Andrew Jackson stopped killing Indians by hand.

President Bush speaks constantly about how he's the guy to protect us. But what about protecting us from what's actually killing people right here, right now?

I don't know how the Environment got to be the lost issue of the 2004 Election, but may I suggest on Tuesday, instead of voting your pocket books, vote your lungs, vote your kidneys, vote your galbladder. Vote for the organs that are going to have to process all the toxic shit that is in the sky, the groundwater, the food supply and the pharmacy. Vote your grand kids' DNA.

Vote for a president who won't hand the job of protecting the environment over to former oil and lumber executives!

This post goes with this post.

This video was shot on August 6, 2004 in Scotia, California.

My friend Gregory and I went back up to the redwoods last Friday to document the horrors we had seen the week before. To us, these tree carcasses provide a shining symbol of our own demise. The beginning of the end, if you will. Humans in the future will look back at this time period and wonder how we could have been so careless and stupid. These trees help keep us and the whole planet alive.

Here is a short video we have created to illustrate what's going on up there, and, specifically, what we saw two weeks ago that set us on such a rampage to try to save this forest:

Pacific Coast Lumber's Scotia Redwood Slaughter
(Small - 7 MB) (Music is "War Again" from the Variable Unit album Handbook for the Apocalypse.)

Remember! As of this moment, there is something you can do. Please, wherever you are in the world, write a letter (I've provided text and word files) to the Appropriations Committee supporting SB 754, The California Heritage Tree Preservation Act. The vote is taking place this Wednesday, August 11th.

Here are some stills of what's in the video. Please send off letters to Judy Chu today. I'm going to figure out who else is on the Appropriations Committee so we can all send them letters too.

Here's the letter (Text and Word docs of it available here).

August 9, 2004

The Honorable Judy Chu
FAX# 916-319-2149
Email: william.wong@asm.ca.gov

RE: SB 754 - SUPPORT

Dear Assembly Member Chu and Members of the Appropriations Committee,

I urge your support of SB 754, the Heritage Tree Preservation Act. This bill
has been carefully written to protect some of California's largest and oldest
trees while minimizing impacts to landowners, jobs and state revenues. The
bill minimizes and offsets costs and it preserves revenues to the state from
tourism, recreation and fisheries.

Less than one percent of California's old-growth trees remain standing on
non-federal forestland. SB 754 will protect these trees and the ecological
and economic benefits they bring to our state. Millions of tourists flock
to California's forests each year to witness these towering giants with their
own eyes. The trees protected by this bill are among the oldest, tallest, and
largest living things on earth.

Please approve SB 754 and help us preserve California's ancient trees for
future generations.

Sincerely,

Your name and address here

The Shrub's own experts are telling us we're all hosed. (Over the next 3-20 years).

What do you think guys? Is this for real? Or are they just trying to freak us out?

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
By Mark Townsend and Paul Harris for the Observer.

and

Leaked Pentagon report warns climate change may bring famine, war: report
By AFP.

Here's a clip from the AFP story:

The report, quoted in the paper, concluded: "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.... Once again, warfare would define human life."

Its authors -- Peter Schwartz, a CIA (news - web sites) consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of Global Business Network based in California -- said climate change should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue.

It "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern", they were quoted as saying.

Some examples given of probable scenarios in the dramatic report include:

-- Britain will have winters similar to those in current-day Siberia as European temperatures drop off radically by 2020.

-- by 2007 violent storms will make large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable and lead to a breach in the acqueduct system in California that supplies all water to densely populated southern California

-- Europe and the United States become "virtual fortresses" trying to keep out millions of migrants whose homelands have been wiped out by rising sea levels or made unfarmable by drought.

-- "catastrophic" shortages of potable water and energy will lead to widespread war by 2020.

Randall, one of the authors, called his findings "depressing stuff" and warned that it might even be too late to prevent future disasters.

"We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he told the paper.

Experts familiar with the report told the newspaper that the threat to global stability "vastly eclipses that of terrorism".

Taking environmental pollution and climate change into account in political and military strategy is a new, complicated and necessary challenge for leaders, Randall said.

"It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat," he said.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad (other article follows):

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

***

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&e=2&u=/afp/britain_us_environment

Leaked Pentagon report warns climate change may bring famine, war: report

Sun Feb 22, 5:17 PM ET

Add Politics - AFP to My Yahoo!

LONDON (AFP) - A secret report prepared by the Pentagon (news - web sites) warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater threat than terrorism.

Pentagon Photo

The report was ordered by an influential US Pentagon advisor but was covered up by "US defense chiefs" for four months, until it was "obtained" by the British weekly The Observer.

The leak promises to draw angry attention to US environmental and military policies, following Washington's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites) on climate change and President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s skepticism about global warning -- a stance that has stunned scientists worldwide.

The Pentagon report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, predicts that "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies," The Observer reported.

The report, quoted in the paper, concluded: "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.... Once again, warfare would define human life."

Its authors -- Peter Schwartz, a CIA (news - web sites) consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of Global Business Network based in California -- said climate change should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue.

It "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern", they were quoted as saying.

Some examples given of probable scenarios in the dramatic report include:

-- Britain will have winters similar to those in current-day Siberia as European temperatures drop off radically by 2020.

-- by 2007 violent storms will make large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable and lead to a breach in the acqueduct system in California that supplies all water to densely populated southern California

-- Europe and the United States become "virtual fortresses" trying to keep out millions of migrants whose homelands have been wiped out by rising sea levels or made unfarmable by drought.

-- "catastrophic" shortages of potable water and energy will lead to widespread war by 2020.

Randall, one of the authors, called his findings "depressing stuff" and warned that it might even be too late to prevent future disasters.

"We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he told the paper.

Experts familiar with the report told the newspaper that the threat to global stability "vastly eclipses that of terrorism".

Taking environmental pollution and climate change into account in political and military strategy is a new, complicated and necessary challenge for leaders, Randall said.

"It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat," he said.

Coming from the Pentagon, normally a bastion of conservative politics, the report is expected to bring environmental issues to the fore in the US presidential race.

Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists, an influential and non-partisan group that includes 20 Nobel laureates, accused the Bush administration of having deliberately distorted scientific fact to serve its policy agenda and having "misled the public".

Its 38-page report, which it said took over a year to prepare and was not time to coincide with the campaign season, details how Washington "systematically" skewed government scientific studies, suppressed others, stacked panels with political and unqualified appointees and often refused to seek independent expertise on issues.

Critics of the report quoted by the New York Times denied there was deliberate misrepresentation and called it politically motivated.

The person behind the leaked Pentagon report, Andrew Marsall, cannot be accused of the same partisan politicking.

Marsall, 82, has been an advisor for the defense department for decades, and was described by The Observer as the author of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plans for a major transformation of the US military.

Aw come on -- we just went through all this trouble to take over Iraq, and now we find out we can make oil out of... anything?

Anything into
Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste
into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
By Brad Lemley for Discover Magazine.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.

Really.

...Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant—an artless assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings—as if it were his favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing. The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers—that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit."

...Chemistry, not alchemy, turns (A) turkey offal—guts, skin, bones, fat, blood, and feathers—into a variety of useful products. After the first-stage heat-and-pressure reaction, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates break down into (B) carboxylic oil, which is composed of fatty acids, carbohydrates, and amino acids. The second-stage reaction strips off the fatty acids' carboxyl group (a carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, and a hydrogen atom) and breaks the remaining hydrocarbon chains into smaller fragments, yielding (C) a light oil. This oil can be used as is, or further distilled (using a larger version of the bench-top distiller in the background) into lighter fuels such as (D) naphtha, (E) gasoline, and (F) kerosene. The process also yields (G) fertilizer-grade minerals derived mostly from bones and (H) industrially useful carbon black...

