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The people of the country need to make an extra effort to surmount the contemporary moral challenges, President Pranab Mukherjee today said, stressing the need to focus on education for India to be "truly developed".
"Educational institutions have a pivotal role to inculcate in our youth the core civilizational values of love for motherland, performance of duty, compassion for all, tolerance for pluralism, respect for women, honesty in life, self-restraint in conduct, responsibility in action and discipline," the President said at the 12th convocation ceremony of Rajiv Gandhi University here. Asserting that education is the bedrock of an enlightened society, he said a good education breeds tolerance for divergent views.
"Our country has done well in terms of economic development. Yet, we cannot claim to have evolved into a truly developed society," he said.
"Development is not only about factories, dams and roads. Development, to my mind, is about people, their values and their devotion to spiritual and cultural heritage of our nation."
"At a time when we, as a nation, have to make an extra effort to surmount the contemporary moral challenges, it is holistic education that must play a definitive role in shaping our values," Mukherjee said.
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What do the torrential rains that swept across a swathe of East Africa in 1997 have in common with the record-breaking drought that Australia has just emerged from? Both can be blamed on El Niño's Indian Ocean sibling.
A study looking at how climate change will affect this ocean oscillation pattern has predicted that if the world is allowed to warm uncontrollably, these kinds of extreme events will become the norm by 2050.
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is an oscillation of warm water across the equator. In the oscillation's positive phase, sea surface temperatures in the Arabian Sea rise whereas temperatures around Sumatra, Indonesia, fall. In the negative phase, it's the other way around.
As well as being blamed for Australia's recent dry spell and the 1997 East African storms, the IOD's positive phase has been linked to droughts in Australia and dry weather in Indonesia over the last 6500 years, according to a 2007 study of fossilised coral. The study also concluded that positive events are becoming more frequent, with an unprecedented 11 occurrences over the past 30 years.
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US and British researchers may have identified the fingerprint of global warming in one of the darkest, coldest, most mysterious places on the planet. Four thousand metres below the sea surface, at the bottom of the north-east Pacific abyss, they have found changes in the food supply to some of the planet’s least known creatures. And these changes track changes to temperatures at the surface.
Kenneth Smith of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and colleagues from the University of Southampton in the UK, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on a 24-year exploration of one of life’s deepest puzzles.
The research is important because it provides yet another indicator of the carbon cycle at work; it is important because it provides another level of understanding of the climate system; and because it provides yet another way to check on global warming.
The last aspect is probably the least significant, if only because the period of observation is so brief, the study is confined to only one site, and the conditions for observation so difficult. But it offers a neat demonstration of how science is done.
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“The Government must provide an absolute and full release of the Ernst & Young Chorus report without any sanitisation of the findings,” says Labour’s Associate ICT spokesperson Clare Curran.
“And it has to be the whole financial truth and nothing but the truth.
“Amy Adams must be open with the people of New Zealand over the real state of Chorus’ books. She is under great scrutiny over how she deals with the Chorus crisis and needs to act with the utmost transparency and integrity.
“Yesterday’s announcement that all political parties represented in Parliament, other than National, will not back any legislation that would overrule the Commerce Commission’s decision, means the Government is out in the cold and Amy Adams will have to reassess her options.
“The country needs ultrafast broadband and Labour remains committed to faster, cheaper broadband in a pro-competitive market framework. But it must be remembered that this is entirely a mess of the Government’s own making.
“The best solution for businesses and consumers is for the Government to enforce the contract that Chorus willingly signed up to.
“Anything less would be crony capitalism,” says Clare Curran.
Benjamin Kay is a school teacher from Santa Monica: this week he released a video documenting the disgusting waste – mostly plastic pollution – that flowed into Santa Monica Bay from the “second flush” at the start of California’s rainy season. Benjamin’s goal is to raise the awareness of his students and engage them in protecting the community’s threatened beaches and waters.
Most of California is a very dry state, so when it finally starts to rain the pollution built up over the dry months – whether plastic bags, bottles, or toxins -- washes from inland streets to storm drains and rivers, then out to the ocean. The first rain of the season in early November was fairly light, so the massive flow of waste didn’t make its way to the ocean until this week’s major downpour. Now, imagine this scene replaying across the state and all around the world, and you’ll understand why globally, oceans are overwhelmed with plastic waste.
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The parliamentary committee which monitors the security services should be given greater powers to obtain evidence and summon officials, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, has urged.
