Africa, the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, is not acting urgently enough to stem the dire economic and environmental damage of greenhouse gas emissions, the UN cautioned Tuesday.

The warning came after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report Friday detailing the impacts of global warming, which, it said, will wreak the most havoc on the world's poor.

"This report is a drastic message about the impact of climate change on the economic development of this continent," UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner told a press conference in Nairobi.

"Africa is on the frontlines of having to cope with the reality of climate change – not in the future, but today," Steiner added.

How might U.S. national security be threatened by mega-droughts, coastal flooding, killer hurricanes, food scarcity and the other ecological calamities scientists widely predict will occur if global warming continues apace?

No one knows, but Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., think it's time to find out. Two weeks ago, the bipartisan duo introduced a bill that would require federal intelligence agencies to collaborate on a National Intelligence Estimate to evaluate the security challenges presented by climate change.

Last week's Supreme Court decision concerning carbon dioxide emissions from cars was welcomed by all who regret that the United States has lagged far behind in addressing this serious environmental challenge.

The decision gives the Environmental Protection Agency two choices. It could develop, implement and enforce rules to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Or, it can seek to demonstrate, using science (real science, not political science) why carbon emissions do not contribute to climate change or bad air quality.

Christine Todd Whitman served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003, prior to which she served two terms as the 50th governor of the state of New Jersey.

New York State has finally entered the stem cell arena with the intention of becoming a big-time player second only to California. The state will put $100 million into the research in fiscal year 2008, and stem cell supporters expect the number ultimately to reach $1 billion over a decade.

"Today at 2:30 EST, at the behest of Barbara Boxer (D-California), the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Gore got 30 minutes to speak before a packed house."

Here is my summary (okay, cut & paste) of the former Vice President's 9 point plan for immediately addressing carbon emissions:

1. An immediate freeze on CO₂ reductions and start from there.
2. Cut taxes on employment and make up the difference with pollution taxes - principally CO₂ taxes.
3. Ratify a cap and trade system [like Kyoto] so the market will work for us rather than against us.
4. A moratorium on new coal plants that are not fixed with carbon capture and sequestration technology.
5. Congress should fix a date beyond which incadescent lightbulbs are banned.
6. Encourage widely distributed power generation. We ought to take off the caps and let individuals sell back as much as they want on the grid.
7. Raise the CAFE standards.
8. Pass a carbon-neutral mortgage association.
9. Require corporate disclosure of carbon emissions.

Embarking on a whirlwind tour of Congress, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore testified before several Senate and House of Representatives committees today, insisting on decisive action to curb global warming. Speaking to overflow crowds, Gore urged lawmakers to solve the climate crisis--a message that drew praise, and some skepticism, from members of Congress.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released documents edited by political appointees in the Bush Administration that "appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change," according to committee staff. Current and former appointees who made the changes appeared today before the panel and testified that they were trying to introduce scientific uncertainty in the reports.

The Bush administration has again been charged with interfering with federal climate science, in order to underplay the significance of global warming.

In a continuing investigation, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held its second hearing on the issue on Monday. Documents "appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimise the significance of climate change", said a memo released by the committee.

A long-term strategy on energy policy, aimed at leading the world in the fight against global warming, was agreed by European Union heads of state on Friday.

The deal sets binding targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, developing renewable energy sources, promoting energy efficiency and using biofuels. It also lays down a challenge to the US and other major industrialised nations to follow suit.

The beginning of a new international trading platform for bioethanol is expected to be announced on Friday, when US president George W Bush meets with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva.

The announcement is in line with Bush's State of the Union address on 24 January 2007, when he announced that the US will cut its gasoline use by 20% over the coming decade, largely by requiring the use of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels – including ethanol and hydrogen.

"The web is like a white sheet that we're holding up," Sir Timothy Berners-Lee told a Congressional subcommittee this morning. "And all these different systems are projecting onto it." That universality—the ability for disparate hardware, software, and languages to coexist in the same medium—has been one of the drivers of the Web's massive growth in the last decade, along with the availability of open and royalty-free standards that make such universality possible.

U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) today announced the Freedom And Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (FAIR USE Act). The bill's aim is to help put an end to the madness circulating around the general imbalance that has befallen copyright in recent years.

Some critics question proposed federal spending hikes for nuclear research.

If new technology is a key answer to global warming and America's addiction to oil, then President Bush's proposal to boost federal spending on energy R&D – by no less than 30 percent in fiscal 2008 – would seem a welcome step.

In the new $2.7 billion budget plan, R&D dollars allotted to the US Department of Energy (DOE) continue a transition toward research that will help cut greenhouse gases.

But overall federal spending on energy research in real dollars is only one-third what it was at its 1978 peak, according to a Harvard University analysis. Some also question the administration's emphasis on nuclear research, saying other promising technologies could be applied sooner to climate and energy-security issues.

Leading politicians agree a new proposal to tackle climate change at US meeting.

Legislators from the world's wealthiest industrialized nations and from major developing countries have signed a non-binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions. The announcement came at the end of a two-day summit in Washington DC.

In a bid to influence the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012, delegates from the G8 industrialized nations and five major emerging economies approved a proposal to establish a global 'cap and trade' market to limit carbon emissions.

The agreement proposes international caps for greenhouse-gas emissions, with both industrialized and developing countries accepting limits on emissions: under the Kyoto agreement, only developed nations are forced to do this. Countries that have signed up to Kyoto can reduce their emissions figures by participating in markets such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme.

The new agreement will be presented for consideration to the next G8 summit, where member nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — will once again discuss the issue of how to tackle climate change.

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.

In yesterday's ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

The U.S. patent system is in bad shape and needs reform, said Rep. Howard Berman (D-California) and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Thursday.

Although Congress has long considered the patent system a shambles and has attempted to pass corrective legislation several times in the past, the issue is so sprawling and integral to the U.S. economy that progress has come slowly and in grudging increments. But lawmakers in the current Congress have vowed anew to clean up a system overwhelmed by frivolous patent applications and expensive lawsuits.

There's a climate of change on Capitol Hill. On 14 and 15 February more than 100 legislators and officials from 13 countries met within the walls of the US Senate to discuss the future of international climate policy.

At the close of the meeting they issued a statement setting out the components which they say will be essential for an international agreement on climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.

The biggest general science conference in the world is shaping up to be unusually political this year, with an emphasis on global warming and sustainability. There's even a workshop on how scientists can fight anti-evolutionists on local school boards.

"It's a smorgasbord of all research in every field," said Ginger Pinholster, spokeswoman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, which begins its annual meeting Thursday in San Francisco. "It helps to foster dialogue between scientists and the public and with policy makers."

Much of the research presented will look at the effects of global warming on glaciers, Antarctica and the ocean. In one speech, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who studies decision-making and public policy is expected to talk about how science can "induce urgent action" regarding climate change.

The World Bank is hiring experts in 'adaptation' to a warming world. Coastal planners are starting to take it into account.

At least in the developed world, the idea that people should start figuring out how to deal with the projected effects of warming – changing temperature and rainfall, shifts in growing seasons, more bouts of severe weather, and rising sea levels – has been overshadowed by calls to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. Some environmentalists have viewed adaptation either as a white flag on the issue or as a refuge of contrarians who pooh-pooh the broad consensus that human activity is warming the climate.

But last week's release of a report on the science of global warming – with its projections of warming based on emissions already in the air, as well as on potential future emissions trends – has helped underscore the need. "Climate change is here and now," notes Ian Noble, a senior climate-change specialist at the World Bank. "We have to adapt."

Congress continued to probe allegations Wednesday that the Bush administration tried to muzzle government scientists on climate change and suppress scientific research, including a comprehensive report in 2000 on global warming's impact on the United States.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers weighed in with harsh words for an administration that has come under fire in the 110th Congress for its stance on climate change.

"One incidence of political tampering with science is too many," said Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the committee chairman, referring to a survey released last week by two advocacy groups that showed widespread political interference in research related to global warming.

Rumor has it that Florida governor Charlie Crist will announce tomorrow that his state plans to scrap tens of millions of dollars worth of touchscreen voting equipment and move to a system based completely on optical scan ballots. The Miami Herald claims that the total tab for overhauling the state's electoral system could be as high as $35 million.