Feedstock is funneled into a grinder and mixed with water to create a slurry that is pumped into the first-stage reactor, where heat and pressure partially break apart long molecular chains. The resulting organic soup flows into a flash vessel where pressure drops dramatically, liberating some of the water, which returns back upstream to preheat the flow into the first-stage reactor. In the second-stage reactor, the remaining organic material is subjected to more intense heat, continuing the breakup of molecular chains. The resulting hot vapor then goes into vertical distillation tanks, which separate it into gases, light oils, heavy oils, water, and solid carbon. The gases are burned on-site to make heat to power the process, and the water, which is pathogen free, goes to a municipal waste plant. The oils and carbon are deposited in storage tanks, ready for sale.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.discover.com/may_03/gthere.html?article=featoil.html

Anything into Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

By Brad Lemley Photography by Tony Law

Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really. "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world." "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director. The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes.

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this." But first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a glass beaker. It really is a lovely oil. "The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline." Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy."

Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this—generally thousands or millions of years—because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds. Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried to do the transformation in one step—superheat the material to drive off the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel. That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous substances to pollute the finished product. Very wet waste—and much of the world's waste is wet—is particularly difficult to process efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to make the stuff. That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he "had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in 1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by 1999. Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics. So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle of pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's exactly what it is. Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long, three feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating coils. He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that we make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other processes all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank, with heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures and pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat into the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic material—not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes." Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a lower pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes. The rapid depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's free water. Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water back up there," Appel says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the beginning of the process, "to heat the incoming stream." At this stage, the minerals—in turkey waste, they come mostly from bones—settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and magnesium, the dried brown powder "is a perfect balanced fertilizer," Appel says. The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. "This technology is as old as the hills," says Appel, grinning broadly. The reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit to further break apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered carbon—used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners—from the bottom. "Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant to heat the process," Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold to the highest bidders. Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes—yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so great about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin—very toxic." Brian Appel, CEO of
Changing World Technologies, strolls through a thermal depolymerization plant in Philadelphia. Experiments at the pilot facility revealed that the process is scalable—plants can sprawl over acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be "small enough to go on the back of a flatbed truck" and handle just one ton daily, says Appel.

The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer next to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags sent by a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up appliances, each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a refrigerator into a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking the bag. "It's PVC, wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different things. This process handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the ground-up appliances is a plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops the lid and instantly regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty." Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "It's a two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you do the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try." "The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says. "If it contains carbon, we can do it." à This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.

The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time. At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the air with the distinctive tang of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large-scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging carcasses clanks past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's waste—feathers, organs, and other nonusable parts—to a rendering facility where it was ground and dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding animals to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization. "In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change everything." Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant—an artless assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings—as if it were his favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing. The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers—that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit." He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the maintenance—it's all proven technology." And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there." "We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works are plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim.

EUREKA:

Chemistry, not alchemy, turns (A) turkey offal—guts, skin, bones, fat, blood, and feathers—into a variety of useful products. After the first-stage heat-and-pressure reaction, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates break down into (B) carboxylic oil, which is composed of fatty acids, carbohydrates, and amino acids. The second-stage reaction strips off the fatty acids' carboxyl group (a carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, and a hydrogen atom) and breaks the remaining hydrocarbon chains into smaller fragments, yielding (C) a light oil. This oil can be used as is, or further distilled (using a larger version of the bench-top distiller in the background) into lighter fuels such as (D) naphtha, (E) gasoline, and (F) kerosene. The process also yields (G) fertilizer-grade minerals derived mostly from bones and (H) industrially useful carbon black.

Garbage In, Oil Out

Feedstock is funneled into a grinder and mixed with water to create a slurry that is pumped into the first-stage reactor, where heat and pressure partially break apart long molecular chains. The resulting organic soup flows into a flash vessel where pressure drops dramatically, liberating some of the water, which returns back upstream to preheat the flow into the first-stage reactor. In the second-stage reactor, the remaining organic material is subjected to more intense heat, continuing the breakup of molecular chains. The resulting hot vapor then goes into vertical distillation tanks, which separate it into gases, light oils, heavy oils, water, and solid carbon. The gases are burned on-site to make heat to power the process, and the water, which is pathogen free, goes to a municipal waste plant. The oils and carbon are deposited in storage tanks, ready for sale. — Brad Lemley

In case you're ever in a conversation with some bozo that tries to tell you that the fact of whether or not global warming is a reality is still in dispute, you can show them this.

Now. Will someone please give a heads up to the Shrub Administration?
Reaping the Whirlwind
Extreme weather prompts unprecedented global warming alert
In The Independent.

In an astonishing announcement on global warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organisation signalled last night that the world's weather is going haywire.

In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks, from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change.

The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from an impeccably respected UN organisation that is not given to hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it to claim that the direst warnings of climate change are being borne out).

The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of 185 countries contribute, takes the view that events this year in Europe, America and Asia are so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of it immediately.

The extreme weather it documents, such as record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, is consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not only becomes hotter but much more unstable. "Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase," the WMO said, giving a striking series of examples...

"New analyses of proxy data for the northern hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years."

While the trend towards warmer temperatures has been uneven over the past century, the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period...

It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have now all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001.

The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO says, it is a reality.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=421166

Reaping the Whirlwind
The Independent

Thursday 03 July 2003

Extreme weather prompts unprecedented global warming alert

In an astonishing announcement on global warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organisation signalled last night that the world's weather is going haywire.

In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks, from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change.

The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from an impeccably respected UN organisation that is not given to hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it to claim that the direst warnings of climate change are being borne out).

The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of 185 countries contribute, takes the view that events this year in Europe, America and Asia are so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of it immediately.

The extreme weather it documents, such as record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, is consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not only becomes hotter but much more unstable. "Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase," the WMO said, giving a striking series of examples.

In southern France, record temperatures were recorded in June, rising above 40C in places - temperatures of 5C to 7C above the average.

In Switzerland, it was the hottest June in at least 250 years, environmental historians said. In Geneva, since 29 May, daytime temperatures have not fallen below 25C, making it the hottest June recorded.

In the United States, there were 562 May tornadoes, which caused 41 deaths. This set a record for any month. The previous record was 399 in June 1992.

In India, this year's pre-monsoon heatwave brought peak temperatures of 45C - 2C to 5C above the norm. At least 1,400 people died in India due to the hot weather. In Sri Lanka, heavy rainfall from Tropical Cyclone 01B exacerbated wet conditions, resulting in flooding and landslides and killing at least 300 people. The infrastructure and economy of south-west Sri Lanka was heavily damaged. A reduction of 20-30 per cent is expected in the output of low-grown tea in the next three months.

Last month was also the hottest in England and Wales since 1976, with average temperatures of 16C. The WMO said: "These record extreme events (high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and droughts) all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages, which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years.

"New record extreme events occur every year somewhere in the globe, but in recent years the number of such extremes have been increasing.

"According to recent climate-change scientific assessment reports of the joint WMO/United Nations Environmental Programme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global average surface temperature has increased since 1861. Over the 20th century the increase has been around 0.6C.

"New analyses of proxy data for the northern hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years."

While the trend towards warmer temperatures has been uneven over the past century, the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period.

Global average land and sea surface temperatures in May 2003 were the second highest since records began in 1880. Considering land temperatures only, last May was the warmest on record.

It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have now all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001.

The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO says, it is a reality.

This is a great article on why Hydrogen cells can work, and what we need to get started doing technologically and regulatory/legislative-wise so we can get the show on the road. (Thanks Joi.)
How Hydrogen Can Save America
By Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall for Wired.

There's only one way to insulate the US from the corrosive power of oil, and that's to develop an alternative energy resource that's readily available domestically. Looking at the options - coal, natural gas, wind, water, solar, and nuclear - there's only one thing that can provide a wholesale substitute for foreign oil within a decade: hydrogen. Hydrogen stores energy more effectively than current batteries, burns twice as efficiently in a fuel cell as gasoline does in an internal combustion engine (more than making up for the energy required to produce it), and leaves only water behind. It's plentiful, clean, and - critically - capable of powering cars. Like manned space flight in 1961, hydrogen power is proven but primitive, a technology ripe for acceleration and then deployment. (For that, thank the Apollo program itself, which spurred the development of early fuel cells.)...

