Distortions, Falsehoods, Fabrications: George Monbiot

Distortions, Falsehoods, Fabrications

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

monbiot.com | So here we go again. For the second time, Channel 4 has been fiercely criticised by the broadcasting regulator for a programme attacking environmental science. For the second time the director was Martin Durkin. Ten years ago, his series Against Nature was found to have misled his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes” and distorted their views “through selective editing”(1). Now Ofcom has ruled that the programme he made last year – The Great Global Warming Swindle – treated two scientists and an organisation (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) unfairly(2). For the second time, Channel 4 will have to make an embarrassing primetime apology.

But while the new ruling exposes some of the channel’s practices, it also exposes the limitations of the regulator. The programme was peppered with distortions and misleading claims. But despite being presented with a vast dossier of evidence by climate scientists, Ofcom decided that it could not rule on the matter of accuracy. While news programmes are expected to be accurate, other factual programmes are not, and Ofcom “only regulates misleading material where that material is likely to cause harm or offence.” It decided that The Great Global Warming Swindle hadn’t caused actual harm to members of the public and would not rule on whether or not the programme had misled them. In fact, it is precisely because “the discussion about the causes of global warming was to a very great extent settled by the date of broadcast”, meaning that climate change was no longer a matter of political controversy, that a programme claiming it is all a pack of lies could slip past the partiality rules. The greater a programme’s defiance of scientific fact, the less likely Ofcom is to rule against it. This paradoxical judgement allows Channel 4 to keep getting away with it.

The Great Global Warming Swindle is part of a long-standing pattern. Channel 4 upsets all sorts of people, and it has every right to do so. On all other issues it appears to do so in a random fashion, sometimes attacking people on one side of the debate, sometimes on the other. But one polemical position has kept recurring over the past 18 years: a fierce antagonism towards environmentalism. Some of these programmes have used misrepresentation, distortion or fabrication to sustain claims that environmental concerns are the fantasies of self-serving scientists. It is arguable that no organisation in the United Kingdom has done more to damage the effort to protect the environment.

For the first eight years of the channel’s life, its coverage of environmental issues was broad, diverse and often stimulating. It broadcast 20 programmes a year in its Fragile Earth slot. But two years after Michael Grade became chief executive, its programming began to change. The trend continued after he left.

In 1990 Channel 4 screened a documentary called The Greenhouse Conspiracy, directed by Hilary Lawson at the company TVF. It maintained that “there is no evidence at all” for dangerous climate change. There is a conspiracy among scientists, it said, to talk up the dangers in order to win funding(3). No reasonable person would dispute that Channel 4 should show countervailing views, or would claim that it has an obligation to take an environmentalist line. But there were three problems with this programme, which appear to characterise several of the channel’s films about the environment.

The first is that it was billed as a science documentary, rather than a one-sided polemic. It had an anonymous and authoritative voiceover, rather than the onscreen presenter you would expect to see in a polemical film. It presented as hard fact statements that were extremely contentious and often plain wrong. The second is that contributors’ commercial interests were not mentioned. The third problem is that though the majority of scientific opinion was at odds with the line the programme took, the opposing point of view was scarcely represented. The contribution of a very eminent climate scientist was edited to make him seem like an inconsistent crank, while maverick outsiders were presented as the voices of scientific orthodoxy.

But this film became a template for the channel’s environmental coverage over much of the following 17 years. Its most prominent films about the environment screened in this period took the same line as The Greenhouse Conspiracy, which created the impression that environmental problems do not exist and that environmental scientists are mendacious fanatics.

In 1997 Channel 4 broadcast a series across three hours of prime time on Sunday evenings, called Against Nature. Made by Martin Durkin, then working for the production company RDF, it claimed that the greens are modern-day Nazis who have been “needlessly consigning millions of people in the Third World to poverty and early death”. The programme’s publicity stated that it “highlights the absence of scientific rigour behind notions like the greenhouse effect and global warming”, yet the series made the most elementary scientific blunders, describing sulphur dioxide as a greenhouse gas and the oceans as the major net source of carbon dioxide.

Like The Greenhouse Conspiracy, Against Nature was billed as a science programme, rather than a polemic. It had no onscreen presenter. It amplified the credentials of some of its contributors and failed to reveal that some were funded by fossil fuel industries. The programme makers duped and misrepresented the environmentalists they featured. This series was subject to one of the most damning verdicts that Ofcom’s predecessor, the Independent Television Commission, has ever handed down.

None of this, or subsequent distortions, stopped the channel from continuing to pay Martin Durkin to pursue what looks like a personal crusade against science. In 1998, he hired a research biochemist and TV researcher called Najma Kazi to help him with a film for Equinox called Storm in a D-Cup claiming that breast implants are completely safe. After two weeks she walked out. “It’s not a joke to walk away from four or five month’s work,” she told me, “but my research was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give an impression that’s not the case. I don’t know how that programme got passed.”(4) In 2000, he made another film – a 90-minute special – for Equinox about genetic engineering. He interviewed the environmentalist Dr Mae-Wan Ho. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, she said. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”(5) Neither of these programmes, however, was criticised by the regulators.

During this period, Channel 4 broadcast several environmental programmes which were vicious and grossly unbalanced denunciations of environmental science. But, as independent film makers I have spoken to testify, proposals for programmes which expressed concern about the environment were rejected out of hand. When I went to speak to the man who was then the director of programmes, Tim Gardam, to ask why the channel seemed so hostile to the environment, he told me something that shocked me more than any defensive statement. “I don’t know what’s important any more”.

The list of environmental programmes Channel 4 has sent me shows a sharp reduction in output during the years 1992 to 2006(6). But in mid-2006 I was told by an executive that the channel had realised it had been misled by people who were sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. It seemed as if the dam had broken. Channel 4’s new commissions suggested that it was at last beginning to wake up to the fact that environmental issues were not just the crazy fantasy of a group of green fascists. That was until March 2007, when The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast, backed by a massive promotional campaign. The director, yet again, was Martin Durkin, and once more he was given 90 minutes of prime time.

The first thing I noticed about the Great Global Warming Swindle is how similar it is to The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast 17 years before. The two programmes made the same claims, using some of the same contributors. They were now a little greyer and fatter, but they repeated their line almost verbatim. A vast accumulation of evidence in the intervening years, contradicting the programme’s thesis, was ignored – it appeared that very little had changed since 1990. Indeed much of the distortion in the programme involved the freezing of timelines at points convenient to his argument, producing a misleading impression of current evidence.

Some of the graphs Martin Durkin used in the programme, for example, seem to have been altered, changing the historical record. A graph of 20th Century temperatures was attributed in the programme to NASA. In reality it was first published by an Exxon-funded lobby group and creates the false impression that most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940, after which there was a sharp fall(7). The data it used ended in the mid-1980s. On Durkin’s version however, the timeline was extended to 2005 – the change of dates on the graph appeared to support his argument. Following complaints, the dates were corrected when the programme was rebroadcast.

He used a graph of temperatures over the past millennium to make the claim that they were higher during the 12th Century than they are today. But again the timescale was altered. An arrow marked “Now” points to data which in fact end at 1975. A third graph had been mislabelled in the same way: the arrow marked “Now” points to the global temperature 108 years ago, in 1900. On a fourth graph, the film-makers altered part of a curve, thereby creating the impression that temperature has precisely tracked changes in sunspot cycles. The author of the original graph complained that the film had presented “fabricated data … as genuine” to make its case(8). In response Durkin said it was a mistake.

It would require a book to catalogue all the distortions and fabrications The Great Global Warming Swindle is alleged to have included. A complaint by a team of senior scientists – the first peer-reviewed submission ever made to Ofcom – runs to 188 pages(9). Not only did the film inflate credentials of some of the contributors; some of them appear to have been made up altogether. The climate sceptic Tim Ball, for example, was said to be a professor at the Department of Climatology in the University of Winnipeg. There is no such department and he has not held a professorship since he retired in 1996. Philip Stott, the programme claimed, is a professor at the Department of Biogeography, University of London. While he was once a Professor of Biogeography, there was no such department, and Stott retired some time ago, becoming professor emeritus. Piers Corbyn was given a doctorate he does not possess and described as a “climate forecaster”. He is in fact a weather forecaster – a very different matter – and has published no peer-reviewed papers on either topic since 1986(10). Fred Singer is said to have been the director of the US National Weather Service. In reality he was Director of the US National Weather Satellite Center.

