BEIJING — Three Tibetan monks in central China set themselves on fire this weekend, raising to 15 the number of suicides in the last year by Buddhist clergy members protesting aspects of Beijing’s rule in Tibet.

James Balog has given multimedia presentations to hundreds of audiences large and small, including high-profile presentations at the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change; two U.S. Congressional briefing; the 2009 COP-15 United Nations Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen; the National Security Agency; the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; the California Academy of Sciences; as well as corporate presentations for Apple, The North Face, Samsung, and Qualcomm. Click here to watch James Balog's talk at TEDGlobal 2009.

It started over dinner one night in 1973, when Graham Nash asked Jacques Cousteau to name the issue he thought posed the gravest danger to humanity. The rock star expected to hear something oceanic, so he was stunned when the famed explorer answered "nuclear power."

"That really blew my mind," said Nash, best known for his work with the band Crosby, Stills & Nash. "It started me thinking."

The thinking turned to conversations with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, John Hall (lead singer at the time for the band Orleans) and James Taylor, all artists who shared Nash's concerns about nuclear energy. The talk them turned to action when the entertainers formed Musicians United for Safe Energy, or MUSE. The group spearheaded a series of all-star "No Nukes" concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1979, as well as a rally at Manhattan's Battery Park City landfill that drew an estimated 200,000 people.

There is a cancer on the U.S. media. That cancer is the disinformation machine aimed at spreading and endlessly repeating the most absurd falsehoods on a host of vital issues to the health and well being of Americans.

As Former NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines put it last year: “Why has our profession … helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?” That was a WashPost op-ed, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“

TOKYO — A total of 68 former elite bureaucrats have assumed executive posts at Japan’s 12 electricity suppliers after retiring from the industry ministry over the past 50 years, the ministry said Monday. Thirteen former career-track bureaucrats of the ministry currently hold senior positions at electric power companies under the practice known as ‘‘amakudari’’ (descent from heaven).

This week, a Mother Jones editor named Adam Weinstein got into a Twitter tête à tête with an Indiana lawyer who called on riot police in Madison to use "live ammunition" to clear protesters out of the state Capitol.

It turned out that lawyer, Jeff Cox, is a deputy attorney general in the state. And -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- he's left a long online trail of controversial statements and diktats.

Debt in the 5 states the forbid it totals $222 billion. In the 11 states that don't ban or require collective bargaining with public employees, their finances are not any better whether or not they do it. In Arizona, where the law permits bargaining but the state chooses not to do so, its total debt stands at $22 billion with a yearly deficit of $2 billion (despite laying off 2,000 state workers in recent years).

A World Public Opinion (WPO) poll finds that a remarkable 60% of those who watched Fox News almost daily believe that "Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring," whereas only 30% who never watch it believe that. Only 25% of those who watch CNN almost daily hold that erroneous belief — and only 14% who listen to NPR or PBS almost daily.

The draft report found that a decision by Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who led the spill response, to approve construction of the berms was made under "intense political pressure" from federal, state and local politicians and against the advice of oil spill responders, the Coast Guard and other federal agencies.

"The decision to green-light the underwhelmingly effective, overwhelmingly expensive Louisiana berms project was flawed," the commission staff wrote.

"Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis," the former vice president wrote on his blog this week. "The leaked e-mails now suggest that this bias comes directly from the executives responsible for their news coverage."

Reporting from Washington —
A group of international investors responsible for more than $15 trillion in assets called Tuesday for the world's nations, particularly the United States, to move decisively to combat climate change or face economic disruptions worse than the global recession of the last two years.

The statement, signed by 259 asset managers and asset owners whose holdings account for one-quarter of global capitalization, was aimed at world leaders who will meet in two weeks in Cancun, Mexico, for a United Nations conference on climate change.

Was Joe Miller required to bring a security detail to his town hall meeting Sunday at Central Middle School in Alaska?

That's what Miller, the Republican Senate candidate, told two national cable news networks Monday in the wake of the arrest by his security squad of an online journalist at his public event.

But the school district said there was no such requirement made of Miller -- he only had to provide a hall and parking lot monitor, and advise participants of school district courtesy and food rules.

Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."

In Washington, DC, top climate scientist James Hansen, who warned Congress of the coming scourge of global warming in 1989, joined over a hundred others who were arrested at the White House for protesting mountaintop removal, which Barack Obama has called an "environmental disaster." The Rainforest Action Network, which helped organize the Appalachia Rising protest, reports on the arrests:

There will be many bad memories from the summer of 2010. We've seen the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, record temperatures across the globe, calving ice chunks the size of Manhattan, record heat waves and wildfires in Russia, and floods in Pakistan submerging one-fifth of the country. These extreme weather events are consistent with scientists' predictions about global warming, and they portend more catastrophes to come as greenhouse gas pollution spews unchecked from power plants, vehicles, and factories [1].

Anti-big government gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino is fighting to hold on to a $1.4 million tax break for a company that created only one job and put back into the economy less than it took out.

In a last-minute bid to keep that lucrative government subsidy, records show he overstated the worth of the company that got the break by including properties he'd already sold off.

While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

US citizens face economic problems that are all too real, and the country's future crucially depends on education, science and technology as it faces increasing competition from China and other emerging science powers…. Yet the public often buys into anti-science, anti-regulation agendas that are orchestrated by business interests and their sponsored think tanks and front groups.

If you haven't already read Jane Mayer's devastating New Yorker profile of the billionaire Koch brothers who, among other things, have been bankrolling the Tea Party and funding climate change skepticism on a massive scale, well, what are you waiting for? I can't think of a better way to ruin a great three-day weekend!

But if you have read the piece, and might somehow still be wondering whether these guys are as bad as they sound, here's another data point, fresh from the keyboard of Todd Woody, in Grist. Through one of their many subsidiaries, Flint Hills Resources, a Kansas petrochemical company, the Kochs just donated $1 million to Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative designed to sabotage the state's global warming law, AB 32.

But the reporting on the move left out the fact that FreedomWorks' change in location also comes at the end of the group's existing lease, and -- according to one source familiar with FreedomWorks' real estate deals -- their new headquarters offers them cheaper rent than their current home. And despite reports of increased threats, the group won't be moving until months after the election is over.

"I'm not saying we think something's going to happen today or tomorrow," FreedomWorks spokesperson Adam Brandon told me last week. "It wasn't that there are new threats that we're specifically worried about."

" Not content to simply stop progress, however, the Koch brothers and various Koch-funded organizations have also been actively trying to roll back existing clean air and clean energy laws — both at the state and national levels.

David Koch, who lives in New York City and whose company is based in Kansas, is secretly bankrolling the Proposition 23 effort to roll back California's landmark clean energy law. Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity helped make opposition to "cap-and-trade" a Tea Party talking point and then launched its so-called "Regulation Reality" tour to attack Supreme Court-mandated Clean Air Act regulations being finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency. "

It was Australia's second climate change election. Climate change deposed the former leaders of both main parties: Kevin Rudd (Labor) because his position was too weak, Malcolm Turnbull (Liberal) because his was too strong. When Julia Gillard, the new Labor leader, also flunked the issue, many of her supporters defected to the Greens.

Labor's collapse began when the senate rejected Rudd's emissions trading scheme. Faced with a choice of dissolving parliament and calling an election or dropping the scheme, he chickened out and lost the confidence of the party. Gillard's support began to slide when she proposed to defer climate change policy to a citizen's assembly. Nearly 70% of the votes she lost went to the Greens.

During the four years of this column, the world's inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable. Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated. Sadly, this year will quite possibly become the warmest on record, yet another testimony to human-induced environmental catastrophes running out of control.

Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

Last month, NASA reported it was the hottest January-August on record. That followed a terrific analysis, "July 2010 — What Global Warming Looks Like," which noted that 2010 is "likely" to be warmest year on record.

