James Brown is Dead

December 25, 2006 - 7:08PM

Photo: James Brown performs during a concert in Shanghai, China, early this year.Photo: AP

James Brown, the dynamic US singer known as the "Godfather of Soul,'' whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco, died early today in Atlanta, his agent said. He was 73.

Brown was hospitalised yesterday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital with pneumonia and died around 1.45am local time (1745 AEDT), said his agent, Frank Copsidas, of Intrigue Music.

Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, Copsidas said.

"We really don't know at this point what he died of,'' Copsidas said.

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolised him, and sometimes openly copied him.

His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others.

Songs such as David Bowie's 'Fame', Prince's 'Kiss', George Clinton's 'Atomic Dog' and 'Sly' and the Family Stone's 'Sing a Simple Song' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

"James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ``To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''

His hit singles include such classics as 'Out of Sight', ('Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine', 'I Got You (I Feel Good') and 'Say It Out Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud', a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

"I clearly remember we were calling ourselves coloured, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 AP interview.

"The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''

He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (best R&B recording) and for Living In America in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.)

He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to ``try to straighten out'' rock music.

From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, 'Please, Please, Please' in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname 'The Hardest Working Man in Show Business'.

With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.

Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers.

"The music out there is only as good as my last record,'' Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

"Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 per cent of their music is me,'' he told the AP in 2003.

Born in poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1933, he was abandoned as a four-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Georgia, in an ``ill-repute area,'' as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.

"I wanted to be somebody,'' Brown said.

By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served three and a half years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia, for breaking into cars.

While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.

In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later 'Please, Please, Please' was in the R&B Top Ten.

While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.

Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tyres of his truck.

Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.

Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.

More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.

Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers.

Brown's lawyer, Albert "Buddy'' Dallas, said the singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.

AP

Affluent lifestyles harming climate

Stephanie Peatling
December 7, 2006
SMH

AFFLUENT lifestyles are producing more waste, using more water and energy and relying more on cars with damaging effects on the environment.
The State of the Environment report, produced every five years and released yesterday, warned that most of the threats reported in 2001 were still present and, in some cases, had worsened.

The past decade had produced higher incomes and lower unemployment, the report found, but the higher consumption rates this brought had affected the environment.

"Realising a sustainable human environment requires a reduction in net consumption and waste," the report found.

"This will involve greater population densities than currently is the case, significant increases in building and material recycling, the capture and use of stormwater, the recycling of wastewater and biological waste, and improved urban form and urban structures.

"It also requires changes in behaviour by individuals."

The chairman of the report committee, University of Queensland Associate Professor Bob Beeton, said "business as usual is not an acceptable model". "We have got to plan to live in this country," he said.

A different approach was needed to get people thinking about their impact on the environment and changing their lifestyles, Professor Beeton said.

"The shock-horror approach is not working," he said.

"If you scare people with something they can't fix they switch off."

Some environmental programs were having unintended consequences and he warned against assuming that market-based approaches would solve natural problems.

The Federal Government will announce a taskforce soon to look at carbon emissions trading and its potential impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

It is also pursuing a national water trading market to help prevent water shortages.

The Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, said the Federal Government was "the best friend the environment had ever had".

Spending on environmental programs had increased in the past decade, he said, and the Government was near to its target of planting 1 billion trees.

But the Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said despite the billions of dollars spent, most environmental indicators were going backwards.

"On John Howard's watch, Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and our vital waterways are deteriorating," he said.

Mr Albanese released a discussion paper raising the possibility of combining land, water and biodiversity programs to cut back on bureaucracy and increase the amount of money spent on environmental protection.

"Labor will establish national targets for environmental improvement, take immediate action to help avoid dangerous climate change and will put 1500 gigalitres per annum back into the Murray River within 10 years," Mr Albanese said.

The Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the report attempted to "greenwash the severe environmental crisis".

"The report acknowledges that increasing demand for water is placing significant pressure on Australia's inland water systems and notes that the impact of wetlands has been dramatic," she said.

The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, said: "Our greenhouse emissions continue to rise, the condition of vital waterways is deteriorating and the decline of important indicator species, including many frogs and fish, is reaching alarming levels."

UNDER THREAT
- Greenhouse gas emissions to increase 22 per cent by 2020.
- Rainfall in the eastern states has been below average for five years.
- 231 nationally significant wetlands under threat.
- Ocean temperatures have risen 0.28C since 1950.

Making Australians understand how easy it is to fight climate change is the biggest challenge facing the nation's leading green politicians.

Stephanie Peatling reports.

Ian Campbell likes to carry a couple of light bulbs with him wherever he goes. The affable federal Environment Minister is not afraid of the dark but is fond of telling people, especially school students, that if everyone in Australia replaced their ordinary light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the world could do without one coal-fired power station.

"You can't look students in years five or six in the eye and say we can't solve climate change," he says. "You have to empower people and individuals and businesses and break things down into action you can take that will change the world."

While Campbell is in charge of a climate change policy that includes impressive-sounding technological solutions such as geosequestration and controversial options such as nuclear power, he is also responsible for explaining a tricky concept to everyone from primary school students to business leaders.

Since taking on the portfolio in 2004 he has tinkered with various explanations to help people understand climate change and encourage them not to see something as simple as changing a light bulb as pointless.

"I have tried to just simplify it by breaking it down to simple statistics," he says. "One of my favourites is: we have produced 1 trillion tonnes of carbon in the past 150 years; it will be another trillion in the next 50 if we keep going the way we are."

Although he admits the language of "trillions" might bamboozle some people he believes it at least conveys the magnitude of the problem.

Another favourite, trotted out by almost every Howard Government minister, is that closing all power stations overnight would be pointless because China would create the same amount of greenhouse gas emission in about 10 months.

For those not illuminated by the light bulbs, Campbell also travels with a set of coloured wedges, each representing the amount of emissions that could be saved or removed by using renewable energy, being more energy-efficient and turning to nuclear power.

Based on a Princeton University study, the idea is to illustrate that there is no one solution to climate change but that if all options are used, there is every chance the world can head off the dangerous consequences.

"You need real policies; hence all the wedges," Campbell says. "People on the left say you can do it with wind turbines, people on the right say you can do it with nuclear power, but both are wrong. You need everything. If you run through all of the things you need to do, people understand. If the problem is that big then people think it makes sense that there is a range of things that need to be done."

Until this week, Campbell's political competition came from Labor's Anthony Albanese, who tirelessly spruiked the Opposition's climate change policy. But he has been replaced by Peter Garrett, the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, whose huge public profile will be used to boost the Opposition's environmental credentials, seen as one of the key differences between the two major parties.

The wisdom of the decision was apparent as Garrett crossed the country this week, being approached by an overwhelmingly positive population wanting to know more about Labor's green policies.

Just whom Garrett faces off against next year in the race towards a federal election remains to be seen. The Prime Minister, John Howard, is believed to be considering promoting Malcolm Turnbull, who has impressed with his work on water policy, to a more senior environmental role.The prospect of two of Federal Parliament's most charismatic and recognisable MPs facing each another is enough to make political junkies salivate.

For now, Garrett is taking a more homespun approach to explaining climate change than his Coalition counterpart. Like most other Australian men he likes to talk about his shed - "a little sustainable shed we had some years ago which ran on solar power, a bit of gas and some insulation, but which was designed as an enclosed farm shed".

The building was used by the Garrett family as a weekender for many years. It slept as many as six people and had an annual electricity bill of about $100. Not only does the shed conjure up an instantly recognisable form but it also appeals to people's hip pocket.

"If you're running solar electricity you become aware of energy in a much more acute way than when you're just using it from the grid," Garrett says. "Talking to a younger audience I tend to talk about the fact that the energy has to come from somewhere, to take them through the process of where it comes from. I'm also a notorious nagger in my own family for turning lights off."

Environmentalists and scientists have complained for years that the threat of rapid climate change has been all but ignored by mainstream politics and the media and, as a result, most of the public.

But the past four months have seen the issue dominate discussion, the result of a culmination of factors: a severe drought; Britain's Nicholas Stern report which tried to put a price on the cost of not doing anything about climate change; and An Inconvenient Truth, the film about global warming featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.