Far from revealing its contributors’ financial interests, the film created the impression that they have taken no money from the coal or oil industry. In truth 10 of its protagonists have either been funded directly by fossil fuel companies, or have received paid employment from lobby groups funded by these companies, which campaign against taking action on climate change(11). Tim Ball claimed in the programme that “I’ve never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies.” But he has received fees from two groups which lobby against taking action on climate change – Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project – both of which receive major funding from energy companies(12). The Great Global Warming Swindle looks like free, undisclosed propaganda for coal and oil firms. Channel 4 forcefully denied this. Ofcom decided that it is “unable to assess or adjudicate on the relative merits of these strongly disputed allegations.”

The film invoked an extraordinary conspiracy theory to explain why governments have tried to tackle climate change. It began, the Swindle claimed, with the British coal miners’ strike. “The miners had brought down Ted Heath’s conservative government. Mrs Thatcher was determined the same would not happen to her. She set out to break their power … At the request of Mrs Thatcher, the UK Met Office set up a Climate Modelling Unit, which provided the basis for a new international committee called The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.” In reality, Mrs Thatcher did not make a public statement on climate change until 1988, three years after the miners’ strike ended in their defeat. The IPCC was established in the same year – not by the UK Met Office but by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN(13) – and the Climate Modelling Unit (the Hadley Centre) did not open until two years afterwards, in 1990(14).

Here too were inaccuracies of the same stamp as those which appeared in Against Nature. The Great Global Warming Swindle claimed that volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together. In truth they produce less than 1%. It maintained that “the biggest source of CO2 by far is the oceans” (they remain a net carbon sink). Sea level changes have “nothing to do with melting ice” (melting ice is in fact responsible for about 40% of the rise) and so on and so forth. One of the contributors to the Great Global Warming Swindle, Carl Wunsch, says that he was duped into appearing in the documentary and his words were “grossly distorted by context”(15). Ofcom found that Professor Wunsch had been treated unfairly in the way in which his edited interview had been presented but that his comments about CO2 in the ocean were not unfairly edited.

Perhaps the cruellest distortion perpetrated in Durkin’s programme was the claim, also carried in Against Nature, that environmentalists are condemning the poor to live without electricity and to cook their meals on smoky fires, causing millions of premature deaths from respiratory disease. The film interviewed a Kenyan official at a rural clinic, whose solar panels did not produce enough power to run both the fridge and the lights. This was apparently the fault of Western environmentalists, who had somehow obliged the clinic to use solar power, which is “at least 3 times more expensive than conventional forms of electrical generation.”

In reality, it is much cheaper to install solar panels in parts of rural Africa which do not have transmission lines than to build a new grid connection, which is probably why the clinic was using them. If they are providing insufficient power, the cheapest solution is to install more panels and batteries. The solar fridge, developed by the British environmentalist and engineer Guy Watson, has saved countless lives, as it permits vaccines and blood which would otherwise be degraded by heat to survive in even the remotest locations. Environmentalists have been amongst the most outspoken campaigners against cooking on smoky fires, partly because of the health effects, partly because they use huge amounts of wood and partly because the black carbon they produce is a cause of global warming. This was the only partiality issue on which Ofcom was prepared to rule, because it regards the treatment of the poor, by contrast to climate change, to be a “matter of major political controversy”. It decided that in this respect the programme breached its rules.

This film was presented as a dispassionate science documentary. We were not told whose opinions the anonymous narrator represented. Outrageous claims were stated as bald fact. Ofcom has decided that there is “no …requirement” to disclose the personal views of the presenter “in relation to factual programmes”. The Great Global Warming Swindle, like Against Nature, had a huge impact, persuading many people that manmade climate change is not taking place. I attended a presentation by a pollster from Ipsos Mori who showed that there had been a decline last year in the number of people who believed that global warming was a real phenomenon – primarily, she said, as a result of Durkin’s film(16). This is hardly surprising. No one unfamiliar with the channel’s record on this issue could have imagined that a public service broadcaster would have transmitted a programme containing so many distortions.

This became a personal issue when the man who commissioned The Great Global Warming Swindle, Hamish Mykura, appeared on the Today programme to defend the film. It was, he said, part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, and was balanced by a film I had made, broadcast in the same week, for Dispatches(17). I was flabbergasted. Neither I, nor the audience, nor anyone on the production team had been told that my programme was part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, or that it would be linked to The Great Global Warming Swindle. Had I known this, I would have pulled out. When I asked Mykura for evidence – some memos or publicity material about this “season”, for example – he was unable to provide any(18).

My film was subjected to such a rigorous process of fact-checking that it was, in effect, edited by Channel 4’s lawyers. While this made it rather dull, it also meant that it was robust and unchallengeable: any claim which would not stand up to rigorous academic scrutiny was excluded. Despite this, it was billed as a controversial polemic and my own personal view (I was the onscreen presenter). Durkin’s film, by contrast, appears to have been exempted from such rigorous fact-checking and was not presented as his opinion. Why did such radically different standards apply? And in what sense did my film “balance” Durkin’s? Mine was about policies seeking to address climate change: I was not asked to demonstrate that manmade global warming was taking place. Even if that had been my aim, Channel 4 misunderstands its public service obligations if it believes it has to strike a balance between truth and falsehood. I was glad to see that Ofcom found that the other programmes in the channel’s schedule “were not sufficiently timely or linked” to the Swindle to balance it.

The channel appears until now to have shrugged off criticism of these programmes: even, in fact, to have enjoyed it. They create “noise”, which is considered by some executives to be the thing that counts. Hamish Mykura, the man who commissioned The Great Global Warming Swindle, has since been promoted. Channel 4’s spokesman tells me “It would be wrong to suggest that Channel 4 has an agenda regarding environmental programmes. The vast majority of Channel 4’s programmes on environmental issues over the last 20 years have reflected the opinion of the majority of scientists on man-made global warming. … to the best of our knowledge, since 1990 there has been 5 ½ hours of programming giving voice to the minority of scientists who question man’s role in global warming.” This, it says, “is against the background of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] stating that there is a 90% certainty that the causes of global warming are man-made, it follows that there is a 10% uncertainty. Yet this 10% uncertainty receives a disproportionately small amount of airtime.”

I find this argument extraordinary. A 90% level of confidence doesn’t mean that 10% of the evidence suggests that an effect is not occurring – in fact there is no reliable evidence showing that manmade global warming is not taking place. It is expressed in this way because there is no absolute certainty in science. The “very high confidence” the IPCC expresses in the global warming thesis is the strongest statement any reputable scientist would make about his area of study. It is legitimate and right to stress that there can be no absolute certainty about global warming. But this is not what Channel 4 has done. The five and half hours of programmes which attack the thesis (and there have been many more which savage other aspects of environmentalism) express absolute certainty that manmade global warming isn’t happening.

So why does Channel 4 seem to be waging a war against the greens? I am not sure, but it seems to me that much of its programming – whether it concerns property, celebrities or contestants seeking fame and money – is aspirational. Environmentalism is counter-aspirational. It suggests that the carefree world Channel 4 has created, the celebration of the self, cannot be sustained.

It is against my interests to publish this article. I would like to continue making programmes for Channel 4. I recognise that what I have written may jeopardise this work. But these matters are far more consequential than my own employment. By broadcasting programmes that appear to manipulate and even fabricate evidence, it has impeded efforts to forestall the 21st Century’s greatest threat. For how much longer will this be allowed to continue? And for how much longer will Ofcom forbid itself to state that a programme is misleading?

George Monbiot’s book Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice is published by Guardian Books, at £10.99.

References:

1. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel Four to Apologise to Four Interviewees in “Against Nature” Series. Press Release.

