Below is the title and abstract from an article by Schaefer et al., just published in Science of 9 June 2006, Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1510 - 1513:
Near-Synchronous Interhemispheric Termination of the Last Glacial Maximum in Mid-Latitudes
"Isotopic records from polar ice cores imply globally asynchronous warming at the end of the last glaciation. However, Be exposure dates show that large-scale retreat of mid-latitude Last Glacial Maximum glaciers commenced at about the same time in both hemispheres. The timing of retreat is consistent with the onset of temperature and atmospheric CO2 increases in Antarctic ice cores. We suggest that a global trend of rising summer temperatures at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum was obscured in North Atlantic regions by hypercold winters associated with unusually extensive winter sea ice.
So at the end of the last ice age the earth warmed up unevenly. It warmed up much sooner in Southern and intermediate latitudes than it did in the Arctic. The Arctic stayed very cold for thousands of years longer than the rest of the world did.
OK. That's rather odd. But our researchers can explain it. Good old atmospheric CO2 is OF COURSE to blame for the warming but the Arctic area had supercold winters which cancelled out the effect in the North.
That's what philosophers call a "deus ex machina" explanation. It is about as informnative as saying that the hand of God did it. It is not a scientific explanation at all unless there is a good independent explanation (as distinct from mere speculation) of WHY the North had extensive ice and WHY the CO2 effect did not melt it.
Gaseous diffusion is very rapid and the CO2 should have managed to have spread widely and fairly evenly with thousands of years to do so. So to say that it had different effects in climatically similar parts of the world is mumbo jumbo. The results are in fact most consistent with CO2 having nothing to do with the thaw.
The Bogus Benzene Scare
Another day, another exaggerated scare story about the dangers of soft drinks. If it weren't enough that the fat police have targeted fizzy drinks in their crusade to slenderize the world, now Coca-Cola and Cadbury-Schweppes have been added to a Florida suit already involving Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Polar Beverages and In zone Brands. The suit alleges that the benzene in their drink products exceeds the one part per billion standard established in Florida -- a standard that is one fifth the federal level set for US drinking water -- and this constitutes a carcinogenic hazard. Benzene at certain levels is associated with leukemia in humans.
As a matter of fact, test results by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have found that five of 100 soft drinks tested -- one for each company sued -- did exceed the water benzene limits. But mostly ignored by the lawsuit and the scare stories is that the testing procedures used exaggerate the benzene in sodas and that the safety limit for water is set far below levels where benzene causes harm.
That matters little to the Environmental Working Group, which initiated fears about soda pop and various other fruit drinks containing benzene. In a letter to the FDA in February, the EWG asked the agency to issue a warning that soft drinks may contain benzene, claiming that it was a "clear health threat." Knowing full well that the agency was in the process of completing tests on soft drinks, the EWG also then swaggered about demanding the agency release the results of any tests that it had performed to determine whether benzene was present in soft drinks. It in addition made the outrageous claim that the agency had suppressed information about the health risks of benzene.
The claims are similar to those of Ross Getman, a Syracuse, NY, lawyer representing parents in suits to remove soda from schools, in a newspaper column in which he wrote that the FDA had gone along with industry back in the 1990s to keep the presence of benzene in soft drinks from the public.**
The release of the FDA's completed survey has only turned up the EWG's volume. "FDA's test results confirm that there is a serious problem with benzene in soda and juices," said Richard Wiles, senior vice president at Environmental Working Group. "There is no excuse for deliberately putting chemicals that form high levels of potent cancer-causing benzene in popular drinks. This is a wake-up call for the beverage industry. It is time to get benzene-forming ingredients out of sodas and juices."
One is minded to suggest to Wiles that he get a grip before leaping off into hyperbole. And meanwhile, before the scared-of-soda crowd panics you into throwing out your pop, you might want to inoculate yourself with a few actual facts about benzene and benzene in soft drinks.
First of all -- and this may sound scary, but it isn't -- benzene is ubiquitous. Not only is it a chemical solvent and gasoline additive ranked among the top 20 chemicals in terms of use in the United States, benzene also forms from natural processes such as forest fires, and is routinely found in both rural and urban air. For example, ambient air levels of benzene have been found at 182 ppb (parts per billion) in Los Angeles and at 179 ppb in London. And most importantly, it is also found in many foods such as meats, eggs and bananas.
Our knowledge about the effects of benzene on humans come from epidemiological studies of workers exposed to it in industries such as rubber, oil and shoe manufacturing, as well as from animal studies. The workers who have shown higher risks of leukemia were exposed to levels of benzene in parts per million, not the parts per billion found in a few soft drinks. Despite EWG and the lawsuit's claims about benzene in soda being a "clear health threat," no human studies have shown benzene as causing cancer at the levels found in soda pop.