Until then, most of the coverage of the issue was either scientific threats about what might happen or political wrangling about whether the Federal Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' international climate change treaty.

And while the major parties argued about an agreement most people probably thought was about a town in Japan, energy use, car use and all the other things contributing to global warming continued to rise further, compounding the problem.

Environmentalists wondered why people who happily started using the now ubiquitous green bags to cut marine pollution were not at least scared into doing something about climate change. Others, whose job is also to explain climate change, believe that it presents an unprecedented challenge because the idea itself is so complicated.

Professor Brendan Mackey agrees with Campbell and Garrett's moves to deconstruct the idea of climate change, to give people a better understanding of how they can fight it.

Mackey, of the Australian National University's School of Resources, Environment and Society, says people have to understand an issue before they are prepared to do something about it, particularly if doing something involves changing their own behaviour and that of most people.
"They have the message that rapid climate change is happening and humans are causing it but I don't think people understand how that can be. They don't understand the mechanics of it.

They probably have heard about carbon or greenhouse and they have a fuzzy understanding of it.

"They associate it with drought and fossil fuels but how they are linked together is quite complicated. That means you have to take someone's word on it without understanding what's going on."

Mackey says the issue has been oversimplified to the extent that most people assume that any extreme weather event is the "smoking gun of climate change".

"But what we're talking about is long-term changes in weather patterns. When we talk about climate change we will still have weather. It's not like polluted water which might look and taste foul and make you sick if you drink it. We will still have weather but it might create problems. The concept is abstract. So you have to make it more real for people."

There would be people, Mackey says, who think global warming and the hole in the ozone layer are the same thing. This leaves people confused about what needs to be done and instead of being presented with a clear set of solutions, they hear competing slogans from the major political parties.

"Politicians are now talking about climate change presumably because the polls are telling them people are worried about climate change. But what if it rains next week? Will this mean we don't have to worry about climate change?"

Mackey says people need to be told exactly what action needs to be taken, including an honest assessment of whether the worst effects of climate change can be headed off and whether people are prepared to act. It is not as simple as taking the politics out of the equation and leaving people to grapple with a purely scientific approach.

Campbell says it is a good thing for public debate that discussion has moved on from the Kyoto Protocol: "The debate was so simple for so long it worked against people taking action. If people think you can solve it just by doing that it diminishes the quality of the debate. The great thing about this year is it forced a debate on the real solutions."

The Federal Government continues to argue against Kyoto and its binding targets on reducing emissions, saying it would damage Australia's economy because of its reliance on industries such as coal and aluminium.

Instead, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars investigating what it refers to as technological solutions such as geosequestration (which basically buries emissions underground) and bilateral agreements with countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. Howard also recently announced that he had appointed a taskforce to investigate a carbon emissions trading scheme.

Labor, for its part, says it would ratify Kyoto if it won government, as well as significantly boost the amount of energy from renewable sources and institute carbon trading.

Not surprisingly, Campbell and Garrett say politics cannot be taken out of the discussion. After all, they have the responsibility to ensure the issue is stuck in people's minds when they step into the ballot box late next year.

"It seems to me the responsibility cuts in every direction: individuals, businesses and governments," Garrett says.

"Until there's an alignment between all of those then I don't think it's a deficiency for us to talk about bigger policy issues. It's still absolutely essential that the right laws, the right policy settings and the right long-term planning is in place and governments are critically important.

"We need more than ever for this public expression of concern to be translated into government action. It's turning off the light switch and thinking about how we vote."

Game of chess anyone ???

MOSCOW, December 14
(RIA Novosti)

An alleged Moscow serial killer, arrested in June, has been charged with 49 murders, but claims that he killed 62 people in all, a senior law police official said Thursday.

Alexander Kshevitsky, a deputy head of the Interior Ministry's operations and investigations bureau, said that in some of the murder cases Alexander Pichuzhkin claims to have committed, the victims are still considered missing.

Pichuzhkin, 32 at the time of his arrest, was earlier charged with killing at least 10 people, most of them in Bitsa park, a stretch of dense woodland in the south of Moscow, where he was apprehended by police this summer.

The investigation determined that Pichuzhkin began killing in 2000. Most of the victims found in the park were killed with a blow to the head after Pichuzhkin approached them from behind.

If it turns out to be true that Pichuzkin, who has already been dubbed the "Bitsa Maniac," killed as many people as he claims, he will become the bloodiest serial killer in Russian history, well ahead of Andrei Chikatilo.

Between 1978 and 1990, Chikatilo, or the "Rostov Ripper," killed 53 people, many of them young women and boys, in and around the city of Rostov, near the Black Sea. He was eventually caught, found guilty of multiple murders, sentenced to death and executed in 1994.

In 1996, Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, and if Pichuzhkin is found guilty of the murders he claims, the most severe punishment he faces will be a life sentence.

For more info on Chikatilo check out:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/chikatilo/coat_1.html


'Chess murders' Russian charged
14 December
BBC


Russian who reportedly said he wanted to kill 64 people to correspond with the squares on a chess board has been charged in Moscow with 49 murders.

Alexander Pichushkin is suspected of being the "Bitsyevskiy maniac", named after the park where 14 of the victims' bodies were found.

He has allegedly confessed to killing 62 people over six years and reportedly said he had missed his goal.

Prosecutors say they only have evidence to pursue 49 cases.

Mr Pichushkin, who worked at a small grocery store in south-west Moscow, was arrested in June on suspicion of killing a female colleague, whose body was found in Bitsyevskiy park the day before.

The woman, Marina Moskaleva, had reportedly left Mr Pichushkin's number with her son before she was killed.

The killings began in 2000 and led to bodies being found in many parks and other places across the Russian capital.

Many, but by no means all, of the victims were elderly men, and there was little else to link the murders, except that they were caused by a blow to the head.

The head of the Russian interior ministry's criminal investigation department, Alexander Kshevitsky, told the MosNews website that Mr Pichushkin was yet to undergo psychiatric tests to see whether he was fit to stand trial.

Bansky

Some artwork from Bansky. Some excellent work !!!

http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html

Anger and Courage

Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage.Anger at the way things are and courage to change them.

St. Augustine

Climate change 'to impact big miners'

December 11, 2006

Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are among six Australian companies most at risk from the impact of climate change, a report says.

Among the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) top-100 listed companies, those involved in emissions-intensive industries are most at risk, says Citigroup research.

In a surprise result, property trusts are among those most likely to benefit from climate change as they could earn emissions credits from a likely trading scheme by reducing energy use when constructing environmentally friendly buildings.

The companies most at risk are Rio Tinto, BHP and BlueScope Steel, Caltex, Iluka and OneSteel, according to the research titled Climate change and the ASX100 - An assessment of risks and opportunities.

Climate change effects companies' profitability due to the cost of potentially pricing carbon,and through weather and climate impacts, the report says.

"Those at risk include emissions-intensive companies, facilities particularly exposed to severe weather damage, agriculture and water-intensive industries exposed to drought, and in the long term insurers that may misprice catastrophe risk," the report said.

BlueScope Steel is the most emissions-intensive company by double that of the next companies, Iluka, OneSteel and AGL and Alumina, when levels of carbon dioxide production for each $10,000 market of capitalisation were compared, the report said.

Citigroup Investment Research managing director Bruce Rolph said some of Australia's biggest companies were beginning to recognise the importance of climate change.

"Some of the big resource companies are taking it seriously - both the issues to do with emissions but also the understanding what physical risks there may be to their portfolio of assets," Mr Rolph said.

He said Rio, BHP and Alumina were among companies most aware of climate change issues and all had strategies in place to reduce emissions.

The report noted that the big miners could be exposed to falling coal sales, as governments seek alternative energy sources to meet climate change commitments.

Prime Minister John Howard announced a task force on the weekend to inquire into Australia's possible involvement in an emissions trading scheme.

The task force of bureaucrats and resource industry figures, will also investigate how Australia might be involved in an emissions trading system that involved other major nations.

