Global Hoax

By ROBERT L. PARK

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.

There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?

Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate.

In 1993, however, with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the situation began to change. The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.

In ruling that such testimony was not credible because of lack of supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as "gatekeepers," screening juries from testimony based on scientific nonsense. Recognizing that judges are not scientists, the court invited judges to experiment with ways to fulfill their gatekeeper responsibility.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.

One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that they had discovered cold fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the discovery and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed scientists to judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer, or the Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science.

Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim to report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition. But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost the signal, which suggests that it isn't really there.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, "data" is not the plural of "anecdote."

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries. There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands of years ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed miraculous remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative medicine" is part of that myth.

Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation. A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong.

I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).

MARC HANSEN
REGISTER COLUMNIST

Skyler Bartels kept looking over his shoulder. It's a habit he picked up living at the Windsor Heights Wal-Mart for three days.

Really living there. Eating, sleeping, checking out the DVDs, never leaving. The plan was to spend his entire spring break there. Under the radar.

Some kids go to Cancun. Skyler Bartels, a Drake University sophomore from Harvard, Neb., went to the garden and patio department.

The great experiment had been over for a few days, but Bartels was still in great-experiment mode. As we sat at a booth in the Subway sandwich shop toward the front of the store, he glanced at the friendly white-haired Wal-Mart greeters.

Were they onto him? Why were they staring? Bartels was still suffering from greeter phobia.

He was never out to get Wal-Mart, he explained. This wasn't supposed to be an expose.

Bartels didn't burst through the door stewing about low wages, poor working conditions or the way the big chain chews up Mom and Pop.

This was part sociology experiment, part school project. Bartels is a writing major. Maybe he'd put it all down on paper and pick up an independent study credit, or even sell it to somebody someday.

Maybe he'd move on to another Wal-Mart and produce a documentary, like the guy who ate nothing but McDonald's for a month.

Bartels got the idea from a commercial. Was it true what those happy, shiny people were telling him: "Always low prices. Always"?

Could the biggest, most successful discount store in the world really meet his every need? Twenty-four hours a day? That's what the TV spots were telling him.

"That was the goal," he said. "To buy everything I needed at Wal-Mart."

His father told him to go for it and offered to bankroll the project.

On Sunday, his girlfriend dropped him off at the front door and drove away. The game was on.

He didn't tell Wal-Mart what he was doing, and it's probably a good thing.

"We weren't aware of this," said corporate spokeswoman Sharon Weber, "but it's not something we condone. We're a retailer, not a hotel."

A Drake law professor gave Bartels some advice: The store is private property. If they ask you to leave, go quickly and quietly.

Bartels walked into the big box wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He had his cell phone in case of emergency, his heart medicine, his bank card, two forms of identification, and nothing else.

He spent the first afternoon watching "Chicken Little," the animated Disney film. He watched it all. Deleted scenes, interviews, outtakes. Everything.

"They had it on a continuous loop the whole time I was there," he said. "I'd pass through the department and say, 'Oh, it's about halfway through' or, 'I like this part. I think I'll watch it again.' "

Bartels decided not to buy anything he couldn't carry around the store. He ended up with a jacket (for storage space), a note pad, some pencils, an electronic voice recorder, a three-pack of underwear, a comb, a toothbrush and some toothpaste.

He lived off energy drinks, doughnuts, yogurt and Subway sandwiches.

He figures he slept four hours out of the 41 in captivity. He'd catch a few minutes whenever he could - in a Subway booth or a restroom stall, which isn't recommended, especially with the night stockers bursting in every five minutes.

"I got to the point," he said, "where I was adept at falling asleep on the toilet seat, which sounds kind of weird."

The best place for dozing was lawn and garden, where the lights weren't so bright. Nobody worked there between 2 and 4 a.m. Bartels found a lawn chair, kicked back and wondered how life could be better.

Life would be perfect, he discovered, without the worker who showed up before dawn to stock plants. Bartels hopped up and pretended to be looking for home patio furniture.

That 1 to 4 a.m. shift was the daily low point. Subway was closed. Bartels was often the only Wal-Mart shopper, which made it harder to blend into the cosmetics and sporting goods.

"It's just me and the stockers then," he said, "and every once in a while somebody who needs a Swiffer at 2 in the morning."

He was sitting on the floor reading a magazine at 3 a.m. when a man, shivering from the cold, walked in, bought an atlas and left. "You'd see a lot of people reading," Bartels said. "Cosmopolitan was a huge favorite. But nobody ever checked the magazine section. I never saw anybody stocking books or magazines."

