Friday, August 6, 2009
They look like a grass-roots campaign, but theyre fakes. The letters purported to be from registered nonprofit groups. Rep. Edward Markey (D- MA), a sponsor of the climate bill, has
begun an inquiry into whether the fake letters amount to fraud. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity disavowed the scurrilous tactic and said it was considering legal action
against the Hawthorne Group, a firm it paid to make the climate bill disappear. Hawthorne, however, is only a contractor. It hired Bonner and Associates to make the hit. The founder of
the firm, Jack Bonner, laid the blame squarely on a wayward employee who has since been fired. Thus was the purity of the legislative process restored. But why had this employee taken it
upon himself to do such a thing? A lowly temp, he was paid according to the number of fraudulent letters he sent to
congressional offices. And nobody supervised his work?
I am deeply grateful to those who send me news stories I should know about. I often make use of them if I think theyre true. This week I got an Aug 4 article from Newsmax.com: Record
Lows Dispel Global Warming Myth by Phil Brennan. Apparently, the author is unable to distinguish between weather and climate. Ordinarily, I would prefer waterboarding to reading this
libertarian rag, but it was sent by a Nobel prize-winning physicist. The first words below the title were "Former Vice President Al Gore, father of the great global warming hoax" I'm
pretty sure Al Gore did not invent global warming, but these people are consumed by their hatred for Gore. I could guess what was coming next: A list of American cities that have been
experiencing unusually low temperatures this summer.
Seattle and Portland were having their highest temperature ever, which also has nothing to do with global warming; of course, they were not mentioned.
Launched in March, the planet-hunting satellite took aim at a yellow star in Cygnus named HAT-P-7 and quickly found a planet. The planet had been discovered before by other means, but
the ease with which it was found bodes well for Kepler's ability to carry out its mission of finding earthlike planets. This was not one; it was too massive and too hot. We will never
travel to other stars, but there is almost no limit to how closely we can learn to examine them. It's the start of our next great adventure.
The axiom has been that the wealthier a nation the lower its fertility.
But above some threshold of development that trend no longer holds, according to a report released in Wednesday's Nature. Australia, Sweden, France, the United States and Britain are
experiencing modest baby booms.
Economists, who worry about support for an aging population, hail this as good news. It's not. Indicator after indicator seems to show that we have already exceeded the population we
can sustain without severe environmental decline.
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