…

Speaking of Cuyahoga County, home of notorious levels of touchscreen-related trouble in both the primaries and the May 7 general elections last year, two election officials have been convicted of rigging a recount of ballots cast in the May 2004 presidential election. Here's a bit of background on the convictions and a short recap of what happened.

US scientists were pressured to tailor their reports on global warming to fit the Bush administration's climate change scepticism, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday 30 January. In some cases, this occurred at the request of a former oil-industry lobbyist.

"High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.

Tomorrow, the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a belated 2007 spending bill that treats research much more favorably than science advocates had dared hoped--and avoids budget cuts that many had feared. While freezing spending across most of the federal government, the legislation gives a shot in the arm to research at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) gets a small increase rather than a cut, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) budget holds steady in the face of a threatened reduction. The legislation may even offer some relief to NASA's beleaguered space science budget. And while science advocates say it's premature to declare "mission accomplished"--the bill next goes to the Senate--they are extremely gratified that legislators have embraced their arguments about the importance of basic research to the nation's economy.

"I think it's a very good sign that they will be supportive of competitiveness and innovation," says Pier Oddone, director of DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, which may have dodged a budget-induced work slowdown. "I understand that they can't do everything we would like to do [this year], but I am appreciative of the support they have shown so far."

In an indication of Democratic eagerness to investigate whether the Bush administration has interfered with federal global warming research, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) today charged the White House with "an orchestrated effort to mislead the public." Waxman, who this month became chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, says his staff has found evidence that scientific reports were manipulated for political ends despite efforts by the Administration to block recent requests for information.

America's addiction to gas-guzzlers is at last poised to receive some treatment. In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, President George W Bush announced a plan to cut US gasoline use by 20% over the coming decade.

"For too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil," Bush told the US Congress. "It is in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply, and the way forward is through technology."

Three quarters of the proposed cut would be achieved by requiring the use of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels – including ethanol and hydrogen – by 2017. This is nearly five times larger than the current target, which must be met by 2012. The rest of the cut in gasoline use would be made by strengthening the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for new vehicles.

The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.

The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.

As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth's climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.

To seriously address the issue of global climate change, policymakers need to establish a framework that extends through the end of the century.

Late in 2006 several events moved the U.S. and other countries closer to serious global negotiations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is therefore timely to ask what a meaningful global agreement would entail. A solid starting point is the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that binds countries to act on the problem and under which specific measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are adopted. The signatories to the Framework Convention, including the U.S. and almost all other countries, declared the objective to be the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the climate system." The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, did not implement this idea very well: it took a short-term view of a long-term objective and as a result lost clarity, credibility and support along the way. The key now is to move beyond it.

Two strong candidates for the 2008 US presidential elections have joined forces to address climate change.

On Friday, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama – plus independent senator Joe Lieberman - will present a bill in Congress calling for mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, industry and oil refineries.

The legislation would require that US greenhouse gas emissions be cut by 2% every year. The senators say that as a result of these cuts, emissions would drop back to 2004 levels by 2012, and to 1990 levels by 2020.

The new Democrat-led Congress this week geared for battle against federal financing limits on embryonic stem-cell research set by the White House and its conservative allies on moral grounds.

Democrats, who took control of Congress last Thursday for the first time in 12 years, plan to fire a legislative salvo exactly a week later which they expect will trigger a veto by President George W. Bush.

The legislative offensive comes as news of promising US research in stem cells derived from amniotic fluid offered opponents of embryonic stem-cell research a new argument in their defense of the financing limits.

Senator John Sununu (R-NH) has just announced that his office is working on legislation that would prevent the FCC from creating specific technology mandates that have to be followed by consumer electronics manufacturers. What's his target? The broadcast flag.

It didn't take long for network neutrality to reappear before Congress. Only days into the new session, two sentors [sic] have teamed up to re-introduce net neutrality legislation that failed to get a hearing last year, and the bill is already sparking very public debate.

Known as the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (S.215), the bill would require network operators to run their network in a "nondiscriminatory manner"—certain types of traffic or traffic from certain sources could not be hampered or prioritized, but operators would still be free to offer different tiers of service. The bill would also require broadband operators to offer "naked" DSL and cable modem service that does not require the purchase of other services.

[U]ntil yesterday, it appeared that no news release on annual climate trends out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Bush White House had said unequivocally that a buildup of greenhouse gases was helping warm the climate.

The statement came in a release that said 2006 was the warmest year for the 48 contiguous states since regular temperature records began in 1895. It surpassed the previous champion, 1998, a year heated up by a powerful episode of the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean by El Niño. Last year, another El Niño developed, but this time a long-term warming trend from human activities was said to be involved as well.

It is the start of a new year in US politics, and environment looks to be top of the agenda for the new Congress.

Two bills were introduced in Congress on Friday 5 December, one proposing to enforce a ban on drilling in a contested Alaskan wildlife reserve, the other calling for numerous energy-efficiency measures. The initiatives are poised to be mirrored in spirit on the other side of the Atlantic: the European Commission will reveal its new energy policy on Wednesday.

In the US, whether or not to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of Northeast Alaska has been a cause of contention since the 1980s. In his 2000 election campaign, President George W Bush backed drilling in the refuge. The area is believed to hold 10.5 billion barrels of oil, and advocates have argued that drilling here could reduce US dependence on foreign oil.

Before that happens, however, Congress must approve any drilling. The US House of Representatives has approved drilling about a dozen times, only to have their plans scuppered in the Senate.

Edward Markey, democrat representative for the state of Massachusetts, is the main proponent of last Friday's Alaska drilling ban bill, which he has proposed several times in the past. He believes that the new Democrat-dominated Congress could spell a new beginning for the Alaskan reserve.

House Democrats announced legislation yesterday aimed at implementing many of the remaining reforms suggested by the Sept. 11 commission, including calls for more thorough cargo screening, better emergency communications and more money for cities at the highest risk of terrorist attack.

Democratic leaders plan to push through votes this week on a long list of Sept. 11-related changes that were rejected by the previous Republican-controlled Congress. The proposals signal an early willingness on the part of House Democrats to pressure their colleagues in the Senate, where lawmakers from both parties are cooler to some of the ideas and where no similar package of legislation has been proposed.

The first Muslim elected to Congress says he will take his oath of office using a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson to make the point that "religious differences are nothing to be afraid of."

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn., decided to use the centuries-old Quran during his ceremonial swearing-in on Thursday after he learned that it is kept at the Library of Congress. Jefferson, the nation's third president and a collector of books in all topics and languages, sold the book to Congress in 1815 as part of a collection.

"It demonstrates that from the very beginning of our country, we had people who were visionary, who were religiously tolerant, who believed that knowledge and wisdom could be gleamed from any number of sources, including the Quran," Ellison said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

fter more than 200 years of paying taxes, fighting in the nation's wars and abiding by sometimes arbitrary acts of Congress, Washington residents are close to getting a full-fledged representative in the House.

The turning point in this long battle for enfranchisement may be an unlikely partnership with the people of Utah.

The new Democratic majority, in the first months of the new Congress, is expected to take up a bill that would increase the voting membership of the House from 435 to 437, giving new vote each to Utah, a Republican stronghold, and the District of Columbia, dominated by Democrats.

Global warming is the greatest environmental threat that humanity has ever faced.

Caused mainly by the unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by automobiles and industries, the rise in temperature is already starting to melt the polar ice caps and disrupt weather patterns.

The potential consequences for California are dire. At current rates of warming, state researchers project that the sea level will rise as much as three feet by the end of the century, flooding many low-lying areas and tainting important sources of fresh water like the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Higher temperatures will drastically shrink the Sierra snowpack that stores much of our water. They will increase smog, boost the risk of wildfires and upset California's vital agricultural industries.

A Virginia congressman will not apologize for writing that without immigration reform "there will be many more Muslims elected to office demanding the use of the Quran," his spokesman said.

Republican Rep. Virgil Goode's letter to constituents also warns that without immigration reform "we will have many more Muslims in the United States."

Spokesman Linwood Duncan said Goode's letter was written in response to complaints his office received about Minnesota Rep.-elect Keith Ellison's request to be sworn in using the Quran.