He found it strange the way the same two guys kept showing up in the middle of the night to buy movies.

"They looked like ' Devil's Rejects ' kind of guys. But they ended up buying stuff like 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' "

Bartels was playing a boxing video game at 1 a.m. when a man appeared out of nowhere, giving him pointers, teaching him how to throw a left jab and a right "steamliner."

Steamliner?

"Yeah, I still don't know what that is."

He met some interesting people during normal hours, too. There was the military recruiter who told him he had what it takes.

I looked at Bartels. Long hair, scruffy college-kid beard, slender build. Pleasant, laid-back demeanor. I had to know. What does it take?

"He said I had good posture and didn't look sad."

Bartels ran into a nun, Sister Mary Sue, who was fun and energetic and looked the opposite of sad.

He saw some strange sights. He followed two birds who swooped into the produce section and swiped some grapes. He named them Laurel and Hardy.

"One sat on the grapes, and the other pulled them off," Bartels said, insisting he wasn't hallucinating.

By Tuesday morning, not even halfway through the great experiment, the store was on to him.

"I noticed the greeters pointing at me," he said. "Somebody got on the intercom and announced a meeting of the department managers. One of the shift managers came up to me and asked, very politely, if I needed anything. I could have told him where everything was."

His debit account was frozen. He was exhausted and paranoid. Game over. His med-student brother picked him up and took him away.

Bartels now regrets the early exit.

"I should have stuck it out, at least to see what the meeting was about. It never got tedious at all, which was surprising. But isn't that how it works in real life? Don't we do pretty much the same thing every day?"

Like real life, you can't get everything at Wal-Mart (new slogan: Not a Hotel). Bartels couldn't get a shower or a bed. He couldn't find one of those miniature bottles of shampoo.

Most of the creature comforts were covered, though. When he wanted to get his hair washed, he made an appointment at the Wal-Mart hair salon.

Real life or not, for a few days this was home. And Bartels figured he might as well treat it like home. When he had nothing better to do, he roamed the aisles, putting away items that were out of place.

"It was a good way to keep busy," he said. "It took a whole lot of time, and if somebody came up and yelled at me, at least I was being productive and beneficial to the store."

Bartels got to feeling so productive and beneficial, he even filled out a job application.

"I wasn't sure how to answer some of the questions," he said. " 'Where can we reach you?' That was a tough one. The electronics department?"
test

Global Warming Heats Up
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis will hit so soon—and what we can do about it
By JEFFREY KLUGER

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry—a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.—exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast—when the emergency becomes commonplace—something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

The image of Earth as organism—famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock—has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.

"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."

And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers—many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies—have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new Time/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.

A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.

Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.

Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."

CO2 AND THE POLES

As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to nasa scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.

It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.

Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.

FEEDBACK LOOPS

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it. That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years—since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (ncar) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10(degree)F, locking the continent in glaciers.

What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.

"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."

DROUGHT

As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.

Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events—the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years—further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by ncar, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.

FLORA AND FAUNA Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.

Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says. Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.

With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.

In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears—prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones—are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

WHAT ABOUT US?

It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for ncar in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."

What we can do

So much environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions—an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record—from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.

The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when nasa researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told Time. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.

The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."

Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform—the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.

"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.

That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem. The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.

--With reporting by David Bjerklie and Andrea Dorfman/ New York, Dan Cray/ Los Angeles, Greg Fulton/ Atlanta, Andrea Gerlin/ London, Rita Healy/ Denver and Eric Roston/ Washington

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RUSH: Now, yesterday we told you that Senator Feingold had a press conference and mentioned me as the primary right-wing critic and also mischaracterized my support for President Bush, saying that I basically said that the president could revive his reputation by breaking the law. This is about Feingold's censure movement and his attempt to get Bush censured because of the "domestic wiretap scandal" which he desperately hopes to convince people is a violation of the law. So before we get to the audio sound bites of that -- we have that. You know what Feingold did is he essentially rolled a bomb down the aisle of the Senate floor and sent everybody scattering, even members of his own party.

Well, he's had a couple of them join him now. Feingold is joined by Barbara Boxer and Tom Harkin of Iowa. But aside from that, nobody has really signed onto this thing, and yesterday Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton, a Democrat, "strongly criticized Feingold's resolution to censure President Bush over domestic spying. 'It's an overreaching step by somebody who's grandstanding and running for president at the expense of his own party and his own country,' said Dayton of Feingold. 'I think it's a very dangerous territory for the democracy that we have in this country to be playing around with those kinds of resolutions without any consultations from his colleagues. I think it was irresponsible.'