How Hydrogen Can Save America:

1. Solve the hydrogen fuel-tank problem.

2. Encourage mass production of fuel cell vehicles.

3. Convert the nation's fueling infrastructure to hydrogen.

4. Ramp up hydrogen production.

5. Mount a public campaign to sell the hydrogen economy.

By pursuing all five at once, the government can create a self-sustaining cycle of supply and demand that gains momentum over the coming decade and supplants the existing energy market in the decades that follow. Rather than waiting to build a hydrogen infrastructure from scratch, the US can start building the new fuel economy immediately by piggybacking on existing petroleum-based industries. Once customers are demanding and producers are supplying, there will be time to create a cleaner, more efficient hydrogen-centric infrastructure that runs on market forces alone.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen.html

Wired Magazine
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How Hydrogen Can Save America

The cost of oil dependence has never been so clear. What had long been largely an environmental issue has suddenly become a deadly serious strategic concern. Oil is an indulgence we can no longer afford, not just because it will run out or turn the planet into a sauna, but because it inexorably leads to global conflict. Enough. What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power. The technology is at a tipping point. Terrorism provides political urgency. Consumers are ready for an alternative. From Detroit to Dallas, even the oil establishment is primed for change. We put a man on the moon in a decade; we can achieve energy independence just as fast. Here's how.

By Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall

Four decades ago, the United States faced a creeping menace to national security. The Soviet Union had lobbed the first satellite into space in 1957. Then, on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off in Vostok 1 and became the first human in orbit.

President Kennedy understood that dominating space could mean the difference between a country able to defend itself and one at the mercy of its rivals. In a May 1961 address to Congress, he unveiled Apollo - a 10-year program of federal subsidies aimed at "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The president announced the goal, Congress appropriated the funds, scientists and engineers put their noses to the launchpad, and - lo and behold - Neil Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface eight years later.

The country now faces a similarly dire threat: reliance on foreign oil. Just as President Kennedy responded to Soviet space superiority with a bold commitment, President Bush must respond to the clout of foreign oil by making energy independence a national priority. The president acknowledged as much by touting hydrogen fuel cells in January's State of the Union address. But the $1.2 billion he proposed is a pittance compared to what's needed. Only an Apollo-style effort to replace hydrocarbons with hydrogen can liberate the US to act as a world leader rather than a slave to its appetite for petroleum.

Tronic Studio
Tronic Studio
Money can do more than ease the pain of lost income. It can turn oil companies into the hydrogen economy's standard bearers.

Once upon a time, America's oil addiction was primarily an environmental issue. Hydrocarbons are dirty - befouling the air and water, possibly shifting the climate, and causing losses of biodiversity and precious coastal real estate. In those terms, the argument is largely political, one of environmental cleanliness against economic godliness. The horror of 9/11 changed that forever. Buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center was the myth that America can afford the dire costs of international oil politics. The price of the nation's reliance on crude has included '70s-style economic shocks, Desert Storm-like military adventures, strained relationships with less energy-hungry allies, and now terror on our shores.

George W. Bush arrived in Washington, DC, as a Texan with deep roots in the oil business. In the days following September 11, however, he transformed himself into the National Security President. Today, his ambition to protect the United States from emerging threats overshadows his industry ties. By throwing his power behind hydrogen, Bush would be gambling that, rather than harming Big Oil, he could revitalize the moribund industry. At the same time, he might win support among environmentalists, a group that has felt abandoned by this White House.

According to conventional wisdom, there are two ways for the US to reduce dependence on foreign oil: increase domestic production or decrease demand. Either way, though, the country would remain hostage to overseas producers. Consider the administration's ill-fated plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. For all the political wrangling and backlash, that area's productivity isn't likely to offset declining output from larger US oil fields, let alone increase the total supply from domestic sources. As for reducing demand, the levers available are small and ineffectual. The average car on the road is nine years old, so even dramatic increases in fuel efficiency today won't head off dire consequences tomorrow. Moreover, the dynamism at the heart of the US economy depends on energy. Growth and consumption are inextricably intertwined.

There's only one way to insulate the US from the corrosive power of oil, and that's to develop an alternative energy resource that's readily available domestically. Looking at the options - coal, natural gas, wind, water, solar, and nuclear - there's only one thing that can provide a wholesale substitute for foreign oil within a decade: hydrogen. Hydrogen stores energy more effectively than current batteries, burns twice as efficiently in a fuel cell as gasoline does in an internal combustion engine (more than making up for the energy required to produce it), and leaves only water behind. It's plentiful, clean, and - critically - capable of powering cars. Like manned space flight in 1961, hydrogen power is proven but primitive, a technology ripe for acceleration and then deployment. (For that, thank the Apollo program itself, which spurred the development of early fuel cells.)

Many observers view as inevitable the transition from an economy powered by fossil fuels to one based on hydrogen. But that view presupposes market forces that are only beginning to stir. Today, power from a fuel cell car engine costs 100 times more than power from its internal combustion counterpart; it'll take a lot of R&D to reduce that ratio. More daunting, the notion of fuel cell cars raises a chicken-and-egg question: How will a nationwide fueling infrastructure materialize to serve a fleet of vehicles that doesn't yet exist and will take decades to reach critical mass? Even hydrogen's boosters look forward to widespread adoption no sooner than 30 to 50 years from now. That's three to five times too long.

Adopting Kennedy's 10-year time frame may sound absurdly optimistic, but it's exactly the kick in the pants needed to jolt the US out of its crippling complacency when it comes to energy. A decade is long enough to make a serious difference but short enough that most Americans will see results within their lifetimes. The good news is that the technical challenges are issues of engineering rather than science. That means money can solve them.

How much money? How about the amount spent to put a man on the moon: $100 billion in today's dollars. With that investment, the nation could shift the balance of power from foreign oil producers to US energy consumers within a decade. By 2013, a third of all new cars sold could be hydrogen-powered, 15 percent of the nation's gas stations could pump hydrogen, and the US could get more than half its energy from domestic sources, putting independence within reach. All that's missing is a national commitment to make it happen.

It'd be easy - too easy - to misspend $100 billion. So the White House needs a plan. The strategy must take advantage of existing infrastructure and strengthen forces propelling the nation toward hydrogen while simultaneously removing obstacles. There are five objectives:

Peter Schwartz (peter_schwartz@gbn.com) is a partner in the Monitor Group and chair of Global Business Network, a scenario-planning firm. Doug Randall (doug_randall@gbn.com) is senior practitioner at GBN. Schwartz, a former futurist for Shell Oil, is an investor in two companies developing hydrogen power technologies.

Page 2 >>

How Hydrogen Can Save America (continued)

1. Solve the hydrogen fuel-tank problem.

2. Encourage mass production of fuel cell vehicles.

3. Convert the nation's fueling infrastructure to hydrogen.

4. Ramp up hydrogen production.

5. Mount a public campaign to sell the hydrogen economy.

By pursuing all five at once, the government can create a self-sustaining cycle of supply and demand that gains momentum over the coming decade and supplants the existing energy market in the decades that follow. Rather than waiting to build a hydrogen infrastructure from scratch, the US can start building the new fuel economy immediately by piggybacking on existing petroleum-based industries. Once customers are demanding and producers are supplying, there will be time to create a cleaner, more efficient hydrogen-centric infrastructure that runs on market forces alone.

1. Solve the hydrogen fuel-tank problem
The fuel cell, essentially a battery with a replaceable energy storage medium, isn't new. The basic ideas were in place by the mid-1800s, and the first proton-exchange membrane fuel cell - the type most practical for use in automobiles - was built by General Electric in the early '60s. Unlike a combustion engine, in which exploding gas pushes pistons, a fuel cell engine strips electrons from hydrogen and uses the resulting electrical current to power a motor. Then it combines the remaining hydrogen ions (protons) with oxygen to form water, the only byproduct. (A hybrid electrical engine is something else: a gasoline engine that powers a battery.)