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."

In another turnaround, Bush said he has ordered Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the Army and Marine Corps, heeding warnings from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill that multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the armed forces toward the breaking point.

I was recently asked by a fellow Newsvine user what my opinion was on a 2003 speech given by author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, State of Fear) at Cal. Tech. titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming." I recalled the title and having read it some time ago, but went back to read it over again earlier today. It's a fairly lengthy read and I won't go into any sort of line-by-line discussion of the entire speech. However, I do believe that there are some very important issues Crichton brings up that I would like to provide some further information on in addition to my own opinions and positions. I suspect a lot of this article won't make much sense without having first read his lecture, so please do so first if you haven't yet.

Alien Invasion Leads to Nuclear War?

Essentially, the premise Mr. Crichton presents is that roughly forty years ago in the U.S., a trend began that would eventually lead us to a politicization of science that would be required for something such as so-called global warming to be widely promoted in the media and by scientists. The SETI movement, which "is unquestionably a religion" in Crichton's view, was based on pseudo-science and fundamentally flawed assumptions beginning with the Drake Equation (see also Wikipedia's entry). Crichton states that the problem with the equation "is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated." He continues: "nor can there be 'informed guesses.' " Now, I don't want to spend much time on SETI, as it isn't Cricthon's main point and I don't wish it to be mine. However, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is most definitely not a religion, as it is just that: a search. It doesn't assume that something is there. Rather, it is looking to confirm if it is (i.e. – testing a hypothesis). The Drake Equation is nothing more than a rough estimator to show that even with very low odds of any one part of the universe having intelligent life, given the vastness of all space, the end probability is still pretty good. To claim that none of the variables can be known is essentially true, since we can never explore all space. However, to claim that there can be no informed guesses is just kind of silly. We have information by which we can make estimates. However, we'll see soon that Mr. Crichton has a hard time understanding what that seems to mean and what it doesn't mean.

The lecture then moves onto the much more politically laced movement within parts of the science community that took place in the seventies and eighties: nuclear winter (or, more accurately, hoping to avoid such a thing; see also here.). Crichton describes the TTAPS report and that while it "never specifically express[ed]" a similar equation, he goes to the trouble of providing one for us. He remarks on it's striking similarity to the Drake equation (one wonders where he got the idea for it…) and the explains that "none of the variables can be determined. None at all." Variables such as number of warheads, warhead size, warhead detonation height, and a few others. Of course, the result is based on input and until a series of nuclear warheads goes off, we wouldn't know some of those numbers. However, assuming someone was left alive to count, we very well could know those values. This isn't counting all of the infinite universe, but the very finite set of nuclear warheads (not just on Earth, but again, in a single event). The other variables, while difficult to know precisely, would not be hard to substitute with averaged estimates. Of course, the results would only be as good as the estimates, but these are testable things which scientists and engineers are very good at determining. That is, when the assumed equation is also valid. Since TTAPS didn't write one but rather Mr. Crichton did, I have my doubts. As we'll also see, Crichton has some confused notions about what a mathematical model is, how one is created, and what its uses are.

Scientific Consensus: The Mavericks Are Always the Rightest?

Crichton describes the invoking of consensus as "the first refuge of scoundrels" (patriotism is the last, so I have to wonder where to scoundrels go in between?). He states that "the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus." Of that, I have no disagreement, but it is actually a very rare thing that a scientist would defend their work or conclusions based on consensus. However, in advising policy, consensus becomes not only involved but very important. Given Mr. Crichton's training as a physician, let us consider a small example to demonstrate the difference. If you are given grave medical advice, you might seek a second opinion. If it differs from the first, you might also seek a third to try and find some idea of which was correct. Why? Because you want to know what the consensus is, not just the worst. Now, if two out of the three physicians agreed on your grave prognosis, you'd be more inclined to act on it than if it were just one of them. Again, consensus to help shape policy. Any one of the doctors may have used sound procedure and judgment to determine differing opinions. However, varying conclusions require the effected person (or people) to make a decision on what to do. That is policy versus science on a very small level. Crichton later pleads for a way to seperate the two, which sounds great save for one thing: who will advise policy if not the experts in their field? Ah, well, that appears to be where untrained politicians and science fiction authors come in (which is really for another article, since it is outside of the scope of this lecture and my response).

Allow me to jump the gun here, since I'm on the subject of scientific consensus, and get to how it applies to global warming as that is the ultimate topic. I agree with the idea that science facts are not a democracy. For an idea to be right, it only need be hypothesized by one person (or few people). On the other hand, as right ideas become more mainstream and accepted, a consensus naturally forms. At some point, those ideas are so readily accepted as be actionable, or essentially fact. This is where scientific consensus comes into play and why it does matter when it comes to setting policy, as I tried to demonstrate with the three doctor delimma above. In 2004, Naomi Oreskes wrote a paper titled "Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in which she surveyed nearly 1,000 peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change. From that article (emphasis mine):

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Now, while we all agree that for an idea to be right, it doesn't need consensus. But if the idea was wrong, wouldn't at least one out of nearly 1,000 papers hope to provide some credible, alternate theory as to the observed phenomena? If all three doctors had told you the same prognosis, wouldn't you be crazy not to act on it?

Crichton gives various examples of what he feels are bad consensus judgments, none of which I want to discuss in depth other than to say this: since when was science described as anything other than a slow process with which skepticism was required to be overcome through observations and reproducible evidence? Of course it often begins with one person (or few people) with a new hypothesis and then they must, over time, show their hypothesis to be correct. That is the scientific method (and we'll see that it applies to global warming more than you or Mr. Crichton may have realized). Now, as Crichton goes on, he makes it out that if anymore than a single individual holds a scientific notion to be true then we should all discount it. We should be skeptical of new, untested hypothesis until they are shown to be more accurate than previous ones. But more accurate than what?

You Mean Science Can Predict the Future?

Science begins by observing a phenomenon in nature: an apple always falls to the ground, new mothers seem to contract fevers at high rates, the planet is getting warmer each year, etc. The scientist asks why and proposes an answer: the hypothesis. Tests are determined to see if the hypothesis hold true in future experiments. Now, there are far too many misconceptions to get into (and even my description likely can't fit every case that is still considered sound science) but one very common misconception is what is meant by 'experiment.' They are not always people with white lab coats and clipboards watching a vile of liquid boil on a laboratory counter. Often it is nothing more than determining what value will occur next in nature. This confusion has long plagued evolutionary biologists as well as climate scientists. What are their experiments? To be sure, some are done in laboratory settings, but most are further observations of nature to see if they agree with a predictive hypothesis (will the next fossil of a give age exhibit the traits we expect?, will the change in temperature affect northern latitude plant life in a expected way?).

Mr. Crichton sets up one of the silliest straw men I've read in some time with predicting the future here. First, he intentionally obfuscates the difference between weather and climate by saying:

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Well, first, short-term meteorology is actually very accurate and if you want to know what kind of jacket to wear to work, I bet you check the daily weather. However, weather and climate may be related but are far from being the same thing. I cannot predict the weather at a given time next summer but I can tell you that the average daily temperature in the northern hemisphere will be higher than what it is in the winter. Why? Because climate deals with the average patterns of weather over time, not the individual occurrences. Confusion over branches of science aside, Mr. Crichton goes on to take plenty of play hits at his freshly stitched straw man just to show us how silly the notion that science can predict the future is: people in 1900 would never have been able to predict today's society and what we see everyday. Really? What about the science of the day? I bet Newtonian physics still pretty well describes the trajectory of every projectile launched. I'm willing to bet that germ theory still is important in medicine. I know for a fact that I couldn't do my day job (structural engineer) without the predictive equations of Euler, Maxwell, and Timoshenko, to name a few. Science is loaded with lots of bold predictive statements made by pompous individuals of what the future will look like to average people, many of which are wrong. However, the ability of the science to hold true is no less valid. There-in lies it's predictive powers, both in short term and long term.