This month continues the trend of 2010 outpacing previous years, according to NASA:

Once accepting that climate change is, publically, a political issue more than a scientific issue, it is important to realize that this challenge to science-based motivation of policy and societal change is not unique to climate change. In a paper I have referred to many times before Liisa Antilla states in her conclusions (I refer you to the original paper for the references):

"The attack on climate science, observed Pollack (2003), replicates previous assaults on science, such as by the pesticide industry (DDT), coal-burning electric utilities (acid rain), and the chemical industry (effect of CFCs on stratospheric ozone). Furthermore, Nissani (1999, p. 37) stressed that the 'phoney' controversy surrounding anthropogenic climate change has been preceded by controversies on such issues as slavery, child labour, and civil rights. There have always been experts willing to back up a 'profitably mistaken viewpoint'; there have always been efforts 'to cover the issue in a thick fog of sophistry and uncertainty' and to 'unearth yet one more reason why the
status quo is best for us' (Nissani, 1999, p. 37–38)."

An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build "underground cities," developing "short, compact bodies" or "curved spines," so that "moving around in tight spaces will be no problem."

Smithsonian Contact Page

Johnson also invoked an interesting -- though not altogether accurate -- argument supposedly proving that climate change is no biggie. "There's a reason Greenland was called Greenland," he said. "It was actually green at one point in time. And it's been, since, it's a whole lot whiter now."

It's an intriguing example -- and not quite true.

In 1994, the "Louie," as the crew calls the ship, and a United States Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Sea, smashed their way to the North Pole through thousands of miles of pack ice six- to nine-feet thick. "The sea conditions in the Arctic Ocean were rarely an issue for us in those days, because the thick continuous ice kept waves from forming," Marc Rothwell, the Louie's captain, told me. "Now, there's so much open water that we have to account for heavy swells that undulate through the sea ice. It's almost like a dream: the swells move in slow motion, like nothing I've seen elsewhere."

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A November ballot measure that would suspend California's landmark global-warming law could also end up rolling back some of the state's other sweeping environmental standards - including rules that require utilities to generate a third of their electricity from renewable sources and programs requiring oil refineries to make cleaner-burning fuels.

How broadly courts might interpret Proposition 23 is setting off alarm bells among Silicon Valley executives and environmental groups.

"If we don't go forward with 33 percent renewable standard for California's energy supply, we undercut all those companies and entrepreneurs creating jobs in solar, wind, biofuels and other renewable forms of energy," said Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a San Jose organization that represents more than 200 companies and which opposes Proposition 23.

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.
We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

"I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic."

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's popularity has nosedived in recent weeks as a result of her government's climate change policy.

Following scandal after scandal, many donors have abandoned the Michael Steele-led Republican National Committee in favor of other right-wing groups preparing to attack Democratic candidates in this fall's elections. The two biggest beneficiaries of the RNC's woes appear to be American Crossroads, the "shadow RNC" setup by Bush operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, and the Republican Governors Association, currently chaired by Mississippi Governor and former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour. Despite their apparent strategic differences, these three groups still have one thing in common: massive infusions of cash from Big Oil. Over $4 million of oil-related cash has spewed into the three groups in the second quarter alone:

As BP's oil rolled onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast and the cash rolled into the RGA, Barbour consistently and conspicuously downplayed the significance of the BP disaster. After skipping two meetings with President Obama, he went on to argue that the Obama administration's common-sense moratorium on deepwater drilling was worse than the spill itself. And before eventually backtracking, Barbour complained that the $20 billion escrow fund BP agreed to setup "bother[ed]" him because it might cut into BP's profits.

Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future.

Uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described "die hard contrarian," tells it like it is in his blunt 2Q 2010 letter:

On the parched paddocks of his grain and sheep farm, Paul Rout is at the frontline of one of the main campaign battles ahead of Australian elections on Saturday: climate change.

Enduring drought, frequent bushfires and rising temperatures have pushed global warming to the forefront of debate in the driest inhabited continent on earth, leaving politicians scrambling to keep up with popular concern.

During Bush's first year in office, the Forest Service's State Fire Assistance program for wildland fire management was funded at approximately $56 million per year. But the President's budget proposal for 2008 only requests $35 million from Congress, an 18% cut from what it spent in the current year, already well below the earlier levels.

Just a days after the Nobel prize was awarded for global warming work, an alarming new study finds that warming signals are stronger, and happening sooner than expected, due to increased human emissions of carbon dioxide and an Earth less able to absorb them.

Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 percent higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated, researchers reported in Tuesday's edition of the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If there's a burning question that's arisen from Brent Wilkes' trial, it's not whether Wilkes is guilty. It's: 'Just how stupid is Duke Cunningham?'

According to testimony, Cunningham's (alleged) bribers were in agreement: his stupidity made him an easy mark. Wilkes' former employee testified that Wilkes told her Duke was "not the brightest congressman up there. We can work with him."

PACHAURI: Well, the calculations are so simple that even a high school kid can do them. The 20th century sea level rise was about 17 centimeters. Our predictions for the end of this century are 18 to 59 centimeters. So even if we end up somewhere in the middle, we have a pretty serious crisis on our hands. The fact that there are storms and coastal flooding even now means there's going to be major devastation. The ocean takes a long time to mix; thus far the warming has been essentially in the upper layers. It's now gone down in several places to about 3,000 meters. In a couple of decades or three decades, the warming will be even more serious.

The right wing Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC) was the clear winner in Sunday's parliamentary elections after boosting its majority with an estimated six more seats. The Greens gained an estimated four more which would give them their biggest number ever, according to the latest projections.

Everybody at least thinks they know about the role FEMA played, or mis-played, in the response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. What many people still don't realize is the role the US Army Corps of Engineers played in designing that disaster.

A lot of folks have bet against the lawsuits filed by a group of New Orleans homeowners against the Corps, on the grounds that the Corps, as a federal agency, is immune from legal action. Well, tell that to Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, who Friday filed suit against the Corps to force it to stop shipping water from Lake Lanier, Atlanta's primary water source, to Florida.

None of Perry's responses since January has mentioned that he personally doubts man-made contributions to warming or that he believes that any Texas actions to gauge or regulate greenhouse gases would be premature, potentially wreaking havoc in the state that leads the nation in such emissions. He did not mention the topic in his state of the state address this year and only sporadically did during his re-election campaign last year.

Several influential Christian conservative leaders said it was unlikely, even after the conference, that they would be able to coalesce around a single candidate as they had once hoped to do. That raises anew the prospect that the movement's ability to shape the outcome of the primaries could be seriously diminished.

A new poll from Texas firm IVR has Fred Thompson losing his position atop the Republican field in this Southern state — a further sign that his much-hyped campaign is falling flat.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant, saying that the greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.

The decision marks a victory for environmental groups that are fighting proposals for new coal-fired plants around the country. It may be the first of a series of similar state actions inspired by a Supreme Court decision in April that asserted that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide should be considered pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Last Friday, shortly after Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, we posted an item on a recently concluded court case in Britain that questioned some of the facts in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. We are now giving Gore's spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, the opportunity to respond to the criticisms of the British judge. Kreider also serves as Gore's environmental adviser. You can find our original posts here and here. Verdict still pending.

From the dingy dungeons of the Dark Ages to today's shadowy holding facilities, the use of torture as an interrogation tactic has evolved little and possibly yielded even less, in terms of intelligence.

Inflicting pain to get information is a practice with deep roots as well as modern relevance, in light of the recent statements by President George W. Bush claiming the U.S. government does not use torture on political prisoners, despite some evidence to the contrary.

The total economic cost of climate change in the United States will be major and nationwide in scope, but remains uncounted, unplanned for and largely hidden in public debate, says a new study from the University of Maryland.

Landslides, floods and storms have taken their toll on Switzerland's political climate, turning the Greens into the fastest growing force in the Alpine nation ahead of Sunday's general election.

"We were taken for a bunch of eccentrics just a few years back," Swiss Green Party Vice President Ueli Leuenberger told AFP.

While many conservative commentators and editorialists have mocked concerns about climate change, a different reality is emerging among Republican presidential contenders. It is a near-unanimous recognition among the leaders of the threat posed by global warming.

But since then, Thompson's taken a lot of flak for a lackluster campaign from party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Support for his campaign has also wavered. The new CNN poll by the Opinion Research Corporation released Tuesday shows Thompson's support dropping -- now at 19 percent, down from 27 percent in September.

