Global Hoax

By Michael Schirber
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 30 March 2005
09:09 am ET

In the past million years, the Earth experienced a major ice age about every 100,000 years. Scientists have several theories to explain this glacial cycle, but new research suggests the primary driving force is all in how the planet leans.

The Earth’s rotation axis is not perpendicular to the plane in which it orbits the Sun. It's offset by 23.5 degrees. This tilt, or obliquity, explains why we have seasons and why places above the Arctic Circle have 24-hour darkness in winter and constant sunlight in the summer.

But the angle is not constant – it is currently decreasing from a maximum of 24 degrees towards a minimum of 22.5 degrees. This variation goes in a 40,000-year cycle.

Peter Huybers of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have compared the timing of the tilt variations with that of the last seven ice ages. They found that the ends of those periods – called glacial terminations – corresponded to times of greatest tilt.

"The apparent reason for this is that the annual average sunlight in the higher latitudes is greater when the tilt is at maximum," Huybers told LiveScience in a telephone interview.

More sunlight seasonally hitting polar regions would help to melt the ice sheets. This tilt effect seems to explain why ice ages came more quickly – every 40,000 years, just like the tilt variations -- between two and one million years ago.

"Obliquity clearly was important at one point," Huybers said.

The researchers speculate that the glacier period has become longer in the last million years because the Earth has gotten slightly colder – the upshot being that every once in a while the planet misses a chance to thaw out.

The glacial cycles can be measured indirectly in the ratio of heavy to light oxygen in ocean sediments. Simply put, the more ice there is on Earth, the less light oxygen there is in the ocean. The oxygen ratio is recorded in the fossils of small organisms – called foraminifera, or forams for short – that make shells out of the available oxygen in the ocean.

"These ‘bugs’ have been around for a long time – living all across the ocean," Huybers said. "When they die, they fall to the seafloor and become part of the sediment."

Drilled out sediment cores from the seafloor show variations with depth in the ratio of heavy to light oxygen – an indication of changes in the amount of ice over time. This record of climate change goes back tens of millions of years.

By improving the dating of these sediments, Huybers and Wunsch have showed that rapid decreases in the oxygen ratio – corresponding to an abrupt melting of ice – occurred when the Earth had its largest tilt.

Other orbital oddities

The significance of this relationship calls into question other explanations for the frequency of ice ages.

One popular theory has been that the noncircular shape, or eccentricity, of Earth’s orbit around the Sun could be driving the glacial cycle, since the variations in the eccentricity have a 100,000-year period. Curiously different, but interesting.

By itself, though, the eccentricity is too small of an effect. According to Huybers, changes in the orbit shape cause less than a tenth of a percent difference in the amount of sunlight striking the planet.

But some scientists believe a larger effect could be generated if the eccentricity fluctuations are coupled with the precession, or wobble of the Earth’s axis. It's like what is seen with a spinning top as it slows down.

Earth’s axis is currently pointing at the North Star, Polaris, but it is always rotating around in a conical pattern. In about 10,000 years, it will point toward the star Vega, which will mean that winter in the Northern Hemisphere will begin in June instead of January. After 20,000 years, the axis will again point at Polaris.

Huybers said that the seasonal shift from the precession added to the eccentricity fluctuations could have an important effect on glacier melting, but he and Wunsch found that the combined model could not match the timing in the sediment data.

Skipping beats

The question, then, that Huybers and Wunsch had to answer: How does the 40,000-year tilt cycle make a 100,000-year glacial cycle? A more careful sediment dating has shown is that the time between ice ages may on average be 100,000 years, but the durations are sometimes 80,000 years, sometimes 120,000 years -- both numbers are divisible by 40,000. It appears there was not a mass melting every time the tilt reached its maximum.

"The Earth is skipping obliquity beats," Huybers explained.

The planet only recently started missing melting opportunities. Although the researchers have no corroborating evidence, they hypothesize that the skipping is due to an overall cooling of the planet.

The last major glacial thaw was 10,000 years ago, which means that the Earth is scheduled to head into another ice age. Whether human influences could reverse this, Huybers was hesitant to speculate. Other researchers have found evidence that the process of climate warming can set up conditions that create a global chill.