Those last names I mentioned just now bring me to one of Crichton's other points of contention with climate science: computer modeling. First of all, I dislike calling them "computer models" when they are more accurately described as mathematical models which happen to run on a computer (because computers are fast at working math routines). Reliance on a mathematical model alone could prove difficult (although it has it's place in estimating probabilities) so that is why they are usually calibrated to real world observations. Those three scientists I mentioned? They sure did and now have some very recognizable equations to their credit which help me (and my computer) predict how much a beam will deflect or how strong it should be for a given situation. My graduate research involved testing physical specimens which were also being modeled with a computer simulation. The mathematical model was calibrated to match the expected material behavior and was tweaked until it was remarkably close. This allowed for testing of a much wider variety of configurations that would have been practical or even economically possible. Other times, as in the case of Drake's equation or the notion behind the TTAPS report, this is done because of the scale of what is being estimated. Of course these can be large and complicated, as in the case of climate modeling, but that is where the use of real-world data comes in. Mathematical models are extremely useful and used every day at varying scales. From you personal budget, to the equations that make your computer work, to the ones I use to design buildings, all the way up to climate modeling, they are extremely useful tools which provide results that can help us, in a sense, predict the future. However, that future is based on the past, which we know.

Mr. Crichton neglects to mention that first of all, climate modeling is far from being he only evidence to support the current theory behind the observed global warming. Secondly, regarding the past, he also seems to overlook (while referencing the IPCC, oddly enough) that Chapter 8 of the IPCC is titled: "Model Evaluation" and that Chapters 10 and 12 further explains how the data that has been observed is used to evaluate model accuracy and performance. Further, more recent modeling shows even higher levels of refinement to the known data. Crichton, placing such a great deal of emphasis on modeling, expresses desire that areas of data collection and analysis be separated. This is actually the case throughout a great deal of climate science. This is, once again, in the IPCC report which Crichton finds time to criticize it's editing process but apparently had little time to actually read (in his defense, it's incredibly long and detailed).

One last thing on predicting the future, and I hope this goes to show just how silly Mr. Crichton's straw man is. What if I told you that indeed, the future had been predicted, and from far earlier than 1900? In fact, in 1827 a soon-to-be-famous French mathematician named Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (yes, that Fourier, the one with the 'transforms') hypothesized that gases in the atmosphere might increase the temperature of the planet. He likened this idea to a greenhouse. 180 years later, his hypothesis has proven correct much to all our dismay (not to mention the fact that the analogy has also stuck). Later, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius and his colleague Arvid Högbom would discover that manmade gases, namely CO₂, from factories could add to the natural carbon cycles from volcanoes, oceans, etc. and in fact raise the temperature of the Earth, given sufficient volume. Both men, assuming 1896 levels of CO₂ emissions in Sweden, doubted this would ever be a problem. Unfortunately, it was that latter "prediction," similar to the straw man of Crichton's, that proved to be incorrect. Human produced carbon now greatly out-paces that of natural carbon cycles. Still, Arrhenius did go on to win a Nobel prize in chemistry, just not for his discovery of anthropogenic climate change nearly fifty years before the first computer would be built. Of course, others would take interest in CO₂ cycles and climate modeling. Later, increases in temperature would be recorded at rates which natural cycles couldn't account for. During the post-WWII industrial boom, particulate air pollution would offset this greenhouse effect and begin a slight cooling of the planet (ironically, Mr. Crichton, this is essentially a low-dose nuclear winter). However, reduction in the particulate emissions without reducing the carbon emissions would result in warming since that has increased at a frightening pace.

A more recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, published in June of this year, stated that the planet was the warmest it's been in 400 years, and most likely in over 2,000 years, and that human greenhouse gas emissions were to blame. Further, this warming has almost completely occurred during the past century. No modeling involved, just observations and proxies, just as with other fields of science that do not employ mathematical modeling (although those are few and far between). To be fair, this report was published nearly three years after Mr. Crichton gave this lecture, so he didn't not have the benefit of reading it (assuming he would have). Never-the-less, mathematical models that do accurately following the past 2,000 years of global temperatures show bad news for the future, and even sooner than 100 years away. We likely won't have to wait that long before rising sea levels, changed weather patterns, and ecological disasters affect mankind for the worse.

My Final Opinion on Crichton's Lecture

Crichton begins his lecture professing his love for science and his wonder at all that it can accomplish. He then spends the vast majority of it belittling scientists and bemoaning the state of science as it advises policy. It appears he could hold scientists in general in no lower regard, given that they are subject to the same biases and opinions that we all are. I find that the fields of science, climate science being no exception even with it's extraordinary level of scrutiny, to be as free of such things as can be humanly possible. This is due to the methods put in place for validating hypothesis as well as presenting data to the public (i.g. – peer review). Science is a human endeavor and like all human endeavors it is, by our nature, flawed and imperfect. However, the scientific method is greater than the sum of its parts and produces sound results. Mr. Crichton makes some decent and perhaps well-meaning proposals for improvement (double-blind research) but in truth has little evidence to demonstrate why such overhauls are required. Many of these ideas are already in place, to varying degrees, in different areas of science as they are applicable (there are good and obvious reasons why medical trials involving humans have some of the most stringent protocols). However, to dismiss good science that has already been done, just because it doesn't meet Crichton's vague requirements, is absurd. Further, it is important that scientists show impartiality to results but is it really fair to require them to have no opinion in policy once evidence has been clearly demonstrated? Also, why should these same experts be asked to not work with politicians to guide policy when non-expert, science fiction authors do just that (honestly, I just can't let that go)? Both proposals seem to rob those who set policy of their greatest resources to ensure the policies are grounded in good science.

Lastly, I openly confess that I am not a climate researcher nor even a hard scientist. My field is that of the applied sciences, namely structural engineering. However, it should be pointed out that the same is true of Michael Crichton. It should be noted that Crichton has not practiced medicine since the early seventies, to the best of my knowledge. He often uses his medical degree to give credence the science aspects of his fiction writing. That is fine to a point, but the fact that someone practiced medicine over 30 years ago does not make them an authority on all science topics. That some people view Crichton as a legitimate source of information on a topic such as climate science, or even the policy and protocols of data collection and research, is nearly laughable. I do not expect that of my audience here but I can at least assure anyone reading this that I have done my very best to obtain information from those who are doing the research I am discussing as well as reputable science journals and periodicals. Perhaps Mr. Crichton holds these sources in disdain when they disagree with his notion of how science should be but to be very blunt, Mr. Crichton's opinion on how science should be done simply doesn't matter all that much, nor should it. A lot has happened in all fields of science since Mr. Crichton stopped practicing medicine and, at least in the field of climate science, a great deal even happened even before he got started. Unlike Mr. Crichton, I see no need to hamstring experts in a field just because I was initially skeptical of their theories.

There certainly is a heightened politicalization of science now and we would do well to have ways of separating science from policy, at least the ideas if not the people involved. However, the notion that because some prior flawed ideas took hold in the popular realm of media and politics in no way lessens the impact of future science. Even if one does accept that SETI and the nuclear winter movements are flawed and psuedo-science, it is irrelevant to the current state of climate change and the fact that an overwhelming number of scientists do happen to agree with it's hypothesis. While it may make for a great science fiction book, aliens, or the search for them, didn't bring about global warming as we understand it. We did. Both in cause and the understanding of.

Dr. Michael Mann and his readers deserve some credit for some of the information included above, particularly regarding the IPCC contents (of which Mann is a partial author and I assumed has therefore read).

Jason Coleman is a structural engineering who lives, practices, and writes in Richmond, VA, where he doesn't need a weatherman to tell him which way the political winds blow. This article first appeared on Jason Coleman.net under a Creative Commons 2.5 license which applies to this reproduction.

The Bush administration has been on a six-year campaign to expand its powers, often beyond what the Constitution allows. So it is odd to hear it claim that it lacks the power to slow global warming by limiting the emission of harmful gases. But that is just what it will argue to the Supreme Court tomorrow, in what may be the most important environmental case in many years.

A group of 12 states, including New York and Massachusetts, is suing the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to properly do its job. These states, backed by environmental groups and scientists, say that the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to impose limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by new cars. These gases are a major contributor to the "greenhouse effect" that is dangerously heating up the planet.

