NOTHING SATISFIES A GREENIE

40 hectares (100 acres) for private use and 1000 hectares for a park is still "too much" private use!

Green groups are furious the [Victorian] State Government will pay for a new 1000ha conservation park on the Mornington Peninsula by allowing development on an adjacent 40ha. The Government hopes to pay for the restoration of the Devilbend Reservoir park with up to $2 million raised by allowing rural housing, farming or commercial development on 40ha across the road. While welcoming the new park, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria secretary Julianne Bell warned: "If you introduce housing there you could very well kill the thing you are trying to preserve."

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MORE EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING ON MARS

Get those Martians to stop using fossil fuels! Whoops! There are no Martians.

Larege areas of the Red Planet were once turned white by heavy snowfalls that were common on Mars several million years ago, scientists say. A new model of the ancient Martian climate has revealed that the glacial deposits of the planet's tropics were laid down by snow carried to equatorial regions by monsoon winds. The findings, published today in Science, resolve the mystery about the source of the rocks and debris at the foot of Mars's tropical mountains and volcanoes spotted by Nasa's Viking mission in 1976. A team led by James Head, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has now established that the deposits are the remains of large glaciers that formed a few million years ago. "What we found was that the glaciers were formed from snow brought from the polar regions," Dr Head said.

At that time, Mars's axis was tilted so that its ice caps were pointed more towards the Sun than they are today. Solar energy hit the ice head on, evaporating large quantities of water, and monsoon-like winds carried the water vapour south. On the slopes of huge volcanoes, the vapour cooled, condensed and fell as snow. It turned to ice, forming glaciers that carried huge boulders down the mountainsides. That debris is what can be seen today. The researchers used a climate model that assumed the 45-degree tilt of Mars millions of years ago. "The findings are important because they tell us that Mars has experienced big climate changes," Dr Head said.

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CELLPHONES SAFE: ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT FOR THE LUDDITES

Using a mobile phone does not increase the risk of a deadly brain cancer, the biggest study so far has indicated. Although it is impossible to say that there is no risk at all, the authors say that the data they have gathered so far provide no evidence of one.

Fears about mobile phones have not discouraged the public from buying and using them, but have encouraged a wave of research and reports from advisory bodies. Little good scientific evidence exists to show that they are a threat.

The latest findings come from the British part of the European Interphone Study, a 13-nation investigation funded by the European Union and mobile phone manufacturers. The British end of this study also had funding from the Department of Health. Researchers from the universities of Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester and the Institute of Cancer Research in London interviewed 966 people who had had glioma diagnosed in Britain between the beginning of December 2000 and the end of February 2004. Their use of mobile phones - intensity, frequency and duration - was compared with that of 1,716 controls matched in other respects but not suffering from glioma. The results, published in the online version of the British Medical Journal, show no difference in mobile phone use between healthy people and those with gliomas. If there had been a link, glioma sufferers would, on average, have used the phones more often or more intensively than non-users. The team also found no link between the risk of glioma and the length of time since someone first started using a mobile phone or the number or length of calls that they made.

Anthony Swerdlow, of the Institute of Cancer Research, said that the results were in line with "numerous reviews" which had concluded that there was no raised risk. Only one researcher, Lennart Hardell, from Sweden, had found an apparent link, he said. "If you look at published reviews, you will see what the opinion is of Hardell's work," Professor Swerdlow said. Professor Hardell's most recent paper showed an apparent link for people living in rural areas, explained by the country base stations being farther apart and requiring phones to use more power. The new study finds no such difference between town and country.

But it does show an apparent increase in gliomas on the side of the head where people customarily hold the phone. The researchers say that this finding is probably due to bias: people who get gliomas are inclined afterwards to say that whichever side of the head the tumours appear was the side on which they used their phone. This interpretation is backed by there being a deficiency in gliomas on the other side of the head. So if mobile phones cause cancer on the side that they are used, they must also protect against it on the other side - an implausible interpretation.

Patricia McKinney, Professor of Paediatric Epidemiology at Leeds University, said that public concern about the effect of mobile phones and tumours was not backed up by their study. "Our study can only evaluate relatively short-term use, because the majority of people had used mobile phones for less than ten years," she said. "Future studies will be able to address the risks of longer-term use, but we found no evidence of increased risks in the short to medium term."

Critics may focus on how the mobile phone industry partly financed the study. But Professor Swerdlow said that the money was passed through an independent intermediary, the International Union against Cancer, and that "firewalls" prevented any improper influence being exerted.

Anxiety about mobile phones has been fostered by two official reports under the chairmanship of Sir William Stewart, a former chief scientific adviser, now the chairman of the Health Protection Agency. In both cases the reports have said that there is no evidence of risk, before going on to advise parents against allowing their children to use mobile phones excessively.

Professor Swerdlow said that it was difficult to assess what the risks might be to children. "There are extremely few children who have used mobile phones for long enough to have data on whether brain tumours may be increased by mobile use," he said. Participants in the study were all aged 18 or over at the time. Caution would be warranted only if mobile phones had a different effect on children's brains than they do on those of adults. So far, there is no evidence of this. Gliomas have been increasing at 2 to 3 per cent a year, probably as a result of better ascertainment, over the past 30 years. There are between 4,000 and 4,500 diagnoses of glioma a year in Britain

Source





SIBERIANS SHIVER IN RECORD COLD

It's that global warming, I tell you!

Record low temperatures were felt in western Siberia over the weekend, with temperatures in the Tomsk region reported at minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit and lower. "This morning people felt Arctic weather," a local meteorologist told the Interfax news agency Friday. A state of emergency was declared in the Tomsk region, where at least one man died because of the cold and hospitals treated dozens of people daily for cold-related health problems, while public transportation and electricity supplies were disrupted, The Moscow Times reported Monday. In the Novosibirsk region, temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit -- the lowest in 100 years. In the city of Krasnoyarsk, celebrations for the Russian holiday known as Old New Year's Eve were canceled Friday after temperatures were also predicted to fall to minus 40. In the Komi-Permyatsky autonomous district, where temperatures were as low as minus 49 Fahrenheit, 85 people -- mostly preschoolers -- were evacuated from a settlement after a heating system serving 600 residents failed, Interfax reported Saturday. There was some good news, however: Scientists in the Tyumen region said the thousands of school closures across Siberia would reduce the spread of an expected flu epidemic among schoolchildren.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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