Bugs Eat Wast and Produce Petrol

Look at what's new in Silicon Valley. Could this be part of our energy future?



LINK to article

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
Related Links

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What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to re engineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-z problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

....snip....


Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”

Power points

— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources

— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs

— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels

EPA Chief Grilled on being a White House Puppet

WASHINGTON, DC, May 21, 2008 (ENS) - The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stonewalled Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, refusing to provide information about the role the White House played in recent agency decisions involving the regulation of greenhouse gases and the finalization of a new federal smog standard. The defiance of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson drew a sharp rebuke from the Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, who said the EPA chief has repeatedly bowed to pressure from the White House and become "essentially a figurehead."

"My concern is decisions at EPA are not being made on the science and they are not being made on the law," said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat. "They are being made at the White House and they are being made for political reasons."
Congressman Henry Waxman chairs the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)

Waxman said senior EPA staff had told Congressional investigators that Johnson reversed course on the smog standard, abandoning a plan to set a secondary standard designed to protect natural ecosystems from ground-level ozone, the key ingredient in smog.

The investigation by Waxman's committee found that the president weighed in with his opposition to a secondary ozone standard only hours before EPA finalized the new rule on March 12.

The EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, CASAC, had recommended setting such a standard to better protect natural ecosystems from the hazards of smog. Documents show Johnson initially agreed with that recommendation. The final rule did not set a secondary standard.

Waxman also pointed to depositions from agency staff that said Johnson caved to the White House in deciding to reject California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

He criticized the EPA chief for a second global warming decision, pointing to agency documents and testimony that indicate Johnson was prepared to push forward last December with an agency effort to begin exploring how to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, only to abandon the plan due to White House pressure.

"Three times in the last six months you have recommended to the White House that EPA take steps to address climate change and protect the environment," Waxman told Johnson. "In each case, your positions were right on the science and the law but in each case you backed down."

Waxman added that Johnson and other administration officials have failed to fill in gaps about how the process for each of the decisions was completed and questioned the legality of the White House's involvement.

"The president apparently insisted on his judgment and overrode the unanimous recommendations of EPA scientific and legal experts," he said "Our investigation has not been able to find any evidence that the president based his decisions on the science, the record, or the law. Indeed, there's virtually no credible record of any kind in support of the decisions."

snip...

Link to Full Article

Climate Change Happening at a Faster Pace than Previously Thought?

Al Gore's newest presentation (this is the first time he has given it)

Please enjoy.....

NASA SCIENTIST: Climate Near Tipping Point

Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.

With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."

The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

The forecast effects include "increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones," according to the NASA announcement.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

Global Warming

Migrations of Animals Confused...

Scientists are now saying that Global Warming is the cause of the internal biological clocks of animals all the way from migratory birds to whales that are either mistiming their migrations or not bothering to even make them anymore as the seasonal changes around them become less distinct.

The bottom line for these species is that it leaves them vulnerable to being decimated by cold snaps and dramatic changes in their environment because they haven't moved on to their normal safer migratory grounds. Many need these various breeding, wintering, and stop over places to survive.

Full Article from Reuters

Arctic ice cap melting 30 years ahead of forecast

For all the non-believers out there...this just in...

Linky-bit

The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050.

No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."

That is because the ice reflects light and heat; when it is gone, the much darker land or sea will absorb more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said.

Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel.

"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said in a telephone interview.

..snip...

"It appears we're on pace about 30 years earlier than expected to reach a state where we don't have sea ice or at least not very much in late summer in the Arctic Ocean," he said.

He discounted the notion that the sharp warming trend in the Arctic might be due to natural climate cycles. "There aren't many periods in history that are this dramatic in terms of natural variability," Scambos said.

He said he had no doubt that this was caused in large part by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which he said was the only thing capable of changing Earth on such a large scale over so many latitudes.

...snip...

"We just barely now, I think, have enough time and enough collective will to be able to get through this century in good shape, but it means we have to start acting now and in a big way."

WA State Clean Energy Rep.

Here's the introduction to an interview with Jay Inslee by David Roberts of Grist.