Mr Rolph said the research found that the "winners" in renewable energy and gas, as they had low or zero emissions.

"Winners were also in the property industry where a number of property trusts are building sustainable buildings and in some cases earning emissions credits (in the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme) through reducing energy use," he said.

Top of the list of "winners" were property investment company Investa Property Group, energy retailer Origin Energy Limited, and metals recycler Sims Group Ltd.

The airline, media and retail sectors were among the 40 per cent of ASX100 companies that failed to provide relevant climate change information and were therefore not included in the research.

AAP

The Report Of The Chief Health Officer released today by NSW Health

In 2005 more than half of all men (57.5 per cent) and almost half of all women (42.3 per cent) over 16 years old were overweight or obese, up from 56 per cent and 41 per cent in 2003.

Almost 25 per cent of school kids were overweight or obese and rates had skyrocketed in the past 20 years. The report blames sedentary lifestyles and high consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food such as soft drinks for much of the ill health in NSW.

Half of all adults and a quarter of school students don't get enough exercise each day.

Only 4.7 per cent of men, 10.1 per cent of women and 20 per cent of children reported eating the recommended five vegetables a day. Yet 60 per cent of boys and 40 per cent of girls drank more than 250 millilitres of soft drink a day.

As a result, the number of people with diabetes or high blood sugar has almost doubled in the past decade to 8 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women.

Other key findings included a halving of the death rate between 1972 to 1994 and a 12-year increase in life expectancy for men and 10 years for women over the past decade. Although women could still expect to live longer than men (83.7 years compared to 78.8 years), the gap is closing.

Few own most of the world's assets: Study

Richest 2% of adults hold more than half of global household wealth, data reveals
Dec. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM
Olivia Ward
STAFF REPORTER

There's fierce debate about whether the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But a pioneering study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research leaves no doubt the tiny fraction of the planet's population who are living in affluence own more than half of its wealth.

"The richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth," says a study released yesterday by the Helsinki-based institute, a division of the United Nations University. "And the richest 1 per cent alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in the year 2000."

Some 37 million people worldwide have reached the top rung of the ladder, owning $500,000 (U.S.) in assets, after debts have been deducted.

"What's special about this project is that it puts personal assets into a global perspective," says University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, one of the authors. "It looks at the role of household assets and debts in relation to growth, and for the first time shows what the global distribution of assets looks like."

The study outlines the economic comfort — and discomfort — zone of people and countries by defining wealth as net worth: "the value of physical and financial assets less debts." And it says, "in this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital."

Although the world's income gap has been amply confirmed, the gap in wealth is even more dramatic.

"Half the world has net worth per adult below $2,200," Davies says.

Not surprisingly, Canada is one of the handful of countries in which wealth is concentrated, though it is less affluent than the United States, the world's richest nation.

"Canada has 2 per cent of the wealthiest 10 per cent of people in the world," Davies points out. "As we only have 0.5 per cent of the world's population, we're right up there, and in fact, over-represented."

Canada has average per capita wealth of $89,252 and the U.S. $180,837, in terms of purchasing power. Japan, with $143,727, ranks just below the U.S.

While capital may be only a part of personal resources, "it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly, on economic development and growth," the study says.

The world's total household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, a sum which, averaged out, should give every adult $20,500. But in some countries, average per capita wealth was below $2,000, while the richest ranked many times higher.

Does the sharp division of the world's wealth mean that globalization has failed?

"Some people are certainly gaining from it, and others are suffering," says Davies. "We should not see globalization as necessarily reducing global inequality."

What we see is what we think we get

November 15, 2006
SMH

Marketing is the art of getting customers to believe the choice is all theirs, writes Ross Gittins.

WHAT innocents we are. We imagine ourselves to be the masters of our consumer fate, the captains of our retail soul. We spend our hard-earned incomes carefully, diligently sorting through the ever-widening choice available to us until we find just what we want.

When you think about it, many people devote large slabs of their lives to hunting out the purchases that suit them best. American consumers are most advanced in this science - most insistent they be given exactly what it is they're seeking - but we're not far behind.

That's the way we see ourselves and that's the way economists see us. Their "doctrine of consumer sovereignty" places shoppers at the centre of the capitalist universe.

The system exists not to advance the capitalists but to serve the consumers. They call the shots. Businesses maximise their profits by meeting their customers' needs as faithfully as possible. Those who put the customer first do best; those who don't risk bankruptcy.

Consumers, for their part, weigh up every purchase, calculating how much "utility" this one will bring compared with that one.

The funny thing about economists, however, is that though they regard consumption as the sole end and object of economic life, consumption itself doesn't much interest them.

They are not interested in studying the actual processes by which we choose what we buy.

Which is, perhaps, just as well. If they did, they might find it too disillusioning.

The profession that does study our choices and how we make them is, of course, the marketers. Their dark art fascinates me.

In Malcolm Gladwell's eye-opening book Blink, published by Penguin, he introduces us to one of the great figures in American marketing, Louis Cheskin, and his concept of "sensation transference".

"Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realising it they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself," Gladwell says.

"To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don't make a distinction - on an unconscious level - between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined."

In the late 1940s, margarine was not popular. Almost everyone preferred butter. Cheskin wondered whether the problem was with the margarine itself or with the things people associated it with.

At that time American margarine was white. He had it coloured yellow, like butter, then staged a series of luncheon lectures for women. Some were served butter, some margarine. When asked to rate the speakers and the food, everyone thought the "butter" just fine.

Cheskin told his client to call the product Imperial Margarine, so it could put an impressive crown on the package. And he put it in a foil wrapper because foil was associated with quality. In taste tests between white margarine and foil-wrapped yellow Imperial Margarine the more carefully packaged product won every time.

In the years since then, Cheskin's company has confirmed the power of sensation transference many times.

A business producing a certain brand of cheap brandy, which had long been the dominant brand in its category, wanted to know why it was losing market share to another brand. The two brands were similarly priced and equally available. In a blind-taste test the two were roughly the same.

The taste test was repeated, but this time people were told which was which. They preferred the one that had been dominant, suggesting there was a sensation transference from the name. So why was it losing market share?

Next they did a taste test leaving the bottles in the background. The dominant brand had an ordinary wine bottle, whereas the rival had a flashier, decanter-like bottle. This time more people preferred the brandy from the fancy bottle.

Just to check, they did a final test in which the client's brandy was served from the rival's bottle and vice versa. The client won.

So the client had the right taste and a favoured brand name, but the wrong packaging. It changed its bottle to something more like its rival's and regained its lost market share.

Cheskin's company also experimented with the 7 Up bottle, adding more yellow to the green on the label. In taste tests, people complained the drink had a lot more lime or lemon flavour than they were used to.

A certain brand of tinned ravioli had a picture of its supposed chef on the label. When the marketers changed him from a photograph to a cartoon figure people were less satisfied with the taste and quality of the ravioli.

When they added a tiny sprig of parsley to the logo on a can of meat, people perceived the meat to be fresher. When peaches were switched from a tin to a glass container, people thought they tasted better.

When ice-cream is sold in a cylindrical container rather than a rectangular tub people are willing to pay a bit more for it.

So there you are. We're conscious only of our conscious decision-making but, in reality, our decisions are heavily influenced by extraneous factors we're not conscious of.

This would be true, no doubt, of even the most calculating and "rational" among us. Even the clear-headed, cold-hearted economists prefer and buy the brand of tinned meat that has a bit of parsley in its trademark.

In consequence, the well-advised producer can wrap the consumer round his little finger, influencing our choices by making the most trivial, irrelevant changes.

But if a producer has to change its logo to make its product more acceptable to the customer, doesn't that prove it's the consumer who calls the shots? Doesn't the addition of a sprig of parsley on the label enhance the utility we gain from a can of meat?

I guess it turns on whether the extra gratification we gain from choosing the product with the more attractive packaging is lasting or fleeting, real or illusionary.

Kavli Foundation

November 13, 2006
SMH

He might be the most active philanthropist you have never heard of: a retired technology entrepreneur putting his stamp on science research centres at the world's top universities and sponsoring what he hopes will be 21st-century versions of the Nobel Prizes.