In 1993, Canadian fuel cell manufacturer Ballard Power Systems began using the technology in buses, which could accommodate huge first-generation hydrogen engines and fuel tanks. The engines have since become smaller, but carrying enough hydrogen for 400 miles of driving - the range consumers generally expect - remains a challenge.

The Bush administration should spend $15 billion to solve this problem. The main question is whether to carry the fuel in gas, liquid, or solid form, each of which offers its own advantages and disadvantages. Until the industry settles on a standard, the market won't support mass production or ubiquitous filling stations.

The simplest option is gaseous hydrogen. The problem: It takes up a lot of room, so the gas must be compressed, but this requires a tank capable of withstanding high pressure. To carry enough fuel for 400 miles of travel, the tank would need to withstand 10,000 pounds per square inch - 50 times the pressure in a combustion engine's cylinders - and to keep it from bursting in an impact, it would need to tolerate 20,000 pounds per square inch. More research is needed to find materials strong enough to do the job yet light enough to carry and cheap enough to mass-produce.

Liquid hydrogen also has pros and cons. It exerts far less pressure on the tank, but it must be cooled to -423 degrees Fahrenheit at the pump and kept that way in the vehicle. This refrigeration demands a significant amount of energy, and insulating the tank can multiply its size. What's more, even with the best insulation, as much as 4 percent of the liquid evaporates daily, creating pressure that can only be relieved by bleeding off the vapor. As a result, a car left at the airport for two weeks would lose half its fuel. Scientists need to find a way to eliminate or utilize this boil-off.

In the long run, the most promising approach is to fill the tank with a solid material that soaks up hydrogen like a sponge at fill-up and releases it during drive time. Currently, the options include lithium hydride, sodium borohydride, and an emerging class of ultraporous nanotech materials. Unlike gaseous hydrogen, these substances can pack a lot of power into a small space of arbitrary shape. And unlike liquid hydrogen, they can be kept at room temperature. On the other hand, energy is required to infuse the solid medium with hydrogen, and in some cases very high temperatures are required to get the fuel back out, exacting a huge toll in efficiency. Also, filling the tank can take far more time than pumping gasoline. Government money could bridge the gap between today's experiments and a viable solution.

2. Encourage mass production of fuel cell vehicles
Once the storage problem has been solved, carmakers should be encouraged to gear up for mass production of fuel cell vehicles.

Detroit is already moving in that direction. To date, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and General Motors have spent roughly $2 billion developing fuel cell cars, buses, and trucks, with the first products due to hit the market this year. Ford chair William Clay Ford Jr. has proclaimed that fuel cells will "finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine."

To make sure the transition doesn't take another century, though, the Bush administration should allocate $10 billion to help automakers manufacture fuel cells efficiently and cheaply, either on their own (like GM) or through contracts with government-approved fuel cell developers. Funding should be contingent on the companies adhering to a strict schedule for bringing hydrogen-based vehicles to market (coordinated, of course, with the schedule for bringing fueling stations online).

A mandatory portion should be set aside for marketing. Detroit will face a tremendous hurdle of consumer acceptance, and it should take full advantage of Madison Avenue's skills to convince the public that fuel cell cars aren't just viable, but desirable. This isn't a fantasy. Toyota's Prius, the first mass-produced gasoline/electric hybrid car, has sold more than 100,000 units since its 1997 debut, proving that the public will embrace a radically different automobile.

3. Convert the fueling infrastructure to hydrogen
Of course, no one will drive a hydrogen-powered car off the lot unless they're confident they'll be able to get fuel when and where they need it. That's why the Bush administration must focus on infrastructure as well as vehicles.

Like the car companies, oil producers have already taken steps toward an oil-free future. Over the past 15 years, corporations like Shell and Exxon have ceded their leadership in oil production to a dozen state-owned enterprises in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Norway. Instead they've focused on adding value farther down the supply chain by refining crude into gasoline and distributing and selling it through filling stations. They know they could play the same role in a hydrogen economy, which is why Shell and BP have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in hydrogen storage and production technology. Indeed, BP, formerly British Petroleum, has rebranded itself Beyond Petroleum.

Page 3 >>

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How Hydrogen Can Save America (continued)

The major oil companies are already extracting hydrogen from gasoline for industrial uses at nine refinery complexes throughout the United States. With a little push, these plants could serve as hubs for a nascent hydrogen-distribution network.

Converting filling stations is bound to cost billions of dollars over several decades. But it should cost relatively little to retrofit clusters of stations in proximity to both a hydrogen-producing refinery and a population center where fuel cell vehicles are sold. Oil companies could meet initial demand by trucking hydrogen from refineries to these stations. As the number of fuel cell vehicles on the road rises, stations that aren't served by refinery hubs could install processors, called reformers, that use electricity to extract hydrogen from gasoline or water. The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling.

In the long run, a pipeline piggybacking on existing natural gas pipelines might deliver most of the fuel, either from high-volume plants or more widely distributed facilities. The administration should set aside $10 billion for incentives like interest-free loans to encourage oil companies to construct a national hydrogen pipeline. It might also grant five-to-ten-year monopoly rights to pipeline builders.

Hydrogen's fuel-efficiency offers immediate benefits to transportation companies that maintain their own vehicles and use them for limited, predictable distances. In fact, FedEx and UPS plan to phase in fuel-cell trucks over the next five years. The Bush administration should take advantage of this synergy between early adopters and the national interest by offering $10 billion in tax breaks to companies that invest in hydrogen-powered fleets. Also, in regions served by a refinery hub, $5 billion should be allocated for fuel cell police cars, ambulances, maintenance trucks, and other municipal vehicles. The military is another sensible target, since 60 percent of its logistics budget is devoted to transporting gasoline.

The critical need to build infrastructure along with vehicles brings to mind an earlier Apollo-like initiative: Eisenhower's National Defense Highway Act. As an officer during World War II, Ike struggled to move troops across the US and saw how Germany's highways conferred a military advantage. Once in the Oval Office, he called for $300 billion in today's dollars to build an interstate highway system. Funded by a gas tax, that program's dramatic success proved that national security can motivate federal infrastructure projects on a grand scale.

4. Ramp up hydrogen production
But where will the hydrogen come from? Ironically, while hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, it rarely appears in its pure form. It must be extracted from substances that contain it, like fossil fuels and water. The problem is that the extraction itself requires power. Currently, the least expensive method is a process known as steam reforming, in which natural gas reacts chemically with steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Far preferable would be to use carbon-free resources like solar, wind, and hydropower to produce electricity for electrolysis, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen would make renewable energy practical, acting as a storage medium for the modest amounts of energy such resources produce. Wind power, especially, lends itself to this sort of use. This and other renewables should receive $10 billion as a seed for long-term development.

This suggests a role for a clean, efficient, and much neglected energy source: nuclear. Like the fuel cell, the nuclear generator is a technology ripe for exploitation. Unlike the solid-core reactors of the past, pebble-bed modular reactors such as the one at Koeberg, South Africa, don't get hot enough to risk melting down. Koeberg uses small graphite-covered uranium balls rather than plutonium rods, and the reactor's cooled by helium rather than water. This new design is so efficient, it might make nuclear competitive with coal and oil. In any event, the nuclear power industry is in dire need of research for everything, from generation to waste treatment. Thus, $10 billion should be allocated to developing and securing nuclear technology that can power the hydrogen revolution.

Nuclear power will serve as a stopgap, enabling the US to achieve energy independence while allowing wind, solar, and hydropower a chance to mature. Given the choice between powering the carbon-free hydrogen economy with fossil fuels or nuclear energy, even Greenpeace might embrace nuke plants as the lesser evil.