Full Article

Rep. Jay Inslee's two central passions, clean energy and global warming, received scant attention during his last eight years in Congress. Now, after a power shift on Capitol Hill, he's at the center of high-profile efforts to attack climate change and promote a new energy economy -- not to mention get his colleagues up to speed on the issues.

The Democrat from Washington state's first district, which encompasses suburbs north and west of Seattle, holds spots on two House committees that will play key roles in debates over how to tackle the climate crisis: the Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), and the new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, created this year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Happily, he's prepared. Inslee has focused on energy issues since the early 1970s and amassed a wonk's expertise. This fall, he will release a book called Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy, about the challenges and opportunities facing America as it navigates the twin crises of global warming and peak oil.

I caught up with Inslee at a Seattle café, where he enthusiastically dove into the weeds of energy and climate policy, all the while cautioning the environmental community to be realistic and understand that Congress is at the beginning of a long journey on these issues.

Rivers Lifesblood Threatened for People All Around The World

Many of the major rivers in the world are in danger of drying up and/or ceasing to be the critical supply of fresh water and food for people all over the globe.

Full Article

Climate change, pollution, over extraction of water and development are killing some of the world's most famous rivers including China's Yangtze, India's Ganges and Africa's Nile, conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.

At the global launch of its report "World's Top 10 Rivers at Risk," the Geneva-based group said many rivers could dry out, affecting hundreds of millions of people and killing unique aquatic life.

"If these rivers die, millions will lose their livelihoods, biodiversity will be destroyed on a massive scale, there will be less fresh water and agriculture, resulting in less food security," said Ravi Singh, secretary-general of WWF-India.

The report, launched ahead of 'World Water Day' on Thursday, also cited the Rio Grande in the United States, the Mekong and Indus in Asia, Europe's Danube, La Plata in South America and Australia's Murray-Darling as in need of greater protection.

Rivers are the world's main source of fresh water and WWF says about half of the available supply is already being used up.

Dams have destroyed habitats and cut rivers off from their flood plains, while climate change could affect the seasonal water flows that feed them, the report said.

Fish populations, the top source of protein and overall life support for hundreds of thousands of communities worldwide, are also being threatened, it found.

The Yangtze basin is one of the most polluted rivers in the world because of decades of heavy industrialization, damming and huge influxes of sediment from land conversion.

Climate change, including higher temperatures, also means devastating consequences for fishery productivity, water supply and political security in Africa's arid Nile basin.

The Ganges basin makes up almost a third of India's land area and one in twelve people in the world depend on this river for activities such as fishing and farming, the WWF said.

Gag on Polar Bears, Arctic Ice, and Global Warming..

Some call it SCIENTIFIC CENSORSHIP. Others just call it SOUND POLICY. Whatever you call it, however, government officials and scientists are asked not to speak in any Public Forum on these particular topics.

Heaven forbid that the Public should hear what Scientists and our Government actually think and know on the topics.......we only pay the paychecks!


Full Article Here

Polar bears, sea ice and global warming are taboo subjects, at least in public, for some U.S. scientists attending meetings abroad, environmental groups and a top federal wildlife official said on Thursday.

Environmental activists called this scientific censorship, which they said was in line with the Bush administration's history of muzzling dissent over global climate change.

But H. Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said this policy was a long-standing one, meant to honor international protocols for meetings where the topics of discussion are negotiated in advance.

The matter came to light in e-mails from the Fish and Wildlife Service that were distributed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity, both environmental groups.

Listed as a "new requirement" for foreign travelers on U.S. government business, the memo says that requests for foreign travel "involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice, and/or polar bears" require special handling, including notice of who will be the official spokesman for the trip.

The Fish and Wildlife Service top officials need assurance that the spokesman, "the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears" understands the administration's position on these topics.

Two accompanying memos were offered as examples of these kinds of assurance. Both included the line that the traveler "understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues."

ARE POLAR BEARS 'THREATENED'?

Polar bears are a hot topic for the Bush administration, which decided in December to consider whether to list the white-furred behemoths as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, because of scientific reports that the bears' icy habitat is melting due to global warming.

Hall said a decision is expected in January 2008. A "threatened" listing would bar the government from taking any action that jeopardizes the animal's existence, and might spur debate about tougher measures to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.