With his efficient use of a roughly $600 million (euro466.4 million) fortune _ big but hardly Bill Gates-ishly mind-boggling _ 79-year-old Norwegian-born philanthropist Fred Kavli could end up having an outsized impact on next-generation science.

Many scientists lament that money for basic research is becoming harder to obtain as governments, corporations and other big funders seek specific breakthroughs that can be applied relatively quickly. Kavli, however, is adamant about giving money for open-ended research whose ultimate fruits may not yet be in sight.

"He's quite visionary," said Eric Kandel, Nobel-winning director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University. "We need more people like him."

Just a few years after seriously beginning his mission to stimulate advances in nanotechnology, neuroscience and astronomy, Kavli has launched 14 research centres in academia's most rarified halls. The sites include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Holland's Delft University of Technology, the University of Cambridge in England and, in China, Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Although Kavli requires universities to match much of the $7.5 million (euro5.8 million) he typically puts up for an institute, no school has turned him down. Many find money for basic research so rare that they send Kavli's foundation unsolicited appeals.

Kavli expects to eventually create 20 such centres. And beginning in 2008, $1 million (euro780,000) Kavli Prizes in nanotech, neuroscience and astrophysics will be awarded every two years by the Academy of Sciences in Norway, where Kavli was born and first yearned to better grasp man's place in the universe.

"I like to look far into the future," Kavli said in his slightly lilting Norwegian accent. "I think it's important for the benefit of all human beings."

While Kavli's $7.5 million (euro5.8 million) to inaugurate an institute is generous, by some measures it's small. New academic buildings, for example, often cost tens of millions of US dollars (euros). What makes Kavli's model notable is that it resembles how a business builds a brand.

Between the Kavli institutes _ expected to be fed by an annual pool of $20 million (euro15.5 million) after his death _ the Kavli Prizes and regular gatherings of Kavli-funded researchers, Kavli hopes to create something larger than the sum of its parts: a growing organism of avant-garde research.

"Fred's interest really is more abstract than most, because he wants to fund the very best of science and doesn't care where it is," said David Baltimore, a Nobel-winning biologist who helped launch the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at the California Institute of Technology when he was the school's president.

The Kavli Foundation's momentum is widely credited to its president, David Auston, a former president of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Auston's connections and credibility have opened doors for the foundation, which is based in Oxnard, California.

But Kavli is not just the guy who signs the checks. The vision at work here germinated in him long ago, when Kavli was a young dreamer in Norway, marveling at the ethereal glow of the Northern Lights.

Kavli appears to have always set his sights on achieving. At age 13, when World War II led to fuel shortages in Norway, he and his brother started a business making wood briquettes that could be burned to power cars. They also sold planks to furniture factories.

He studied physics in college, then left Norway in 1955 for America with a classic immigrant's narrative. "I was ambitious, let's face it," he said with a wink.

After a year in Canada, Kavli joined a small Los Angeles company that developed flight controls for Atlas missiles. Kavli rose to chief of engineering, but his entrepreneurial side beckoned. So he put a simple ad in the newspaper: "Engineer seeking financial backing to start own business."
What emerged was Kavlico, which specialized in navigational sensors for the defense and aircraft industries.

Kavli invested much of his resulting wealth in Southern California real estate. He also became a well-known community donor near his company's headquarters in Moorpark, California, putting his name on a local performing arts centre, and endowed some university professorships.

But not until he sold Kavlico for $345 million (euro268.2 million) to C-Mac Industries Inc. in 2000 did Kavli set his sights on a larger-scale legacy.

"It's important to realize this guy's kept a very low profile his whole life, until he came out with all this," said Charles Vest, former MIT president and a member of the foundation's board.

The foundation is getting most of Kavli's money _ he is divorced and does not believe in leaving significant sums to his two children _ and his businessman's emphasis on streamlining. Its operations essentially consist of just Kavli, Auston, a communications director and a fund manager.

"One of the problems with philanthropy is to make it effective, and to use money so that it's not wasted away," Kavli said.

That principle is partly why the foundation expects universities to put up their own resources to snare a Kavli Institute. Kavli and Auston believe the rule ensures a university is committed to supporting its researchers in the long term.

Kavli has few concrete expectations for scientists who get his money, other than that they attend interdisciplinary gatherings every so often to share ideas.

"We don't try to tell the institutes what to do," he said. "We try to just select the very best science teams and institutions and support them in what they want to do, and we expect them to choose the very best course of action."
___
On the Net:

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/

Jack Williamson- "Science Fiction" Master

Jack Williamson, who died Friday at 98, deserves to be remembered as one of the fathers of science fiction and had a role in inspiring Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, both of whom read his stories when they were still kids.

In 1928, the year his first short story, "The Metal Man," was published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, the cutting edge in technology was Charles Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris from New York.

Williamson's last published work, the novel "The Stonehenge Gate," appeared in 2005. The world was immeasurably different, and many of the fantasies he and those who followed him had dreamed of had become reality, from robots to rocket ships. Yet Williamson's themes remained strikingly constant over eight decades - the interaction of man and machine, and the possibility of dystopia.

His 1949 novel "The Humanoids," his first to garner serious critical attention, concerned a group of humans who rebel against their animatronic guardians and zoom around the galaxy via teleportation, which one character mastered "with the greatest of ease." "The story bogs down into complete illogic," complained a Hartford Courant reviewer, who nevertheless enjoyed the descriptions of people re-creating consumer society on dead planets chilled to absolute zero.

"‘The Humanoids' marked a turning point in science fiction and in Jack's career," Williamson's longtime editor, James Frenkel, told the Los Angeles Times."Before that, science fiction had been a cheerleader for science and technology and really had not, for the most part, focused on the potential dangers of science and technology."

In "Dragon's Island" (1951), Williamson chronicled the creation by biologists of a race of supermen who are forced into hiding by an organization bent on hunting them down and killing them. The book was not, as has been reported, the first to use the term "genetic engineering."

However, the Oxford English Dictionary does give Williamson credit for coining "terraforming" - the wholesale resurfacing of a planet. He used the concept to great effect in a late novel, "Terraforming Earth," that won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction novel of 2001.

Other concepts he came up with or at least was among the first to use in fiction included in vitro insemination ("The Girl From Mars," 1929), artificial gravity ("The Prince of Space," 1931), organ transplants ("The Reefs of Space," 1964, with Frederick Pohl), and antimatter ("Seetee Ship," 1951).

"When I got into the game, I was one of very few players," he told Science Fiction Weekly in 2002. "Every idea seemed to be worth a new story. Nowadays, fresh ideas are harder to find."

As a faculty member at Eastern New Mexico University in the 1960s, Williamson launched one of the nation's first college courses on science fiction and fantasy writing, helping legitimize science fiction as a field worthy of academic attention.

Williamson was born April 29, 1908, in Bisbee, Ariz., a place about as far from his high-tech adventures as can be imagined. When his family moved to eastern New Mexico in 1915, they did so in a covered wagon.Williamson credited a childhood spent on desolate farms and ranches with developing his creative powers."Life would have been absolutely empty without imagination," he told Publishers Weekly in 1986.

In 1926, he discovered the early pulp magazine Amazing Stories, and within two years had landed "The Metal Man" on its cover. From there he became a prolific contributor to the pulps, writing multiple connected stories that were later collected into books including "The Cometeers" (1936) and "The Legion of Space" (1947).

"Jack Williamson was one of the great science-fiction writers," Mr. Bradbury told the Los Angeles Times recently. "He did a series of novels which affected me as a young writer with dreams. I met him at 19, and he became my best friend and teacher."

The New York Sun
15th Nov 2006

House/Unit Prices-Sydney (in red) 1993-2006

Beer spill blocks major highway

November 14, 2006

A major Victorian highway has reopened after a semi-trailer tipped over and its cargo of beer spread across the road.

The Princes Highway, near Geelong, was reopened just after 4.30am (AEDT) today after the beer-laden B-double semi-trailer lost control and overturned last night.