For the past six years, Michael Kirk has produced 10 Frontlines for PBS on behind-the-scenes moves in the Bush White House.

In each case, Kirk says, a common thread has emerged: When it comes to "what goes on behind closed doors, it always leads to the vice president."

As conditions worsen, the Army Corps of Engineers has become a favorite target of lawmakers in Georgia, Florida and Alabama, where the drought has intensified a decades-old feud involving how the Corps manages water rights.

"I particularly am disappointed that the Corps has allowed so much water to drain out of our reservoirs, out of our lakes, as they have," said Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, a Republican. "It's not that we haven't had enough water. It's more a function of allowing so much of it to go downstream."

He added that Sanchez's own record in Iraq is blemished: Abu Ghraib "got out of control under his watch. The war in general got out of control under his watch."

But Graham said that "finally," with the commitment of nearly 30,000 additional U.S. troops since January, "We are getting it right."

Sanchez told reporters that American political leaders have cost American lives on the battlefield with their "lust for power."

Sanchez said it had been his duty to obey orders and not object publicly while on active duty, but that he has an obligation to speak out now that he has retired.

"While the politicians espouse a rhetoric designed to preserve their reputations and their political power, our soldiers die," he said.

Mitt Romney was in Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada and then went back to Michigan. Rudy Giuliani visited Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Alabama, Washington and New Hampshire. John McCain went from Michigan to Iowa to New Hampshire.

But where was Fred, as in Fred Thompson?

Besides participating in his first presidential debate in Michigan last Tuesday, Thompson was missing from the campaign trail. The former Tennessee senator and star of NBC's "Law & Order" was scheduled to be in New Hampshire this weekend, but canceled.

New Hampshire voters noticed.

Australia's prime minister, John Howard, called a general election yesterday as polls showed him heading for a landslide defeat after nearly 11 years in office.

Speaking in Canberra the 68-year-old insisted he was still the best man to lead the country despite many voters switching to his Labor opponent, Kevin Rudd.

The transition of Al Gore from failed presidential candidate to climate change crusader and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is testament to his undaunted perseverance and commitment to his cause. But it also owes much to Gore's smash hit documentary movie, An Inconvenient Truth. The portrayal of Gore's unflagging efforts to educate people about the pressing dangers of global warming was the fourth most successful documentary in US history.

Its effect in convincing the US public about the scientific certainty of the human causes of global warming made it one of the most powerful political documentaries of modern times.

The group that founder Al Gore once praised as the planet's "PR agent" became $750,000 richer after the former vice president announced Friday that his Nobel Prize winnings would be given to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

The money is a financial boost that could help the year-old organization assume an even larger role in the campaign to fight global warming and its potentially catastrophic impacts.

The alliance is a kind of think tank-in-action whose major goals include publicizing the effects of global warming and turning citizens into climate change activists. Through this summer's Live Earth concerts and a follow-up campaign, the alliance has persuaded tens of thousands of Americans to pledge to lobby Washington on global warming.

What does global warming have to do with global peace? The globe may find out sooner than we think, experts say.

"Climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and in a larger sense to life on Earth as we know it to be," retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, former U.S. Army chief of staff, told a congressional panel last month.

Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of humanity. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.

US Democratic lawmakers have accused the Bush administration of "polluting" a plan to protect an endangered owl species, to make it more favorable to the timber industry, while scientists have also rejected the plan as flawed.

Ralph Regula, a Republican representative from Ohio, lost his coveted subcommittee chairmanship when Democrats took control of the House in January. Now, looking at his party's 2008 prospects, he's thinking retirement.

``I've discovered I prefer the majority,'' said Regula, 82.

High Court Judge Michael Burton said Gore's movie could be shown if the written guidance for teachers bundled with the program was changed to prevent Gore's views from being promoted to children. Earlier Tuesday, the government said it was rewriting its advice.