2. Ofcom, 21st July 2008. Broadcast Bulletin, Issue 114.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb114/issue114.pdf

3. You can read the transcript here:

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/gaudcert/globwarm3.htm

4. Najma Kazi, pers comm.

5. Mae-Wan Ho, pers comm.

6. Channel 4, by email.

7. You can read the account of where this graph came from and much more at http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

8. Nathan Rive and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 27th April 2007. Regarding: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on March 8, 2007. http://folk.uio.no/nathan/web/statement.html

9. See http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

10. Piers Corbyn has sent me the list of his publications.

11. See http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

12. Tim Ball, pers comm.

13. http://www.ipcc.ch/about/index.htm

14. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/history/

15. http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/channel4response

16. Dr Lucy Arnot, 18th October 2007. Communicate 07 conference, Bristol.

17. Hamish Mykura, 16th March 2007. The Today programme.

18. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/04/01/correspondence-with-hamish-my…

Luxury community of "conscience"

When the locals cried green-wash, the elite developer cried class envy. Welcome to Paradise Valley.

By Fred Haefele

Read more: Environment, Opinion, Global Warming

Image: Ameya Preserve

Rendering of home at Ameya Preserve.

May 3, 2008 | LIVINGSTON, Mont. -- Somewhere on his 9,500-acre ranch in Montana's Paradise Valley, maybe as he watched the sun-dazzled Yellowstone River slide by the 12,000-foot Absaroka Mountains, Wall Street tycoon and self-described conservationist Wade Dokken must have had a vision: He would create a new kind of luxury community in the heart of the American West. Different from the typical recreation-based developments, utopian in concept, his Ameya Preserve would be a place of unsurpassed beauty, where bright and uncommonly well-heeled people could, however briefly, take their ease in a community implementing the kind of cutting-edge technology that could one day save the planet.

Along these lines, Ameya (Sanskrit for "without boundaries") would be powered entirely by solar, wind or geothermal sources, the buildings would be constructed according to the most advanced environmental specifications. Most prominently, Ameya would also be designed to "zero out," which means that the carbon emitted in the construction process would be scrupulously calculated, then offset by planting forest tracts somewhere else in the West.

In place of golf or skiing, residents could participate in a variety of Chautauqua-like events, conducted by Ameya "cultural directors," community members with distinguished backgrounds in the arts and sciences. Indeed, the people Ameya would have on board include some of the brightest stars on the American scene: best-selling author and restaurateur Alice Waters; soprano Renée Fleming; paleontologist Jack Horner; and former head of New York's Metropolitan Museum, Thomas Hoving, to name a few.

In terms of best and brightest, Dokken could hardly hope for better. The only thing he might wish is that Park County locals stay too dazzled to notice that his project is a meticulously designed biosphere for the über-riche, built smack in the middle of habitat that conservationists are fighting to save.

It's fair to say that, for the world's wealthiest, environmental issues have not always been a prime concern. Often enough, ignoring the environment is exactly how they got rich, and nowhere is this more true than in the American West, where the ravening extractive industries have run roughshod for over a century. It's not surprising that plush developments like Big Sky's Yellowstone Club (where skiers schuss on trademarked "Private Powder") occasionally have issues with the EPA.

The ultimate glitzification of sleepy mountain towns like Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo., was more about insouciance than noblesse oblige. So to many, it was refreshing to hear a high-end developer talking knowledgeably about aquifers and habitat depletion. At first, Dokken got a lot of good ink about how painstakingly his initial proposal was put together. "I was kind of blown away (with it)," Jim Barrett, director of the Park County Environmental Council, told David Nolt, who penned an in-depth investigation of Ameya in NewWest.net ("The Voice of the Rocky Mountains"). "It's not perfect, but if we were to write the handbook on smart growth development ... that's basically what it was."

A North Dakota native, Dokken made his fortune on Wall Street as president of American Skandia, a financial services company. He sold Skandia to Prudential in 2003, returned west to deal in high-end real estate. (Price for an "Ameya Estate Preserve Lot": $2.1 million.) A tycoon who votes Democratic, a developer who sees himself as a conservationist, Dokken had straddled enough fences to know that if he was to build Ameya in a place like Paradise Valley, it would help to win over the community, and a fairly sophisticated one at that.

For years, the cowboys, ranchers, artists and working people of Livingston coexisted peaceably with celebrities, from movie folk like Sam Peckinpah and Jeff Bridges to famous writers like Jim Harrison and Tim Cahill. What they all had in common was they knew a great place when they saw one, and they liked it the way it was. In this manner, except for the bank account, notoriety and charisma, their move to the Montana Rockies was much like my own. I know a good place when I see one, too.

By last June, Ameya seeded the local papers with ads trumpeting the smorgasbord of benefits that the development, were it approved, would bring to Park County. These included a large spike in property tax revenues, a $50,000 donation to the rural fire department, the building of one Habitat for Humanity house for every 50 built at Ameya, funding for two advanced-placement teachers at Park County High School, and a 200-acre reservation for Livingston's "Farms for Families," a local program that promotes organic farming.

If such high-flying P.R. made locals a bit leery ("One can't help but notice the lengths to which Ameya is going ... to make their project palatable to the public," one letter to the Livingston Enterprise observed), the discovery that Ameya would try to buy two sections of public land made them downright skeptical. Though the project was still in the early planning stages, by July, locals began airing their doubts in a series of blogs and letters to the papers.

While some thought it laudable that Ameya eschewed the traditional 6,000-square-foot "Log-Mahal" for more discreet 4,000 footers, and that these homes would be powered renewably, and that the acreage upon which they'd be built was subjected to exhaustive impact studies, many struggled with pronouncements like "Ameya will be the most sustainable community ever built." Other project descriptions seemed almost nonsensical. A "private national park"? A "community of culture and conscience"? Finally, Ameya's assertion that "this project preserves natural resources that couldn't be preserved by any other means" involved the kind of death-defying, leap-of-faith logic few besides Dokken could manage.

Neither did it help that Ameya had a way of getting ahead of itself, and was prone to make claims it couldn't substantiate; for example, it was news to Thomas Hoving to learn he'd accepted Ameya's invitation, and it was news to the Corporation for the Northern Rockies to read that they'd already endorsed Dokken's project. More to the point, locals objected to a large-scale development built in a fire-prone drainage; they objected to the fact these were second, third or even fourth vacation homes; they objected to what seemed like Dokken's selective environmentalism.

Park County wildlife ecologist Peter Feigley, who smelled green wash early on, questioned Ameya's principles on the blog Luxist. "How many homes do the prospective clients [already] own, and how large are they? Think of how much jet fuel and gasoline is wasted by the ultra wealthy and their families, bopping around between their various homes and resorts." Feigley would go on to describe Ameya as "a sham; targeting wealthy and naïve, if not arrogant, individuals."

For Dokken, this proved too much. When you cracked on the ultra-wealthy, you were cracking on his people, and he couldn't let such a remark go unchallenged. He fired off a letter to Park County planner Mike Inman in which, among other things, he berated his critics for "class envy," claiming remarks like Feigley's were directed "at people who have had more success in life than the letter writers and blog writers ... Perhaps they were smarter. Perhaps they worked harder. Perhaps they managed their money better ..."

There followed a brief communal gasp. Had the locals just been scolded for not respecting their betters? Had Dokken been drinking? Whatever the case, everyone knew what really happened: A millionaire finally used the C-word.

It's weird to be discussing "class" in the 21st century West. For openers, many of us moved here precisely to get away from such a concept, and besides, the West is known for its frontier egalitarianism and hard-nosed reality checks; a beautiful but uncompromising place you were required to meet on its own terms. In short, it was a place where old-world conceits like "class" and "privilege" would get you nowhere, quickly.

Still, the fact that the high-end real estate market fairly suppurates with descriptors like "elite," "privileged" and "exclusive," underscores an unpleasant truth; the people who can afford to buy up the most beautiful spots in the West have no intention of leaving their aristocratic values back home. This would also seem to underscore Dokken's contention that the development of areas like the Paradise Valley is inevitable, and if he doesn't do it, some less visionary person will.

Be that as it may, Dokken seems to want it all; he wants to make money doing something that seems, environmentally speaking, indefensible, but he wants to be well thought of, too. Following his now infamous letter to the Park County Planning Board, he quickly wrote the Enterprise that he "deeply regretted (his) choice of words." He went on to state that "a careful reading of the remainder of the letter ... revealed an outline of environmental initiatives ..." that would, essentially, authenticate his commitment to conservation.