As all the various subsidies kindle a self-sustaining economy, they should be tapered and the money shunted to the other major power in the conversion from oil to hydrogen: electric utilities. Within a decade, outlays to power companies should be aimed at connecting hydrogen pipelines to the power stations.

5. Mount a Public Campaign To Sell the Hydrogen Economy
With a growing federal deficit and a stagnant economy, this might seem like a singularly bad time to unleash an immense tide of new subsidies. And let's be honest: Even framed as a national security issue, a $100 billion proposal won't go down easily on Capitol Hill or in Peoria. This is why the Bush administration's campaign to sell the hydrogen economy must be even more vigorous than its campaign to sell the war against Iraq.

Financially, the case is compelling. One hundred billion dollars is less than a quarter of what the federal government plans to spend annually on defense within five years. A 5 cent per gallon increase in the gasoline tax - less than the seasonal variation in gasoline prices - would pay for part of it. For the rest, the government could issue "H Bonds." Like Liberty Bonds during World Wars I and II, "securities for security" would give citizens a way to take part in the cause while providing an attractive investment. Like war bonds, they could be promoted by celebrities, sold by Boy and Girl Scouts, and paid for via payroll deduction plans.

Convincing Congress will take all the finesse the administration can muster, but some states are already pushing the hydrogen agenda with tax credits, research funding, and other policies to create jobs in fuel cell manufacture. "We want to collaborate with the federal government and industry to make California a leader in hydrogen," says Alan Lloyd, chair of California's Air Resources Board, an EPA suboffice in a state where SUVs sport SAVE THE EARTH bumper stickers. (The city of Los Angeles bought its first fuel-cell vehicle from Honda last December.) States that foster hydrogen technology companies will be rewarded with tax revenue from sales to Europe and Asia, which are also looking into it.

Page 4 >>

How Hydrogen Can Save America (continued)

Even before he sells the plan to Congress, the president will have to sell it to the oil and auto industries. After all, hydrogen power is a potent threat to their current business, and they own the fueling infrastructure and manufacturing capacity necessary to bring that power to market. The prospect of massive subsidies will help; these industries are squeezed between shrinking profits and rising costs. But the money can do more than relieve their pain. It can set them on a sustainable course for the future, turning the biggest obstacles to the hydrogen economy into its standard bearers.

Petroleum suppliers and auto manufacturers alike understand the need to disentangle their business models from crude. By most estimates, the worldwide oil supply has nearly stopped growing. Thanks to new discoveries, the total reserve increased by 56 percent between 1980 and 1990 but only 1.4 percent between 1990 and 2000. Pessimistic geologists argue that production will begin to decline as early as 2006, while optimists point at 2040. What's more, it's now clear that oil consumption is at least partly to blame for global warming, prompting ever-louder calls for alternatives. It shouldn't take much persuasion to convince the oil and car industries that the most profitable course is to adapt to hydrogen sooner with government money rather than later without.

The most important market over the next decade, of course, is the US consumer. The administration should allocate $25 billion to persuade Americans to buy fuel cell cars and invest in hydrogen technology. This budget would pay for a $2,000 tax rebate on vehicle purchases, and fund local incentives such as preferential parking, freeway lanes, and free registration for fuel cell cars. At least $1 billion a year - equal to Nike's 2001 advertising budget - should be devoted to public-service announcements, posters, lectures, contests, and other ways of sending the message that achieving energy independence through hydrogen is a patriotic duty.

There are good reasons to wonder whether any government initiative, even one that's critical to national security, can bring about such a radical change. Federal energy programs don't have much of a track record, and past efforts to promote hydrogen itself - after the oil crises of 1973, 1978, and 1980, for instance - have failed to take root.

These attempts foundered mainly because the US continued to have access to cheap oil. Energy independence briefly became top priority after OPEC raised prices from $3 to $12 per barrel between 1973 and 1975, but momentum dissipated as the crisis ended and prices fell. As a result, the political will to make tough energy decisions vanished. The threat to national security means that politics no longer stands in the way: Better to make hard choices today than send your children off to fight for oil tomorrow.

Earlier initiatives were also hampered by primitive technology. Today, however, fuel cells have reached the point where hydrogen is a credible substitute for oil. Outdoor-product maker Coleman recently released the first commercial fuel cell product, an emergency power generator for home use, and large fuel cells have been installed as backups in office buildings throughout the country. Hydrogen-powered buses are already operating in Toronto and Chicago, and soon will be in London, Madrid, and Hamburg. Iceland has embarked on an ambitious effort to convert its public transit and fishing fleets to hydrogen. The most encouraging sign is the investment by oil and car companies, not to mention venture capitalists.

If President Bush can implement this program, or something comparably aggressive, by 2013, all major car companies will sell fuel cell vehicles, and several new manufacturers will probably emerge to produce specialty hydrogen-powered items like sports cars and SUVs. Filling stations in the nation's six largest cities will carry hydrogen as well as gasoline; many will offer only the new fuel. Some refineries will be selling more hydrogen than gasoline, measured by both dollars and volume.

Imagine how the hydrogen economy will change geopolitics. OPEC will no longer be a factor in foreign policy. Relations with oil-producing nations will be based on common interests. The US will be free to promote democracy in countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar will be dismantled and naval forces in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf sent home.

Even at that point, the transition will be far from complete. It will take decades to get every conventional car off the road, and even longer before hydrogen can be mass-produced using clean energy. In the long run, automobile fuel cells themselves might be tied to the grid, making it possible for vehicles to feed power into the system rather than simply consume energy. That is, electrical meters might run backward some of the time. Futurist Amory Lovins envisions a peer-to-peer energy network in which spot power is distributed to users from the nearest source, be it a utility station or a station wagon. Such a system would make the grid more efficient and power less expensive. This cheaper energy could be sold in bulk to businesses looking to cut costs, creating further momentum for the new fuel system.

In time, US fuel cell and hydrogen-extraction technology will provide enormous opportunities for developing nations like China and India, which will be the fastest-growing consumers of energy in coming decades. Because they don't have an adequate petroleum-based infrastructure today, these nations will be quick to take full advantage of hydrogen, leapfrogging developed countries. Cheaper than oil, the new fuel will empower poor countries, reducing their trade deficits and security threats.

Page 5

How Hydrogen Can Save America (continued)

The stakes are higher today than they were in Sputnik's wake. Unlike space travel, energy independence bears directly on US self-determination. The dangerous turmoil in the Middle East, the growing national security budget, the promise of technology that needs only a financial push - all these things make this the right moment to launch an Apollo-scale commitment to hydrogen power. The fate of the republic depends on it.

10 YEARS OF ENERGY INNOVATION

1995

General Motors rolls out an electric car, the Impact (later refined into the EV1), at the Greater LA Auto Show.

GE introduces the H System, a natural gas-burning turbine that uses gas, steam, and heat-recovery technologies.

1997
In Japan, Toyota unveils the Prius, the first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid.

1999
Chicago spends $8 million installing solar panels in old industrial sites to light municipal buildings and parks.

2000
The South African company Eskom begins construction on the first pebble-bed modular reactor, a safer kind of nuclear plant.

2001
Clean Energy Systems develops a power plant that runs on natural gas and releases steam and carbon dioxide.

2002
Honda leases the first of five fuel cell cars to Los Angeles. The 80-horsepower FCX's only emission: water.

Ireland approves the world's largest offshore wind park, 200 turbines on a sandbank 15 miles long and a mile wide.

Officials warn public away from shuttle debris.

The trouble is twofold: Liquid nitrogen could combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form nitrous oxide, a gas that can be fatal if inhaled. The second possibility is that either liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen can severely burn anything or anyone it touches, Perry said.

Texas Department of Health spokesman Doug McBride said they were awaiting word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA as to what hazards the debris may contain.

"We don't know what kind of chemicals are on the spacecraft," he said.

Much of the debris scattered across Nacogdoches, where authorities ordered people to stay 100 yards away from the debris because of contamination fears. Those who had touched the wreckage were urged to get medical attention.

