UN Launches Climategate Probe
Written by Rebecca Terrell
The United Nations is launching an investigation into Climategate, the scandal involving incriminating e-mails from a leading climate change research center in England.
Item: The Obama administration must make a commitment on carbon-emission reductions, insisted the Washington Post on November 19. The House of Representatives, commented the Post, “has endorsed a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions from the 2005 level, and the Senate is considering a 20 percent cut. The administration is also moving forward with Environmental Protection Agency regulation that does not require congressional approval. Mr. Obama should be able to produce a number or a range of numbers that reflects the level of emissions reduction the United States can achieve.”
Australian delegates to the UN climate-change conference have arrived empty-handed in Copenhagen since last week their parliament defeated cap-and trade legislation. The surprising turn of events was brought about by a groundswell of angry constituents enraged at the proposed massive tax hike.
President Obama's science adviser faced intense questioning from House Republicans this week in a hearing on Capitol Hill. At issue was the role Science "Czar" John Holdren played in Climategate and his support of researchers implicated in that scandal.
For years, former Vice President Al Gore has foisted his environmental jeremiads on the world, traveling by private jet to calling upon the industrialized world to repent of its polluting ways. Now, as the nations of the world gather in Copenhagen to discuss addressing the climate change which Gore had proclaimed was threatening the Earth with near-certain doom, the man who only weeks ago was appealing to the “collective will” of mankind may be absenting himself from the proceedings.
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The veracity of proponents of the theory of man-made climate change is very much in doubt in the days leading up to the UN conference in Copenhagen. However, one thing that will be proven beyond a doubt in the next several weeks is that not all pollution is created equal: Some pollution is apparently sanctified by the context of its generation.
Just when you thought you’d heard it all when it comes to bizarre solutions to the imaginary global warming threat, along comes the Optimum Population Trust. In a new twist on “cap and trade,” the UK-based environmental think tank says that the key to decelerating the rate of calamitous climate change is to send condoms in bulk to poor people.
A leading climate researcher is planning to sue NASA for withholding information about climate-change data used to establish environmental regulations. Christopher Horner, Senior Fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), has notified NASA and its Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) that he will sue in late December if that agency does not fulfill Freedom of Information (FOI) requests Horner placed in 2007.
The U.S. government on December 2 approved 13 batches of human embryonic stem cells, opening the door for researchers to receive millions of dollars in federal money to finance their research. This comes as a result of President Barack Obama lifting the restrictions on human embryonic stem-cell research enacted by the previous administration under George W. Bush.
One of the leading Climategate researchers, Dr. Phil Jones, is “standing aside” as Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Great Britain while an independent review board investigates the case. Jones has earned an internationally infamous reputation as the author of several incriminating e-mails hacked from a CRU server in November, among them one stating he “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The UEA announced Jones’ temporary departure in a press release published on the university’s website.
CERN Atom Smasher Sets New Record
Written by Bruce Walker
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has developed the fastest proton accelerator in the history of science — the Hadron Collider, which accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV on November 30, breaking the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider since 2001. The collider used by CERN enables scientists to probe a little closer to the first moments of the universe which should help scientists answer questions which have now remained unanswerable. Although the new collider will help physicists learn more than they know now, experimentally, the fundamental theoretical problems of physics remain as elusive as ever.