Hall defended the policy laid out in the memos, saying it was meant to keep scientists from straying from a set agenda at meetings in countries like Russia, Norway and Canada.

For example, he said, one meeting was about "human and polar bear interface." Receding Arctic sea ice where polar bears live and the global climate change that likely played a role in the melting were not proper discussion topics, he said.

"That's not a climate change discussion," Hall said at a telephone briefing. "That's a management, on-the-ground type discussion."

The prohibition on talking about these subjects only applies to public, formal situations, Hall said. Private scientific discussions outside the meeting and away from media are permitted and encouraged, he said.

"This administration has a long history of censoring speech and science on global warming," Eben Burnham-Snyder of the Natural Resources Defense Council said by telephone.

"Whenever we see an instance of the Bush administration restricting speech on global warming, it sends up a huge red flag that their commitment to the issue does not reflect their rhetoric," Burnham-Snyder said.

New Study of Polar Regions Begins

An iceberg carved from a glacier floats in the Jacobshavn fjord in south-west Greenland in this undated handout photograph released on September 20, 2006.(Konrad Steffen/University of Colorado/Handout/Reuters)

Full Article Here

Thousands of scientists from across the world join forces this week to investigate the effects of global warming on the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.

The ice in both polar regions is melting more rapidly than anywhere else, leading to rises in sea levels and possibly to dramatic changes in ocean currents and food chains.

International Polar Year, which will run to 2009, will involve 50,000 people from 63 nations in 228 projects looking at and under the ice, in the sea and in the atmosphere in the biggest coordinated polar study for half a century.

..snip..

One estimate suggests that if the vast Greenland ice sheet disappears, sea levels around the world will rise by seven meters, drowning huge areas of the planet.

That fades into insignificance against the 200-meter sea level rise expected if all the Antarctic ice melts.

"Global warming is the most challenging problem our society has ever had to face up to," said Britain's chief scientist David King.

"Ice is the canary in the coal mine of global warming."

World scientists predicted this month that average world temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due mainly to carbon gases from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

This is a global average, however, and the temperature rises at the poles are expected to exceed that by a large margin.

Scientist Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey said atmospheric concentrations of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide had fluctuated between 180 and 280 parts per million (ppm) for 650,000 years.

Since 1850 they had shot up to over 380 ppm. "We are on an unsustainable path," she said.

The Antarctic ice sheet is up to 4.8 kilometres (3 miles) thick in places and it holds 90 percent of the world's fresh water. It is also crucial to the circulation of the world's ocean currents and therefore to planetary air circulation...

Over 5200 Square Miles of Ice Shelf Gone in Recent Years

Full Article Here

Spindly orange sea stars, fan-finned ice fish and herds of roving sea cucumbers are among the exotic creatures spied off the Antarctic coast in an area formerly covered by ice, scientists reported on Sunday.

This is the first time explorers have been able to catalog wildlife where two mammoth ice shelves used to extend for some 3,900 square miles over the Weddell Sea.

At least 5,000 years old, the ice shelves collapsed in two stages over the last dozen years. One crumbled 12 years ago and the other followed in 2002.

Global warming is seen as the culprit behind the ice shelves' demise, said Gauthier Chapelle of the Polar Foundation in Brussels.

"These kind of collapses are expected to happen more," he said. "What we're observing here is probably going to happen elsewhere around Antarctica."

Melting ice shelves are not expected to directly contribute much to global sea level rise, but glaciologists believe these vast swaths of ice act like dams to slow down glaciers as they move over the Antarctic land mass toward the coast. Without the ice shelves, glaciers may move over the water more quickly, and this would substantially add to rising seas.

Since 1974, 5,213 square miles of ice shelves have disintegrated in the Antarctic Peninsula.

...And if you missed it....here are the moving pictures...

...From Oscar Night...Click Here

An Inconvenient Truth...

...for some, will be that Al Gore's documentary on Global Warming has now won an Oscar. He can add that feather to his hat now, along with his nomination for a Nobel prize for bringing worldwide attention to the same issue.