The different views among the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court about climate change were clearly visible today as the high court tackled the simmering controversy over government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Climate research has played a central role in the case, which addresses the degree of scientific uncertainty on global warming and the impacts of rising temperatures.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency has been working its way to the high court since 1999, when a group of nonprofits asked EPA to set greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act. Four years later, the agency said that Congress hadn't given it the legal authority to do so. Even if the agency had such authority, EPA officials added, setting such limits would be premature given ongoing climate studies, debate over likely impacts, and concerns that new rules would interfere with fuel-efficiency laws. Also at issue is whether the states have the right to ask EPA to act. Under the legal principle of standing, parties must be able to show that they are being harmed by the current situation. An appeals court rejected the arguments by a number of states, led by Massachusetts, that impacts such as the loss of coastline from rising sea levels gave them the right to sue. The high court agreed to take the case in June.

In a case that hinges on the meaning of "obvious," at least one thing is obvious: the U.S. Supreme Court has grave doubts about one of the key criterion used to decide if an invention deserves a patent. The case of KSR International Co. vs. Teleflex Inc., argued today in the Court, should provide an answer about what makes an invention obvious--and hence undeserving of a patent. And it won't be an outcome that makes everyone happy.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed back in 2002 by a Limerick, Pennsylvania-based manufacturer called Teleflex. Teleflex sued KSR International, a Canadian brake pedal maker in Ridgetown, Ontario, for patent infringement. KSR had developed a pedal that is both electric and adjustable, and that's remarkably similar to the one claimed by Teleflex in a patent granted in 2001. Teleflex won before the Federal Circuit appeals court in Washington, D.C., but KSR shot back, appealing to the Supreme Court. At issue is whether the patent covering the electric and adjustable pedal is obvious and should not have been granted.

It's been six months since the surprise hit movie and book An Inconvenient Truth transformed Al Gore from the man who, as he puts it, "used to be the next President of the United States" to global warming's archenemy.

Now, as the DVD hits holiday shelves, the former U.S. Vice President tells National Geographic News podcast correspondent Patty Kim whether he'll run for President in 2008, how you can fight climate change, whether he practices what he preaches, and yes, whether he'll grow back the beard.

…

Now, Shon says he doesn't have the political power to make much change, but you do. Mr. Gore, are you even remotely tempted to run for President in 2008?

Well, I think when enough individuals do change their minds, it will have a profound impact on the political environment, and that's the kind of campaign I'm involved in—to try to change the way people think about this so that the candidates who do run will encounter voters in both parties who demand a solution.

But have you ever—

I am not considering becoming a candidate again, but I'm going to concentrate on changing people's minds.

What if Shon and others like him say to you, But our country needs you?

Well, I'm grateful for that encouragement and for the expression of confidence. And while I haven't ruled out considering a race at some point in the future, I really don't expect to, because I've done it twice.

I've learned the importance of changing people's minds at the grassroots level so that whoever does run will have a much better chance of encountering public opinion that reaches a critical mass and brings about a change not only in White House policies but in the Congress and in the state legislatures and all around the world.

Democrats, buoyed by their midterm win, favor a 'tough love' approach with the Iraqi government.

On Capitol Hill, there is near agreement on at least one aspect of Iraq policy: the Iraqis themselves need to shoulder more of the burden of stabilizing their country. But this consensus breaks down over the obvious follow-up question. How?

Many Democrats, newly emboldened by their election victories, favor an approach that might be labeled "tough love." It goes something like this: If the US plans a phased pullout of troops within four to six months, the Iraqi government will face up to what has to be done.

"This is not precipitous; it is a responsible way to change the dynamic in Iraq," said Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan, soon to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, at a Wednesday hearing.

But the White House - and the top generals of the US military - favor a strategy that they consider more nurturing. The US needs to intensify efforts to train the Iraqi armed forces to fight for themselves, according to Gen. John Abizaid, US commander in the Middle East. A scheduled US pullout might simply cause Iraq's sectarian factions to prepare for chaos to come.

Democratic-led Congress could shake up funding for science agencies.

When the Democrats take control of Congress in January, they will also gain control over the nation's purse strings. Scientists should take note.

Federal agencies that fund the bulk of the nation's research, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, will all have to answer to new Congressional overseers. Some agencies will see little change in their budgets when control shifts from the Republicans to Democrats, says budget policy expert Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Historically, science funding has not been a partisan issue," he says.

But Democrats will probably leave lasting financial marks on some other areas of science. "It will be a fascinating time," says Joel Widder, a former Senate staffer now at Lewis-Burke Associates, a science lobby firm in Washington, DC.

In the wake of yet another election marred by technical glitches, critics of electronic voting machines are repeating their call to restore old-fashioned paper to the increasingly computerized election process.

But a smaller, quieter group is convinced the real solution lies in the other direction. Now is the time, they say, to make elections completely electronic, and allow voters to cast their ballots from home, over the internet.

"The technology is done," said Jim Adler, founder of election-auditing firm VoteHere. "It's really an issue now of politics and people's will."

With Democrats holding the majority, moderates will be driving policy in Congress.

For Democrats, who swept back into power in both the House and Senate last week, the pledge to govern in a bipartisan way may not be postvictory rhetoric. At least in the Senate, it's a mandate of the math.

While an effective 51-49 majority allows Democrats to organize the Senate - Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernard Sanders of Vermont ran as independents - it is still nine votes short of the 60 votes now needed to advance controversial bills on issues ranging from taxes to the Iraq war.

"Nothing can be accomplished in this town unless it's on a bipartisan basis," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, after meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney at the White House on Friday.

It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins. Or, as Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist, recently put it in making much the same argument, ''Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century.'' The era of baby-boomer politics - with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all - is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological - and not a moment too soon.

Short of actual insurrection, I don't think the country could have spoken more clearly than it did Tuesday. But there's one question still to be answered, and in honor of Donald Rumsfeld, who now can devote full time and attention to stretching the boundaries of modern philosophy, let's call it a known unknown: Did George W. Bush really hear what the nation told him about Iraq?

I think he did, but I'm pessimistic that he'll listen.

Democrat James Webb, who campaigned for Virginia's U.S. Senate seat by opposing the war in Iraq and calling for economic fairness, yesterday succeeded in his improbable bid to unseat Republican George Allen, giving the Democrats a 51-seat majority and control of both houses of Congress.

Webb's lead over Allen widened yesterday in the post-election vote canvass, and Allen graciously conceded to Webb to make the victory official. A short time later, Virginia's newest senator, who lives in Fairfax County, addressed a giddy crowd of hundreds of supporters in front of the Arlington County Courthouse.

…

Webb will join Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) in the Senate, where he will likely become a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a spokesman against the war with substantial credentials. Warner and Webb are part of a small fraternity, having both served as secretary of the Navy.

While the balance of power in the Senate remains undecided, pending a probable recount in Virginia, the 7 November US elections swept the Democrats back into the majority of seats in the House of Representatives. What do the changes really mean, and what will the Democrats do next? Nature takes a look at the politicians old and new who, starting in January, will be running the key House committees on science issues.

There should be a new human right: everyone should be entitled to equal access to the atmosphere. So say researchers attending a UN climate conference in Nairobi, Kenya, where countries are discussing how to limit global greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

A report launched at the conference today complains that discussion on climate change has been dominated by science and economics, with vital ethical dimensions being left out by governments and scientists alike.

Climate change violates the most basic human rights. It kills tens of thousands of people a year and threatens the survival of whole nations, says Don Brown at the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, US, who wrote the report with colleagues. Yet we haven't had a public discussion about the ethics of climate change. People have a right not to be harmed by others without their consent.

What a wild ride it's been! As the midterm madness of 2006 draws to a close, the Crystal Ball is reminded just how quickly the facts of our politics can change.

Although we're not out to determine who's been naughty or nice (believe us, that's a subject for many other Crystal Ball emails--and both parties have their fair share of people on both lists), we did make a list of predictions on Thursday, and we promised we would check it twice. The result of our re-checking is a last-minute batch of ratings changes, and even several changes of our predictions.

So thanks for staying with us this election year--now fasten your seat belts and hang on for the ride as the Crystal Ball calls 'em all!

Election analysis from Larry Sabato and David Wasserman, who know a thing or two about elections and they provide the best, non-partisan analysis anyone's likely to find.