Indeed to reach the same level of exposure to benzene as those lab animals or industrial workers who suffered health effects, someone would have to consume 10,000 bottles of those soft drinks with benzene them. And as the FDA study showed, they are few. And its study has been confirmed by other food safety agencies. The UK's Food Standards Agency found that more than two-thirds of the samples it tested were not merely below the five parts per billion threshold but had undetectable levels of benzene. Or, to put the risk in perspective, it would take the benzene found in 20 liters of a soft drink that contained benzene -- about what it takes to fill a gasoline tank -- to equal the benzene the average person who lives in a city breathes in a single day.
The benzene found in a few soft drinks has nothing to do with contamination, just as the benzene found in Perrier in 1990 was not caused by contamination. Instead, it is the combination of Vitamin C in some soft drinks (mostly juice-containing drinks), reacting with preservatives -- such as sodium benzoate -- that are used in soft drinks to prevent the development of health threatening bacteria that poses the problem. And mostly that occurs from exposure of cans and bottles to heat in excess of 90 degrees Fahrenheit for a substantial period of time.
Finally, and most importantly, the industry and the FDA -- in opposition to the EWG's outrageous claims -- haven't been colluding to hide a health threat from the public. Instead, they've been cooperating to make soft drinks safer. Though the FDA's handling of the benzene issue has been sometimes less than surefooted, the FDA began the joint research program to understand the causes of benzene formation when the industry first learned of the presence in some products in 1990 and reported it to the FDA. They then moved to reformulate soft drinks to prevent its development. In 1993 the FDA published the results of this research -- results which showed that the benzene levels in soft drinks were not considered a health risk.
In November when the FDA received lab reports showing low levels of benzene in certain soft drinks, it began to collect and test samples of soft drinks. Since November the FDA has analyzed more than 100 soft drinks and other beverages susceptible to benzene contamination. The results of FDA sampling shows that "the vast majority of beverages sampled contain either no detectable benzene or levels below the 5 ppb limit for drinking water, and do not suggest a safety concern."
Of the 100 drinks sampled, five had levels of benzene that exceed the drinking water standard. These were Safeway Select Diet Orange, Crush Pineapple, AquaCal Strawberry Flavored Water Beverage, Crystal Light Sunrise Classic Orange and Giant Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail. Even with these drinks the benzene was found only in a few production batches. And of these, two were within the World Health Organization's standard of 10 ppb for water -- which shows how exacting and safe the U.S. standard is. Nonetheless, in accordance with FDA and industry standards, the products are being reformulated.
As Laura Tarantino, director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety, noted: "This is likely an occasional exposure, it's not a chronic exposure. ... the amount of benzene you are getting in a soda is very, very small compared to what you're being exposed to every day from environmental sources."
So benzene is not present in most soft drinks, in those that it is, the level is not harmful. And the FDA, far from covering up the risks of benzene has, is taking the appropriate steps to test and measure the risk, while the industry is reformulating drinks to ensure they meet the agency's most exacting standard.
And as for the EWG and the trial lawyers, while it is good to have watchdogs to ensure industry and regulators are playing square, their false and shrill alarms will only turn off the public if they ever stumble upon a real threat to the public health.
Source
KNOW-ALL LEFTIST ELITISTS VERSUS THE PEOPLE
Next time you take a plane flight, take a look out the window. If you're over a city, you'll see roads that form a grid connecting homes, offices and stores. But if you are flying over the suburbs, you'll see roads that look like trees. The trunks are great big feeder streets with branches splitting off. At the ends of the branches are what look like circular leaves. Those are the cul-de-sacs, the dead-end streets that have become a symbol of suburban life. Since the end of World War II, millions of cul-de-sacs have been built on the fringes of American cities.
In recent years, however, the cul-de-sac has fallen out of favor with urban planners [The Soviets had lots of "planners". Very nice if you want to remove from people the power to make decisions for themselves] and architects. Some cities have even banned them. To understand why, I recently visited a cul-de-sac in Carderock Springs, Md., where I lived when I was in the sixth and seventh grades. Traveling with me was Jeff Speck, an urban planner who works at the National Endowment for the Arts.
Behold "the American dream, circa 1960," he said, surveying my old neighborhood. "One, two, three, four, five houses surrounding a circular drive. Each house looks inward at the donut hole of plants in the middle. Each house is very carefully designed with windows on the front and back and not on the sides, so they don't really see each other." Now, I had some trouble finding my own house because the trees are so much taller now. But some things haven't changed. First, you can still hear the rumble of traffic on the nearby freeway.
"And the other thing we hear are the birds," said Speck. "And that's actually the Scylla and Charybdis of the suburban condition. On the one hand, you do have this feeling of a close contact with nature, because you don't have cars going by every minute within the community. The only cars that come by are going to be the ones that are parking nearby."