Mostly, a careful reading of the letter brings forth a number of statements that seem in direct opposition to the term as most people understand it. Consider: "Ameya Preserve will be the first carbon neutral community in the U.S. ... addressing the potentially greatest issue of our day in the single most responsible manner." On any green scale, how is the clearing, excavation and paving of elk habitat to build baronial-size, seldom-used luxury homes to be viewed as "responsible," no matter how they are powered, how many organic farming projects, easements or carbon switcheroos are in the works?

In any event, Dokken was hard-pressed to put the genie back in the bottle. For weeks, the Enterprise printed responses like the following:

"It is difficult to forgive Mr. Dokken for insinuating ... that we are stupid enough not to recognize a land speculator when we see one."

"The stark reality is that the Ameya Preserve will turn ... Paradise Valley into upscale suburbia."

"One piece of advice for you, Mr. Dokken. Don't get stuck in a snow drift, coming out of your 'preserve' ... you may find that nobody wants to stop and help you."

And finally: "Years from now, we will look back on the loss of these public sections with regret. The developer and his clients are the only ones who will be happy."

The coming summer promises interesting times for Ameya. While many elite developments have been hit hard by the slumping market (the Yellowstone Club and Idaho's Promontory, among them), interest in Ameya appears to continue unabated; in spite of local opinion, the development goes apace. In the past month, Dokken sold 4,000 acres of Ameya land to neighbor and fellow millionaire candy-magnate Giorgio Perfetti. The deal helped eliminate most of Dokken's debt, and helped move his project along toward final approval. Interestingly enough, Perfetti wanted to buy the land because he didn't want to watch it get developed.

The real genius to Ameya Preserve is that it foresees that global warming might take the fun out of being rich. What if they wouldn't let you jet to two vacation homes per week? But at Ameya, some of the wealthiest people in the world would get to feel that, with no noticeable change in their habits or behavior, they could still be part of the solution. In this way, what Dokken offers most closely resembles the medieval sale of Indulgences; instead of examining or changing behavior, well-heeled sinners simply paid the fine, went right on sinning. After all, they could afford it.

Not one word mentioned about the indigenous population of Montana, which leaves in one of the WORST of all Reservations.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Current crop of extreme tornadoes

BULLETIN ITEM: Current Crop Of Extreme Tornadoes - No Connection With Solar Activity

Most probable this is due to Global Warming Syndrome while coming out of Pacific La Nina phase.

Sunspot Activity is ZIP and there are no major recorded Fluxgate (U of Alaska) magnetic disturbances. Take a look at current monitors:

http://www.michaelm andeville. com/earthmonitor /topten_monitor. htm

One on global warming .. from 2003 books of note

Go ahead, guys! Believe the soft fasicst Al Gore who stands to make billions off your gulliblity, I don't believe a WORD he says. Yes, greenhouse gases are BAD, but what's HE doing about it?

Nothing. Nothing at all. But the TRUTH will out eventually.

Same goes for the nasty Thomas Friedman. Trying to profit off your stooopidity.

Veeger.

Wipeout

New Scientist vol 178 issue 2392 -

26 April 2003, page 38

A major catastrophe 251 million years ago left life teetering on the brink of oblivion. Now for the first time we have a clear picture of what caused it, says leading palaeontologist Michael Benton

251 MILLION years ago, at the end of the Permian period, life on Earth was almost completely wiped out by an environmental catastrophe of a magnitude never seen before or since. All over the world complex ecosystems were destroyed. In the sea, coral reefs, fishes, shellfish, trilobites, plankton, and many other groups disappeared. On land, the sabre-toothed gorgonopsian reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, the dinocephalians and pareiasaurs, were wiped out forever. Only 5 per cent of species survived the catastrophe, and for the next 500,000 years life itself teetered on the brink of oblivion. What terrible event could have wrought such havoc?

Two theories have been proposed - the impact of a huge meteorite or comet over 10 kilometres in diameter, or a massive and prolonged volcanic eruption. Up to now the evidence has been equivocal. But the data has been accumulating over the past 10 years, and the picture is now clear enough to say with some certainty what happened.

An impact might seem a tempting model. A massive catastrophe demands an extraordinary explanation - something unexpected, something from outer space. And we know that impacts can cause mass extinctions. It seems that the dinosaurs and many other groups of animals and plants were wiped out 65 million years ago by the impact of a huge meteorite in modern day Mexico. The crater has been found, there is good evidence for the shock wave, and for the fallout rocks and dust all round the world.

In February 2001, a team of scientists claimed they had found clear evidence that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian was also caused by a meteorite impact. Luanne Becker of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues from NASA and other institutions announced in a paper in Science (vol 291, p 1530) that they had found extraterrestrial helium and argon in rocks from the Permo-Triassic boundary in China and Japan.

The gases were trapped inside the fullerenes or buckyballs that are often associated with impact debris. When Becker and her team looked closely at the helium and argon they found isotope ratios like nothing else on Earth, but similar to those found in meteorites. On this basis they argued that the fullerenes - and their entrapped gases - must have come from an impact.

The claim was splashed all over the press. On 23 February 2001, The New York Times reported "Meteor crash led to extinctions in era before dinosaurs". The Times said, "Asteroid collision left the world almost lifeless".

But later in 2001, several learned journals published critiques in which other geochemists tried and failed to replicate Becker's results. Other samples from the same boundary bed in China apparently contained no buckyballs, argon or helium, and a Japanese geologist, Yukio Isozaki of the University of Tokyo, pointed out that the Japanese sample came from a rock formation that didn't even include the Permian-Triassic boundary.

But Becker and her team still stand by their results. They repeated their analyses from the Chinese samples, and confirmed the helium result. They also have support from an independent source. In September 2001, Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University in Japan reported that sediment grains from Permo-Triassic boundary sections in China show evidence of compression by impact, as well as geochemical shifts indicative of a huge impact - though his data is far from conclusive.

All in all, the evidence for an impact at the Permo-Triassic boundary is limited when compared with the mass of evidence for an asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous: the iridium anomaly (a worldwide spike in the abundance of iridium, an element derived from meteorite impacts); shocked quartz (grains showing evidence of high-pressure modification); glassy spherules (melt particles derived from sedimentary rocks); and above all an enormous crater of the correct age. The discovery of a Permian equivalent of any of these could confirm the impact theory at any moment. But for now, most geologists do not accept the impact model for the crisis at the end of the Permian.

Instead, their attention has focused on Earth-bound processes. The idea is that massive volcanic eruptions, sustained over half-a-million years or more, caused catastrophic environmental deterioration - poison gas, global warming, stripping of soils and plants from the landscape, eruption of gases from their frozen locations deep in the oceans, and mass deoxygenation. The evidence for this version of events is compelling compared with the impact hypothesis.

First and foremost, the end of the Permian was indeed characterised by huge volcanic eruptions. The remains of these are preserved in the Siberian Traps, a vast accumulation of basalt lavas some 3 million cubic kilometres in volume and covering 3.9 million square kilometres of what is now eastern Russia. Precise dating of the Siberian Traps shows that they span the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic, with the eruptions beginning perhaps 500,000 years before.

The Siberian Traps were not formed by explosive eruptions from classic cone-shaped volcanoes. More commonly, basalt is erupted through fissures, long cracks in the ground, as happens on Iceland today. Such eruptions last for a long time, and the lava bubbles up in huge volumes, spreading sideways from the fissure. They are accompanied by prodigious outpourings of gases, mostly carbon dioxide.

The effect of these gases was devastating. The full story of the havoc they wrought is written in the sedimentary rocks that span the Permo-Triassic boundary. Until the 1990s, geologists had to rely on incomplete or hard-to-date sections in northern Italy, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Reputedly excellent sections in southern China were not available to overseas geologists, mainly for political reasons.

Nothing daunted, British geologists Tony Hallam of the University of Birmingham and Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds obtained a modest travel grant from the Royal Society, and went to China in 1991. What they found amazed them: the rock record was complete, and it told the story of the crisis millimetre-by-millimetre as they worked their way through the rocks from bottom to top.