The short story:

• THE SENATE: +6 Dems = 51D, 49R
• THE HOUSE: +29 Dems = 232D, 203R
• THE GOVERNORSHIPS: +7 Dems = 29D, 21R

A group of prominent Catholics is challenging church leaders' opposition to stem cell research and to the proposed Constitutional amendment that would protect such research in Missouri.

The group, led by former Sen. Tom Eagleton, e-mailed a letter to fellow Catholics last week explaining its reasons for supporting Amendment 2, which Missourians will vote on Tuesday.

The amendment would ensure that any federally approved stem cell research and treatments would be available in Missouri.

The letter from Catholics for Amendment 2 said the group felt a moral obligation to respond to what it called misinformation, scare tactics and distortions being spread by opponents of the initiative, including the church.

Saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large, a Military Times editorial calls on President Bush to fire him.

Published in the Nov. 13 issue of Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times, on newsstands Monday, the editorial says it is time for the president to face the hard bruising truth.

Put away the petri dish. Turn off the Bunsen burner. When mid-term election results start to roll in next Tuesday, few groups will be as glued to the television as America's scientists.

In a country grousing for new leadership, the elections will be a referendum on an unpopular president and a chance for science-friendly candidates to hang out a shingle on Capitol Hill. The change could prompt government action on a range of issues.

Mike Stark, a high school dropout who is a University of Virginia law school student, said he wishes his scuffle at a George Allen campaign stop had never happened.

I think it's embarrassing for the country. I think it's embarrassing for Virginia, said Stark, a 38-year-old New York native who moved to Charlottesville to attend law school. I'm not a Democratic activist. I'm a man with strong ideas of what's right and what's wrong. . . . Anybody who thought it would be better to manhandle a constituent than ignore the questions should definitely be fired.

Charlottesville police are investigating the scuffle Tuesday at a downtown hotel and may interview Allen to determine what happened. The incident has attracted nationwide attention.

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has rejected staff scientists' recommendations to protect imperiled animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act at least six times in the past three years, documents show.

In addition, staff complaints that their scientific findings were frequently overruled or disparaged at the behest of landowners or industry have led the agency's inspector general to look into the role of Julie MacDonald, who has been deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks since 2004, in decisions on protecting endangered species.

Could George Allen, once a slam-dunk Senate pick, drop the ball next week?

A few months ago, when the warm breezes of summer were wafting across Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, George Allen could justly expect only one result from Election 2006 - he would be reelected easily to the US Senate.

Senator Allen's supporters were already quietly looking beyond November. There were whispers in Republican circles about Allen running for the White House in 2008.

Yet as autumn drew near, there was an abrupt change in the political climate. The winds from the Blue Ridge grew cold. Very cold.

The Rockefeller University recently hosted a talk by Michael Stebbins, Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists and a member of the board of the recently formed organization Scientists and Engineers for America. As a former congressional fellow and director of FAS's biosecurity project, he has extensive experience with science policy and the political maneuvering that accompanies its formation and adoption. His talk was entitled The Rebirth of Scientific Activism.

Although little time was spent on when scientific activism experienced its initial birth, the history he provided of organizations such as FAS suggested a likely origin in the immediate aftermath of the initiation of the atomic era. Much of the focus was on defining what science activism is, and how it could be accomplished in the present political climate. One of the central ideas of his talk was that scientists have a lot of unfocused anger resulting from seeing their work on many topics either ignored or disparaged during the formation of policy and legislation. But most professional science organizations are ill-prepared to engage in the political process in any way beyond requesting more money for research in the field. He presented scientific activism as a way to convert this anger into action in ways separate from the budgeting process.

Hey, Web 2.0! Election Day is Nov. 7, and your country needs you.

At BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, NetSquared and other hacker get-togethers, scores of entrepreneurs and engineers arrive eager to collaborate, make information easier to share and use, and mobilize groups for effective action.

Though it may not be obvious, the road marks in this amorphous thing called Web 2.0 are political: grassroots participation, forging new connections, and empowering from the ground up. The ideal democratic process is participatory and the Web 2.0 phenomenon is about democratizing digital technology.

There's never been a better time to tap that technological ethic to re-democratize our democracy.

A veritable who's who of climate scientists has weighed in on an important question before the Supreme Court: whether the U.S. government should regulate carbon emissions from new cars. Last month, a group of climate scientists told the Supreme Court that a 2003 decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to regulate greenhouse gases from cars was based on a misreading of the scientific literature. Yesterday, eight climatologists took EPA's side in the case, writing that there is insufficient evidence that carbon dioxide emissions will endanger public health or welfare.

The case, Massachusetts v. EPA, was brought by 12 states and nonprofit organizations who argue that EPA should add greenhouse gases to the list of substances whose impacts on the atmosphere are monitored. The Clean Air Act, first passed in 1970, requires the government to regulate substances that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.

The most audacious campaign ad of this topsy-turvy political year is set in the sanctuary of the Mt. Moriah East Baptist Church in Memphis. With a praise song swelling in the background, the camera pans down from sunlit stained-glass windows to a dapper young man striding thoughtfully up the aisle and flashing a Hollywood smile as he says, I started church the old-fashioned way--I was forced to. And I'm better for it.... Here, I learned the difference between right and wrong. But now, he says solemnly, his opponent is doing wrong, telling untruths about...me. He sits in a pew and leans forward prayerfully. With a huge red tapestry with a white cross perfectly positioned over his right shoulder, he dead-eyes the camera and corrects the record. I voted for the Patriot Act, five trillion in defense, and against amnesty for illegals. I approved this message because I won't let them make me somebody I'm not. And I'll always fight for you.

While militant God-talk has long been a staple of Republican campaigns, shooting ads inside the Lord's house has been considered off-limits. But that wasn't the biggest source of surprise when Tennesseans started seeing the now-famous church ad in September. The candidate exploiting his faith was a Democrat--Harold Ford Jr., the 36-year-old Congressman from Memphis. Once considered a quixotic long shot to fill the US Senate seat left vacant by Republican majority leader Bill Frist, Ford has risen from a double-digit deficit in the polls to draw even with former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, a moderately conservative multimillionaire with all the charisma of a tree stump. Ford could deliver the Democrats a majority in the Senate by becoming just the fourth African-American ever elected to that chamber by popular vote, and the first from the South.

President Bush and his aides are annoyed that people keep misinterpreting his Iraq policy as stay the course. A complete distortion, they say. That is not a stay-the-course policy, White House press secretary Tony Snow declared yesterday.

Where would anyone have gotten that idea? Well, maybe from Bush.

Two weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans are losing the battle for independent voters, who now strongly favor Democrats on Iraq and other major issues facing the country and overwhelmingly prefer to see them take over the House in November, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new poll underscores how much of a drag the war threatens to be on Republican candidates in competitive races. With debate underway in Washington about possible course changes in Iraq, Americans cite the war as the most important issue in determining their vote next month more often than any other issue, and those who do favor Democrats over Republicans by 76 percent to 21 percent.

The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration''s Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month''s midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking.

Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame. Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration''s strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece and getting its security forces up and running while 140,000 U.S. troops try to keep a lid on rapidly spreading sectarian violence.

While most voters are focusing on Iraq, congressional races in Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and other states could turn on the stem cell issue. It''s a particularly prominent issue this year since President Bush used the first veto of his presidency on a bill that would have expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. The move essentially left the issue for individual states to sort out.

The state campaigns are numerous and difficult to track. So John Hlinko, the veteran internet grass-roots organizer who spearheaded DraftWesleyClark, has launched a website called StemCellCandidates to highlight -- and facilitate donations for -- the races in which the stem cell issue is most likely to tip the scales.

To maximize the resources allocated to science and technology during the next US administration the science community must prepare now, argues Thomas Kalil.

In less than two-and-a-half years, the next president of the United States will take the oath of office and deliver his or her inaugural address. In early 2009, the president and a small group of sleep-deprived aides will submit a multi-trillion-dollar budget, nominate or appoint senior advisers and members of the cabinet, and establish the administration''s initial policy priorities. As a result of my eight years as a science and technology policy adviser to President Clinton, I am convinced that the scientific and technical community should begin to plan now for this transition.