Ozone Hole Back to Record 2001 Size

The hole in the Ozone is not healing like scientists had predicted. Some point to developing countries as the new source of the compounds which are making this a new and stunning reality on a situation that was once thought to be under control.

Original Article

Until recently, it looked like the depleted ozone layer protecting the earth from harmful solar rays was on its way to being healed.

Anthony Saldhana, 35, a mechanic at a repair shop in downtown Mumbai, adds air-conditioning refrigerant to a car.

But thanks in part to an explosion of demand for air conditioners in hot places like India and southern China — mostly relying on refrigerants already banned in Europe and in the process of being phased out in the United States — the ozone layer is proving very hard to repair.

Four months ago, scientists discovered that the “hole” created by the world’s use of ozone-depleting gases — in aerosol spray cans, aging refrigerators and old air conditioners — had expanded again, stretching once more to the record size of 2001. An unusually cold Antarctic winter, rather than the rise in the use of refrigerants, may have caused the sudden expansion, which covered an area larger than North America.

But it has refocused attention on the ozone layer, which protects people and other animals as well as vegetation from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Now, the world’s atmospheric scientists are concerned that the air-conditioning mania sweeping across Asia could lead to more serious problems in the future.

As it turns out, the fastest-growing threat to the ozone layer can be traced to people like Geeta Vittal, a resident of this hot, thriving metropolis of 18 million, who simply wants to be cooler and can now afford to make that dream a reality.

When her husband first proposed buying an air conditioner eight years ago, Mrs. Vittal opposed it as a wasteful luxury. But he bought it anyway, and she liked it so much that when the Vittals moved last year to a new apartment, Mrs. Vittal insisted that five air conditioners be installed before they moved in.

“All my friends have air conditioners now,” she said. “Ten years ago, no one did.”

Rising living standards throughout India and China, the world’s two most populous countries and the fastest-growing major economies, have given a lot more people the wherewithal to make their homes more comfortable. The problem is that Mrs. Vittal’s air conditioners — along with most window units currently sold in the United States — use a refrigerant called HCFC-22, which hurts the ozone.

“The emissions of things like HCFC-22: we had thought they were sufficiently in control, that we didn’t have to worry about them,” said Joe Farman, the British geophysicist who discovered the ozone hole.

A recent technical study by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program found that the so-called ozone “hole” over Antarctica — actually an area of unusually low ozone concentrations — was mending more slowly than expected.

Scientists mostly blame chloroflourocarbons, a chemical used in an early form of refrigerant that they now realize was released into the atmosphere in larger quantities than forecasted. As a result, the international agencies now say that injury to the Earth’s ozone layer could take a quarter of a century longer to heal than predicted.

The fastest-growing offending gas that scientists say can be better managed is HCFC-22. Nearly 200 diplomats will gather in September in Montreal to determine how to speed up the timetable for the elimination of certain gases that threaten the ozone layer, in particular how to manage HCFC-22. A deadline for proposals is March 15.

At a meeting in Washington on Feb. 16, Bush Administration officials said for the first time that they are considering four possible proposals for a faster phaseout.

Industrial countries currently must phase out production of HCFC-22 by 2020 and are ahead of schedule, with the United States banning domestic production in 2010. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying whether to ban imports of the gas and sales of new products using the gas by then as well.

By contrast, the Montreal Protocol, which governs the phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, allows developing countries to continue using HCFC-22 through 2040.

China in particular is stepping up exports to the United States of air conditioners using the chemical, often labeled as R22, especially after the European Union finished phasing out the production and import of such air conditioners in 2004.

Pound for pound, HCFC-22 is only 5 percent as harmful to the ozone layer as the chlorofluorocarbons it replaced. But it still inflicts damage, especially when emitted in enormous quantities by China, now the world’s dominant producer of window air conditioners, and by India, a fast-growing market and manufacturer.

The latest estimate from technical experts is that the chemical’s output in developing countries is rising 20 percent to 35 percent each year and could continue at that pace for years: slightly over 2 percent of Indian households currently have air conditioners, according to LG Electronics of South Korea, a giant maker of air conditioners...

Exxon Mobile Hates Polar Bears...