(story) "Dayton is a member of Feingold's own party from a neighboring state and has himself been one of Bush's harshest critics. Dayton said he and his Democratic colleagues were blindsided by Feingold's proposal made last Sunday on ABC News. 'For somebody who wants to lead our nation and our party I think consultation forewarning is a prerequisite to that kind of leadership.'" Well, this is what happens when you have to play to your hard left-wing base. This is a good lesson for these people. Feingold is going to find out what's going to happen to him out there when he starts his presidential campaign. These guys are not used to getting criticism. But when you kowtow to the far-left fringe of your party, you're opening yourself up, and you watch. They're going to be profoundly surprised.
I also think that Dayton coming out with his statement here and some of these other Democrats... Isn't Dayton quitting? I don't think he's running again. He's not running again. So we could have a Republican pickup here. The GOP could pick up his seat in Minnesota. It's not that far out of the realm of possibility. You know, I think he could have a dual purpose here, folks. He just wants to tamp down all the lunacy on the left until after November. It's just a convenient way for the Democrats to hold onto some semblance of middle America and still get the insane left's support. So there may have been consultation, we don't know, but let's go to Feingold's press conference yesterday. And again, he's given us a shift, showing us who the Democrats really are. Here's the first of three sound bites.

FEINGOLD: At the judiciary committee hearing, uh, that I attended with seven constitutional scholars, I asked those who believe in this inherent power whether this inherent power would extend to assassinating American citizens --

RUSH: (scoffs)

FEINGOLD: -- and none of them could give me a colorable or credible answer that it would not.

RUSH: Oh-ho-ho-ho!

FEINGOLD: That's a dangerous doctrine, and that is the context that makes me think that censure is an appropriate -- and in fact measured -- response to this kind of an attempt at executive power.

RUSH: You gotta be kidding me! So Feingold is now suggesting that this law that Bush has cited to "spy on Americans" could lead to the assassination of Americans, and he brought seven scholars up there and none of them could say, "No, I can't see where this could be prevented." They're going nuts, folks! They're going nuts. Bush could nuke an American city! He might nuke the whole state of Wisconsin if Feingold is not careful here. He could probably get away with it under this law. I mean, if you can assassinate American citizens you could nuke 'em. This... (Laughing.) You've got to love this. "I asked those who believed in this inherent power..."

Don't forget "inherent power." Can we go back when this thing first came up? Inherent power was first used by Jamie Gorelick to describe President Clinton's inherent power to do just this kind of thing, this kind of surveillance, foreign surveillance. All previous presidents have done it. Our memories are short -- not on this program, but some people's memories are very short. I told you this is a gift. I haven't seen any outraged reaction to this. You have a United States senator here basically suggesting that this inherent power would allow the president to assassinate people. Here's the second bite. There are actually four bites. Here is the second of four. We've got an unidentified reporter saying, "I'm curious why you're even holding this news conference right now. Is this to sort of defend what you've triggered here?"

FEINGOLD: It seems to me appropriate when the spin machines are out there and the people are using various language to come out and reiterate my reasons for doing this. Uh, I think that the press decided, uh, immediately that somehow this was a bad thing for Democrats and a good thing for conservatives. The facts don't bear it out. You don't have the polls to prove it, the way my colleagues are responding to me suggests to me they're thinking about this, that they feel that there has to be some accountability. So the instant decision about the what the story is actually I think is going to backfire on those who made up the story. I don't get the feeling that I had on Monday about this. Yes, people were concerned. I'm not getting...that.
RUSH: So he says people had decided that his move is bad for Democrats but they don't have the polls to prove it. These people are all about polls. By the way, there is a poll on impeachment, and there is a poll on censure, and I'll get to that here in just a second. Here is his attack on me. He added this next little bit right after he finished the previous bite that you heard.

FEINGOLD: If the right wing really believes in this country that -- Rush Limbaugh and others that -- they can somehow turn the president's reputation around by saying, "You're darn right he violated the law, and it's a good thing," I think they're just as confused as they are about their Iraq policies. People aren't buying it anymore. Not only defy not regret it, I felt an absolute obligation to do it.