The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing

Climate change geeks with a thing for international conferences — like me — were spoilt for choice this past week. You could rub shoulders with national leaders from over 80 countries — or just their junior advisers, depending on the color of your badge — at the United Nations high-level meeting on climate. You could Amtrak down to the White House and hear President George W. Bush tell the world's major economies that this global warming thing might actually be a problem and that we should maybe consider doing something about it eventually. Or you could catch the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in Manhattan, where billionaire executives, extremely smart people and star-struck journalists listened raptly as Brad Pitt detailed his plans to rebuild New Orleans in fabulously green fashion.

"The days of cheap grain are gone," says Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co., a Chicago commodity forecasting concern.

This year the prices of Illinois corn and soybeans are up 40% and 75%, respectively, from a year ago. Kansas wheat is up 70% or more. And a growing number of economists and agribusiness executives think the run-ups could last as long as a decade, raising the cost of all kinds of food.

President George W. Bush went on the offensive on climate change Friday, proposing a summit next year among major emitters of greenhouse gases that would set a long-term global goal for curbing this dangerous pollution.

Bush also endorsed the UN as the final arena for tackling global warming, but gave not an inch of ground to those demanding the United States slap a legally-binding cap on its own massive carbon emissions.

It left a major question unanswered for me: what would be a significant enough event - weather-related or otherwise - to dramatically alter the public perception in the UK about climate change? I've asked some people this question myself - including government officials off the record - and many say that, to be blunt and realistic, it will take the "deaths of a large number of white, middle class people". That's why 9/11 shook America to its very core, whereas Hurricane Katrina by and large didn't, they point out. "Now, if Katrina had struck New York or Washington DC..."

Yes, I know that we can't blame individual weather events on climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that big enough events do obviously have the potential to change people's attitudes. But if a flood that caused billions of pounds worth of damage across the UK, and left thousands homeless, is not enough, then what is?

California Rep. John Doolittle said Thursday that the Justice Department has issued subpoenas to him and five of his staff members seeking office records going back 11 years in connection to the congressman's relationship with jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Doolittle's attorney indicated that he might fight having to comply.

Doolittle, a Republican, declined further comment about the subpoenas. But his criminal defense attorney, David Barger, said in a prepared statement that the subpoenas "raise serious constitutional issues going to the very core" of the separation of powers between the Congress and the executive branch.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, on Wednesday called for a "Marshall plan" to make job creation and measures to address climate change compatible and urged President George W. Bush to commit to mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

"This is an emergency," Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. "I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this."

Americans want their leaders to move boldly to help the environment but give them dismal grades for their actions so far, according to a poll released Wednesday that highlighted rampant pessimism on the issue.

Only about one in five voiced approval of how President Bush, Congress and U.S. businesses have been handling the environment. And while decisive majorities said they want strong public and private action, fewer than one in 10 said they had seen such steps in the past year, according to the poll by The Associated Press and Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment.

Climate change poses this century's biggest security threat, possibly forcing the migration of millions of people from countries such as China, Australia's top policeman has warned.

Water and food shortages could send waves of migrants across oceans and borders in the Asia-Pacific region, causing social disruption and unrest, said Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a collaboration of over 315 institutional investors with assets under management of more than $41 trillion, releases its 5th annual global report, providing the largest and most comprehensive database of strategies from the world's largest corporations regarding the impact of climate change on shareholder value.

The prosecutor who brought charges against Sen. Larry Craig in an airport sex sting says he told the Idaho senator that he should hire an attorney, according to court papers filed Monday.

Prosecutor Christopher Renz, in a motion opposing Craig's request to withdraw his guilty plea, wrote that he spent considerable time in a July 17 conversation telling the Idaho senator how the legal process would work if he chose to plead guilty.

An overwhelming majority of the global population believes it is "necessary" for the world to take action on climate change within the next few years, according to a poll released on Tuesday.

Some 65 percent of the 22,182 people questioned in 21 countries for the BBC World Service poll agreed it was necessary to "take major steps starting very soon" to combat global warming, while a further 25 percent said modest action was needed "in coming years."

Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday that she and Alaskans are owed a more thorough explanation from U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens about why he is under federal investigation.

"Right now, Alaskans aren't hearing anything," Palin said, adding that she and many of the state's residents are willing to give Stevens more leeway than most people because of the Republican senator's long service to Alaska.