Here is a follow up to some news I posted the other week...because it bares mentioning again considering where the money is coming from...

Full Article Here

Snippit below...

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Man Made Global Warming

The question mark is gone for good, according to a world body studying all the scientific data and reports from around the globe on climate and global warming: We have been the cause of the warming over the last 50 years. And we are on the brink of an irreversible trend that could continue for the next 1000 years.

Link to Article

Snippit...

The world's top climate scientists said on Friday global warming was man-made, spurring calls for urgent government action to prevent severe and irreversible damage from rising temperatures.

The United Nations panel, which groups 2,500 scientists from more than 130 nations, predicted more droughts, heatwaves, rains and a slow gain in sea levels that could last for more than 1,000 years.

The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.

That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely," or 66 percent probable.

Possible signs range from drought in Australia to record high winter temperatures in Europe.

"February 2, 2007 may be remembered as the day the question mark was removed from whether (people) are to blame for climate change," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program.

"Faced with this emergency, now is not the time for half measures. It is the time for a revolution, in the true sense of the term," French
President Jacques Chirac said. "We are in truth on the historical doorstep of the irreversible."

House Panel Seeks Administration's Documents

A House Panel headed by Democratic Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman says that the White House Administration is not handing over documents that have been requested in their inquiry into how the administration has handled government scientific reports having to do with climate and the environment.

The allegations are that the administration has strong-armed scientists into taking out mention of global warming and climate change from reports and in other instances inserting their own verbiage and altering that of the scientists to change the meaning of the entire report.

Link Here

Excerpt to follow:

Two private advocacy groups, meanwhile, presented to the panel a survey of government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming.

The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report.

The questionnaire was sent by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private advocacy group. The report also was based on "firsthand experiences" described in interviews with the Government Accountability Project, which helps government whistleblowers, lawmakers were told.

'Smoking Gun' on Global Warming

The second major international report, compiled by over 600 scientists and reviewed by even more than 600 experts, is due out in the very near future. The bottom line... 'duh', global warming is here and 'duh' humans are making it happen.

Full Article Here

Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.

That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said.

New Levels of Censorship on Gov't Scientists? and Their Peer Reviewers?

What sort of danger is there for the public when politics interferes with the dissemination of scientific data and information? What if it is in regards to Public Health, Public Safety? What if politics gets in the way of the actual scientific findings even coming out?

Or worse yet, what happens when the studies done by scientists are falsified?

That might be the case, for instance, in the study of the water that seeps through Yucca Mountain where the federal government will place tons of radioactive waste material.

Can you imagine the impact of the true data on that being tampered with? It is a harrowing, but all too believable, scenario to think that Inconvenient Truths are swept aside for political reasons. But what are the costs to you and I in the end? What happens, say, if the great aquifer of North America becomes contaminated with radioactive material? What happens to you and I, or our children, or the plants and the animals?

There are news stories almost every day about something unexplained plaguing populations of birds and animals. And when scientists find the culprits, or go looking for them, they often begin and end their search with contaminates that have entered land and waterways by human hands.

If we are at the top of the food chain, we are dumping our most toxic waste into the very chain we will eat from. That isn't 'shitting where you sleep' that is 'shitting where you eat', a foul image but one that is disgustingly true.

Today's Article on the Government regulating the information that comes from our own Publicly funded Scientists...and the information that is coming from their Peer Reviewers, which means every other Scientist in the Country.

Today's Article on 1000 dead Mallard Ducks found alongside ONE stream. They don't know what is causing it, but they suffered and died from lesions on the lung walls and hemorrhaging of the heart.

Today's Article about a Wisconsin hunter that found a deer with 7 legs and both female and male sex organs.

Today's Article about sloppy use of scientific data in regards to opening up areas of Grizzly habitat in Idaho and WA. Now a federal judge has slapped down the government agencies in question and sent them back to the drawing board on their assessment of impact.

Yesterday's Article about the extinction of an entire species of fresh water Dolphin in China. A species that was with us not so long ago. Many more marine and fresh water animals are where the Yangtze White Dolphin was just a few years ago, which is now so much more clearly meaning on the verge of extinction.