Hallam and Wignall focused on sections around the Meishan township. Working up through the succession, the last rocks deposited in the Permian were limestones containing diverse and abundant fossils, such as foraminiferans (microscopic shelled protozoans), brachiopods (lamp shells), and conodonts (jaw elements from primitive fish-like vertebrates). Rarer fossils include cephalopods (coiled molluscs that are distant relatives of the modern squid and octopus), sea urchins, starfish and small crustaceans called ostracods, all typical of warm, shallow seas. Near the top, there is extensive burrowing in the limestones, indicating conditions of full oxygenation. Clearly, life at this time was diverse and abundant.

Then, suddenly, everything changes. The thick, burrowed limestones disappear, and with them the abundant fossils. The limestone is capped by a mineral-rich layer containing lots of pyrite - a classic marker of very low atmospheric oxygen. On top of this are three layers of limestone, mudstone and clay, encompassing about half a million years. These layers, numbered as beds 25, 26 and 27 in the Chinese system, tell how the crisis unfolded, so let's look at them in more detail.

The oldest layer, bed 25, is a thin band of pale-coloured clay 5 centimetres thick in which fossils are very rare, just a few foraminiferans and conodonts. Under the microscope, this clay contains small iron-rich pellets and decayed pieces of quartz that indicate it was formed from an acidic "tuff", an amalgam of volcanic fragments and ash from an explosive volcanic eruption - presumably the Siberian Traps.

The next bed up, number 26, consists of 7 centimetres of dark, organic-rich limey mudstone in which fossils are slightly more abundant - there are brachiopods, clams and cephalopods. Based on the relatively diverse fossils, and on geochemical evidence, oxygen levels during deposition of bed 26 were low but not anoxic.

Together, beds 25 and 26 form a distinctive dark-on-light marker band that has been detected elsewhere in China, which is useful for geologists who wish to make correlations from location to location. This "ash band" has been detected so far in 12 provinces throughout China, covering at least a million square kilometres. Whatever created it was extremely far-reaching.

Bed 27 indicates some degree of environmental recovery. The 17-centimetre-thick layer of limestone is full of burrows, so bottom conditions were not especially low in oxygen. The lower part of the bed contains occasional Permian brachiopod fossils near the base. Near the top, the conodont Hindeodus parvus appears for the first time: this is the globally accepted marker for the beginning of the Triassic period. (Geological boundaries are marked by the appearance of fossils, not their disappearance. The major event happened at the base of bed 25, but no significant new species appeared until the middle of bed 27.)

What does it all mean? One of the stories the Meishan section tells is of a dramatic extinction event. In the late 1990s, Jin Yugan and his colleagues from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and Doug Erwin from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, undertook a huge sampling programme. They found that at the base of bed 25, 116 marine species suddenly disappeared, representing 94 per cent of the total. Then, in the following 500,000 years stretching to the top of bed 27, new species appear then disappear with alarming speed. Overall a further 45 species dropped out, one at a time. Clearly something terrible happened at the base of bed 25 and its ramifications continued for half a million years.

But what exactly happened? Fortunately, the Meishan rock section, and other sections elsewhere, contain a record of environmental changes through the Permo-Triassic crisis, in the form of isotopes of oxygen and carbon. Both elements have two stable, naturally occurring isotopes whose ratios fluctuate depending on environmental conditions. The isotope ratios are locked into the skeletons of organisms during their lifetimes, so careful recordings from the shells of bivalves or foraminiferans, for example, can give a detailed picture of atmospheric and oceanic conditions through time.

Oxygen isotopes are used as a palaeothermometer. Oxygen occurs in two forms, oxygen-16 and oxygen-18. These are incorporated into the calcite skeletons of marine creatures at different rates depending on the water temperature, more oxygen-18 at low temperatures, and more oxygen-16 at high. At the base of bed 25, the main mass extinction level, there was a sudden shift in the oxygen isotope ratios indicating a worldwide rise in temperature of 6 °C. This may not sound much, but it would have a profound effect on the world's ecology. Climatologists have been getting very excited recently about a half-a-degree rise in global temperatures.

The carbon isotopes suggest what might have caused the temperature increase. They show a massive shift towards the light isotope, carbon-12, exactly at the time of the big extinction. Pulses of carbon-12 in the geological record are usually indicative of a volcanic eruption or a large die-off (plants, animals and bacteria concentrate carbon-12 in their bodies and release it when they die). Both certainly happened at the end of the Permian. But the carbon-12 pulse is far too big to be explained by these mechanisms alone. Calculations of global carbon budgets have suggested that, even if every plant, animal, and microbe died and was buried, altogether they would only account for about one-fifth of the observed carbon shift. The Siberian Traps would have added another fifth. Where did the remaining three-fifths come from?

The extra carbon-12 was probably buried, frozen deep under the oceans in the form of gas hydrates. These are extraordinary accumulations of carbon-12-rich methane locked up in cages of ice at very high pressure. If the atmosphere and oceans warm up sufficiently, these gas reserves can suddenly melt and release their contents in a catastrophic way. The explosion of gas through the surface of the oceans has been termed a "methane burp". A very large methane burp at the end of the Permian could have produced enough carbon-12 to make up the deficit.

The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO₂ from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago.

The effects were profound and long-lasting. In the Meishan section, the Permo-Triassic boundary in bed 27 is followed by a succession of dark limestones and shales containing sparse fossils. This seems to represent a post-apocalyptic world, in which CO₂ levels were still very high and the oceans and atmosphere were starved of oxygen. The 6 per cent of species that survived the initial onslaught were struggling. Normal recovery processes had not yet kicked in. When oxygen levels fall, plants and photosynthesising plankton in the sea normally replenish it by absorbing excess CO₂ and generating oxygen. After the crash at the end of the Permian, perhaps oxygen levels had been driven so low, and so much of plant life had been killed, that this was impossible.

The surviving species were a very poor sample of what had lived before: thin-shelled molluscs that required very little food and swam languidly over the black, deoxygenated muds, and the "living fossil" Lingula in its shallow burrows. Near the end of the Permian period, each region of the world had its own fauna and flora. Afterwards, the survivors became cosmopolitan. It took 20 or 30 million years for coral reefs to re-establish themselves, and for the forests to regrow. In some settings, it took 50 million years or more for full ecosystem complexity to recover. Geologists and palaeontologists are only just beginning to get to grips with this most profound of crises.

Michael Benton Michael Benton is head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His book on the end-Permian crisis, When Life Nearly Died, has just been published by Thames & Hudson, price £16.95

Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change

Notice that they don't talk about the death of biodiversity .. the animals are left to "speak for themselves". How highly politically correct.

Does anyone in America grasp the concept of "stewardship of the planet" as yet??

Nope. Just a few "pagan", "savage" natives, I guess. People who might take a look at junque science ..

Veeger


By NEELA BANERJEE

Published: March 10, 2008

Signaling a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to back a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

The largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, is politically and theologically conservative.

Yet its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed.

“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,”

the church leaders wrote in their new declaration.

A 2007 resolution passed by the convention hewed to a more skeptical view of global warming.

In contrast, the new declaration, which will be released Monday, states,

“Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.”

The document also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy.

Jonathan Merritt, the spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative and a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said the declaration was a call to Christians to return to a biblical mandate to guard the world God created.

The Southern Baptist signatories join a growing community of evangelicals pushing for more action among believers, industry and politicians. Experts on the Southern Baptist Convention noted the initiative marked the growing influence of younger leaders on the discussions in the Southern Baptist Convention.

While those younger Baptists remain committed to fight abortion, for instance, the environment is now a top priority, too.

“In no way do we intend to back away from sanctity of life,” said the Rev. Dr. Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala.

Still, many powerful Southern Baptist leaders and agencies did not sign the declaration, including the convention’s influential political arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Dr. Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy at the commission, played down the differences between the declaration and the Southern Baptist Convention’s position.

The declaration says in fact that lack of scientific unanimity should not preclude “prudent action,” which includes changing individual habits and giving “serious consideration to responsible policies that effectively address” global warming.

The declaration is the outgrowth of soul-searching by Mr. Merritt, 25. The younger Mr. Merritt said that for years he had been “an enemy of the environment.” Then, he said, he had an epiphany.

