In this live-and-let-live town, where medical marijuana clubs do business next to grocery stores and an annual fair celebrates sadomasochism, prostitutes could soon walk the streets without fear of arrest.

San Francisco would become the first major U.S. city to decriminalize prostitution if voters next month approve Proposition K—a measure that forbids local authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting anyone for selling sex.

The ballot question technically would not legalize prostitution since state law still prohibits it, but the measure would eliminate the power of local law enforcement officials to go after prostitutes.

Proponents say the measure will free up $11 million the police spend each year arresting prostitutes and allow them to form collectives.

"It will allow workers to organize for our rights and for our safety," said Patricia West, 22, who said she has been selling sex for about a year by placing ads on the Internet. She moved to San Francisco in May from Texas to work on Proposition K.

Even in tolerant San Francisco—where the sadomasochism fair draws thousands of tourists and a pornographic video company is housed in a former armory—the measure faces an uphill battle, with much of the political establishment opposing it.

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Below is a response from a friend in a high-place.  He's quite the Obama supporter and anti-Bush activist.  I asked him recently (via email) what he thought about BHO (Barack Hussein Obama) touring the world while running for President in the US.  Of course, I totally disagree with this international media stunt, and I think it will eventually wear out key voters who don't want an international savior - they want a President who will lower gas prices, fix the economy, and protect us from terrorism.  Here's the open letter from my high-ranking friend:

"Well my friend I feel uncomfortable with my candidate’s speech and visits to GR, FR and UK.  I understand and applaud his visit to the battle zones in our alleged war (but truly a neo-con misadventure into Iraq) and our war against the terrorists in Afghanistan.  That makes sense.

It’s a little bit of a stretch for the Middle East visit.  It appears more of a campaign stop for votes in New York and Florida.

But the speech in Berlin in my book comes across of as inappropriate.  He can say all the wants: “America has one President at a time” or that “I’m just here as a private citizen.” But how many private citizens give a speech to 200,000 people? 

There is no good reason for him to have gone to France, Germany or Great Britain.  The Blue Collar workers of Ohio and the Mid-West are going to see this as arrogant and think to themselves: “Who does he think he is?”

I’m not at all confident that he will win this election.  The final two legs of this trip were not a smart move.  What American cares how many people turn out to see you in any country as a candidate?  No me!

Respectfully Submitted"

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has penned a letter to the President of the American Physical Society demanding that an offensive disclaimer to one of his papers be removed from the APS website or justified to his satisfaction. And he's also expecting a well deserved apology for the horrendous mistreatment the Society has recently subjected him to.

"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

"The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

"The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

‘Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.'

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that ‘Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.'  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed."

Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,

President, American Physical Society,

Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.

By email to artieb@slac.stanford.edu

Dear Dr. Bienenstock,

Physics and Society

The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008 edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.

I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to all of the reviewer's requests for revision (see the attached reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC evaluates climate sensitivity - a method which the IPCC does not itself clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC's viewpoint. Some days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website of Physics and Society:

"The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur's findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of the text of the Council's decision, together with the names of those present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo, that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the "overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community"; and, tertio, that "The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions"? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?

Yours truly,

THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

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The American Physical Society had been a proponent of the “consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change — until now.  While the main organization has not addressed its position — yet — a major unit within APS has declared global warming unproven and that the IPCC’s conclusions unsupportable.  The APS will re-open the debate on global warming with a new paper accusing the IPCC of deliberate obfuscation (via Memeorandum):

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.” …

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

The paper points out that the warming seen on Earth during the period under question matched the warming seen on other planets in the solar system, a point repeatedly made by skeptics over the last few years.  Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and one of Neptune’s moons experienced the same climate shift at the same time, and Monckton assigns the blame not to SUVs or belching smokestacks, but to the only energy source all have in common: the sun.  Solar activity during the past seventy years, Monckton states, exceeded what had been seen for 11,000 years, which led to the warming activity here on Earth and elsewhere in the system.