The intelligence and security committee (ISC), which oversees the work of MI5, MI6 and the monitoring agency GCHQ, should be chaired by a politician from an opposition party and provided with an independent secretariat and legal advice, the Liberal Democrat peer added. The current chair is Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative former foreign secretary.
In a speech entitled "Secrecy in Justice – Can it Ever be Fair?", Macdonald said more effective parliamentary oversight of intelligence gathering was vital in the wake of revelations about mass surveillance by GCHQ and the expansion of "closed material proceedings" (CMPs) , known as "secret courts".
Macdonald warned that the Justice and Security Act, which introduced both secret hearings into civil courts and partially reformed the ISC, "has, unwittingly or not, actually weakened democratic oversight of the security and intelligence agencies".
He said it had allowed "the introduction of closed hearings into our civil justice system in national security cases, while simultaneously failing to strengthen the structures of direct parliamentary oversight in any meaningful way".
The peer warned that the way the government handled rendition cases, like that of Binyam Mohamed, and programmes like Tempora – the clandestine electronic surveillance programme revealed by leaks from the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden – signalled the need for enhanced public scrutiny.
"The risk they portend is simply a further weakening in democratic and parliamentary oversight – less pressure to behave," the former DPP said. "And this risk will grow unless the courts are vigilant to ensure that secrecy in justice is never be allowed to become a damaging alternative to integrity in these most sensitive areas of our public life.
He warned that the intelligence agencies have the power to "procure legislation" to dominate decision making in their sphere of influence and "even seek to lock its antagonists out of judicial processes".
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Rain gauges are generally pretty accurate at measuring the amount of precipitation that has fallen at their location, but they can't be everywhere. This means that average rainfall figures for a region could be inaccurate, if considerably more or less rain has been falling in unmonitored areas. Cars, however, are just about everywhere that there are roads. With that in mind, researchers from Germany's University of Hanover are looking at using them to tell us how much water is coming from the sky.
When you're driving and it starts raining, what's the first thing that you do? That's right, you turn on the windshield wipers. The harder it rains, the faster the setting that you select. Scientists with U Hanover's RainCars project postulated that if select cars where outfitted with GPS and wiper speed-monitoring sensors, they could provide real-time data on how much rain was falling in a wide number of locations.
In order to test their theory, they set up an experiment in which a stationary car was placed under a sprinkler system, with a person inside the car. As water flowed from the sprinkler, at known output rates, the person turned up the speed of the wipers in order to maintain their view through the windshield. It turned out that there was a fairly consistent correlation between the speed of the wipers, and the amount of water coming from the sprinkler – in other words, the flow rate of the sprinkler could be roughly determined by measuring wiper speed.
One problem with this approach, however, is that not all drivers are equally fussy about how moisture-free they like their windshield. Therefore, the RainCars team believe that their system would work better on cars with optical sensors that automatically adjust the speed of the wipers – an increasing number of which are already on the roads.
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Argentina's embassy in London said new laws had been passed by the country's congress to clamp down on exploration it claims is in breach of UN decisions.
The UK's Foreign Office insisted the activities were legitimately controlled by the islands' government.
Islanders recently voted overwhelmingly to remain a British overseas territory.
The embassy said legislation "provides for prison sentences for the duration of up to 15 years; fines equivalent to the value of 1.5 million barrels of oil; the banning of individuals and companies from operating in Argentina; and the confiscation of equipment and any hydrocarbons that would have been illegally extracted"
It said in a statement: "The Argentine government has protested against and rejected all of the United Kingdom's attempts to promote and authorize such hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation activities in the area of the Argentine continental shelf.
"These attempts are manifestly contrary to Resolution 31/49 of the United Nations General Assembly, which requires the UK and Argentina to refrain from taking decisions that would imply introducing unilateral modifications into the situation of the Malvinas Islands while the sovereignty dispute between the two countries is still pending."
In a referendum in March, Falkland Islanders decided by 1,513 votes to three to remain a UK overseas territory but Argentina - which calls the islands the Malvinas - has stepped up its claims to them at the United Nations.
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Broadband rollouts in parts of Europe are likely to get substantially cheaper and easier, after a committee of the European Parliament backed plans to encourage access to existing infrastructure.
When you’re laying fiber in the ground, it’s a bit of a no-brainer to do it in ducts that already exist – sewage pipes and drainage systems, for example – particularly as most of the cost of a rollout lies in civil works.