"What we have here is a great laboratory for seeing how climate changes naturally," he said. "But this is a 100,000-year cycle, whereas global warming is happening a thousand times faster.”

This is what we are up against! These people are nothing more than raving loons!

September 13, 2006
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

THE tea bag, a clever enough idea at first, went terribly awry somewhere along the way, at least in the view of people who love to savor their tea. Now it is in the process of large-scale reinvention, and some of those who currently shun it with almost ostentatious disdain are very likely to be won over.

At age 100 or so, the old bag is increasingly being filled with fine whole leaf tea, the kind connoisseurs brew in their teapots, and the bag itself has been redesigned in shapes that are not only elegant but constructed to allow those flavorful leaves to show what they’ve got.

With tea sales in the United States now four times what they were a decade ago — about $6.2 billion annually, according to the Tea Association of the USA, a trade group — the American tea drinker seems ready for a change for the better.

The change, some say, is overdue. Look closely at a conventional tea bag in your cupboard or in the paper cup from the local deli. Chances are that instead of leaves it is filled with indistinguishable bits, the detritus left after tea leaves are sifted and graded. The tea industry calls it dust, and the beverage it makes is likely to be rusty-looking and often bitterly tannic. But it no longer has to be, nor is it necessary to brew a whole pot of tea to achieve something better tasting.

Perhaps the surest sign that the tea world is changing is this: Lipton, the world’s largest tea company and a division of Unilever, will start selling tea bags containing long leaf teas in supermarkets nationwide next month.

Instead of paper, the leaves will be enveloped by nylon mesh bags in a delicate pyramid shape.

Lipton is following the lead of American businesses like Harney & Sons, Mighty Leaf, Adagio and the Highland Tea Company, which for several years have sold tea bags filled with high-quality full-leaf teas, ones with complex, often floral, herbaceous, spicy or fruity nuances.

Smelling a trend, new companies, like Revolution Tea, Numi Tea, Two Leaves and a Bud, and Tea Forté, have formed expressly to sell fine teas in tea bags. Harrisons & Crosfield, from England, and the luxury Parisian tea purveyors Le Palais des Thés and Mariage Frères have also introduced tea bags.

“We decided to put some of our teas in tea bags because that’s the way most people drink tea,” said Wanja Michuki, the president of the Highland Tea Company, in Montclair, N.J., which sells fine teas from Kenya, the leading exporter of tea worldwide.

James Wong, a Unilever vice president and general manager of Lipton, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., said the company’s research showed that “every consumer is becoming a gourmand.’’

“They want long leaf tea, but they can be intimidated by buying and brewing it,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to simplify it, making it convenient and accessible, and it’s appealing to new consumers as well as tea lovers.”

Lipton’s new line, called Pyramid, took the company two years to develop. It offers six varieties of long leaf tea, all but one flavored with bits of dried fruit or other seasonings. Only Black Pearl, a black tea blend, is unflavored.

“Consumers have reacted positively to the flavorings,” said John Cheetham, Lipton’s Royal Estates tea master, who selects and blends teas. “And we have Black Pearl to appeal to the purist.”

Even the best tea companies have introduced flavored teas in response to consumer demand, but over the years their reputations have been based on the quality of their oolongs, Darjeelings and senchas.

Mr. Cheetham acknowledged that Lipton’s flavored varieties were “entry level” teas. And they are a far cry from Harney & Sons’s Dragon Pearl Jasmine or Mighty Leaf’s Darjeeling Choice Estate, which are sold in bags that cost 30 cents to $2 each and available at tea shops, fancy food shops and online. Lipton’s Pyramid teas, at $3.49 for 20 tea bags, cost less than 20 cents a cup. Ordinary tea bags average 2 to 8 cents a cup.

“Lipton’s Pyramid will bring premium tea to the masses,” Mr. Cheetham said.

That is the very attitude that drove the company’s founder, Thomas Lipton, an English tea merchant. By buying his own tea estates in the late 1800’s, he made tea, which had been an aristocratic beverage, more affordable and popular.