"What we fly in space is operated in many cases with toxic propellant and some of the debris may be contaminated, so we need to be careful," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said.

Shuttles have long used a chemical called hydrazine to run their auxiliary power units. Hydrazine, a colorless liquid with an ammonia-like odor, is a toxic chemical and can cause harm to anyone who contacts it.

A water plant was closed in the Louisiana town of Many because of fears that toxic debris fell into the Toledo Bend reservoir along the Texas-Louisiana line.

"To be safe rather than sorry we closed the water plant until further notice," Many Mayor Ken Freeman said.

Here's the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/02/sprj.colu.shuttle.health.ap/index.html

Officials warn public away from shuttle debris

Sunday, February 2, 2003 Posted: 8:56 AM EST (1356 GMT)
Residents look at a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia on highway 84 near Maydell, Texas on Saturday.
Residents look at a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia on highway 84 near Maydell, Texas on Saturday.
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SPECIAL REPORT
• Debris scattered over 200 miles
• Gallery: The trail of debris
• NASA looks to fuel tank in investigation
• Audio Slide Show
• Gallery: Columbia crew
• Gallery: Columbia's final mission
• Video: Lives, dreams lost on Columbia
• Gallery: Remembering Columbia
• Timeline: Columbia's last moments
• Special Report
TO REPORT DEBRIS
NASA urges people not to go near debris from Columbia because it could contain toxic substances. People who find debris are asked to call (281) 483-3388. NASA has also set up a Web site to collect information that may be helpful in the investigation of the shuttle disaster.external link

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- From corrosive fuels to ammonia-like liquids, insulation and plastics, space shuttle Columbia carried a witch's brew of toxic and caustic materials designed to work in the hostile environment of space. Authorities warned the public to stay away from shuttle debris because it could be harmful.

"There's nothing on the shuttle beneficial to humans. The fuel, the propellant, all can be very abrasive," said Gene Perry, an engineer who worked on early space station plans put together at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Perry said either liquid oxygen from the shuttle's fuel system or liquid nitrogen used to inflate the tires could be dangerous.

The trouble is twofold: Liquid nitrogen could combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form nitrous oxide, a gas that can be fatal if inhaled. The second possibility is that either liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen can severely burn anything or anyone it touches, Perry said.

Texas Department of Health spokesman Doug McBride said they were awaiting word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA as to what hazards the debris may contain.

"We don't know what kind of chemicals are on the spacecraft," he said.

Much of the debris scattered across Nacogdoches, where authorities ordered people to stay 100 yards away from the debris because of contamination fears. Those who had touched the wreckage were urged to get medical attention.

"What we fly in space is operated in many cases with toxic propellant and some of the debris may be contaminated, so we need to be careful," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said.

Shuttles have long used a chemical called hydrazine to run their auxiliary power units. Hydrazine, a colorless liquid with an ammonia-like odor, is a toxic chemical and can cause harm to anyone who contacts it.

A water plant was closed in the Louisiana town of Many because of fears that toxic debris fell into the Toledo Bend reservoir along the Texas-Louisiana line.

"To be safe rather than sorry we closed the water plant until further notice," Many Mayor Ken Freeman said.

Oh yeah and if you're unfortunate enough to be anywhere near the debris: Stay away from it! It will kill you. (I'm not exaggerating.)
Space Shuttle Apparently Breaks Apart
(Thanks, Xeni.)

At 9 a.m., Mission Control lost all contact with the crew. At the same time, residents in north Texas reported hearing "a big bang."

Television footage showed a bright light over Texas followed by smoke plumes streaking diagonally through the sky. Debris appeared to break off into separate balls of light as it continued downward. NASA declared an emergency after losing contact with the crew and sent search teams to the Dallas-Fort Worth area...

On Jan. 16, shortly after Columbia lifted off, a piece of insulating foam on its external fuel tank came off and was believed to have hit the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.

The shuttle was at an altitude of about 203,000 feet over north-central Texas at 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph, when Mission Control lost all contact and tracking data.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad (or is too busy right now to serve you a page):

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=624&e=1&u=/ap/20030201/ap_on_sc/space_shuttle

At 9 a.m., Mission Control lost all contact with the crew. At the same time, residents in north Texas reported hearing "a big bang."

Television footage showed a bright light over Texas followed by smoke plumes streaking diagonally through the sky. Debris appeared to break off into separate balls of light as it continued downward. NASA declared an emergency after losing contact with the crew and sent search teams to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Residents of Nacogdoches, Texas, said they found bits of metal strewn across the city.

"It's all over Nacogdoches," said barber shop owner James Milford. "There are several little pieces, some parts of machinery ... there's been a lot of pieces about 3 feet wide."

Two hours after the shuttle had been expected to land, a screen at the front of Mission Control showed a map of the Southwest United States showed what should have been Columbia's flight path. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was meeting with the astronauts' families, who had been waiting for the landing in Florida, NASA spokeswoman Melissa Motichek said.

"A contingency for the space shuttle has been declared," Mission Control somberly repeated over and over as no word or any data came from Columbia.

It was the 113th flight in the shuttle program's 22 years and the 28th flight for Columbia, NASA oldest shuttle.

In 42 years of U.S. human space flight, there had never been an accident during the descent to Earth or landing. On Jan. 28, 1986, space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff.

On Jan. 16, shortly after Columbia lifted off, a piece of insulating foam on its external fuel tank came off and was believed to have hit the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.

The shuttle was at an altitude of about 203,000 feet over north-central Texas at 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph, when Mission Control lost all contact and tracking data.

Gary Hunziker in Plano, Texas, said he saw the shuttle flying overhead. "I could see two bright objects flying off each side of it," he told The Associated Press. "I just assumed they were chase jets."

"The barn started shaking and we ran out and started looking around," said Benjamin Laster of Kemp, Texas. "I saw a puff of vapor and smoke and saw big chunk of material fall."

Former astronaut John Glenn and his wife were watching on television at their home in Maryland.

"Anytime you lose contact like that, there's some big problem. Of course, once you went for several minutes without any contact, you knew something was terribly wrong," Glenn said.

Security had been extraordinarily tight for Columbia's 16-day scientific research mission because of the presence of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.

Ramon, 48, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, had survived two wars. He became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's launch, but also for its planned landing. Space agency officials feared his presence might make the shuttle more of a terrorist target.

"The government of Israel and the people of Israel are praying together with the entire world for the safety of the astronauts on the shuttle Columbia," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s office said in a statement.

Columbia's crew had completed 80-plus scientific research experiments during their time in orbit.

Only three of the seven astronauts had flown in space before, the shuttle's commander, Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, and Kalpana Chawla. The other four were rookies: pilot William McCool, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ramon.

Just in the past week, NASA observed the anniversary of its only two other space tragedies, the Challenger explosion, which killed all seven astronauts on board, and the Apollo spacecraft fire that killed three on Jan. 27, 1967.

___

On the Net:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov

Watching the House in action is pretty funny. They are doing one minute speeches.

One Rep has been introducing a Reverend and his family for the last full minute, for instance. This next one is explaining how a particular company has progressive health care policies (ah, back to issues of governmental concern...) Now another Rep is talking about what a big fat liar Saddam is (fair enough). Now another one is talking about a church again (what is it with that? what do these churches have to do with running our country?) "God has truly blessed the _______ Congregation..." (so what? let's get back to healthcare and the war...)

Now they're looking at a Mosquito Control Bill. Wow, cases of West Nile Virus have gone up 160% in the last year. Over 2,400 cases across the us and over 100 deaths. Holy moly! Better pass that sucker...

Yeah I've actually been meaning to write about the Mosquito Invasion of this country for a while, actually. But there's not a whole lot people can do besides try to keep the little buggers away and have treatment facilities ready. (Oh yeah, and spray the hell out of everything -- which I have mixed feelings about.)

But I digress -- No word on the Peace Bill or the Internet Radio Fairness Act :-)

Study: Power Lines Probably Risky
by Paul Boutin for Wired News.