Countries such as the UK and France already promote this kind of infrastructure-sharing, but now the same idea seems set to spread across the EU. On Thursday, the European Parliament’s industry committee said it had approved a draft law that would give broadband firms the right to “access ‘promptly’, via a single information point, at least information on the location, route, size, type and current use, name of owner and a contact point for existing infrastructure.”
They will also be able to access better information about upcoming civil works, and information will only be denied if “security or fundamental public or individual interests are at risk.”
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Irish incumbent Eircom today announced an increase to its planned national fibre footprint from 1.2 million homes and businesses to 1.4 million homes and businesses across Ireland.
This means that by July 2016, 70% of the country should have access to fibre broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps via the network. Eircom’s fibre rollout programme is currently ahead of schedule and the company is on track to pass 700,000 premises by the end of the year.
Today’s announcement means that an additional 562 communities across all 26 counties will be able to avail of the operator’s ‘eFibre’ high speed service.
Back in October, we wrote about the absolutely ludicrous situation in which the City of London Police ordered registrars to take down a bunch of websites and point them to a page designated by the police (which pointed to some commercial services in London). There was no court order. There was no court involved at all. No one had been charged, sued, tried or anything. Just the City of London Police, their brand new "Intellectual Property Crime Unit" (set up at the urging of the RIAA), and a demand that the website domains be yanked and that the registrars bar them from being transferred out. While some registrars, such as the incredibly misnamed "Public Domain Registry," caved immediately to the completely bogus request, EasyDNS strongly and publicly refused (telling the police to come back with a court order) while also questioning (1) whatever happened to due process and (2) how any registrar could do this when it clearly violated ICANN's policy on transferring domain names.
Given this, EasyDNS went even further and filed a "request for enforcement" against Public Domain Registry, for locking the domains from being transferred out (and to EasyDNS). As EasyDNS notes, PDR's decision to lock the domains, despite being asked to do so by the police, violated ICANN's policies. ICANN's policies are pretty straightforward: the only times a registrar can deny a transfer-out request is in a few specific cases. And "asked by random police" isn't one. Instead there's "court order by a court of competent jurisdiction." But, again, there's been no court order.
Given this, the fact that PDR is denying to transfer the domains to EasyDNS it seems like an open and shut case that PDR is violating the rules. Verisign, which oversees all of this, should have made quick work of this in telling PDR to get on with the transfers. Instead... it totally punted, issuing one of the most bizarre statements you can imagine:
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“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. ”Control food and you control the people.”
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.
Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.
Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health. Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.
The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the US spends over twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest populations. The World Health Organization has ranked the US LAST out of 17 developed nations for overall health.
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In their obsessive war on piracy, the copyright industries have tried various approaches. For a while, the "three strikes and out" was popular, until it became clear that it was completely ineffectual. At the moment, the preferred method is to try to force ISPs to block access to sites holding material that infringes on copyright. The UK led the way, and has now made the whole process pretty routine, as a recent post on the TechnoLlama blog explains:
The blocking order follow a now familiar pattern established in 20th Century Fox v BT: lawyers for the film and/or music industry go to court against UK ISPs to try and obtain an injunction that will block access on those to a specific website. The subject websites are not included as co-defendants, and their guilt tends to be assumed, or dealt with separately. The websites are then blocked at the ISP level, meaning that any person who enters "www.thepiratebay.sx" into their browser will receive a notice stating that the site is not available.
The fact that it is easy to circumvent these blocks doesn't seem to worry the industry much: either the only concern is to make it hard for less tech-savvy users to access a site, or maybe a symbolic victory is all that is required. In any case, the approach is beginning to spread in Europe. For example, Switzerland is currently reviewing the operation of copyright in a digital world, and blocking content is likely to be one of the recommendations from the AGUR12 working group -- following the usual heavy-handed hints by the USTR, as TorrentFreak explains:
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Just five years since its inception, does the strategic plan for the Australian National Broadband Network need significant revision, and if so, what sort of revision? Already, there is discussion about where to use fiber to the home and where to use fiber to the neighborhood.
But are other changes, relying more on mobile access, also needed? A position paper created by the McKell Institute, and funded by Vodafone Australia, raises even more questions.
The McKell Institute paper makes the case that the Australian National Broadband Network, intended to build a new fiber access infrastructure for Australia, also can be used to support enhanced mobile Internet access, using fiber backhaul to support new arrays of small cells, and should do so, according to study author Michael Gordon-Smith.
The position paper, funded by Vodafone Australia, argues that It argues that small mobile base stations, able to be placed on lampposts, and using the NBN for backhaul, could significantly increase and improve mobile coverage in both urban and regional Australia.