“I learned that God reveals himself through Scripture and in general through his creation, and when we destroy God’s creation, it’s similar to ripping pages from the Bible,”

Mr. Merritt said.

Dr. Michael Castle: The Methodic Demise of Natural Earth

THE METHODIC DEMISE OF NATURAL EARTH -

I apologise - AS I GOT THIS I CANNOT TAKE THE UNDERLINES OUT.

PLEASE go to the source material. I have taken hours to try to put in the urls for the pertinent information.

As the satellite gets shot down and the hydrazine gets released, I know that it is time to call people's attention to this information.

Decide for yourself. I know that much or my work has led me to this place to look at this information NOW - and I hope you take a look, too.

Be kind to one another, good to yourselves and love your children. What else can I say?

I am very appreciative to the anoynous man at the HAARP facility who led me to this information and to ever that is, I say thank you. It is better to know. I was able awhile back to find out where the chemical were made at a factory in China - I assumed it had much to do with depleted uranium weapons; it obviously was more than THAT. Someone has to be making the chemicals that the planes are using - I was able by doing some research to find out where that was.

I have some strange "sync" with Haarp, it's strange electrical effects show up on my skin. I have degenerative fibromyalgia which I am convinced came from something released following the Gulf War while I was living in the UK - I have the biochemical weapons issues ever since it was suggested to me that either the chemicals released OR the burning of the oil near Kuwait had been a major contributor to my illness. I have often wondered what the chemical Red Adair who put out the fire were and why were not ever told. I know, and you cannot convince me otherwise, that contracting my illness had something to do with the way I think or my family genes. I saw many many others in London at the time who had their livers destroyed at the time.

I know I got sick then and I try to stay as healthy as I possibly can. At no time has any ever checked my blood for the toxic metals. And I often wonder what blood checks they do in medical exams to let people enter Canada - blood tests I tried heartily to avoid by coming in as a refugee wherein you do not have to have them. I have one more paper to follow.

Veeger

An Environmental Impact Overview

By Dr. R. Michael Castle 27 March 2004.

In this century, we believe we are witnessing the gradual, purposeful demise of the Earth's Natural System. There are those who will debunk/dis-info all that is written regarding the subject of this paper: ChemTrails. ChemTrails are only a vague description, in lay-terms, of a greater theater of toxic materials being released into the atmosphere/stratosphere, for a myriad of crude and toxic agendas.

The author, Dr. R. Michael Castle, will attempt to put this Global debacle into a profile of events. Technical specificity of all the identified components would require at least a book in length, to recite them all. A short Bibliography follows, and links to various pertinent documents of unquestionable validity.

First Rule of Understanding: There are very large, winner-take-all games orchestrated by the Global Interests of the World. We have investigated, researched and found substantial evidence of a multiplicity of Global operations designed to mitigate various and theoretical Global catastrophes, as defined by a late 1980's and 1990's International Panel of Conferees. (The value of who are they, what's the politics smell like and all that is not of the utmost importance in our attempt, herein, to describe what serious destruction they have caused and are causing to Humans and our Finite Environment. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch)

1 Many of the operations we have collectively found in our investigations of this debacle have remained a secret, classified and not for general populace information or knowledge. You must answer the question, Dear Reader as to why someone would possibly deploy these Geo-weapons. Just follow the money trails. We will yield all of our voluminous data, information and all references we have used in our validation of facts surrounding this Global atrocity. The recipients of this information must be interested enough in what we are trying to expose, the Human-health risks, the Environmental risks and the plain, simple "wrongness" that prevails. We must determine first if you are provoked to really care, because the research and development of this information for a Major Media whistle-blowing expose will require passion and dedication. Our research work has spanned almost five years of....watching and discovering, with disgust, the scenarios which follow. This is not a small task.....but the Mission is simple. Expose and Stop the Methodic Demolition of our Natural Earth and its inhabitants. Executive Summary Dr. Edward Teller wrote a white paper in the late 1990's describing a remedial operation, strategy, epic-in-proportion, to change the predicted course of what was believed by an International group of Scientists, including Dr. Edward Teller, Livermore National Laboratories, et al, to be the cataclysmic certainty from the results of global-warming, crisis level Ultra-Violet/Cosmic radiation, crisis Ozone-layer depletion and other theoretical doom. (Edward Teller's "Sun Screen" Document - PDF: http://www.rense.com/general18/scatteringEdTellerwithnotes.pdf)

There is not enough room to put ALL the information on this blog - I Refer you to:
http://www.chemtrails.ch/dokumentationen/THE-METHODIC-DEMISE.htm

REFERENCES:

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch

2. Edward Teller's "Sun Screen" Document -

PDF: http://www.rense.com/general18/scatteringEdTellerwithnotes.pdf

Edward Teller's "sun screen" document: Global Warming and Ice Ages: I. Prospects for Physics-Based Modulation of Global Change, E. Teller et al., August 15, 1997,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as PDF Presented at: 22nd Intl. Seminar on

Planetary Emergencies, Erice (Sicily), Italy

3. WHO IS EDWARD TELLER?: http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/042401HBomb.html This is the same Dr. Edward Teller known as Father-H-Bomb. (The same person that once recommended "nuking" a prominent East Coast U.S. harbor in order to make it deeper for ships of International flags' commerce. In the Super-Port that would result, International Commerce and Trade would be exceptional; especially one that would not be a Union controlled port. None-the-less, someone nixed that idea after they reviewed the potential lethality of the residual radiation for at least 1,000 years.

4. BARIUM FLUORIDE OPTICAL CRYSTAL SAFETY DATA SHEET: http://www.crystran.co.uk/baf2safe.htm

5. 2003 Chemtrails over America (Scroll down to: RADIO FREQUENCY MISSION PLANNER): http://lookupabove.tripod.com/chemtrailsoveramerica

6. [2025] Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025: http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research/ay1996/acsc/96-025ag.htm

FOR EASE IN DOWNLOADING ABOVE PAPER: PDF:Weather as a Force Multiplier -

Owning the Weather 2025: http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/vol3ch15.pdf

7. AF2025 v3c15-1 | Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning... | (Ch 1): http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm

8. Carnicom - Aerosol Operations: http://www.carnicom.com/conright.htm

9. Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming: US Patent: 5,003,186-Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding:

10. Aerosol Programs Patently Obvious: http://users.ev1.net/~seektress/patlist.htm

AEROSOL RELATED LINKS: http://www.aaar.org/hplinks.htm

11. HAARP HOME PAGE: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp

12. Correspondence with Dr. Bernard Eastlund: Space Based Weather Control: The Thunderstorm Solar Power Satellite: http://www.borderlands.com/spacewea.htm

13. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison: PCMDI Home Page: http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov

14. TOMS -- Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer: http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov

15. AIR FORCE 2025 FINAL REPORT: http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025

16. RIZZO DM - Oak Tree Sudden Death: http://www.plpnem.ucdavis.edu/plp/people/bio_info/Rizzo.htm

Source: http://www.wnho.net/methodic_demise.htm

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KlusterfucK: The coming food crunch

CLIMATE CHANGE: Africa, South Asia Could Face Famines (Feb 1, 2008)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41041

BROOKLIN, Canada (IPS) - Climate change will cause major disruptions in the global food system, and adaptation to those changes needs to begin immediately, experts say.Otherwise one-fifth of the world's population could starve and millions of others become climate refugees, forced by heat and drought to abandon their lands and hunt for food elsewhere in the coming decades. To prevent this nightmarish future, researcher David Lobell says the world community should focus its efforts where climate threats are likely to make the greatest impacts. "We used historical data to determine what food-producing regions of the world were most sensitive to changes in temperature and rainfall," said Lobell, author of the study published in the journal Science today. "Impoverished regions of Southern Africa and South Asia will be hit first and hardest by climate change," Lobell told IPS from his office at Stanford University's Programme on Food Security and the Environment. Other climate risk hot spots include Central America and Brazil. The analysis compared 20 climate change models for those areas and determined that average temperatures would rise one-degree Celsius in most areas by 2030. (...) Around the world, soils are in decline, largely because of the focus on increasing crop yields. Agriculture depends on using solar energy from the sun to recycle nutrients from the soils into crops that we eat. However, if the nutrients removed from the soils are not replaced, soils become depleted. Recent research has found that chemical fertilisers do not replace these nutrients but rather mask declining soil quality. Equally important is the problem of soil erosion. As reported by IPS last September, 100,000 square kilometres of land becomes degraded or turns into desert every year. However, climate change is expected to boost agriculture output in some countries such as Canada and Russia, which would have longer growing seasons. That raises equity issues and requires a rethinking of global grain stocks, and whether these should remain largely in private hands and where they should be physically stored, says Tansey. "What is clear is that there are serious flaws in a (current) food system that globally leaves more than 850 million people undernourished and over one billion overweight (300 million of them obese)," he wrote.