Suburban Isolation
On the other hand, there's the problem of having to drive your car almost everywhere. Or, in Speck's words, the uneasy feeling that "your car is no longer an instrument of freedom but a prosthetic device." Driving is the only way to get from a typical cul-de-sac to a restaurant, a store or your office. And on the roads that funnel back to that main trunk, the traffic is usually awful. That is one reason urban planners such as Speck do not think much of cul-de-sacs. Neither do anti-sprawl activists, many architects and some city managers and mayors. If these critics have a leader, it is probably William Lucy, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Virginia. He says a national debate is brewing about the future of the cul-de-sac. "The era of the cul-de-sac is certainly threatened; it's a battleground," Lucy says. "The professionals tend to think that the connected neighborhood is the good neighborhood. And the developers and the realtors are more of a mixed mind."
Some of the earliest American cul-de-sac communities were built in Radburn, N.J., in the 1920s. By the mid-1950s, they were everywhere. Developers learned that cul-de-sacs allowed them to fit more houses into oddly shaped tracts, and to build right up to the edges of rivers and property lines. "Going over the lines had two problems," Lucy says. "One, it was expensive to try to traverse the obstacles. Second, it made connection to other neighborhoods or other subdivisions, and that was contrary to the notion of safety."
Safety Hype
Lucy says safety has always been a big selling point for cul-de-sacs. From the beginning, builders noted that they gave fire trucks extra room to turn around, and that they prevented strange cars from speeding by on their way to somewhere else. Ads for cul-de-sacs often pictured children riding bikes and tricycles in the street. These days, those images seem grimly ironic to people who actually look at safety statistics. For example, Lucy says cul-de-sac communities turn out to have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children. "The actual research about injuries and deaths to small children under five is that the main cause of death is being backed over, not being driven over forward," he says. "And it would be expected that the main people doing the backing over would in fact be family members, usually the parents."
Armed with such arguments, critics of the cul-de-sac have won some victories in recent years. In cities such as Charlotte, N.C., Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, construction of cul-de-sac-based suburbs has basically been banned. In other places, cul-de-sac communities have been retrofitted with cross streets.
Safe in the American Dream
But one important group still appears to be in love with the cul-de-sac: homebuyers. Theres Kellermann, a realtor who lives and works in Carderock Springs, says buyers still line up to live on dead streets. "When I put ads in about a house that has just been listed, if it has a cul-de-sac I say: 'Cul-de-sac location -- location within location,'" says Kellerman. "It has no through street, [so] nobody will race by -- not even the teenagers that go on their little racing sprees, because they can't go anywhere." A recent study backs up Kellerman. It showed that buyers will pay 20 percent more for a home on a cul-de-sac.
Even cul-de-sac critic Jeff Speck says he understands the attraction. In recent years, he's helped design some well-known grid-like "new towns," where it is possible to walk to places like a corner store. But for some cul-de-sacs -- like the one in Carderock Springs -- Speck says he would do some extra driving. "I am not embarrassed to say [that] if I could afford this I would happily raise a family in this environment," he says. And Speck says this isn't just an American dream anymore. He says that in countries like the Philippines and China, and in parts of the Middle East, cul-de-sacs are fast becoming all the rage.
Source
Chill out over global warming
You'll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society. Why not give it a whirl? Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you're at a LoDo cocktail party and see what happens.
Admittedly, I possess virtually no expertise in science. That puts me in exactly the same position as most dogmatic environmentalists who want to craft public policy around global warming fears. The only inconvenient truth about global warming, contends Colorado State University's Bill Gray, is that a genuine debate has never actually taken place. Hundreds of scientists, many of them prominent in the field, agree. Gray is perhaps the world's foremost hurricane expert. His Tropical Storm Forecast sets the standard. Yet, his criticism of the global warming "hoax" makes him an outcast. "They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."
Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age. "Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." Thank God they did nothing. Imagine how warm we'd be?
Another highly respected climatologist, Roger Pielke Sr. at the University of Colorado, is also skeptical. Pielke contends there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate. He claims a few vocal individuals are quoted "over and over" again, when in fact there are a variety of opinions. I ask him: How do we fix the public perception that the debate is over? "Quite frankly," says Pielke, who runs the Climate Science Weblog (climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu), "I think the media is in the ideal position to do that. If the media honestly presented the views out there, which they rarely do, things would change. There aren't just two sides here. There are a range of opinions on this issue. A lot of scientists out there that are very capable of presenting other views are not being heard."
Al Gore (not a scientist) has definitely been heard - and heard and heard. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is so important, in fact, that Gore crisscrosses the nation destroying the atmosphere just to tell us about it. "Let's just say a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," Gray says. "It's about politics. Very few people have experience with some real data. I think that there is so much general lack of knowledge on this. I've been at this over 50 years down in the trenches working, thinking and teaching."
Gray acknowledges that we've had some warming the past 30 years. "I don't question that," he explains. "And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s."
Both Gray and Pielke say there are many younger scientists who voice their concerns about global warming hysteria privately but would never jeopardize their careers by speaking up. "Plenty of young people tell me they don't believe it," he says. "But they won't touch this at all. If they're smart, they'll say: 'I'm going to let this run its course.' It's a sort of mild McCarthyism. I just believe in telling the truth the best I can. I was brought up that way."
So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff. Back away slowly. You'll probably be called a fascist. Don't worry, you're not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.
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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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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