The implications are unclear. If Vodafone Australia wishes to secure backhaul from the NBN, it is allowed to do so. The McKell position paper argues only that the NBN should be recrafted to add support for backhaul to small cell sites.
In and of itself, that is not so surprising. The minimalist change is that some potential small cell sites, such as lamp posts, could become terminating access locations.
But there also is another potential complication, namely the possibility that mobile Internet access, supported by such a network, could emerge as a stronger competitor to the planned fixed line access network.
And that eventuality could emerge based on the extent of the backhaul network for small cells. What if, instead of a “thin” deployment, small cell backhaul connections were widely deployed?
“Changes in the environment are sufficiently large that policymakers and NBN Co should consider whether strategic decisions made five years ago need any modification,” said Gordon-Smith.
The key word is “strategic,” not merely “tactical.” And one might argue that allowing a mobile service provider to buy backhaul at urban backhaul locations is fairly tactical, requiring only that the NBN be willing to install drops for a paying customer.
It is subtle, but that very statement suggests mobile Internet access could become a more-important part of the access infrastructure enabled by the NBN. The reason is simple: mobile carriers always would have had the ability to buy services from NBN, to deploy in support of small cell networks, if they chose to do so.
The position paper, in suggesting markets and end user demand have shifted in the direction of mobile, invites further shifts in NBN architecture that seemingly have implications beyond allowing mobile service providers to become customers of the backhaul network.
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Back in April, Israel’s Elbit Systems won a $40 million contract to supply Nigeria with the Wise Intelligence Technology (WiT[TM]) System, a cyber intelligence analysis and tracker.
The system collects data from multiple sources, databases and sensors, processes it and sends it to intelligence personnel for action. Set to be installed in Abuja , Nigeria, the operation is against Chapter four, section 37 of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria and will be like the US’s infamous Prism project that has caused a public outcry in the country and globally.
Media reports are claiming Elbit Systems, are already in the country to start the two year project set in Abuja, that will help the Nigeria government spy on its citizens online activities, even against the suspension of the project by the National Assembly. The report also claim there are about 20 Nigerian intelligence officers receiving training in Israel on how to use the technology.
The WiT technology will be integrated with various data sources, including Elbit Systems’ Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) solution and Elbit Systems’ PC Surveillance Systems (PSS), an advance solution for covert intelligence gathering. Click headline to read more--
A judge’s decision this week to block the state’s access to billions of dollars in bonds it needs to build a bullet train also threatens the only other pot of money California has to finance the project — $3.3 billion from Uncle Sam.
Just a few days ago, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority believed it had $8.6 billion in state bond proceeds and $3.3 billion in federal money to begin construction this spring on the rail line’s first stretch of track in the Central Valley.
But now the authority’s ability to spend any of those crucial funds to push the controversial bullet train project forward is highly uncertain.
“The rulings raise so many questions about whether this project still makes financial sense,” said Joe Nation, a public finance professor at Stanford University who called it a “moment of truth” for California. “This could turn into a real nightmare,” he added.
Even before Monday’s stunning rulings by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny, the project had been mocked as a “train to nowhere” because the state had only enough funding to build about 120 miles of track, from the Fresno-Madera area to the northern outskirts of Bakersfield.
The $8.6 billion in voter-approved state bonds and the $3.3 billion in federal funds represent less than one-fifth of the money needed for the $68.4 billion project. But because of Monday’s rulings and the possibility that federal funding could be pulled back, the money “in hand” could ultimately become pocket change.
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Faster broadband is one of the policies for the future of Yapton on show this weekend.
Residents will have the chance to have their say about possible housing sites at the drop-in day on Saturday (November 30).
It is being held from midday-6pm at Yapton Village Hall to enable villagers to see the draft neighbourhood plan.
MP Nick Gibb will be attending the event at the opening.
The plan has been produced by a group of residents to guide the area through the challenges of the next 15 years.
Deborah Robinson, the group’s chairman, said: “We are delighted to be able to present the first draft of our neighbourhood plan to the village.
“Community engagement has been a fundamental part of the process. “All of our previous consultation has been poured into this document. We hope as many villagers as possible will come along to tell us what they think.
“Our neighbourhood plan is being put together by local people for local people. So, have your say on how we shape the final version of it.”
The plan can also be viewed on the group’s website at www.ynp.org.uk
It proposes several sites for small-scale development, the preservation of the village boundaries and the establishment of better broadband internet connections.