Emergency crews took about 30 minutes to free the driver from his truck cab following the crash, which happened just after 9pm (AEDT).

The man was taken to the Geelong Hospital with possible spinal injuries.

Packaged beer and kegs were spread across the highway and the road was blocked between Cochranes and Pettavel roads.

Police said the goods were recovered, loaded onto another vehicle and transported from the crash scene.

Emergency services continued working at the scene early today to remove fuel spilt on the roadway following the accident.

Heavy haulage equipment was brought in to recover the overturned truck.

AAP

Attenborough: Climate is changing

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing the world, naturalist Sir David Attenborough has said.

The veteran broadcaster said scientific data clearly showed that human-induced climate change was now beyond doubt.

Sir David, 80, added that everyone had a responsibility to change their behaviour, including being less wasteful and more energy efficient.

It is the first time Sir David has voiced his concerns in public about the impacts of global warming.

His comments come ahead of a two-part BBC series in which he examines the impacts of global warming on the Earth.

Sir David has been criticised by environmentalists in the past for not speaking out on the matter.

If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something

Sir David Attenborough"If you take one moment in time, you can't be sure what the trend is," he told the BBC.

"Now... when we look at the graphs of rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather."

Sir David, whose distinguished broadcasting career spans more than half a century, says everyone has a responsibility to act: "What people (must) do is to change their behaviour and their attitudes.

"If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something, and we have to demand that our governments do something.

His comments came as a UK parliamentary body, the All-Party Environment Group, issued a report labelling the government a "climate laggard" for its record on reducing emissions.

Sir David, whose natural history programmes have been watched by millions of people around the world, is the latest high-profile figure to say the world is facing a climate crisis.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams; the government's chief scientist Sir David King, and former Royal Society president Sir Robert May have all expressed public concern on the issue.

This week, former US Vice President Al Gore has been at the Cannes Film Festival to promote a documentary on climate change.

Mr Gore told festival goers that the world was facing a "planetary emergency" due to global warming.

The man who beat him to the White House in the 2000 US presidential elections, George W Bush, remains sceptical about the influence of human activity on the state of the planet's atmosphere.

He says binding targets to reduce greenhouse emissions are inefficient and would harm the US economy.

Last year, he launched a partnership alongside five Asia-Pacific nations to promote technological solutions for reducing the world's dependency on fossil fuels.

Sir David will present a two-part television programme that will explore how climate change is altering the planet, from drought-hit rainforest to the decline of polar bears.

Sir David Attenborough presents Are We Changing Planet Earth?
on BBC One, Wednesday, 24 May 2006, at 2100 BST

BBC

Random Man says "please leave a comment"

Water Scarcity

Physical water scarcity: More than 75% of river flows are allocated to agriculture, industries or domestic purposes (accounting for recycling of return flows). This definition of scarcity - relating water availability to water demand - implies that dry areas are not necessarily water-scarce, eg Mauritania.

Approaching physical water scarcity: More than 60% of river flows are allocated. These basins will experience physical water scarcity in the near future.

Economic water scarcity: Water resources are abundant relative to water use, with less than 25% of water from rivers withdrawn for human purposes, but malnutrition exists. These areas could benefit by development of additional blue and green water, but human and financial capacity are limiting.

Little or no water scarcity: Abundant water resources relative to use. Less than 25% of water from rivers is withdrawn for human purposes.



Physical scarcity occurs when the water resources cannot meet the demands of the population. Arid regions are most associated with physical water scarcity. But the IWMI says there is an alarming trend in artificially-created scarcity - even in areas where water is apparently abundant.

This is largely due to overuse; agriculture uses up to 70 times more water to produce food than is used in drinking and other domestic purposes, including cooking, washing and bathing.

The results are desiccated and polluted rivers, declining groundwater and problems of allocation, in which some people win out in access to water over others.

Environment trade-off

Egypt imports more than half of its food because it does not have enough water to grow it domestically.

Australia is faced with major water scarcity in the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of diverting large quantities of water for use in agriculture.

The Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its original volumeAnd the shrunken Aral Sea remains one of the most visible examples where massive diversions of water to agriculture have caused widespread water scarcity, says the report, along with an environmental catastrophe.

"It is possible to reduce water scarcity, feed people and address poverty, but the key trade-off is with the environment," said IWMI's David Molden, who led the assessment.

"People and their governments will face some tough decisions on how to allocate and manage water."

Frank Rijsberman, director general of the institute, told the BBC that one quarter of the world's population lived in river basins where water is physically scarce. Another one billion people live in river basins where water was economically scarce.

As a result, he said, many people around the world dependent on rivers, lakes and other wetlands risk falling into poverty.

Rising demand

The assessment says urbanisation and economic growth will drive food demand towards a higher food intake per capita and richer, more varied diets in coming decades.

Producing milk, meat, sugar, oils and vegetables requires more water than cereals and a different style of water management.

The total amount of water used up in crop production each year could rise from 7,200 cubic km to as much as 13,500 cubic km by 2050.

David Molden said that responding to growing food demand by diverting more water to agriculture and expanding the total area used for growing crops and livestock would exert a major toll on the environment.

Instead, the assessment urges farmers to grow more food without placing added pressure on the environment.

"We must grow more crop per drop, more meat and milk per drop, and more fish per drop," said Mr Molden.

BBC
21 August 2006

People first, river second, PM and premiers agree

Stephanie Peatling
November 8, 2006
SMH

DRAINING wetlands and cutting environmental flows to the Murray-Darling river system will be considered by a team of public servants ordered by state and territory leaders to find ways to guarantee towns, farmers and irrigators do not run out of water.

A meeting between the Prime Minister, John Howard, and four state leaders yesterday heard the drought was much worse than a one-in-100-year event; it was more like one in 1000 years.
But scientists and environmentalists say the needs of the river system must be considered alongside those of the people relying on its water.

Professor Gary Jones, the head of the Co-operative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology, said: "Whilst I recognise these are tough times for everyone concerned, we have to be careful because it won't do any good to damage the river system in the long term."

The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, said any decision to forgo water for environmental purposes would be a "total admission of failure despite years and years of warning".

"We have to look after farmers that are suffering but the really crucial thing is we have to speed up work to bring the Murray-Darling back to health," he said.

After yesterday's summit, permanent water trading between NSW, Victoria and South Australia will begin on January 1 next year. The leaders said this would free up water by dealing with the problem of overallocation of water licences. They agreed to work out how to secure water supplies for 2007-08. A group of state and federal public servants was asked to draw up plans for how this will be done. It will report back by the middle of December.

Mr Howard said he would not direct them to consider specific proposals but "it will be apparent what some of the options are, including the draining of wetlands and allowing some of the dams to dry up. They will be considered. The purpose is to get a warts-and-all action plan. It's serious and we all understand that."

Water efficiency measures and alternative water source projects, such as desalination, will be prioritised when the Federal Government hands out funds from its $2 billion National Water Initiative.

But Mr Howard rejected a suggestion that significant amounts of water could be freed up if Queensland's Cubbie Station was bought out. "While it might be an attractive subject for media focus and debate and interest, the idea that Cubbie Station is the silver bullet is nonsense," Mr Howard said.

A scientific report, commissioned by a similar group of ministers in 2002, found 1500 gigalitres of water - enough to fill Sydney Harbour three times - was needed to address the decline of the whole Murray-Darling system. A meeting of ministers the following year agreed to find a third of that water to sustain five key environmental sites along the river system, but none of that water has yet been returned to the river.

Now the scientific research body CSIRO will prepare regular reports on the sustainable yields of the Murray-Darling basin's surface and groundwater systems.

The Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, said: "The figures we've used for an average water flow are not the figures that will be required in the future. This is drought upon drought upon low water reserves. Effectively, if we use the 100-year average, we are not representing what's happening with the effect of climate change and the low water flows and stream flows which are occurring."

The federal Opposition's water spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said water needed to be considered alongside climate change. "We must draw a line in the parched earth - no more denial, no more delay, no more procrastination."

