This Week's Mailbag

The World Is An Unsafe Place
And it's not getting any safer, in case you're not used to that notion. You'd better believe it: Here's Pleiades' weekly list of global horrors, terrors and other travesties, political and ecological.

First on this list is this link to a book promotion. It's about the MIC. Should check out the introduction page at least.

Second up: This is an article in The Guardian. It's a generally 'down' article on 'the Iraq War', but it closes with this:

Our faith is that human beings only support violence and terror when they have been lied to. And when they learn the truth, as happened in the course of the Vietnam war, they will turn against the government. We have the support of the rest of the world. The US cannot indefinitely ignore the 10 million people who protested around the world on February 15 2003.

There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress.

The third is a KeepMedia watch on Global Warming. Today's entry has this section in it:

GENEVA (AFP) �� Swiss technicians are to use a special insulating foam to wrap up a glacier that has been shrinking under the summer sun, an official from a resort whose clients ski down the ice-field said.

Carlo Danioth, in charge of the slopes at the Andermatt resort in central Switzerland, said the Gurschen glacier was to be partially covered with 3,000 square metres (32,300 square feet) of PVC foam from the beginning of May.

Confirming a report in the weekly SonntagsZeitung newspaper, Danioth said the aim was to halt the melting of the glacier, a phenomenon that has been attributed to global climate warming.

Sure enough, the glaciers are moving faster because they're melting.
Greenpeace, as shrill as they are, are reporting this thing here.

Independent scientists on board a Greenpeace ship found last month that the glacier, located in eastern Greenland, is moving at a speed of 14 kilometres per year, compared to five kilometres per year in 1988, it said.

The scientists, from the Climate Change Institute in the US state of Maine, also found that the glacier had receded five kilometres since 2001 after remaining stable for four decades.

"This is a dramatic discovery", said scientist Gordon Hamilton.

As the warming trend migrates north, other glaciers could respond in the same way and "this could have serious implications for the rate of sea level rise," he said.

"Greenland's shrinking glaciers are sending an urgent warning to the world that action is needed now to stop climate change," Greenpeace expedition leader Martina Krueger said.

There's even this little thing here:

Satellite and weather-balloon research released today removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say.

Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating -- and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data.

Climate expert Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, lead author of one of the papers, says that those fairly steady measurements in the tropics have been a key argument "among people asking, 'Why should I believe this global warming hocus-pocus?'"

After examining the satellite data, collected since 1979 by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif., found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. The team also found a math error in the calculations.

Just in case anybody had some doubts about it. Ladies in Mosman, STOP DRIVING YOUR FRICKIN' ALL-WHEEL DRIVES! Apart from being environmentally dangerous, they kill people.