They are among the proposals which establish a vision for the evolution and long-term sustainability of the village for the next ten to 15 years.
Once the draft version is finalised, people living and working in the village will be invited to go to the polls and vote on its contents in a referendum.
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Japan's coal consumption jumped 26% in October, compared to the same month last year. As the world's largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), this could have implications for the sector.
According to Reuters, the country's 10 main utilities consumed nearly 16% more coal in the first 10 months of the year compared with the same period last year. Two new power stations are expected to start producing next month, adding 3.7 million tonnes per year to demand.
Japan is the world's second-largest coal importer and the third-largest oil consumer. A major surge in the country's coal consumption could raise global prices which are down nearly 9% for the year.
After the Fukushima meltdown, Japan began shutting nuclear reactors and had to make a sudden switch to oil to meet energy demands.
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Japan's oldest automaker, Daihatsu, raised some eyebrows a couple of years ago when it unveiled its FC ShoCase vehicle. Along with being funny-looking, it was powered by a prototype fuel cell (first announced in 2007) that was said to overcome some of the key limitations of traditional hydrogen fuel cells. At this year's Tokyo Motor Show, a new FC concept vehicle has been presented – the FC Deco Deck mini-truck.
A detailed description of the fuel cell can be found in our previous article on the ShoCase, but here's an overview of what makes it special.
In a conventional fuel cell, platinum must be used as the electrode catalyst, as its excellent corrosion-resistance keeps it from being eaten away by the cell's acidic polymer electrolyte membrane. Daihatsu's cell, by contrast, utilizes a much more innocuous alkaline anion exchange membrane. This means that expensive platinum isn't required for the electrode catalyst, which can instead be made from cheaper metals such as nickel or cobalt.
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Top secret documents retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.
The documents are being reported exclusively by CBC News.
The briefing notes, stamped "Top Secret," show the U.S. turned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the National Security Agency while U.S. President Barack Obama and 25 other foreign heads of government were on Canadian soil in June of 2010.
The covert U.S. operation was no secret to Canadian authorities.
An NSA briefing note describes the American agency's operational plans at the Toronto summit meeting and notes they were "closely co-ordinated with the Canadian partner."
The NSA and its Canadian "partner," the Communications Security Establishment Canada, gather foreign intelligence for their respective governments by covertly intercepting phone calls and hacking into computer systems around the world.
The secret documents do not reveal the precise targets of so much espionage by the NSA — and possibly its Canadian partner — during the Toronto summit.
But both the U.S. and Canadian intelligence agencies have been implicated with their British counterpart in hacking the phone calls and emails of foreign politicians and diplomats attending the G20 summit in London in 2009 — a scant few months before the Toronto gathering of the same world leaders.
Notably, the secret NSA briefing document describes part of the U.S. eavesdropping agency's mandate at the Toronto summit as "providing support to policymakers."
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Over the weekend, NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper, reported that the NSA has infected more than 50,000 networks with malware globally. This report was followed by one in the New York Times, detailing the lengths the NSA is willing to go to in order to obtain more power.
On Saturday, the NRC published a heavily redacted slide, taken from information released by Edward Snowden, that shows the scope of the NSA's Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) efforts. According to slide, more than 50,000 networks worldwide are infected with the agency's malware. However, given that the slide dates to 2012, it's possible that the numbers are actually higher.
Additional proof that the data in the slide is legitimate, the NRC said, comes from the reports earlier this summer when Belgacom announced that the GCHQ (the British partner of the NSA) has infected their network and installed malware. The GCHQ was able to do this by infecting the systems used by employees as they visited a fake LinkedIn page.
According to the NRC report, supporting claims from the Washington Post as well as reports from Foreign Policy, the NSA's malware campaign was assigned to TAO (Tailored Access Operations), a department within the agency that employs more than 1,000 hackers. According to the Washington Post, CNE-operations such as the ones recently confirmed have been going on since 1998.
The NSA declined to comment on the NRC's story, or questions related to the redacted slide. Experts who have speculated on the story say that based on the numbers and the data within the slide, it appears that the NSA is targeting Telcos, banks, and ISPs.
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A British startup called Bluenio has revealed what it claims is the world’s first Bitcoin payment smartcard – or at least it will be if no others have popped up by the time it ships in March.
Bluenio is already in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for the nio Card, which was initially pitched as a security chain for helping to cut down on the loss of smartphones and wallets. It still does that – it does a few things, actually — but on Friday the company said it would also function as a Bitcoin wallet-slash-payment-card that can transfer money “in a single tap” using near-field communication (NFC) technology.