Thomas Sullivan, the New York tea merchant who is credited with inventing the tea bag about 100 years ago, used the bags at first to send samples to his customers. The idea caught on, and by the 1920’s the tea bag was commercially established.

But companies began compromising quality, and before long the little paper pouches were filled with the lowest grades of tea. Consumers did not object. In fact, they liked the fact that the minute particles in tea bags required but a few seconds in hot water to produce deeply colored, strong flavored liquid.

In 1929 Lipton began packing tea in paper tea bags. In 1954 the company introduced its patented double-wall tea bag, which exposed more of the tea to the hot water and took even less time to brew.

Brewing tea from fine tea leaves takes longer, as much as five minutes, for the infusion to develop. And the leaves themselves require more space to unfurl, which is why the better teas are put in pyramid-shape bags, or larger pouches, often made of silk, muslin or nylon mesh (and some hand-sewn). You can see the leaves swell as they come in contact with the hot water.

Like coffee lovers who moved up from making instant coffee to grinding their own estate-grown beans fresh for each cup, many American tea drinkers have graduated to whole leaf teas. Though there are myriad gadgets on the market, like little metal infusers, for brewing a single cup from whole tea leaves, they do not eliminate the chore of cleaning up the soggy remains. Recognizing the demand for convenience, Ito En, a Japanese tea company that has a store on Madison Avenue, has introduced fine nylon mesh bags, $1 each, that can be filled with a cup’s worth of tea, brewed and discarded.

Somewhat surprisingly, English tea companies appear to be the slowest to catch on to the trend of fine tea in tea bags. The English often drink tea with milk and sugar, so they like it dark and strong, just the way cheap tea bags make it. “The English consumer is less adventurous than the American,” Mr. Cheetham said.

Until recently, Americans considered the English to be the standard-bearers for proper tea drinking. But the influence of Japan, which was a bigger supplier of tea to the American market before World War II, has grown in recent years. Many Americans got their first taste of green tea at a sushi bar and have come to appreciate its refined delicacy and earthiness. Since 1998 sales of green tea have increased at a faster rate in America than any other kind of loose or bagged tea.

Joseph P. Simrany, the president of the Tea Association of the USA, which is based in Manhattan, said tea sales are projected to grow 10 percent a year for “the foreseeable future,” fueled in part by ready-to-drink bottled iced tea and by an increasing belief that tea, especially green tea, is healthful. Tea bag sales are lumped in with figures for loose teas, so there are no statistics for the growth of the tea bag segment of the market. But, Mr. Simrany said, “the new tea bags are changing consumer attitudes toward tea; the snobbism is gone.”

And even though the better tea bags will produce an excellent cup of tea, some of the finer points of tea making have been lost, like the different water temperatures and steeping times required, depending on whether the tea is black, oolong or green. An exception is the tea made by Le Palais des Thés: a suggested temperature and brewing time is printed on the foil packets that contain the muslin tea bags. But how many tea drinkers pay attention to those arcane details anyway?

“People like good tea but not the work,” said Michael Harney, a vice president of Harney & Sons, in Millerton, N.Y., a company that his father, John, founded. “We see our customers switching from loose tea to sachets all the time now.”

Analyst predicts plunge in gas prices

By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The recent sharp drop in the global price of crude oil could mark the start of a massive sell-off that returns gasoline prices to lows not seen since the late 1990s — perhaps as low as $1.15 a gallon.

"All the hurricane flags are flying" in oil markets, said Philip Verleger, a noted energy consultant who was a lone voice several years ago in warning that oil prices would soar. Now, he says, they appear to be poised for a dramatic plunge.

Crude-oil prices have fallen about $14, or roughly 17 percent, from their July 14 peak of $78.40. After falling seven straight days, they rose slightly Wednesday in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, to $63.97, partly in reaction to a government report showing fuel inventories a bit lower than expected. But the overall price drop is expected to continue, and prices could fall much more in the weeks and months ahead.

Here's why:

For most of the past two years, oil prices have risen because the world's oil producers have struggled to keep pace with growing demand, particularly from China and India. Spare oil-production capacity grew so tight that market players feared that any disruption to oil production could create shortages.