"But not hearing anything in terms of information that can be shared regarding the senator's innocence is kind of frustrating for Alaskans," Palin said in a telephone interview from Anchorage. "Alaskans are getting more anxious to hear any information that he can provide regarding his innocence."

That's world coal consumption in 2004.
Or more precisely ;

6,098,000,000 tons of coal
12,196,000,000,000 lbs. of coal

EIA

Nowadays, with a world average efficiency of around 31%, coal-fired power stations is said to compare favorably with the upper range of any other power generation technology.

That same year, we consumed roughly 80,000,000 barrels a day of oil.
Or,
29,200,000,000 barrels that year, + 12,196,000,000,000 lbs. of coal.

Since then, China, is now bringing on line 2 coal fired power plants a week.

God knows how many corporate jets, and Chinese Oldsmobile buyers have come on the the market since then.

This is the latest year for numbers ...... 3 years old.

Yet "the deniers" say that all that somehow doesn't count.

Oil closed at $83.32 a Barrel today. Up $ 1.39 a Barrel.

Global warming is occurring at a faster rate than the worst-case scenario envisaged by experts just six years ago, Australia's top climate change scientist said Thursday.

Tim Flannery, named the 2007 Australian of the Year for his work in alerting the public to the dangers of global warming, said the issue was the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century.

One of the industries considered most vulnerable to climate change is the insurance industry, with shifting weather patterns threatening property in the nation's most hurricane-prone areas.

Yet in its 345-page annual financial report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this year, Allstate, which insures one out of every eight homes in the United States, did not mention climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide.

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein's regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

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Alan Greenspan, a conservative central banker, has tossed a political grenade into the 2008 elections and it exploded right under his Republican Party.

In his memoir, ``The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,'' the former Federal Reserve chairman skewered President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans for what he said was reckless spending and a politically driven economic agenda and said they deserved to lose control of Congress in 2006. By contrast, he praised former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and his economic record.

Greenspan's words are likely to echo throughout next year's campaigns for president and Congress.

``Democrats will taunt the Republicans with this and they will have to address it,'' said James Carville, who ran Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. ``This is not coming from some shoe clerk.''

Choosing the right way to describe Al Gore got a little more difficult last night, when the former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate (whose Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" has galvanized the modern green movement) won an Emmy.

The political movement loyal to radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr has withdrawn from Iraq's governing Shia alliance.

The move deprives Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's coalition of 30 votes - leaving it in control of about half the seats in parliament.

The Environmental Protection Agency will finish 24 Superfund toxic waste cleanups this year, far fewer than the average 76 completed annually during the Clinton administration.

EPA initially targeted 40 Superfund sites for completed cleanups this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Forty cleanups were finished in fiscal 2005. Among the most common contaminants are asbestos, lead, mercury and radiation.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, blamed the Bush administration's efforts to cut EPA spending for slowing the pace of cleanups, even though Congress ultimately sets the agency's budget.

Earlier snowmelts, longer summer droughts and bigger Western wildfires on federal lands are being caused more by "climatic conditions than land management techniques," government investigators conclude.

They fault the Bush administration for not providing managers of national parks, wildlife preserves and marine sanctuaries with better guidance on how to address the effects of global warming.

A report Thursday by the Government Accountability Office found the Interior Department has "not made climate change a high priority," despite a 2001 order to include climate change in land management planning.

Through his long years of greenhouse denial, George Bush must have been particularly grateful to John Howard. The Australian prime minister was quick to join Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and has batted for his country's coal interests as trenchantly as Bush has batted for US coal and oil interests.

Now Bush has had to deal with the impact on American public opinion of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's movie, and can no longer afford to ignore climate change. Howard, contending with a killer drought, is similarly finding that greenhouse denial is out of bounds. The flow of Australian rivers has fallen by a staggering 70% in recent decades. All Australia's major cities are in drought. The "big dry" in the Murray-Darling basin threatens 40% of food production. Global warming has become an issue in the January elections.

Everybody here seems to be talking about climate change, but when it comes to action, there are two very different responses to be seen in Australia this week. The first will be the discussions at APEC, taking place in Sydney amid intense security. The second couldn't be more different – the practical, dogged and groundbreaking work of conservationists in the country's bush.