RUSH: Well, something's up here because nobody joins him other than a couple other kooks in the Senate. So he goes out there and has to call a press conference again to try to regain some credibility because his own party ran away from him on this, because he rolled a bomb in the Senate; everybody ran for cover, but now he's out there mischaracterizing what I said. I've never said that the president broke the law, just the exact opposite -- and that has been established by a whole bunch of people who have looked at this. This really isn't even an argument. It's an argument in the drive-by media. It's an argument in the Democratic Party. It's a false argument they're putting forth, but the law is clear, and it wasn't violated, and members of Congress were brought in on it, but you're not going to bring all of them in on it.

What I take from this is that Feingold has got to be in a weakened position here if he's going to run out and mischaracterize what me and others -- there are no "others," by the way. There's only me, what I am saying about this. Turn the president's reputation around by saying you're darn right he violated the law and it's a good thing? I never said it. In fact, I didn't say we've got to turn the president's reputation around. I said, "You guys are destroying yours. You're giving us a gift. You're telling everybody who you are. You are establishing that you've got in your DNA an aversion to national security. You just can't be trusted."

Where in the world is anything that I've said...? We can't find it. We went back to the transcripts. I searched my own memory. Well, there's nothing I said about the president reputation being revived by breaking the law. I haven't even talked about the president's reputation in this. I didn't talk about the president. I talked about the Democrats, the liberals, and what this position of Feingold's represents. So another question from a reporter: "You talk about your Democratic colleagues sort of cowering about this issue. I mean you look at all the polls getting consistently worse and the sort of frozen response. It's not like Democrats are against the idea. It's like they don't really even know how to express themselves on this issue. Why is that?"

FEINGOLD: When I used that word, which is a strong word, I use it in the form of a question: Why would people cower at a time when the president's numbers are so low? That was the context. There is a tendency in our party, unfortunately, that we have to break through to be afraid of taking a strong stand and stick to it. What the American people want are people that believe in something. There's this tendency as soon as the president and the spin machine comes out and says, "This means you folks are soft on terrorism," we let them intimidate us.

RUSH: Uh... (Laughing.) Now he has to explain why he accused his fellow Democrats of "cowering." He's right about one thing: Voters want people who believe in something. Unfortunately, they don't want what Senator Feingold believes in, and that has been pretty well demonstrated.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Play this sound bite again from Feingold. I want to think this through with you people.

FEINGOLD: At the judiciary committee hearing, uh, that I attended with seven constitutional scholars, uh, I asked those who believed in this inherent power whether this inherent power would extend to assassinating American citizens and none of them could give me a colorable or credible answer that it would not. That's a dangerous doctrine, and that is the context that makes me think that censure is an appropriate, in fact measured, response to this kind of an attempt at executive power.

RUSH: All right. Let's ask a question here, Senator Feingold. Why would a president order the assassination of someone in the United States? Let's really think this through for just a second and examine -- (interruption) no, no, no -- just what this is. This (interruption). Do not frown to me in there. This is really low-rent what this man has done here. When a police chief sends his officers to arrest or stop a killer, is he sending his officers to assassinate the killer? If the killer himself is killed by the cops because he won't agree to be apprehended, has he been assassinated? Does that make the police chief or the mayor or the governor assassins? Does it mean that they ordered an assassination?

See, to even come up with this as an example of what this whole story is about, Senator Feingold has to make you believe something like this has never happened and won't happen. But conjuring up images and circumstances that are extreme and have nothing to do with intercepting Al-Qaeda communications to prevent attacks on our homeland, is outrageous. He wants to talk about this -- I misspoke -- as though assassinations have happened! He just mentions this, throws it out there very casually -- oh, the president wants to order assassinations -- as though it's happened, and it may have happened with President Bush. Now, if you're going to voice such an example, he's got to try to make you believe this has happened.

But this has nothing to do with intercepting Al-Qaeda or terrorist communications to prevent attacks on this country. It has literally nothing to do with it. Now, he's not a dumb guy. He's a third-term United States senator. He is not dumb. There's a reason he's doing this, and it's disgusting. The extremism that the far left continues to resort to and turn to surprises even me sometimes as to how whacked out it can get. I think that Feingold and his buddies on the left actually think they are living in a police state. I think they actually do. I have come to the conclusion that they think that there may as well be Nazi swastika flags all over Washington, all over the country. Because they think they're being spied on; they think that they're being poisoned; they think that this is a police state and that they are imprisoned -- and he's now talking about assassinations, presidential assassinations!