At the same time, one of the authors who built Australia’s compliance protocol for the Kyoto Accords admits what most of us suspected all along — that the scientific community jumped to conclusions:

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

In other words, the science community had reasons to jump to conclusions.  They got grants, they got attention, and they started getting all the hot chicks — well, at least they got money and felt important.  Those are powerful motivators to reach conclusions that keep money and attention flowing, instead of concluding that they aren’t terribly necessary at all.

And governments had powerful motivations to believe them.  It gave politicians reasons to impose greater control on energy production, and to increase the power of the state.  That creates winners and losers, which begets lots of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Unfortunately, the recent data argues against anthropogenic climate change, and in fact its advocates never really proved anything.  For one thing, as David Evans points out, the “greenhouse” model should have produced an atmospheric hot spot — which no one has ever found, despite years of looking.  Despite ever-increasing production of carbon, the last seven years have produced a cooling trend.  And more recent data shows that carbon increases at the end of warming cycles, not at the beginning, which demolishes the cause-and-effect assumptions for climate-change advocates.

In short, the Earth is not in danger of “getting a fever”, and the global-warming theory has been shown to be a Chicken Little scenario with no real scientific basis.  Even those who helped lead the hysteria now have serious doubts.  It’s time to stop wrapping public policy around a fraud.

Update: As I noted in the first paragraph, the APS has not changed its position on anthropogenic global warming, at least not yet.  This effort comes from a subgroup within APS.  They “reaffirm[ed]” their November 2007 position, but momentum is shifting away from them, and the debate will occur regardless.  (via Rick Moran and Jonah Goldberg)

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Opening a farewell tour of Europe, President Bush won European support on Tuesday to consider additional punitive sanctions against Iran, including restrictions on its banks, if Iran rejects a package of incentives to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

But Iran has begun transferring billions of dollars from European banks to Iranian and Asian banks, and buying gold and equities, according to Iranian media reports, apparently to protect its windfall oil revenue from any new sanctions,.

Mr. Bush arrived in Slovenia at the start of a European tour that will take him to Berlin, Rome, Paris, London and Belfast, Northern Ireland. A summit meeting with European Union leaders here was part of an effort to persuade them to adopt a stronger line toward Iran.

Iran’s leaders, Mr. Bush said, “can either face isolation, or they can have better relations with all of us if they verifiably suspend their enrichment program.”

At a news conference after the summit meeting, Mr. Bush warned that if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, “the free world is going to say, ‘why didn’t we do something about it at the time, before they developed it?’ And so now is the time for there to be strong diplomacy.”

A joint statement issued after the meeting urged Iran to “comply with its international obligations concerning its nuclear activities” and reaffirmed Western commitments to a “dual-track strategy,” employing the threat of punitive sanctions along with incentives to Iran. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is to travel to Tehran to present the new package of incentives this weekend.

The communiqué coincided with heightened tensions over Iran’s nuclear program since the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna registered “serious concern” last month about Tehran’s suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons.

The issue became even more pressing after Israel’s transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, warned last week that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites would be “unavoidable” if weapons programs proceed.

Some analysts said the language of the joint communiqué on Tuesday appeared to try to ease that sense of threat.

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One of the worst earthquakes in decades struck central China on Monday, killing nearly 9,000 people, trapping about 900 students under the rubble of their school and causing a toxic chemical leak, state media reported.

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake devastated a hilly region of small cities and towns in Sichuan and nearby provinces. The official Xinhua News Agency said 8,533 people died in Sichuan alone and dozens of other deaths were reported in surrounding areas.

Xinhua said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Sichuan province's Beichuan county after the quake, raising fears the overall death toll could increase sharply.

State media said a chemical plant in Shifang city had cratered, burying hundreds of people and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia from the site.

The earthquake sent thousands of people rushing out of buildings and into the streets hundreds of miles away in Beijing and Shanghai. The temblor was felt as far away as Vietnam and Thailand.

It posed a challenge to a government already grappling with discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Beijing Olympics this August.

The quake hit about 60 miles northwest of Chengdu—a city of 3.75 million—in the middle of the afternoon when classrooms and office towers were full. There were several smaller aftershocks, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.