Olmec Head

Rancho La Corbata head, at 3.4 m high

Artifacts from the culture later termed Olmec turned up at widespread sites in Mexico and adjacent Central America. The colossal heads are commanding portraits of individual Olmec rulers, and the large symbol displayed on the 'helmet' of each colossal head appears to be an identification motif for that person. Colossal heads glorified the rulers while they were alive, and commemorated them as revered ancestors after their death.

Controversy

Climate change special: State of denial

04 November 2006
NewScientist
Fred Pearce

KEVIN TRENBERTH reckons he is a marked man. He has argued that last year's devastating Atlantic hurricane season, which spawned hurricane Katrina, was linked to global warming. For the many politicians and minority of scientists who insist there is no evidence for any such link, Trenberth's views are unacceptable and some have called for him step down from an international panel studying climate change. "The attacks on me are clearly designed to get me fired or to resign," says Trenberth.

The attacks fit a familiar pattern. Sceptics have also set their sights on scientists who have spoken out about the accelerating meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and the thawing of the planet's permafrost. These concerns will be addressed in the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global organisation created by the UN in 1988 to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. Every time one of these assessments is released, about once every five years, some of the American scientists who have played a part in producing it become the targets of concerted attacks apparently designed to bring down their reputations and careers. At stake is the credibility of scientists who fear our planet is hurtling towards disaster and want to warn the public in the US and beyond.

So when the next IPCC report is released in February 2007, who will be the targets and why? When New Scientist spoke to researchers on both sides of the climate divide it became clear that they are ready for a showdown. If the acrimony were to become so intense that American scientists were forced to stop helping in the preparation of IPCC reports, it could seriously dent the organisation and rob the world of some significant voices in the climate change debate.

One of those who knows only too well what it is like to come under attack from climate change sceptics is Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. The lead author of a chapter in the 1995 IPCC report that talked for the first time about the "discernible human influence on global climate", he was savaged by sceptics and accused of introducing this wording without consulting colleagues who had helped write the chapter. One sceptic called it the "most disturbing corruption of the peer-review process in 60 years". Another accused him of "scientific cleansing" - at a time when the phrase "ethnic cleansing" was synonymous with genocide in Bosnia. The IPCC investigated and dismissed the allegations as baseless.

Another scientist to suffer the ire of the sceptics was Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He was attacked after the IPCC assessment in 2001, which highlighted his "hockey stick" graph showing that temperatures began a rapid rise in recent decades and are now higher than at any time over the past thousand years. The sceptics accused Mann of cherry-picking his data and criticised him for refusing to disclose his statistical methods which, they claimed, biased the study to show recent warming (New Scientist, 18 March, p 40). Last year, Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, ordered Mann to provide the committee with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. Barton's demands were widely condemned by fellow scientists and on Capitol Hill. "There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," said Santer at the time. Mann's findings, which will be endorsed in the new IPCC report, have since been replicated by other studies.

Santer says, however, that he expects attacks to continue on other fronts. "There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute," he says. "And Kevin [Trenberth] is a likely target." Mann agrees that the scientists behind the upcoming IPCC report are in for a rough ride. "There is already an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC by climate change contrarians," he says.

“There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disreputeBen Santer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory”

The "contrarians" include scientists and politicians who are sceptical of the scientific evidence for climate change. Some of those who spoke to New Scientist insist that they are not planning character assassinations, and intend merely to engage in robust scientific debate, not least by challenging the IPCC's status as the arbiter of truth on climate change.

Many of the IPCC's authors, some of whom asked not to be named, say this is a smokescreen. They claim there is an extensive network of lobby groups and scientists involved in making the case against the IPCC and its reports. Automobile, coal and oil companies have coordinated and funded past attacks on them, the scientists say. Sometimes this has been done through Washington lobby groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose officers include Myron Ebell, a former climate negotiator for George W. Bush's administration. Recently, the CEI made television advertisements arguing against climate change, one of which ended with the words: "Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life." CEI's past funders include ExxonMobil, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

The money trail

Some sceptical scientists are funded directly by industry. In July, The Washington Post published a leaked letter from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), an energy company based in Colorado, that exhorted power companies to support the work of the prominent sceptic Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Worried about the potential cost of cleaning up coal-fired power plants to reduce their CO2 emissions, IREA's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, wrote: "We believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists... In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels."

So what is this money buying? For one, an ability to coordinate responses to the IPCC reports. Michaels told New Scientist that a flashpoint in the upcoming report could be hurricanes. Trenberth, who is the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, has angered the IPCC's critics by supporting the idea of a link between global warming and the intensity of hurricanes. The sceptics insist there is no published evidence to back this up. Trenberth says he is simply putting two established facts together: "Sea-surface temperature is rising because of global warming, and high sea-surface temperatures make for more intense storms."

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and with a US administration that has a record of hostility to concerns about climate change, Trenberth's statements are political dynamite. "I suspect the sceptics will want to try and dismantle the argument that there is a link," Mann says. Santer agrees: "If I was an industry-funded sceptic, I'd hit that area hard, for sure." Trenberth himself fears the worst. "I would not be surprised if the hurricane aspect of the report is targeted, along with my own role," he says. "But I am proud of what we have achieved."

One lead author of the chapter on hurricanes told New Scientist that it will include discussion of two papers published last year in Science and Nature, both of which showed that the frequency of the most intense hurricanes has increased in recent years. Even if Trenberth and his co-authors do not directly attribute this to global warming, the mere mention of these papers in the context of climate change is likely to provoke criticism.

Trenberth's opinions have already alienated his co-author Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Florida. Landsea disputed Trenberth's view, arguing that older measurements made before the era of satellite observation were not reliable enough to make the claim stick (New Scientist, 3 December 2005, p 36). When IPCC chiefs refused to censure Trenberth for his remarks directly linking last year's hurricanes to climate change, Landsea resigned, claiming that the IPCC had been "subverted, its neutrality lost".

Another sensitive area is the concern that existing models of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica massively underestimate future melting and consequent sea-level rise. "Our understanding of the dynamics of ice-sheet destruction has completely changed in the last five years," says Richard Alley of Penn State University, a lead author of the chapter on ice sheets who expects to find himself in the firing line over this issue. "We used to think it would take 10,000 years for melting to penetrate to the bottom of the ice sheet. But now we know it can take just 10 seconds," he says.

The rethink has come from the discovery that when surface water from melting ice drains down though crevasses it can lubricate the join between ice and bedrock. This mechanism appears to explain the faster discharge of ice from Greenland into the Atlantic, but it has yet to be incorporated into ice-sheet models, which still assume that the limiting factor is the rate at which heat penetrates through solid ice.

Michaels dismisses the idea of more rapid loss as "hysteria", and has thrown down a challenge to the IPCC to justify any change to the ice-sheet models. "[The IPCC] criticise people like me for saying the models are wrong, so it's going to be really interesting to see how they respond when their own people say the models are wrong." Alley, however, points out that leading glaciologists mostly agree that the current generation of ice-sheet models are wanting, whereas climatologists are mostly happy with their models.

A third focus for debate will be the way the IPCC treats recent reports of climate change disrupting the natural carbon cycle more than anticipated. This has to do with the release of large amounts of CO2 from rainforests and soils, and methane from permafrost and beneath continental shelves, possibly speeding up global warming. "These are factors not included in the current models, which may cause us to underestimate warming," Mann says.

Some insiders suggest that the IPCC may be more cautious in its upcoming report than it has been in the past, but this is unlikely to placate climate-change sceptics. Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, Boulder, accuses the IPCC leadership of "seeing their role as political advocates rather than honest brokers". And Michaels has set out to prove this (see "A taste for bad news?", below).