The only government sanctioned assassination that I'm familiar with was the killing of the president of South Vietnam during the John Kennedy administration, but that didn't involve a US citizen here at home -- and this business of the president assassinating an American citizen, you have to understand how the audience that Feingold targets hears that, because these kooks that occupy the fringe of the Democratic Party are convinced Bush lied. They're calling him Hitler. "Bush kills." They are convinced it's possible. He's giving voice to a fear that they actually have, and he clearly is running for president. But they are definitely setting up impeachment, if they win either the House or the Senate. This censure movement is just the first stage of that, as I have mentioned to you on several other occasions. Bill in Anniston, Alabama. I'm glad you called. Welcome to Open Line Friday.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. If you look at Feingold's statement, he doesn't say the scholars didn't give him answers. He says that their answers were not credible to him, which really doesn't mean anything. It just means he didn't believe their answers.

RUSH: Well, I know and that's another obfuscation. This is another attempt to manipulate people and their thinking. You're absolutely right. Just because somebody can't come up with an answer... The whole thing is outrageous and ridiculous. This is why, though, I say this is not mainstream. This is not something that the majority of the American people run around thinking about, that the president's going to assassinate American citizens and the president is spying on them. It is a fear that is totally occupying the minds of the American people on the left, the fringe.
But I just think this is despicable. This is absolutely despicable, and it's hard to characterize and describe the kind of rage and hatred these people have to be harboring day in and day out that is festering, that would even lead them to this. So he's just thrown another bomb out there. I don't know how many people in the mainstream press are even talking about this aspect of it. I mean, I've got the story. There are two stories have been written about this since the press conference, and none of them mention the word. I never heard this 'til I saw this sound bite and listened to it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go to Chicago. This is Tom. Nice to have you with us, sir.

CALLER: Rush?

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I can't believe what I've been hearing on the radio this morning. Feingold. You portrayed him as being a person that's not really that dumb much. He's been in Congress for three sessions, whatever. How does he expect us to eat this stuff? I mean, come on! This guy is the Eli Whitney of spin machines.

RUSH: (laughs)

CALLER: He's accusing other people of spinning. I've never heard of anybody spinning as well as this guy is trying to spin, but it's just such an intelligence-insulting conference that he just had. I can't believe it.

RUSH: Well, I know. When I say he's not stupid -- and, by the way, can I ask you a question, ladies and gentlemen? Was the Waco invasion a series of assassinations? Well, no. Let me just ask the question. Since he's bringing up the fact that presidents have the power to assassinate under this inherent power in the Constitution that Democrats have cited Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Reagan. They've all cited this inherent four in the Constitution. He's gone in this far-out, extreme position that includes the inherent power to assassinate American citizens. All right, well, he's gotta make you believe that something that hasn't happened and won't happen, is pretty much routine.

So let's ask him. Was the Waco invasion a government assassination, a series of assassinations? When I say Feingold is not dumb, it's a fine line, meaning that intellectually he's not dumb, and politically I know exactly what he's doing with this. When I say he's not dumb, I'm trying to further indict his motive here. This motive, folks, is horrible. He's talking about inherent power to assassinate citizens, presidential power to assassinate citizens. We're not even talking about that. This spy program has nothing to do with assassinations. It's all about detecting terrorist operations in this country. That's all it is. Look what he's taking it to, and look at how he's using it, and to whom he's playing here.

I remember when I first started this program and the critics (and they're still out there, of course) were accusing me of -- even Clinton, accused me of -- the Oklahoma City bombing. Actually McCurry did it, but it was the Clinton administration. They're out there saying that the anti-government rhetoric on this program and the hate-government rhetoric on this program inspired the people that went and blew up that building. That was outrageous, and we called 'em on it, and then they "corrected." Oh, no, no, no. We didn't mean Limbaugh. We're talking about the Michigan militia short-wave radio network!

Come on. (interruption) That's what they said, Brian. You weren't around then, but they blamed at it on the Michigan militia short-wave radio people. They did have a little short-wave radio network up there, the Michigan militia. Remember, we got footage nightly on the news of these 57-, 80-, 90-year-old guys in camouflage trudging through the woods as posing a great threat to the great government of Bill Clinton? Well, this is what Feingold is actually doing. He's talking to people and he knows that they're demented but he doesn't care because he needs their support. He knows they're demented. He knows they think they live in a police state, that they've lost all their freedoms, that they have no freedom to move around. They're being spied on!
Now all of a sudden he talks about in this censure movement the fact, "Well, you know, the president could even run around and assassinate people and nobody can tell me that he doesn't have that power." Whoa, my God! The paranoia that he's ratcheting up already existing in these people's warped minds? This is dangerous stuff that he's doing here, and it's irresponsible. When I say he's a smart guy, I'm impugning the motive even more because he knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows how irresponsible it is, and he knows how off-subject it is. He's just trying to get a head start on the presidential nomination. These people I'm telling you will wreck the country in order to get their power back, and then they'll do what they think they have to do to fix the country later, but they will do that. They will tear this country apart. They don't care what they have to do to get their power back, and this is just an example of it. Here's Frank in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Welcome, sir.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, how you doing?