The temblor struck hilly country leading up to the Tibetan highlands, toppling buildings in small cities and towns in the largely rural area. About 1,200 pandas—80 percent of the surviving wild population in China—live in several mountainous areas of Sichuan.

The earthquake, China's deadliest since 1976, occurred in an area with numerous fault lines that have triggered destructive temblors before. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Diexi, Sichuan that hit on August 25, 1933 killed more than 9,300 people.

Xinhua said 50 bodies had been pulled from the debris of the school building in Juyuan town but did not say if the children were alive. Students also were buried under five other toppled schools in Deyang city, Xinhua reported.

Its reporters saw buried teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story building in Juyuan "while others were crying out for help." Two girls were quoted by Xinhua as saying they escaped because they had "run faster than others."

Photos showed heavy cranes trying to remove rubble from the ruined school. Other photos posted on the Internet and found on the Chinese search engine Baidu showed arms and a torso sticking out of the rubble of the school as dozens of people worked to free them, using their hands to move concrete slabs.

Calls into the city did not go through as panicked residents quickly overloaded the telephone system and the quake also affected power networks.

Although it was difficult to telephone Chengdu, an Israeli student, Ronen Medzini, sent a text message to The Associated Press saying there were power and water outages there.

"Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting," he said.

The road to Wenchuan from Chendu was cut off by landslides, state media said, slowing the rescue efforts.

Though news trickled out in the first hours after the quake, the government and its media quickly mobilized, with nearly 8,000 soldiers and police sent to the area. China Central Television ran non-stop coverage, with phone reports from reporters and a few isolated camera shots from the scene.

Disasters always pose a test to the communist government, whose mandate in part rests on providing relief to those in need. In recent years, the government has improved emergency planning and rapid response training for the military.

The earthquake also rattled buildings in Beijing, some 930 miles to the north, less than three months before the Chinese capital was expected to be full of hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors for the Summer Olympics.

Li Jiulin, a top engineer on the 91,000-seat National Stadium—known as the Bird's Nest and the jewel of the Olympics—was conducting an inspection at the venue when the quake occurred. He told reporters the building was designed to withstand a 8.0 quake.

"The Olympic venues were not affected by the earthquake," said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee.

Skyscrapers swayed in Shanghai and in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, 100 miles off the southeastern Chinese coast. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The quake was felt as far away as the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, where some people hurried out of swaying office buildings and into the streets downtown. A building in the Thai capital of Bangkok also was evacuated after the quake was felt there.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake is considered a major event, capable of causing widespread damage and injuries in populated areas.

The last serious earthquake in China was in 2003, when a 6.8-magnitude quake killed 268 people in Bachu county in the west of Xinjiang.

China's deadliest earthquake in modern history struck the northeastern city of Tangshan on July 28, 1976, killing 240,000 people.

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Relief deliveries into cyclone-hit Burma increased today but aid groups said supplies fell far short of the enormous need and that foreign experts were still barred from the country.

A cargo plane chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) carrying 35 tonnes of aid was one of the latest to arrive.

The ICRC said the medical supplies on board were sufficient to treat some 250 trauma patients and provide three months of basic health care for 10,000 people. The plane was also carrying sanitation equipment, including a mobile water-treatment plant to provide drinking water for 10,000 people, it said.

But other aid groups warned of a growing catastrophe. “It’s really crucial that people get access to clean water sources and sanitation to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering,” Sarah Ireland, Oxfam regional chief, said.

She said the death toll from the May 3 cyclone could go up to 100,000, a figure also suggested by other aid groups.

“There are all the factors for a public health catastrophe which could multiply that death toll by up to 15 times,” she said.

Cyclone Nargis, which smashed into the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta region in the country’s south on May 3, left 60,000 people dead or missing, according to an official toll.

The junta, deeply suspicious of the outside world, has refused to let in foreign experts who specialise in getting aid to disaster victims, and said that only the government would be allowed to distribute emergency supplies.

“Some opening-up on the part of the (Myanmar) authorities is allowing us to get these materials to their destination,” said Stephan Goetghebuer, director of operations of medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres.