For the majority of climate scientists, who are convinced that global warming is a real and present danger, the most alarming outcome of this discord is that federal funding could be withdrawn from those who work on IPCC reports. Here too Trenberth may find himself caught in the headlights. The US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee under its chairman James Inhofe has begun investigating NCAR, Trenberth's employer. Inhofe has repeatedly written to NCAR and other agencies demanding details about financial and contractual arrangements with their employees and with federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). In a letter to the NSF in February, Inhofe said he needed the information to help him in "researching, analyzing and understanding the science of global climate change". Inhofe has a record of hostility to the idea of climate change, having asked on the Senate floor in July 2003: "Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

NCAR is not commenting on Inhofe's investigation, but many climate scientists contacted by New Scientist regard it as a tactic designed to intimidate those working on the IPCC report. "Inhofe's actions appear to be an effort to discourage leading US scientists from being involved in international scientific assessment processes such as the IPCC," Mann says.

“There appears to be an effort to discourage US scientists from being involved in international scientific assessment processesMichael Mann, Penn State University”

This is potentially disastrous for the IPCC. Out of 168 scientists listed as lead authors or reviewers involved in assessing the science of climate change, 38 are from the US - more than twice as many as the second-largest national grouping, the British.

IPCC scientists who spoke to New Scientist insist they are not trying to turn science into politics or to shut down genuine debate. They do, however, worry that their conclusions might be drowned out by some politically motivated and industry-funded sceptics. "I'd hate to see hundreds of people putting years of their lives into producing a report that is then trashed by these people for political ends," says Santer. "That is what happened in my case, and I felt very bad about it."

“The literature is intrinsically biased, and that means that the IPCC is also biasedPat Michaels, University of Virginia, Charlottesville”

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 18-21

A taste for bad news?

Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, claims that climate research is biased towards pessimistic conclusions, and says he can prove it.

Michaels has analysed publications by climate scientists in the journals Nature and Science between mid-2005 and mid-2006. He found 115 articles of which 83 said that the likely impact of the greenhouse effect was going to be worse than previously suggested, 23 saw no change and only 9 said that things were not as bad as previously thought.

To most researchers this is solid evidence that the prognosis for the planet is worsening as new science comes in. Michaels rejects this interpretation. To have any faith in the forecasts of climatologists, he argues, "we should expect that new research should have an equal probability of being better or worse [for Earth's climate] than previous research."

His explanation for what he calls "this highly skewed result" is that scientists and journal editors are more interested in bad news. "The literature is intrinsically biased," he says. "And that means that the IPCC - which is largely a literature review process - is also biased." Michaels aims to publish his work in February, when it is likely to distract attention from the IPCC report expected at that time.

Murdoch calls for climate deal

Peter Alford and Matthew Warren
November 07, 2006
The Australian

RUPERT Murdoch has called for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to be replaced by a new international agreement that can be endorsed by the US and the emerging industrial giants China and India.

And the chairman of News Corporation, publisher of The Australian, said that while he had until recently been wary of the global warming debate and apparently far-fetched assertions about its causes, he now believed business must lead the search for solutions.

"What is certain is temperatures have been rising and we are not entirely sure of the consequences," he told a Tokyo conference last night. "The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt."

But he did not favour the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse emissions, which the US and Australia have refused to sign and which does not bind the major emerging industrial nations.

"I think we should certainly have a protocol and probably a new one," he said, noting the Kyoto pact was impossible for the US to accept and also unlikely to be adopted by the biggest emerging economies.

Any agreement on global warming was useless unless it was adopted by the US, Japan and Northern Europe, but also by China and India: "Whatever is done must apply to all countries."

Mr Murdoch, probably the world's most influential media businessman, described the debate on global warming as an example of the beneficial effects of globalisation.

"Without globalisation, the debate on climate change would be meaningless and without the active support of business, there will be no meaningful solution to the problem of global warming."

He singled out the chief executive of British satellite broadcaster BSkyB, his son James Murdoch, as a leader in the direction the News Corp group now intended to take.

James Murdoch's plan to make BSkyB a carbon-neutral company "is not sentimentality, it is sound business strategy that reduces costs and reassures carbon conscious governments" the group is not complicit in global warming.

Mr Murdoch's comments came as it emerged that a group of blue-chip Australian companies was looking to fast-track commercialisation of low-emission technologies as the basis of an evolving business policy response to climate change.

This new coalition follows the Business Roundtable on Climate Change, which released a report in April to lobby government for early action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The evolving new business policy group has held a number of preliminary discussions and last week formed a work plan to look at which policy tools might accelerate and deepen the commercialisation of low-emission technologies such as clean coal and energy efficiency in Australia.

Companies involved in the discussions include BP Australia, Westpac, Visy, Anglo Coal, ANZ, Insurance Australia Group and Rio Tinto subsidiary Comalco.

Visy Industries was the foundation member of the first business roundtable, and last night a spokesman said the packaging giant was considering if it would participate in the working group.
Visy spokesman Tony Gray said the first roundtable had triggered greater action by corporate Australia to consider how it might respond.

"If we don't sign up it won't be because we don't think it's a good idea, it will be because we're glad more companies are doing it and our efforts are best spent somewhere else," he said.

Australia's drought could be worst in 1,000 years

07 Nov 2006
Reuters
By James Grubel

CANBERRA, Nov 7 (Reuters) - The drought gripping Australia could be the worst in 1,000 years, government officials said on Tuesday, as Australia started to draw up emergency plans to secure long-term water supplies to towns and cities.

The drought affecting more than half of Australia's farmlands, already lasting more than five years, had previously been regarded as the worst in a century.

But officials from the Murray-Darling river basin commission told a water summit of national and state political leaders on Tuesday that analyses of the current prolonged drought now pointed to the driest period in 1,000 years.

"What we're seeing with this drought is a frightening glimpse of the future with global warming," the leader of the South Australian state government Mike Rann told reporters.

A spokeswoman for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission said the current consecutive years of drought had not been observed in the 114 years since records were first kept.

She said mathematical and probability analyses of the current dry spell found Australia was moving into what was possibly a one-in-1,000-year drought.

"We don't have the records to substantiate a one-in-100-year drought any more -- it's beyond that," she told Reuters.

Lack of winter rain has meant record-low inflows into the Murray-Darling river system, which drains an area the size of France and Spain combined and provides water to Australia's major agricultural areas.

The average inflow of water into the Murray River, which flows through three states, is 11,000 gigalitres a year. In the past five months it has received less than 600 gigalitres. One gigalitre is one billion litres.

Green groups have warned that towns and cities along the river system could run out of water if the drought goes into another year.

Prime Minister John Howard used the water summit to announce moves to investigate how to secure log-term water supplies for towns and cities along the Murray River.

The summit also approved a new weir across the Murray to provide emergency water, if needed, for the South Australian capital of Adelaide, a city of about one million people, which draws 40 percent of its drinking water from the Murray River.

But Howard, who remains sceptical about the impact of global warming, declined to publicly declare the drought the worst in 1,000 years. "All I know it is a very bad drought. It is the worst in living memory," Howard told reporters.

The Australian Democrats party criticised the summit, saying the meeting had ignored both the need to buy water back from farmers and irrigators, and the need to put a higher price on water use.

"Making water more expensive is not going to be popular, but it needs to be done," Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett told reporters.

The Murray-Darling catchment covers 1.06 million sq km (409,000 sq miles), 15 percent of Australia's landmass, and accounts for 41 percent of Australia's agricultural production and A$22 billion worth of the nation's agricultural exports.

Random Man

Heat to soar in NSW, says CSIRO

November 6, 2006

Average temperatures in NSW could soar by up to 6.4 degrees by 2070 unless action is taken to tackle climate change, new research by the CSIRO shows.

The study also warns that annual rainfall in key farming areas could drop by 70 per cent in the next 64 years.

The NSW Government, which commissioned the research, seized on the figures to attack Prime Minister John Howard's refusal to sign up for a national emissions trading scheme.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma said climate change was a real threat to the state's way of life.

"The CSIRO research paints a frightening picture; that's why we need a national approach to climate change," he said.

Under the emissions trading scheme proposed by the states, greenhouse gas emissions from Australia's electricity industry would be capped at between 1997 and 2000 levels by 2035.

Electricity generators would be required to hold permits to emit greenhouse gases but would be able to purchase extra permits and offset emissions through forestry and capturing or storing carbon.