RUSH: Just fine. Thank you.

CALLER: In the Air Force I've been hearing all the stuff come out about the NSA and stuff, you know, about Bush doing the wiretaps and stuff? What about all these other countries like North Korea, Iran, Al-Qaeda, who are spying on us with the same means, and the Democrats aren't doing anything about it? They're not even bringing it up.

RUSH: Yeah. Well, it doesn't help them to bring it up.

CALLER: I mean, it's kind of counterproductive to what President Bush and our military is trying to do. We have people, you know, intercepting our electronic communications from other countries, and do they care about that? Do they care that that might put our service members in danger?

RUSH: No. You have to understand where we're coming from here. You have to understand who these people are. These people -- it may surprise you. I talked to David Horowitz. I interviewed him for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter. He's got a book out: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and his crusade is to expose the socialism and the Marxism and the liberalism among professors and institutions of higher learning. He told me of the 400,000 higher institution professors, that there are at least 50,000 who are anti-America, who have chosen Al-Qaeda, who routinely root for this country's defeat -- openly, not in a clandestine way -- and it may be more than 50,000. You have to understand that in this country.

We all think that we're a part of the great United States of America, that we're all patriots, and that we all love our country. There are plenty of people in this country that hate it. There are people in this country, and I don't want to go into the reasons for it because we've done it for 18 years, but the sum total is, this country's guilty. This country steals all of the resources in the world and we use them up, and we are the reason that there are poor people. We are the reason there are oppressed people. We are the oppressors. We are the imperialists. We deserved to get hit on 9/11. We deserved to have our military sabotaged. We deserve to have our own communications listened in to. It's unfair that a nation should be as powerful and rich as we are.

Because the only way it could happen is if we've stolen it from the rest of the world, and now we are destroying the world with global warming, with our own prosperity. There are more people in this country who believe that than you would care to admit, and so when you wonder, "Well, where is the concern for...? They hope that we lose! There are people -- and they are leftists; they are socialists; they are Democrats -- they hope that we lose. Now, they're not all Democrats, but my point is they don't reside on the right. They reside on the left, and the left and the way-out left and the far-gone left, the insane left, lunatic fringe left. They're way, way out there, and the left just keeps going all the way to infinity and they're on their way to reaching it. So you have to, I think, have a credible understanding -- and that's why when you have a United States senator start talking about the inherent power of a president to assassinate American citizens, it's going to resonate with some people out there.

What the blak is this? Well it's the newest drink from Coca Cola! Can you believe they are introducing a coffee/coke drink? Now that's quite a combination. I wonder if the bling will be the blak of this? Huh...just wondering..

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cosmic nebulae usually look like blobs in space, but astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope reported on Wednesday they have found a nebula twisted like the double helix of DNA.

"Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles. Most nebulae are "formless, amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas," Morris said in a statement, adding that this one "indicates a high degree of order."

The discovery of the twisted nebula, which stretches across 80 light-years at the center of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth, was reported in the current edition of the journal Nature.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

"We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule," said Morris, lead author of the Nature article.

DNA, which forms the basic material in chromosomes, has a molecule that looks like a twisted ladder, known as a double helix.

The strands of the nebula may be torqued by twisted magnetic fields at the Milky Way's center, Morris said by telephone.

These magnetic fields are indirectly spawned by the gaping black hole at the galactic heart, he said. Black holes are massive matter-sucking drains in space, pulling in everything around them so powerfully that not even light can escape.

But before the matter falls into the black hole, it swirls around its edges. This rotation twists the magnetic fields, which in turn twist the nebula's strands, Morris said.

The nebula is relatively close to the black hole, just 300 light-years away. Earth is more than 25,000 light-years away.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope detects the infrared energy emitted by objects in space with high sensitivity and resolution, enabling it to clearly see the nebula's distinctive shape.

What is the truth? Is this a newly discovered cave or a new hoax? Only time will reveal the truth!