Can science influence politics in the forthcoming US elections? Nature investigates how Democrats and Republicans are striving to win the hearts of voters.

Heather Wilson has something she wants the voters of New Mexico''s first congressional district to know about her: unlike President George W. Bush, she supports embryonic stem-cell research. In a local television advertisement last month, Wilson told viewers in Albuquerque and its environs: The president vetoed the stem-cell bill, and I voted to override his veto because it was the right thing to do.

It is not that surprising for a candidate to say an unpopular president is wrong, or that a popular biomedical cause is right. It is rather more surprising when the candidate and the president are members of the same party. But Wilson, the only woman in Congress who has served in the military, is a moderate Republican in a close fight to keep her seat. The stem-cell issue is one that she thinks may help her in the struggle to a fifth term in the House of Representatives, despite the fact that in other parts of the country some of her fellow Republicans are making opposition to the research a strong part of their campaign.

James Webb mounts an independent-minded challenge.

The U.S. Senate race in Virginia pits a novice politician, Democrat James Webb , against a much more experienced one, incumbent Republican George Allen, who spent much of the early fall obliterating his reputation for amiable charm and political deftness. As Mr. Allen has partially admitted, his wounds in the close race have been mostly self-inflicted and have left a sour taste in the mouths of many Virginians. Still, there is an even better reason to vote against Mr. Allen: Quite simply, he is a mediocre senator whose six years of undistinguished service do not justify rehiring.

His opponent -- former Navy secretary, former assistant defense secretary, former Marine Corps officer and former Republican -- is admirably independent-minded. He was prescient in warning, back in 2002, that the war in Iraq risked stranding the United States in a long-term occupation without an exit strategy. An intelligent man with a record of integrity, he has resisted the packaging of political consultants, which can only be a good thing. Those assets, as well as his deep familiarity with military and national security affairs, offer the promise that he would make an able, if unorthodox, U.S. senator. And the fact that his youngest son is deployed as a marine in Iraq gives him a perspective that is rare in today''s Congress.

As international leaders condemn North Korea's recent underground nuclear test, a crucial anniversary is observed: Twenty years ago Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev outlined a vision for a non-nuclear world. What went wrong? In this Nation forum, Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Randall Caroline Forsberg and George Perkovich talk about how to put nonproliferation back on the global agenda.

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The Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 will long be remembered because the leaders of the world's two superpowers, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, seriously entertained for one brief moment the goal of a non-nuclear world. The end of the cold war reduced the fear of a nuclear exchange, but it did not bring us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, with the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan and North Korea, and with concerns growing about Iran's nuclear program, the idea of a non-nuclear world seems more distant than ever. As the report of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction issued earlier this year makes clear, even the limited goals of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation have been set back by the lack of leadership on the part of the United States and by the proliferation of new weapons states. And as worrying, the goal of nuclear disarmament no longer seems to animate the progressive community or the peace movement, let alone figure into today's discussion of American national security policy.

Republican U.S. Sen. George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb clashed over economic policy and the Iraq war last night in the fourth and final debate of the Senate campaign.

America needs a new Congress--the question is, Will Americans hold the GOP to account for their corruption, ineptitude and irresponsibility?

When House Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Republican Congressional leadership convened a press conference on the last Friday of September, their intent was to spin their record before heading off to the campaign trail. Instead, they found themselves answering questions about their deputy whip, Mark Foley of Florida, who had been sending Do-I-make-you-horny instant messages to Capitol pages. Hastert lamely denied the undeniable: that GOP leaders had known of Foley's creepy communications but had done nothing to protect his teenage targets. Calls for Hastert's resignation soon mounted within the GOP ranks, where strategists worried about what the revelations would do to turnout among the Christian-right faithful. Having abandoned common decency to stay in power, Republicans would happily throw their leader overboard if it would serve that cause.

Bob Woodward's State of Denial is the hottest book in the country right now. It details the infighting, disarray, and mistakes made by the Bush war council during the Iraq war. The third in the famous reporter's portraits of George Bush, it is also the longest. Slate's reading guide [by John Dickerson] fast-forwards you straight to the juicy parts. Want to know where to go to read accounts of Donald Rumsfeld's every flaw? Do you wonder about Bush's decision-making abilities? How does former CIA Director George Tenet come out? Grab a copy and read along.

Frustrated by their government's position on the environment, climate change and stem cell research, a group of US scientists have decided to take matters into their own hands and actively promote the election of a president in 2008 who is more receptive to science.

Scientists and Engineers for America plunged into politics last week with the aim of campaigning for particular candidates, starting with the 2006 mid-term elections. SEA says that scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation's leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis.

Canada will not use public money to buy carbon emission rights on an international market after failing to meet its targets to curb pollution under the Kyoto Protocol, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said.

We will not use taxpayer money to play the emissions trading market, nor will we use taxpayer money to create an artificial market to buy and sell credits, Ambrose told a parliamentary committee on environment and sustainable development.

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But Canada will not back out of the Kyoto Protocol ratified by the previous Liberal administration, she said, despite repeated claims by the new Conservative government that Canada would not achieve its emissions reduction target.

For too long scientists have approached politics with one hand tied behind their backs. This November, Chris Mooney says, that's going to change.

Scientists and Engineers for Change formed to support the election of John Kerry in 2004. Today it has reemerged bearing a new strategy, a new name—Scientists and Engineers for America—and a new attitude, one reflecting the idea that, to flex their political muscles, scientists need to do a lot more than simply give talks. Mike Brown, a lawyer and political consultant who directed the successful 2004 congressional election campaign of Jim Moran (D-VA), is the group's new executive director. Making the news with petitions and talks is fine, he says, but "you have to have follow-up and make sure that these moves really lead to electoral action." Brown hopes Scientists and Engineers for America can build upon the experience of the 2004 election, channeling outrage over repeated attacks on science in Congress and the executive branch into actual votes in 2006 and beyond.

From a cranky Republican traditionalist, Webb has transformed into one of the unlikeliest protest candidates ever. And now, thanks to the spiral of controversy set off by Allen's now-legendary macaca moment in mid-August, Webb has also become the unlikeliest of this year's Democratic challengers to have a genuine shot at toppling a Republican incumbent and giving his new party a majority in the next Senate.

The Mark Foley Scandal is over. The Florida Republican congressman who sent Do I make you horny? messages to teenage pages has resigned his seat and gone into rehab. He needed help and, now, he's getting it. There will be a few more salacious revelations--like today's report that the congressman was such a multi-tasker that he balanced the sending of racy instant messages with his duty to show up for floor votes -- and perhaps some legal playout to this sad tale. But Foley's political journey is finished.

The Republican Congressional Leadership Scandal is most definitely not over. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, House Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chair Tom Reynolds, R-New York, and other leaders of the GOP caucus who knew about the Foley problem and did little or nothing to deal with it, have been exposed for what they are: Political animals who care about nothing--absolutely nothing--except maintaining power.

America's ruling party has been battered by bad news

One might argue that there are three types of Republican voter. Those who like small government. Those who think the "Grand Old Party" is the stronger party on defence. And those with solidly conservative social values. Today's free-spending Republicans have given the small-government types nothing to cheer about . A week of awful news may now help to alienate the other two.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese civilians, 2/3 of whom were US citizens, in military camps across the western half of the country. Effectively stripping Japanese Americans of virtually all constitutional protections (including rights to property, trial by jury and habeas corpus), 9066 is now widely decried as one of the darkest moments in US history. In 1988, Congress passed Public Law 100-383, which apologized to Japanese internees, provided reparations and created a public education fund to inform the public about the internment of such individuals so as to prevent the recurrence of any similar event.

Congress should have enrolled in its own re-education program.

By passing the Military Commissions Act (a.k.a. the torture bill), Congress has granted the Bush administration extraordinary powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged terrorists and their supporters. Anyone anywhere in the world at any time may be summarily classified an unlawful enemy combatant by the executive branch, seized and detained. Only aliens are subject to military trials (I've updated my original post here to more accurately describe persons subject to military commissions; see sec. 948a-c in text of legislation). As Bruce Ackerman points out in the LA Times, the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" includes those who "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" (by say, writing a check to a Middle East charity) and may extend to US citizens. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, US citizens at least appear to retain habeas corpus rights, a foundation of Western jurisprudence. Foreign nationals do not; the Act explicitly denies them the writ of habeas corpus (the right to be charged and tried and the right to appeal any convictions in a court of law).