Fear of disruption focused on fighting in Nigeria, escalating tensions over Iran's nuclear program, violence between Israel and Lebanon that might spread to oil-producing neighbors, and the prospect that hurricanes might topple oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil traders bet that such worrisome developments would drive up the future price of oil. Oil is traded in contracts for future delivery, and companies that take physical delivery of oil are just a small part of total trading. Large pension and commodities funds are the big traders and they're seeking profits. They've sunk $105 billion or more into oil futures in recent years, according to Verleger. Their bets that oil prices would rise in the future bid up the price of oil.

That, in turn, led users of oil to create stockpiles as cushions against supply disruptions and even higher future prices. Now inventories of oil are approaching 1990 levels.

But many of the conditions that drove investors to bid up oil prices are ebbing. Tensions over Israel, Lebanon and Nigeria are easing. The hurricane season has presented no threat so far to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. peak summer driving season is over, so gasoline demand is falling.

With fear of supply disruptions ebbing, oil prices began sliding. With oil inventories high, refiners that turn oil into gasoline are expected to cut production. As refiners cut production, oil companies increasingly risk getting stuck with excess oil supplies. There's already anecdotal evidence of oil companies chartering tankers to store excess oil.

All this is turning financial markets increasingly bearish on oil.

"If we continue to build inventories, and if we have a warm winter like we had last winter, you could see a large fall in the price of oil," said Gary Pokoik, who manages Hedge Ventures Energy in Los Angeles, an energy hedge fund. "I think there is still a lot of risk in the market."

As it stands now, the recent oil-price slump has brought the national average for a gallon of unleaded gasoline down to $2.59, according to the AAA motor club. In the Seattle area, prices per gallon have fallen to $2.856 currently from $3.071 a month ago, a decline of 7 percent, according to AAA.

Should oil traders fear that this downward price spiral will get worse and run for the exits by selling off their futures contracts, Verleger said, it's not unthinkable that oil prices could return to $15 or less a barrel, at least temporarily. That could mean gasoline prices as low as $1.15 per gallon.

Other experts won't guess at a floor price, but they agree that a race to the bottom could break out.

"The market may test levels here that are too low to be sustained," said Clay Seigle, an analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consultancy in Boston.

On Monday, the oil-producing cartel OPEC hinted that if prices fall precipitously, OPEC members would cut production to lift them. But that would take time.

"That takes six to nine months. If we don't have a really cold winter here [creating a demand for oil], prices will fall. Literally, you don't know where the floor is," Verleger said. "In a market like this, if things start falling ... prices could take you back to the 1999 levels. It has nothing to do with production."

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Veteran singer Bob Dylan has called the quality of modern music recordings "atrocious" and "worth nothing".

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the 65-year-old said: "There's no definition of nothing, no nothing, just like... static".

Dylan, who is to release his first studio album in five years, added that his music sounded better in the studio.

He also failed to denounce illegal music downloads, saying: "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

'No stature'

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he said.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really.

"CDs are small, there's no stature to it," added Dylan, who has released eight studio albums in the past 20 years and 44 official albums during the course of his career.

His new release, Modern Times, features 10 original tracks recorded by the musician and his touring band last winter.

Dylan plays keyboard, guitar and harmonica as well as singing on the record.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/5277574.stm

Published: 2006/08/23 09:46:55 GMT

Ian Gerard and Tony Koch
05sep06

FOOTAGE of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin being fatally attacked by a stingray on the Great Barrier Reef has been handed to Queensland police as fans worldwide come to grips with the "freak" death.

Irwin, 44, was killed almost instantly when the stingray stabbed him in the heart with its poisonous 20cm barb as he snorkelled off Port Douglas, in north Queensland, yesterday morning.

His American-born wife, Terri, was trekking in Tasmania's Cradle Mountain and Lake St Clair National Park when the news broke of her husband's death and was last night being raced back to Queensland with her two children Bindi, 8, and Bob, 2.

"The footage shows him swimming in the water, the ray stopped and turned and that was it," said boatowner Peter West, who viewed the footage afterwards.

"There was no blood in the water, it was not that obvious ... something happened with this animal that made it rear and he was at the wrong position at the wrong time and if it hit him anywhere else we would not be talking about a fatality."