Why a World-Wide Famine is Coming:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2008/02/07/cnoil107.xml

Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Books that will change the world

By Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch. com. Posted January 2, 2008.

Twelve authors on war and peace, dissent, the environment and the empowerment of the poor provide inspiration to transform the world in 2008.

Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks -- or building ladders -- rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It's a world view, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.

Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as "the secret library of hope." None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.

Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates:

The Power from Beneath

When the monks of Burma/Myanmar led an insurrection in September simply by walking through the streets of their cities in their deep-red robes, accompanied by ever more members of civil society, the military junta which had run that country for more than four decades responded with violence. That's one measure of how powerful and threatening the insurrection was. (That totalitarian regimes tend to ban gatherings of more than a few people is the best confirmation of the strength that exists in unarmed numbers of us.)

After the crackdown, after the visually stunning, deeply inspiring walks came to a bloody end, quite a lot of mainstream politicians and pundits pronounced the insurrection dead, violence triumphant -- as though this play had just one act, as though its protagonists were naive and weak-willed. I knew they were wrong, but the argument I rested on wasn't my own: I went back to Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, by far the most original and ambitious of the many histories of nonviolence to appear in recent years.

When it came out as the current war began in the spring of 2003, the book was mocked for its dismissal of the effectiveness of violence, but Schell's explanation of how superior military power failed abysmally in Vietnam was a prophesy waiting to be fulfilled in Iraq. Schell himself is much taken with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom he quotes saying, in 1969:

To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.

I hope that his equally trenchant explanation of the power of nonviolence is fulfilled in Burma. Schell has been a diligent historian and philosopher of nuclear weapons since his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, but this book traces the rise of nonviolence as the other half of the history of the violent twentieth century.

That's what books in a library of hope consist of -- not a denial of the horrors of recent history, but an exploration of the other tendencies, avenues, and achievements that are too often overlooked. After all, to return to Burma, much has already changed there since September: Burma's greatest supporter, China, has been forced to denounce the crackdown and may be vulnerable to more pre-Olympics pressure on the subject; India has declared a moratorium on selling arms to the country; a number of companies have withdrawn from doing business there; and the US Congress just unanimously passed a bill, HR 3890, to increase sanctions, freeze the junta's assets in US institutions, and close a loophole that allowed Chevron to profit spectacularly from its business in Burma.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as Burma's head of state in 1990 and has, ever since, been under house arrest or otherwise restricted. She nonetheless remains the leader of, as well as a wise, gentle, fearless voice for, that country's opposition. Since the uprising, her silencing has begun to dissolve amid meetings with a UN envoy and members of her own political party; some believe she may be on her way to being freed. The Burmese people were hit with hideous, pervasive violence, but they have not surrendered: small acts of resistance and large plans for liberation continue.

The best argument for hope is how easy it ought to be for the rest of us to raise its banner, when we look at who has carried it through unimaginably harsh conditions: Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom recounts his unflagging dedication to his country's liberation (imperfect though it may still be); Rigoberta Menchu dodged death squads to become a champion of indigenous rights, a Nobel laureate, and a recent presidential candidate in Guatemala; Oscar Oliveira proved that a bunch of poor people in Bolivia can beat Bechtel Corporation largely by nonviolent means, as he recounts in !Cochabamba! ; and Aung San Suu Kyi radiates -- even from the page -- an extraordinary calm and patience, perhaps the result of her decades of Buddhist practice. She remarks, toward the end of The Voice of Hope, a collection of conversations with her about Burma, Buddhism, politics, and her own situation,

"Yes I do have hope because I'm working. I'm doing my bit to try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it. But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no hope for it."

For a book about those who did their bit beautifully long ago, don't miss Adam Hochschild's gripping Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.

It begins with a handful of London Quakers who decided in the 1780s to abolish the institution of slavery in the British Empire and then, step by unpredictable step, did just that. It's an exhilarating book simply as the history of a movement from beginning to end, and so suggests how many other remarkable movements await their historian; others, from the women's movement to rights for queers to many environmental struggles, still await their completion. If only people carried, as part of their standard equipment, a sense of the often-incremental, unpredictable ways in which change is wrought and the powers that civil society actually possesses, they might go forward more confidently to wrestle with the wrongs of our time, seeing that we have already won many times before.

Indians, Environmentalists, and Utopians

One spectacular book along these lines already exists: Charles Wilkinson's Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. For us non-native people, Native Americans became far more visible during the huge public debates around the meaning of the Quincentennial of 1992 -- the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in this hemisphere. They reframed the history of the Americas as one of invasion and genocide, rather than discovery and development. But the story was not a defeatist one; simply in being able to tell their own stories and reshape their histories, native people of the Americas demonstrated that they were neither wholly conquered, nor eradicated; and, since then, the history of the two continents has been radically revised and indigenous peoples have won back important rights from Bolivia to Canada.

In the United States that reclaiming of power, pride, land, rights, and representation began far earlier, as Wilkinson's book relates. A law professor and lawyer who has worked on land and treaty-rights issues with many tribes, he begins his story of ascendancy with the 1953 decision by the US government to "terminate" the tribal identities, organizations, and rights of Native Americans and push them to melt into the general population. This represented an aggressive attempt at erasure of the many distinct peoples of this continent and their heritage. Told to disappear,

"Indian leaders responded and by the mid-1960s had set daunting goals... at once achieve economic progress and preserve ancient traditions in a technological age.... Against all odds, over the course of two generations, Indian leaders achieved their objectives to a stunning degree."

Wilkinson's monumental history of the past half-century concludes:

By the turn of this century Indian tribes had put in place much of the ambitious agenda that tribal leaders advanced in the 1950s and 1960s. They stopped termination and replaced it with self-determination. They ousted the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] as the reservation government and installed their own sovereign legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies. They enforced the treaties of old and, with them, the fishing, hunting and water rights. Nowhere have these changes been absolute and pure. In most cases the advances represent works in progress, but they have been deep and real.

Late this November, Canada set aside 25 million acres of boreal forest as a preserve to be managed, in part, by the Native peoples of the region, a huge environmental victory for the largest remaining forest on Earth -- and for all of us. How did it happen?

I am still looking for an environmental history with the strength and focus of Blood Struggle or Bury the Chains. An exhilarating 2006 article in Orion magazine by Ted Nace describes how a bunch of North Dakota farmers killed off Monsanto's plans to promote the growing of genetically altered wheat worldwide. The essay concludes:

"On May 10, 2004, Monsanto bowed to the prevailing political sentiment. It issued a curt press release announcing the withdrawal of all its pending regulatory applications for [its genetically altered] Roundup Ready wheat and the shifting of research priorities to other crops.

We need books on victories like this, books that tell us how this dam was defeated, this river brought back from being a sewer, that toxin banned, that species rebounded, that land preserved.

In fact, a broader history with some of those threads did appear this year, geographer Richard Walker's The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. It describes generations of struggle to preserve something of the richness of this extraordinarily diverse region by defeating some of the most awful proposals most of us have never heard of -- to, for example, completely fill in the San Francisco Bay -- back in an era when water and wetlands were just real estate waiting to happen.

The book does justice to a whole unexpected category of unsung heroines -- the often-subversive affluent ladies who have done so much for the environment and the community -- then moves on to document the emerging environmental justice movement that took on toxins, polluters, and the overlooked question of what ecology really means for the inner city. It's a great, hopeful history of a region that has long created environmental templates and momentum for the rest of the nation -- and Walker makes it clear that this trend was not inevitable, but the result of hard work by stubborn visionaries and organizers.