The US Department of Commerce and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have signed a new agreement extending the Commerce Department's oversight of ICANN while loosening the apron strings tying them together. Most significantly, the agreement may lead to the Commerce Department's cutting ICANN free from oversight in 18 months.

Created in 1998, ICANN is responsible for oversight of the Internet's domain name systems and IP addresses. US oversight of the organization has become a topic of debate over the past couple of years, with calls for international control increasing. Some countries believe that the root server system should fall under control of the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union. Others, including many in the EU, feel that the system should be managed via some sort of public-private partnership.

Mark Foley's sexuality was never much of a secret to those who served with him in the House.

The New York Times and every major newspaper in Florida had been writing articles on the congressman's agonizingly inept attempts to remain closeted for years. Indeed, it was the embarrassing manner in which he had attempted to cloak his sexuality that prevented Foley from securing his party's nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2004 and again this year.

Tragically, as a Florida Republican, Foley felt that if he wanted to remain a political player he needed to live a lie. He was probably wrong; Republicans who have come out of the closet, such as retiring Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe, have often thrived politically. Openly gay men and lesbians have been elected and reelected to the House as Democrats and Republicans, and Foley -- whose relatively moderate voting record could have appealed to both Main Street Republicans and Democrats -- might well have broken the barrier in the Senate.

A revolt is brewing among our retired Army and Marine generals. This rebellion--quiet and nonconfrontational, but remarkable nonetheless--comes not because their beloved forces are bearing the brunt of ground combat in Iraq but because the retirees see the US adventure in Mesopotamia as another Vietnam-like, strategically failed war, and they blame the errant, arrogant civilian leadership at the Pentagon. The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the Big Red One). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.

In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was not a competent wartime leader who made dismal strategic decisions that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq. Rumsfeld, he said, dismissed honest dissent and did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.

[Allen] praised Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Americans United to Preserve Marriage president Gary Bauer and the American Family Association's Don Wildmon, as The Four Horsemen, a reference to Notre Dame's legendary 1924 backfield--or perhaps the original quartet from the Book of Revelations.

[As] Allen sought to dampen the public controversy over his mishandling of his Jewish heritage, his association with these Four Horsemen simply called attention to Dobson's and Perkins's problematic utterances. Dobson's Focus on the Family, for example, published an article in its Citizen magazine last February attacking the parents of federal judge Stephen Reinhardt (whose step-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor) for telling their son "tales of horrific violence" about the Holocaust "that lacked the redemptive power of Christ's atonement." The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly condemned Wildmon for his conspiratorial diatribes against "secular Jews." And Perkins, for his part, paid $82,500 to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for his phone-bank list and then spoke at a 2001 fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, America's largest white supremacist organization.

You would think that a consensus report from all sixteen US intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the President. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence.

Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded what me worry countenance.

A long-awaited bill to bolster U.S. science and engineering was introduced today in the Senate. The 212-page measure, called the American Competitiveness Innovation Act, has attracted bipartisan support from leading senators and the strong backing of the scientific community. But plans to put the bill on the fast track for Senate passage this week have been abandoned, leaving it for a lameduck session of Congress held after the 7 November elections.

The bill borrows liberally from an acclaimed October 2005 report issued by the National Academies, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. That report, in turn, was based on a request from Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), to describe the 10 most important actions that the federal government should take to preserve U.S. leadership in science. At the top of the panel's list were strengthening U.S. science and math education--both attracting more students into science and better teacher preparation and professional development--and doubling federal spending on research in the physical sciences. This was followed by several proposals that would foster innovation across government, industry, and academia. The panel put a price tag of $9 billion a year on the package.

A sprawling array of cases challenging the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of American's domestic and international communications may be moved to an obscure secret court in Washington, if a pending bill to alter the nation's surveillance law is voted on before the upcoming recess.

Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter's National Security Surveillance Act would allow the Attorney General to move surveillance cases involving state secrets to the little-known Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has only heard one case in its 28-year history.

National security experts and civil liberties advocates assail the idea, saying it would diminish the chance that the government's controversial snooping would face open judicial scrutiny.

A strike group of six US naval vessels have orders to depart for the Persian Gulf October 1. Wary critics of the Bush Administration and members of the military are raising flags that an October surprise attack on Iran is imminent. Others are skeptical.

As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have issued orders for a major strike group of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

As Time writes in its cover story, What Would War Look Like?, evidence of the forward deployment of minesweepers and word that the chief of naval operations had asked for a reworking of old plans for mining Iranian harbors suggest that a much discussed--but until now largely theoretical--prospect has become real: that the U.S. may be preparing for war with Iran.

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received recent orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

Just a short editor's note: I really despise headlines with question marks in them, but I am just trying to keep this as accurate to the seeded article as possible.

Technology and Voluntary Cutbacks Urged

The Bush administration yesterday laid out a long-term strategic plan for using technology to curb the impact of global warming, reiterating its position that basic scientific research and voluntary actions can curb greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

Addressing complaints by environmentalists and some scientists that Bush has not done enough to cut the nation's emissions of such gases, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said the 244-page Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan promotes initiatives such as sequestering carbon dioxide before it enters the atmosphere and promoting hydrogen-powered cars.

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Energy Department officials described the plan -- which has taken four years to produce -- before the House Science subcommittee on energy yesterday. It immediately came under fire from senior Hill Republicans as well as several outside scientists and policy experts.

It's good as far as it goes, but it needs to go a lot further, House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said in an interview after the hearing. It's good to look ahead, but people expect something immediate, as well as futuristic.

The administration claims it wasn't telling scientists what to say about climate change; e-mails obtained by Salon prove otherwise.

In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he'd been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.

At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. (The e-mails were provided to several members of Congress for comment; Rep. Henry Waxman's office has now published them).

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When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?

The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way

This uncertainty is central to the difficulty of tackling the problem. Since the costs of climate change are unknown, the benefits of trying to do anything to prevent it are, by definition, unclear. What's more, if they accrue at all, they will do so at some point in the future. So is it really worth using public resources now to avert an uncertain, distant risk, especially when the cash could be spent instead on goods and services that would have a measurable near-term benefit?

If the risk is big enough, yes. Governments do it all the time. They spend a small slice of tax revenue on keeping standing armies not because they think their countries are in imminent danger of invasion but because, if it happened, the consequences would be catastrophic. Individuals do so too. They spend a little of their incomes on household insurance not because they think their homes are likely to be torched next week but because, if it happened, the results would be disastrous. Similarly, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the risk of a climatic catastrophe is high enough for the world to spend a small proportion of its income trying to prevent one from happening.

One time climate skeptics, The Economist weighs in with a special issue on climate change.

President Bush is preparing an astonishing U-turn on global warming, senior Washington sources say.

After years of trying to sabotage agreements to tackle climate change he is drawing up plans to control emissions of carbon dioxide and rapidly boost the use of renewable energy sources.

Administration insiders privately refer to the planned volte-face as Mr Bush's Nixon goes to China moment, recalling how the former president amazed the world after years of refusing to deal with its Communist regime. Hardline global warming sceptics, however, are already publicly attacking the plans.

The rethink follows increasing pressure on the White House from Republican governors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, the mayors of more than 300 cities, business leaders and Congress.

For the Bush White House, this week's showdown with the Senate over US treatment of detainees sets up a rematch with a triumvirate of GOP senators who have been the president's strongest supporters in the war in Iraq - and his most effective critics.

Sens. John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina led the first push-back in the Senate over the war when they opposed the White House over its torture policy last year.

Now the trio is on a new collision course with the White House over how to bring suspected terrorists to trial - a must-pass bill, since the US Supreme Court overturned the president's plan for military tribunals in June.

Senator McCain, a former prisoner of war in North Vietnam, knows torture firsthand and brings moral authority to the issue. Torture is wrong, he says. Anything that weakens international protections for detainees, threatens US troops in this and future wars, he said on Friday.