“But it’s no more than a drip-feed, really, given a serious response is more than required. We still need more back-up aid and personnel ready to leave,” he added.

“Clearly our priority is to ensure victims of this terrible disaster access to clean drinking water, shelter, food and health care,” said Pierre-Andre Conod, head of the ICRC’s delegation in Myanmar.

“It’s not true that nothing is happening at all, but not enough is happening,” said Frank Smithuis, Myanmar country manager for MSF.

The medical charity said that a cargo plane carrying 35 tonnes of shelters, water-treatment equipment, first-aid supplies and food was en route from France.

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Sue Sigle was hoping the government would offer more money for her home before she moves away from this pollution-scarred town. Then the tornado came.

As she began the task of salvage Sunday, Sigle kept a smile on her face, noting that she was fortunate to be visiting family in Missouri when the massive twister hit Saturday night, killing at least six people in this northeastern Oklahoma town. Tornadoes killed at least 22 people in three states that night.

"I'm OK with everything," Sigle said. "The Lord is going to take care of anything. ... I was going to move anyway. I guess I'll just have to move sooner."

That sense of inevitability appeared to grip residents as they picked through the remnants of their homes. The lead and zinc mines that made Picher a booming town of about 20,000 in the mid-20th century closed decades ago; leftover waste has turned the area into an environmental disaster and a Superfund site.

Many families have moved away to escape the lead pollution, taking advantage of state and federal buyouts in recent years. Piles of mine waste, or chat, have long towered over the town across a highway from the devastated neighborhood; they're now peppered with debris from homes flattened by the tornado.

The tornado - spawned by storms that also killed at least 16 people in Missouri and Georgia - could be the ultimate incentive for those 800 or so residents who have been reluctant to leave, said John Sparkman, head of the local housing authority.

"I think people probably have had enough," he said. "There's just nothing to build back to any more."

Some residents, like Sigle, were waiting for better buyout offers before their homes were damaged.

Gov. Brad Henry, who toured the area both by air and on foot Sunday, said the buyout program won't stop just because homes were leveled. He went so far as to say he would "guarantee" that those awaiting buyouts who lost their homes would be treated fairly.

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BEIJING — A powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of western China on Monday, reportedly killing more than 8,500 people, including as many as 5,000 people in a single county, and trapping more than 900 students beneath a collapsed high school as tremors shook buildings throughout China and were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam, according to interviews and reports in China’s state media.  Let us pray for the people of China.
News Link:

CHAITEN, Chile (AFP) — Ash from the erupting Chaiten volcano in southern Chile spread across a growing swathe of South America on Wednesday, forcing flight cancellations across much of Argentina and threatening to blanket more towns in Argentina and Chile.

The volcano, located 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Santiago near the border with Argentina, erupted violently on Tuesday, raining ash and lava over its surroundings and forcing a total evacuation in a 30-kilometer (19-mile) radius, Chile's National Emergency Office said.

The long-dormant volcano began rumbling and belching smoke on Friday.

The 4,000 residents of Chaiten, the town nearest to the volcano, were evacuated on Tuesday, and only a handful of emergency personnel and news reporters remained.

The volcano's dense 30 kilometer (20 mile) high plume of ash took a northeasterly turn overnight Tuesday to Wednesday after moving for days in a southeasterly direction, Office of National Emergencies head Rodrigo Rojas told AFP.

Ash from the volcano is expected to blanket the Chilean town of Palena and the Argentine ski resort Bariloche northeast of Chaiten, according to Rojas.

Otherwise "there have been no reports of significant changes in seismic activity or emission of ashes" since the volcano began to erupt violently on Tuesday, Rojas said.

Flights were canceled from Buenos Aires to most of the major southern Argentine cities due to ash from the Chaiten eruption.

Three leading airlines -- Aerolinas Argentinas, Austral and Chile's LAN -- cancelled flights across the region, including flights to the Atlantic port cities of Bahia Blanca -- 900 kilometers (560 miles) northeast of the volcano -- and Comodoro Rivadavia, located 575 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of the volcano.