"To our national shame, John Howard refuses to sign up in the face of overwhelming evidence of the impact of climate change on families and the economy," Mr Iemma said.

The new research also predicts that summer temperatures in inland northern NSW could be up to 7.1 degrees higher by 2070 and that spring rainfall could be up to 60 per cent lower.

Further climate change studies covering all of the major catchment areas in NSW will be released in the coming months.

The State Government is also funding research into the effect of climate change on rainfall patterns, water availability and flooding in the greater metropolitan region.

AAP

Special TODGER

Melbourne Cup loser ???

Milkman

Study: 90% of the ocean's edible species may be gone by 2048

2nd Nov 2006
By Elizabeth Weise,
USA TODAY

Ninety percent of the fish and shellfish species that are hauled from the ocean to feed people worldwide may be gone by 2048, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Even now, 29% of those species have "collapsed," meaning a 90% decline in the amount being fished from the sea, says Boris Worm, lead author and a professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

"It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating," Worm says. The paper represents four years of work by an international team of researchers at various universities who analyzed oceans species diversity over the past 1,000 years.

Overfishing is a big part of the problem. "Every year it's estimated that human beings remove 150 million metric tons of life from the seas," says Joshua Reichert, environment-program director at Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia.

But fishing isn't the only problem, the report states. Destruction of coastal areas, estuaries and reefs by dredging, building and pollution destroys nursery habitats for young fish. Global warming and the changes in water temperature and salinity are thought to play a role.

As marine species disappear, the ability of others to survive is further harmed by the drop in the ocean's overall productivity and stability, the researchers found.

"Through this research, it became clear to me that we hardly appreciate living on a blue planet," Worm says. "The oceans define our planet, and their fate may to a large extent determine our fate, now and in the future."

Fish and seafood are key protein sources for a world that's expected to add another 3 billion people by 2050. But it's also problem for people who don't eat fish. Sixty percent of Americans live within 60 miles of a coast. Declines in marine biodiversity can:

•Increase coastal flooding because of loss of floodplains and erosion control provided by the wetlands, reefs and underwater vegetation that have a symbiotic relationship with marine life.

•Reduce water quality by destroying the plankton, plants and shellfish that are the ocean's biological filtering ability. A single oyster, for example, can filter 50 gallons of water a day.

•Increase beach closure because of harmful algae blooms, such as red tide, facilitated by the diminished filtering.

The good news is that it's not too late to turn this around, Worm says. When marine ecosystems are protected, the trend can be reversed, he says. Scientists studied 48 areas worldwide that have been safeguarded and report dramatic recoveries in the variety of species and stability of the ecosystem.

"We know how to do this. But it must be done soon," he says. "With each species that is lost, the opportunity for the system to repair itself is diminished."

Quote

"There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance."


Hippocrates

Young Aussie wins British snooker title

October 30, 2006
SMH

Australian Neil Robertson has won the British snooker Grand Prix.

The 24-year-old from Melbourne beat Englishman Jamie Cope 9-5 in Aberdeen to take the $148,000 prize.

The Press Association reports that Robertson was given odds of 33-1 to win, becoming the first Australian to win a ranking event title.

"I was twitching all over the place toward the end there," Robertson said, adding that it had been the best week of his life.

Frame scores (Robertson first): 40-67 ,100-8 (Break 100) 78-0 (78), 60-59 (59, Robertson), 61-2, 35-70 (55), 59-10, 63-38, 64-31, 98-9 (63), 0-105 (105), 42-69, 27-57, 70-1 (55).

Supreme Court tackles global warming

Corporate America is split on whether the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide

By Marc Gunter,
Fortune senior writer
October 27 2006

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to take up the issue of climate change, some unusual alliances are forming - and corporate America finds itself on both sides of the debate.

The case before the high court, known as Massachusetts v. EPA, turns on a question that, surprisingly, remains unanswered after seven years of legal wrangling: Does the U.S. EPA have the authority under the 36-year-old Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant?

It sounds simple, but like the rest of the scientific, legal and political debate about global warming, it's not. Nor is the response from big business.

Carbon dioxide, you may recall from high school science, is a clear, odorless gas that helps trees and crops grow - in other words, not your typical pollutant. Yet rising levels of CO2, most of which is generated by power plants and motor vehicles, contribute to the greenhouse effect, which traps heat in the atmosphere, increasing the earth's surface air temperature.

Here's how the sides have lined up in the case, so far.

Supporting federal regulation are the attorneys general of 13 states, environmental groups, a coalition of church groups, native Americans living in Alaska, - and utility companies Entergy and Calpine, as well the Aspen Skiiing Co.

Such bulwarks of the Fortune 500 as General Electric and Wal-Mart also say they favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases, although they have not joined this case.

On the other side are the EPA, about a dozen mostly-industrial states, the American Petroleum Institute, utilities, car dealers and automakers Daimler Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. It's not every day that the EPA joins forces with big business to ask that its powers be curbed, but that's what's happening here.

"This case makes for strange bedfellows," say the lawyers for Entergy, a $10-billion a year utility company based in New Orleans, in their friend of the court brief. "Entergy's position is atypical of an industry largely opposed to CO2 regulation."

Why? Entergy is the U.S.'s second largest generator of nuclear energy, which does not contribute to global warming. Nuclear power could be advantaged if carbon emissions are regulated or taxed.

Calpine, an $8.7 billion a year utility that also backs regulation, operates natural gas-fired power plants and is North America's largest producer of renewable geothermal energy. It, too, wouldn't mind seeing curbs placed on coal-burning utilities that generate lots of CO2. Then again, Calpine is bankrupt so it has more than global warming to worry about.

As for the Aspen Skiing Co., which filed a friend of the court brief, its CEO has said that the loss of a few dozen days in the ski season because of rising temperatures would wipe out the profits of Colorado ski resorts and lead to "an economic disaster" for the state.

U.S automakers, meanwhile, oppose any regulation that penalizes the big cars and trucks that generate their profits. Coal-burning utilities, too, don't want to have to charge more for electricity, which would likely happen if carbon is regulated or taxed.

Others argue that carbon regulation will curb economic growth. "There are risks of climate change but also of climate change policy," writes Marlo Lewis Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Carbon emissions can't be stabilized, much less lowered, he argues, without "heavy constraints on U.S. energy consumption and economic growth."

The Supreme Court case has a tangled history. In 1999, near the end of the Clinton administration, environmental groups petitioned the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. The EPA began to look at the issue, but after the 2000 elections the agency's legal counsel decided that it did not have the authority to regulate CO2 for global climate change purposes. That triggered this lawsuit.

Last year, the EPA won an important victory when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to support the government's argument. To the surprise of many, the Supreme Court agreed in June to take the case. Oral arguments are scheduled for November 29.

Truth be told, the case may end up having more political than legal impact. A win by the environmentalists "would add to the momentum building for greenhouse gas regulation," Michael Gerrard, a partner at the law firm of Arnold & Porter and author of a fortcoming book on global climate change and U.S. law.

But a win for the environmentalists will merely set off a long round of administrative proceedings, and a defeat probably would not slow down the momentum building for carbon regulation, even in the state and in the corporate world.

"There's a growing unease in many sectors of the economy about the chaotic growth of inconsistent greenhouse gas regulation," Gerrard says.

Already, California's efforts to curb motor vehicle emissions have been joined by 10 other states; California Gov. Schwarzenegger recently signed a bill to regulate industrial sources of CO2; and northeastern states from Maine to Maryland have joined forces to curb CO2 emissions from power plants.

All this brings pressure on the auto industry and electric utilities to find ways to profit from carbon regulation, rather than fight it. The Supreme Court case is "one move in a big chess game," says David Doniger, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The automakers, in particular, need to find ways to make more-efficient cars and trucks that emit less carbon dioxide, he argues. "We want them to innovate rather than litigate," Doniger says. "They should put their lawyers in a cage and let the engineers out."

That's what GE, Wal-Mart, DuPont and a slew of other companies are doing: They are finding ways to innovate, save energy, cut costs and reduce emissions. Smart companies can see which way the wind is blowing - and how fast the ice is melting.