A decade ago, Alan Weisman wrote a profile of a town in the inhospitable savannah of eastern Colombia, a miraculous community in which that unfortunate nation's turmoil and our age's environmental destruction was replaced by a green, utopian approach that involved reinventing the roles of both technology and community. It worked, though Weisman ended his 1997 book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, on a prophetic note of caution:

[The] fading of the Cold War has revealed clearly that a far more incandescent and protracted battle -- a potentially apocalyptic resource war -- has been stealthily gathering intensity throughout the latter part of the twentieth century.... Yet a place like Gaviotas bears witness to our ability to get it right, even under seemingly insurmountable circumstances.

Weisman's deservedly successful 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, takes an extreme approach to getting it right, by showing how the planet might -- in part -- regenerate itself if we were to go away, all of us, for good. The chapters on nuclear waste and plastic are dauntingly grim, but the descriptions of New York City reverting to nature go two steps past Mike Davis's Dead Cities in praise of entropy, weeds, and the power of natural processes to take back much of the Earth as soon as we let go.

While Gaviotas stands out as a rare, realized utopia, our choices among the unrealized ones -- except as literature -- are legion. In 2007, I finally got around to reading what has already become my favorite utopian novel: William Morris' News from Nowhere. Best known during his life as a poet, Morris is, unfortunately, now mostly remembered for his wallpaper. He designed it as part of his lifelong endeavor to literally craft an alternative to the brutality and ugliness of the industrial revolution through the artisanal production of furniture, textiles, and books -- all as models of what work and its fruits could be.

That attempt had its political and literary faces, which is to say that Morris was also a prolific writer and an ardent revolutionary. He was more anarchist than socialist, as well as an antiquarian, a translator of Icelandic sagas, and so much more. News from Nowhere, published in 1890, portrays his ideal London in the far-distant future of 2102, a century and a half after "the revolution of 1952."

It's a bioregional and anarchic paradise: The economy is localized, work is voluntary, money is nonexistent and so is hunger, deprivation, and prison. The industrial filth of London has vanished, and the river and city are beautiful again. (They were far filthier in Morris' time, when every home burned coal, while sewage and industrial effluents flowed unfiltered into the Thames.)

Most utopias, of course, aren't places you'd actually want to live. Admittedly, Morris' is a little bland and mild, as life on earth without evil and struggle must be. But his utopia is prophetic, not dated, close to many modern visions of decentralized, localized power, culture, and everyday life. It is, in short, an old map for a new world being born in experiments around the globe.

Dreams on the Southern Horizon

Morris provided the name for the present-day News from Nowhere Collective, a group that has edited one of the more rambunctious handbooks for activists in recent times, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. A visually delicious, horizontally formatted little chunk of a book, it features a lot of photographs, a running timeline of radical victories in our era, and short, punchy essays from people immersed in changing the world all over that world (from Quebec and Nigeria to Bolivia and Poland). Playful, subversive, and far-reaching, the book -- even four years after its publication -- demonstrates the scope of constructive change and activism around the planet.

There are other such handbooks, including my brother David's Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, out from City Lights Books a few years ago. It was in the course of editing some of the essays in that book that I discovered the beautiful, hopeful voice of Marina Sitrin, a sociologist, human rights lawyer, and activist who has spent a great deal of time among the utopian social movements of Argentina. Her encounters become ours in her new book Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.

That country's sudden economic collapse and political turmoil in December of 2001 was largely overlooked here, but the crisis begat an extraordinary grassroots response -- about as far from shock and paralysis as you can imagine. Neighborhoods gathered in popular assemblies to protest the political structure, and then stayed together to feed each other during the fiscal crisis; factory workers took over shuttered factories and ran them as cooperatives; the poor organized and mobilized; but more than these concrete actions, Argentinean society itself changed.

People began to talk across old divides and create new words for what mattered now -- none more valuable than horizontalidad, which Sitrin translates as "horizontalism, " a direct and radically egalitarian participatory democracy, and politica afectiva, the politics of affection, or love. The 2001 crisis was soon transformed into an opportunity to overcome the legacy of the terrifying years of the Argentinean military dictatorship, to step out of the isolation and disengagement that fear had produced, to reclaim power and reinvent social ties. With this, Argentina moved a little further away from hell and a little closer to utopia.

It's not a coincidence that Weisman's Gaviotas is in South America (though it is a surprise that it's in Colombia). After all, the most powerful voice coming from the Spanish-speaking majority of the Americas is that of the Zapatistas, and Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana Ponce de Leon, is still the best English-language introduction to that indigenous movement's non-indigenous spokesman and raconteur Subcommandante Marcos. Via his poetic, playful, subversive, and ferociously hopeful manifestoes, tirades, allegories, and pranks, he has reinvented the language of politics, pushing off the drab shore of bureaucracy and cliche, sailing toward something rich and strange.

Ponce De Leon's book, however, only covers the first several years of Marcos's contributions. City Lights recently brought out his The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007. On page 102, he advises an indigenous audience: "It is the hour of the word. So then, put the machete away, and continue to hone hope." By page 349, he's quoting a possibly fictional elderly couple in San Miguel Tzinacapan, who say,

"The world is the size of our effort to change it."

Not that all resistance, all hope, comes from the south. It can be found everywhere, or at least on many edges, margins, and in many overlooked zones -- and one of the most exhilarating histories of it is The Many Headed-Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their book traces a plethora of acts of resistance to capitalism, exploitation, authoritarianism and the generally sorry lot meted out to the poor in the eighteenth century. That resistance was exuberant, inventive, and occasionally ferocious, and it found its own utopias. The book begins with a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, in which the shipwrecked sailors and passengers begin to form their own convivial utopia that the Virginia Company forcibly disbanded. The Many Headed Hydra covers some of the same ground -- and ocean routes -- as Hochschild's book, and they make good joint reading.

I wish Linebaugh's The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All was out in time for this list, but look for it in February. (I read it in manuscript for the University of California Press, loved it, and learned a lot from it.) Beginning with Bush's breach not just of the Constitution, but of Magna Carta's grant of habeas corpus, Linebaugh returns to that moment at Runnymede when King John was forced to concede rights to England's citizens. Linking that despot to the one in the White House, he ventures back and forth between the two times to explore the once evolving -- and now revolving or maybe even regressing -- territory of rights and liberties.

The Climate of Change

One thing becoming increasingly clear in this millennium: Human rights and the environment are all tangled up with each other -- and not only in environmental injustice hotspots like Louisiana's Cancer Alley or oily places like Nigeria. Democracy and an empowered citizenry are the best tools we have to make progress on climate change in this country. The issue of climate change may be global, but in the US a lot of the measures that matter are being enacted on the local level by cities, towns, regions, and states. Together, they have pushed far ahead of the recalcitrant federal government in trying to take concrete measures that could make a difference. Global measures matter, but so do local ones: The change here is likely to come as much from the bottom up as the top down.

One common response to climate change is to try to limit your own impact -- by consuming less. An issue, for instance, that's front and center in Britain but hardly on the table in the US, is taking fewer airplane trips. (The state of California, however, did recently start looking into ways to regulate and reduce airplane carbon emissions.) So there's personal virtue, which matters. Then there's agitating and organizing like crazy, which might matter more. Certainly, Bill McKibben makes a rousing case for it in his introduction to Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement. The book, edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, covers a lot of ground when it comes to how policy gets made and how to make it yourself, as does McKibben's own Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community.

Maybe the best news of 2007 is that we're finally doing something about the worst news ever: that we've royally screwed up the climate of this planet. After all, the rest of that news is: We still have a chance to mitigate how haywire everything goes, even though no one is yet talking about what a world of low to zero carbon emissions would look like.

Maybe one thing we really need (just to be a little more visionary and less grim about the subject) is a modern version of News from Nowhere portraying what a good life involving only a small carbon footprint might mean -- most likely a more localized, less consuming life with some cool technological innovations, including many we already have (some of which are described in Weisman's Gaviotas).

In ceasing the scramble for things, there would be real gains; we'd gain back time for sitting around talking at leisure about politics and the neighbors, for wandering around on foot -- and for reading. But you don't have to wait for everything to change: change it yourself by seizing these pleasures now.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.