Here's the actual report, if you're interested:

An Evaluation of the Possible Risks From Electric and Magnetic Fields (EMFs) From Power Lines, Internal Wiring, Electrical Occupations and Appliances.

Or you could go right to the conclusions...

Experts are still trying to find out the exact cause and origin (the best guess at this point is "caused from animals released into the wild after nutritional testing in Colorado in 1965"), but the final conclusion is the same: our nation's deer has been infected with Chronic Wasting Disease, a disease similar to Mad Cow -- both are variations of "Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy" -- weird diseases that aren't viral or bacterial yet can still fold protiens and cause ruptures in infected brain cells.

But all of that is just a really complicated way of saying: DON'T EAT ANY DEER MEAT FOR THE NEXT 5 OR 10 YEARS OR UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Who is to Blame for Mad Deer?
by Brian McCombie for the Progressive.

Here's the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.progressive.org/August%202002/mcco0802.html

August 2002

Who is to Blame for Mad Deer?

by Brian McCombie

E-Mail This Article

The helicopter rises up over the ridge line, the noise of the rotors scattering the targets below. But the snipers in the doorway already have their scoped, high-powered rifles locked in, and the bullets fly until the targets pitch forward, kicking and writhing in their death throes.

The latest battlefield description from Afghanistan? No. It's the next battlefield from the rolling, wooded hills near Madison, Wisconsin. The snipers are employees of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The targets? White-tailed deer, potential carriers of a deadly disease that may also infect people. It's called Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), and it's steadily spreading across North America.

"CWD clearly originated in northeastern Colorado and now has ended up spreading far and wide into many states and two Canadian provinces," writes John Stauber, a Madison, Wisconsin, activist and co-author of Mad Cow U.S.A. (Common Courage, 1997), which examines England's Mad Cow nightmare and whether it could happen here.

The disease, he claims, is traveling faster and more effectively than nature could ever accomplish. He suspects this is due to the interstate transportation of game farm animals. And he blames the expansion of the disease on the game farm industry and state agricultural agencies that act more as game farm patrons than as regulators.

The outbreak is causing near hysteria in rural Wisconsin. The state plans to kill as many as 50,000 deer in the south-central part of the state, and deer hunters everywhere are left to wonder whether their venison is safe to eat. Research and anecdotal evidence suggests it is not. And that's scary news for the fourteen million deer hunters around the country.

Both Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting Disease are kinds of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE). These diseases aren't viral or bacterial, yet somehow they transform or "fold" proteins in brain cells called prions. When enough infected prions deposit themselves in the brain, microscopic ruptures form in the brain cells. Prior to death, behavioral changes become apparent.

As the disease progresses, infected cattle become very agitated, kicking violently with no provocation. They also have trouble eating and swallowing, and usually lose weight. Similarly, deer with Chronic Wasting Disease stop eating. Their resulting emaciated state gives the disease its name. They also shy away from fellow animals, begin to slobber uncontrollably, and walk in circles.

As with all TSEs, Chronic Wasting Disease has no cure and is always fatal. The only way to test for it in elk and cattle is to kill them and examine brain samples under a microscope. A live test for deer was recently developed using a tonsil biopsy, but it's not yet clear how accurate this is.

The human version of TSE is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (pronounced Croytz-feld Yawkob). People with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease experience symptoms similar to Alzheimer's, including memory loss and depression, followed by rapidly progressive dementia and death usually within a year. While Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is rare (humans literally have a one-in-a-million chance of getting it), over the last few years three young deer hunters (from Utah, Oklahoma, and Maine) died of the illness.

Those deaths sparked an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, largely because the three hunters were younger than thirty, which is extremely rare for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (sixty-eight is the median age for deaths resulting from the illness). While it found no connection to Chronic Wasting Disease-infected venison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also had no way to test deer these hunters had already consumed. The agency did kill and test some deer where the victims of the disease had hunted. All the animals tested negative. There was evidence, though, that all the hunters were exposed to elk from Colorado or Wyoming, possibly from areas where Chronic Wasting Disease is prevalent. However, it was impossible for center investigators to know if those particular elk were infected.

Dr. Thomas Pringle thinks it's very likely that Chronic Wasting Disease can harm people. A molecular biologist who for five years covered TSE diseases for Sperling Biomedical Foundation in Oregon, Pringle notes that game agencies in Colorado and Wyoming have spent the last two decades assuring hunters there was no scientific proof that anyone had ever died from eating Chronic Wasting Disease-tainted venison. Yet, Pringle says, the research on Chronic Wasting Disease's potential human health risks is virtually nonexistent. He contends these agencies took their position to protect a multibillion dollar industry that revolves around deer and elk hunting.

The research that does exist isn't encouraging. In September 2000, the European Molecular Biology Organization published a study that found that deer prion materials infected with Chronic Wasting Disease converted human prion materials in test tubes at very low rates. "Chronic Wasting Disease and [Mad Cow conversions happened] at about the same rate, in this proxy test, for humans," Pringle observes, and says similar tests alerted British scientists that Mad Cow beef could potentially infect people. To date, more than 100 people have died from a Mad Cow-derived form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

In early April 2002, Byron Caughey, who directed the European Molecular Biology Organization research, told a Wisconsin newspaper that while the risk of people contracting infection from a Chronic Wasting Disease deer is probably low, "it's not a risk I'd want to take." The head of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Darrell Bazzell, publicly admitted his agency couldn't guarantee that meat from deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease was 100 percent safe to eat, leading one Milwaukee food bank to stop accepting venison.

The epicenter of Chronic Wasting Disease is the Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, operated by the state's Department of Wildlife. In the mid-1960s, the Department of Wildlife ran a series of nutritional studies on wild deer and elk, releasing them when various projects were completed. Soon after the studies began, however, Foothills deer and elk began dying from a mysterious disease. It was not identified as Chronic Wasting Disease until 1980.

The Foothills facility also held a number of sheep with scrapie, the sheep form of TSE, which has existed in North America since 1947, and which Pringle thinks was transferred into the deer and elk from contact with the sheep. He believes Chronic Wasting Disease "must be an extremely virulent strain" to jump the species barrier.

"That's the theory," says Michael Miller, a veterinarian and Chronic Wasting Disease expert at the Foothills facility. Yet he also says it's possible the disease existed naturally in wild deer and elk, and infected animals were brought into Foothills for nutritional studies and began spreading the illness among the closely confined animals.

In 1981, the first wild animal (an elk) with Chronic Wasting Disease was found in Larimer County, Colorado, near the Foothills facility, and the disease moved out into northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. Today, the disease is found in more than 15,000 square miles of Colorado alone. However, testing by the Colorado Department of Wildlife in the 1980s found Chronic Wasting Disease at under 1 percent in elk and 2 percent or less for deer. But the rate of infection picked up speed in the mid-1990s. Pockets in Colorado today have deer at 7 to 8 percent infection rates, while 15 percent of the deer in Larimer County have tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease.

In 1996, an elk at a Saskatchewan game farm was found to have the disease. By 2001, the province had twenty-nine game farms under quarantine, and eventually nearly 8,000 elk were slaughtered, with more than 100 testing positive for Chronic Wasting Disease.

"We traced back all the Chronic Wasting Disease exposures to a single elk from South Dakota," says Dr. George Luterbach, chief veterinarian for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. That elk arrived in the province in 1989 and died in 1990. Chronic Wasting Disease was eventually found on the South Dakota farm, and Luterbach thinks an animal from there infected the Saskatchewan game farm, which then bought and sold elk, seeding the disease into other operations. Citing Canada's privacy act, Luterbach won't release the name of the South Dakota farm.