Irwin was shooting a documentary on dangerous marine life, in shallow water at Batt Reef, about 32 nautical miles offshore, at about 11am.

Tributes poured in from around the world for Irwin, a renowned environmentalist who was estimated to be earning more than $4million a year from his Queensland reptile park, Australia Zoo.

Footage of the attack shows Irwin swimming above a 2.5m stingray before it turns on him and sends a poisonous barb through his heart.

Irwin was pulled from the water by a cameraman and a crewman, put on an inflatable tender and taken to a support boat about 500m away.

Crewmembers say he was barely conscious in the minutes after the sting and died as his production team rushed him to his vessel, Croc One, and to a nearby island for emergency treatment.

A charter dive boat crew desperately tried to revive him on the beach, but were unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards by Queensland Rescue Service officers, who had flown to the area by helicopter.

Irwin's body was last night flown to Cairns for a post-mortem examination as police seized all available evidence and interviewed witnesses in order to prepare a report for the Coroner.

A coronial inquest is expected.

Producer, director and life-long friend John Stainton yesterday said Irwin did not provoke the stingray and was simply swimming above it when he was attacked.

"He came over the top of a stingray and the stingray barb went up and into his chest and into his heart," Stainton said.

"It's likely that he possibly died instantly when the barb hit him, and I hope he felt no pain."

One of Irwin's contemporaries, internationally known cameraman and spearfisherman Ben Cropp, was in his own boat off Port Douglas when Irwin was killed.

"I have just spoken to a cameraman friend who was there and has seen the footage," Mr Cropp told The Australian last night.

"He was up in the shallow water, probably 1.5m to 2m deep, following a bull ray which was about a metre across the body - probably weighing about 100kg, and it had quite a large spine.

"The cameraman was filming in the water."

Mr Cropp said the stingray was spooked and went into defensive mood.

"It probably felt threatened because Steve was alongside and there was the cameraman ahead, and it felt there was danger and it baulked.

"It stopped and went into a defensive mode and swung its tail with the spike.

"Steve unfortunately was in a bad position and copped it.

"I have had that happen to me, and I can visualise it - when a ray goes into defensive, you get out of the way.

"Steve was so close he could not get away, so if you can imagine it - being right beside the ray and it swinging its spine upwards from underneath Steve - and it hit him.

"I have seen that sort of reaction with rays - with their tail breaking the water, such is the force."

Internationally renowned jellyfish sting expert Jamie Seymour was on board Irwin's boat at the time.

Irwin had decided yesterday morning to shoot a segment of film on stingrays for a new television program that will be hosted by his daughter, Bindi.

Surf Lifesavers national marine stinger adviser Lisa-Ann Gershwin said there had only been 17 fatal stingray attacks worldwide.
"I think it's just an extraordinary freak accident that has happened to his heart," she said.

"A lot of people will be afraid by this, but they need to keep in mind that this was a freak accident, it was a terrible tragedy but it is not common."

Dr Gershwin said stingray stings to the legs or arms were common and, while painful, were not normally considered dangerous. She said there were many different types of stingrays, with barbs on their tails up to 30cm long, and they poisoned victims with a range of toxins.

Mr West said the barb was like a "very rough knife" and while fatal stingray stings had been known to occur, filming and swimming alongside the animal was commonplace among marine filmmakers.

Mr Cropp said he was told that the strike was "close to the heart and Steve had a cardiac arrest".

"At first they treated him as being wounded, but he didn't survive unfortunately," he said.

"The second boat in attendance raced in to give assistance and they radioed for help.

"They went into Low Isle and met the chopper which took Steve's body out."

In September 2004, Mr Cropp was attacked by a tiger shark on Bott Reef. "The rays in Australia and particularly in the north are not like those on the Cayman Islands, which are very quiet and allow people to ride on their backs," he said.

"At this time of the year they are on the lookout for tiger sharks and are very frisky.

"They are not aggressive. In fact they are very timid, but they defend themselves by throwing their tail spine upwards, and there is a spike on the tip about eight inches long which they can use like a dagger."