“It’s a cool way to provide secure Bitcoin payments in a way you currently can’t do,” Bluenio co-founder Ben Hounsell told me. “The way of making a Bitcoin payment right now can be a little bit convoluted, or certainly not as easy as making a traditional chip-and-PIN payment or a tap. You have to scan a QR code, read it in, validate the payment, enter private keys… it can be quite irritating.”
“Having a card where you tap to make a payment securely bring s [Bitcoin] in line with more conventional ways of making payments.”
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The importance of public perception of scientific consensus has been established in a number of studies (e.g., here, here and here). Perhaps nothing underscores its importance more than the strenuous efforts that opponents of climate action have exerted in attacking consensus. For over two decades, fossil fuel interests and right-wing ideologues have sought to cast doubt on the consensus:
Consequently, it comes as no surprise that our paper Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature has come under intense attack. Since published 6 months ago, nearly 200 articles have been published online attacking our paper. The attacks have come in the form of blog posts, Youtube videos, cartoons, papers, reports and conspiracy theories. The most entertaining conspiracy theories are Christopher Monckton's suggestion that the high-impact journal Environmental Research Letters was created for the purpose of publishing our paper and Anthony Watts' accusation that Dana Nuccitelli has vested interests in oil.
Attacks on any scientific consensus, whether it be human-caused global warming or the link between smoking and cancer, exhibit five characteristics of science denial. Similarly, the attacks against our paper have exhibited the same five characteristics. Some of these characteristics are on offer in an opinion piece by Anthony Cox published in the Newcastle Herald. I was granted the opportunity to publish a response in the Newcastle Herald, which was published today:
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Coal is a hard sell in the United States. The Obama administration has ratcheted up environmental restrictions on coal-fired utility plants, with more regulations to come, and fracking has flooded the market with cheap, cleaner, and abundant natural gas. Across the county, electric utilities are switching from coal to natural gas.
Outside the U.S., coal, the dirtiest carbon fuel, is outstripping demand for cleaner fuels. So Big Coal is following the path of Big Tobacco, selling a toxic product in foreign markets beyond the reach of U.S. regulatory agencies.
But coal is a heavier lift than tobacco. To move coal from mines in Montana and Wyoming to Asian markets, producers like Peabody Energy (which trades as "BTU" on the New York Stock Exchange) and coal shippers like the BNSF Railroad (which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company) need export terminals—huge transshipment facilities that receive and store mountains of coal, then load it onto huge seagoing bulk carriers.
This coal-rail combine started out with 10 prospective West Coast export sites, but a coalition of local, regional, and national environmental groups determined to stop the export of U.S. coal are engaged in a campaign that has reduced that list to three or four viable sites.
Until early this month, their best bet was the Gateway Pacific Terminal, which if permitted and built will export almost 50 million tons of coal per year from a site 20 miles north of Bellingham, Washington.
The Gateway project requires multiple permits from state and federal agencies. But because it is located in Whatcom County, it requires a permit from the seven-member Whatcom County Council.
Four council seats were on November’s ballot. When I was in Bellingham in September, reporting on the coal terminal, several environmental activists I talked predicted a flood of corporate contributions that would support a pro-coal council slate.
In fact, BNSF had already made one $20,000 contribution to the state Republican Party, which in turn made four $5,000 contributions to candidates assumed to be supporting the export terminal. (Candidates did not take public positions on the coal terminal because the council is a quasi-judicial body.)
"The big money will be spent late," campaign-finance watchdog Lisa McShane told me in September. No one, she said, wanted to show their hand too early on the Washington Public Disclosure Commission website.
The outside money did come in late: $836,843 to fund a campaign on which $6,723 was spent when the same four seats were on the ballot in 2009.
But Big Green outspent Big Coal.
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Such losses, says Ceres, a US-based non-profit organization which promotes environmentally sustainable business practices, are set to rise considerably in the years ahead as a result of climate change, imposing an ever bigger burden on the US taxpayer.
Federal and state disaster relief payouts last year alone are estimated to have cost every person in the US more than $300.
Yet according to a new report by Ceres, Inaction on climate change: the cost to taxpayers, the US administration, its agencies and state bodies are still not facing up to the grave financial implications of a warming world.
“Part of the reason for our collective shortsightedness is that the issue of climate change, and what to do about it, has become politicised in the US”, it says.
The report says there have been at least 200 weather-related natural catastrophes annually in North America in recent years, compared to around 50 a year in the early 1980s.
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