Take APEC first. Asia Pacific leaders have started to arrive here in fortress Sydney.

The first to arrive was China's President Hu Jintao, who entered via Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and had coal on his mind. China's the most important customer for that state's big mining companies, buying up natural resources as fast as they can be dug from the ground.

President Bush came next amid the biggest security operation this country has ever seen. His harborside hotel will give him a stunning view of the Opera House – and a three-mile long, nine foot tall security fence, which the local media has dubbed the "Great Wall of Sydney," to keep protesters at bay.

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth's climate warms.

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including "severe thunderstorms" that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

US President George W. Bush is so preoccupied with Iraq he is neglecting Asia and allowing China to take a greater leadership role, a former senior US official said in remarks published Monday.

"In every measure, China is making real hay right throughout Asia," Richard Armitage, Bush's former deputy secretary of state told The Australian newspaper in an interview.

Flood victims are being left with "worthless" home insurance cover after being blacklisted in the wake of the devastating floods that swept across the country this summer.

Floods in Yorkshire
Flood victims have been 'blacklisted' by insurance companies

Householders hit by the flooding in Yorkshire and Gloucestershire over the past two months have been presented by their insurance companies with massive excesses of up to £10,000 and new clauses that mean they will not receive a payout if temporary flood defences are not erected.

Hundreds of thousands of homes not hit by flooding are also facing premium increases as they are classed as being in high-risk areas.

LORETO, Italy - Pope Benedict, leading the Catholic Church's first 'eco-friendly' youth rally, on Sunday told up to half a million people that world leaders must make courageous decisions to save the planet "before it is too late."

"A decisive 'yes' is needed in decisions to safeguard creation as well as a strong commitment to reverse tendencies that risk leading to irreversible situations of degradation," the 80-year old Pope said in his homily.

Greece's embattled Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called for an overhaul of the state machinery following a series of unprecendented and ruinous summer blazes, as the toll climbed to 64 on Sunday.

"The lessons from the last few days of the crisis reinforce my belief in the need for reforms to create a more modern, efficient and credible state," he said in a media interview on Sunday, referring to the nationwide fires which have ravaged the country since August 24.

Karamanlis' conservative government has confirmed that a general election scheduled for September 16 will go ahead despite the tragedy.

The opposition Socialists (PASOK) have scented blood over the government's handling of the fires and roundly attacked the prime minister, who had appeared set for an easy electoral win.

The arson has destroyed 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of forests and farmland and sparked widespread anger that the government did not intervene soon enough and at the scale required.

The battle to see which Republican presidential candidate can appoint people to key positions just before they are exposed in career-ending personal transgressions or criminal acts, or both, just keeps chugging along. Tonight, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani tries to get back in the game. But after Mitt Romney's success with Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), it's just hard for the others to compete.

The former chief of the general staff said the approach taken by Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, was "intellectually bankrupt", describing his claim that US forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical".

Sir Mike's comments - made in his forthcoming autobiography Soldier, serialised exclusively in The Daily Telegraph - represent the most outspoken criticism of American military policy in Iraq to come from a senior British officer

GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) said Friday it is "time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station" and urged an end to the federal aid to the region that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago.

"The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called 'recovery' efforts has been mind-boggling," said Tancredo, who is running a long-shot presidential campaign. "Enough is enough."

Congressional auditors have determined that the Iraqi government has failed to meet the vast majority of political and military goals laid out by lawmakers to assess President Bush's Iraq war strategy, The Associated Press has learned.

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, will report that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks to measure the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq are unfulfilled ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline for Bush to give a detailed accounting of the situation eight months after he announced the policy, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been made public, also said the administration is preparing a case to play down its findings, arguing that Congress ordered the GAO to use unfair, "all or nothing" standards when compiling the document.

Farmers who scratch a living from olive groves and a few animals were counting the cost of the devastation.

Alexander Georgorlias, 73, from the Peloponnese village of Andritsaina, threw chickens killed in the fires into a ravine.

"The Turks, Italians and Germans combined didn't do as much damage as this," he said, referring to invading armies that had pillaged Greece.