The year 2000 also saw Saskatchewan record its first wild deer with Chronic Wasting Disease, followed the next year by two more. Darrel Rowledge, director of the Alliance for Public Wildlife, a conservation group based in Calgary, says, given that Chronic Wasting Disease is virtually indestructible (disinfectants and ultra-high temperatures don't prevent transmission) and always fatal, historical and scientific records should reveal its presence in North America before the 1960s. They don't, so Rowledge, like Stauber, blames game farms for transporting the disease. "Scientists knew that privatization, domestication, and commercialization of wildlife was going to cause horrendous disease problems," he says. But in many state legislatures and agricultural agencies, "There was this presumption that [game farmers] should be allowed to exist until it was proven that they were doing something wrong."

Chronic Wasting Disease was also discovered on game farms in Alberta, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota from 1997 to 2001. By the time Wisconsin announced its problem, Nebraska and South Dakota had infected wild deer, too.

But Wisconsin is arguably in the most dire straits. Elk appear the least susceptible to Chronic Wasting Disease, with mule deer (a western cousin of white-tails) next in line. All the evidence suggests that white-tailed deer most easily contract and spread the illness. The exact route of infection between animals isn't known, but Miller says casual contact passes the disease. This could include deer feeding together, touching noses, or stepping in each others' feces and urine.

Most deer in Colorado and Wyoming are mule deer, very thinly dispersed (usually fewer than ten animals per square mile), and much less sociable than white-tails. But Wisconsin has an estimated 1.6 million white-tails, often at seventy or more per square mile, and in frequent contact. Pringle thinks Chronic Wasting Disease could rip through the deer population east of the Mississippi with virtually nothing to stop it.

In February, Wisconsin reported that three deer killed by hunters the previous fall had Chronic Wasting Disease, its first appearance east of the Mississippi River. After further testing found another fifteen deer with Chronic Wasting Disease approximately twenty miles west of Madison, the Department of Natural Resources announced it would try to eradicate all the deer (estimated at more than 25,000) in the 360-square-mile area, figuring fewer deer will slow the spread of the disease. The Department of Natural Resources began giving away free hunting permits this June, vowing a near-continuous hunt in the fall. The state legislature and the governor also gave the agency the legal right to shoot deer from roads and, if necessary, from helicopters.

The Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives held Chronic Wasting Disease hearings in mid-May, and Wisconsin Governor Scott McCallum, who had asked the federal government for $18.5 million to fight the disease, testified that Chronic Wasting Disease could destroy Wisconsin's wildlife and hunting heritage. While Wisconsin Congressmen chimed in supportively, not everyone was a booster.

Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, asked McCallum about a 1998 Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources memo on Chronic Wasting Disease-exposed elk coming onto Wisconsin game farms. Why hadn't Wisconsin taken more precautions to keep out the disease? he asked. McCallum insisted state agencies had taken the appropriate steps, but Inslee doesn't buy it.

"There were at least two specific instances where other states had informed Wisconsin that Chronic Wasting Disease-infected [or exposed] herds had sent elk to Wisconsin," Inslee says. "Even in light of this, Wisconsin didn't require mandatory testing and inspection of game farms."

"It's important to note that there's never been a case in Wisconsin of Chronic Wasting Disease in an elk ranch or game farm," says Henry Kriegel of a Montana public relations firm that represents a large game farm association. Wisconsin's discovery of Chronic Wasting Disease in wild deer, he argues, has "become an opportunity for those who oppose game farming to get media attention and create leverage for their position against game farming."

The first part of Kriegel's statement is true. Yet he doesn't reveal the whole picture.

For example, the voluntary monitoring plan had only forty of the state's 272 elk farmers signed up by the summer of 2000, and just eighty by May 2002. Wisconsin's 570 deer farmers ignored the voluntary program almost entirely.

Flaws with no mandatory testing were apparent in October 2001, after Colorado discovered a Chronic Wasting Disease outbreak on a number of game farms. At that point, 450 elk had been shipped to game farms in other states, including nineteen to Wisconsin. The Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection either quarantined or killed and tested these elk, except for two elk which the department wasn't able to locate. They had died before the investigation, and no one is sure where the carcasses are. A third carcass was recovered, but it was so decomposed that a brain sample couldn't be taken.

Game farm regulations concerning Chronic Wasting Disease vary by state, but in the past someone could import nearly any animal as long as it had a health certificate. That process could find detectable diseases like bovine tuberculosis, but did little for the nontestable Chronic Wasting Disease.

Once a state finds Chronic Wasting Disease, though, the whole game changes. South Dakota and Nebraska, for example, now require game farms to import animals only from operations certified as Chronic Wasting Disease-free for at least five years. Wisconsin put such a regulation into effect following its discovery of the outbreak.

Many states recently closed their borders to elk or deer from states with Chronic Wasting Disease. But, as with much of the regulatory framework surrounding game farms, this was done only after years of interstate trade in game farm animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in September 2001, declared a Chronic Wasting Disease emergency nationwide and announced its intention to wipe out the disease. With agriculture its regulatory focus, though, the department's efforts are concentrated on the game farm industry, not the spread of the disease in the wild. Among its initiatives is to provide indemnity monies (about $3,000 per elk) to game farms found with Chronic Wasting Disease where the standard management procedure is euphemistically called "depopulation." That is, slaughtering all the animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture took a more proactive approach this spring, actually buying up the stock of fifteen game farms in Colorado, even though no Chronic Wasting Disease was ever found in these facilities. The department then "depopulated" them to the tune of approximately 1,200 elk.

No word yet if game farms in other places with Chronic Wasting Disease, like Wisconsin, will now be bought up, too, or if the Department of Agriculture will also try to eradicate Chronic Wasting Disease in the wild--or if it can.

In most states, game farms are regulated by agriculture departments, though that wasn't always the case. In Wisconsin, for example, the Department of Natural Resources oversaw game farms until the mid-1990s, when the state legislature and then-Governor Tommy Thompson shifted responsibility to the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection, a move the game farmers applauded.

Rowledge says these regulatory shifts across the United States weren't accidental. In the 1970s, more and more potential game farmers wanted to set up operations so they could sell elk velvet (the soft material that peels off newly formed antlers, which is marketed as a nutritional supplement and aphrodisiac), host "canned" hunts where animals are shot inside these farms, and market elk meat.

Despite tall fences, game farms have a well-documented history of captive and wild animals intermingling. For state wildlife biologists, the big concern was game farms bringing in diseases. "Whenever you move an animal," Rowledge says, "you're moving all the diseases and parasites the animal has in it and on it. You have no choice."

So state wildlife agencies generally opposed these farms. "When there was resistance," Rowledge says, "the game farmers sought to put themselves under the jurisdiction of bureaucracies that were friendly to their ideas."

Stauber thinks the federal government must step in with an eradication program or Chronic Wasting Disease will expand even further across the continent.

"If I'm right, we've got a hell of a crisis on our hands," he says. "My hope is that growing public outrage over Chronic Wasting may light a fire under the feds to address a problem they've ignored for a decade and a half."
Brian McCombie is a freelance writer based in Marshfield, Wisconsin. He specializes in wildlife and environmental issues.

See the story by Alex Kirby for the BBC:
Antarctic ice fringe 'melting faster'.

Hal Plotkin has written an informative piece for SF Gate about a controversial new technique for seeding plankton growth in our oceans.

See:
Ocean Rescue Planktos Foundation hopes to reduce global warming by fertilizing the seas.

A group of scientists say it may be possible to simultaneously reduce global warming and increase dwindling supplies of fish around the world by adding relatively tiny amounts of powdered iron to the ocean.

Although the concept is controversial, several demonstration experiments have already been conducted, including by the Half Moon Bay-based Planktos Foundation, which hopes to eventually turn the cultivation of plankton forests at sea into an environmental-restoration business similar to reforestation on land.

The proposal has sparked considerable debate within the scientific and environmental communities, in part, because some energy and oil companies see it as a possible way to offset atmospheric pollution caused by their products. If it works, its backers say, the idea could help save humanity from the twin dangers of dying oceans and an overheated planet. On the other hand, others see it as an unworkable scheme that would interfere with nature, one that could lead to consequences even more dire than those it seeks to address.