"The airports are open but the airlines cancelled flights because the volcanic ash gets in the airplane turbines and could cause material damage," said an aviation official at the Jorge Newbery airport north of Buenos Aires.

The airport source said it was likely that flights would remain grounded Thursday given the weather forecast.

Officials in the Argentine province of Chubut east of the eruption said some 160 schools closed since Friday due to the volcanic ash reopened on Wednesday.

A Chilean vulcanologist warned Tuesday that the eruption was only at the beginning stage, and that an explosive eruption was possible.

"There could be a major explosion that could collapse the volcano's cone," said Luis Lara of the National Geologic and Mining Service.

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More than 41,000 people are missing and 22,000 dead after Cyclone Nargis pummels Myanmar.  Let's pray for Myanmar.

It goes without saying that climate realists around the world believe Nobel Laureate Al Gore used false information throughout his schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in order to generate global warming hysteria.

On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." [audio available here]

Adding delicious insult to injury, this was presented by one of ABC's foremost global warming alarmists Sam Champion during Friday's "20/20":

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A strong and potentially deadly earthquake is virtually certain to strike on one of California's major seismic faults with a magnitude of at least 6.7 within the next 30 years, scientists said Monday in releasing the first official forecast of statewide earthquake probabilities.

By their calculations the probability of such a strong and damaging quake hitting somewhere the Golden state is now more than 99 percent.

A much more damaging quake of magnitude of 7.5 or greater is at least 46 percent likely to hit on one of California's restless web of active fault systems within the same three decades, but probably in the southern part of the state, the team of federal and state earthquake scientists warned.

The new report by the team of federal and state geologists, seismologists and geophysicists does not significantly change the current probability estimates for future large quakes on the Bay Area's major faults that were calculated five years ago, but it does provide the first detailed forecasts for the odds of future quakes on faults in the Los Angeles area: on the southern San Andreas, on the San Jacinto and on the Elsinore faults specifically.

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Ha ha ha... Couldn't pass it up; you've got to read them.

Link to article

Link to Politico Article

After some pretty serious whistle-blowing by former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, it seems the organization is on the rebound. American Airlines is grounding some of its flights for a second day due to risky wiring in Boeing MD-80’s wheel wells. The airline had failed to comply with the FAA’s directive on this issue. In the past two days 1,550 flights have been scrapped, stranding over 170,000 passengers. Are these extreme measures merely to demonstrate the safety consciousness of the FAA and the airline companies themselves? I’m sure they want what’s best for their patrons, but I can’t help but heap a little cynicism on the situation. Maybe political methodology is really getting to me.

This article should be read by the international community.  Anyone who actually believes that Iran is innocent of developing weapons of mass destruction must concede.  The technology's there, the scientists are there, the motive is there, the funding is there (thanks to oil and gas prices), it's all there.  Wake up world!!

I have expressed my distrust for the World Bank ever since I learned how they were formed.  This group of financial tycoons care nothing about your wellbeing; they are only after one thing, and that is your liberties and your money. This bank will be the catapult for the Anti-Christ to setup his kingdom, as they are already consolidating financial institutions around the world. This article is yet another eye-opener to the cold reality that Global Warming is simply another hoax to wrest control over the mind-numbed masses.

Tim Torres
Express-Way / Endtime Generation Ministries

Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades.

"The World Bank's foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon," Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital.

"Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank's attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts," he said.

Before they agree to any sort of restrictions on emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling global warming, poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts.

The money will be used for everything from flood barriers against rising sea levels to "clean" but costly power stations, an example of the "technology transfer" developing countries say they need to curb emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide.

As well as the obvious arguments about how much money will be needed -- some estimates run into the trillions of dollars by 2050 -- rich and poor countries are struggling even to agree on a bank manager.

At the week-long Bangkok conference, the World Bank pushed its proposals for a $5-10 billion Clean Technology Fund, a $500 million "adaptation" fund and possibly a third fund dealing with forestry.

However, developing countries want climate change cash to be administered through the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which they feel is much less under the control of the Group of 8 (G8) richest countries.

"Generally we have been unpleasantly surprised by the funds," said Ana Maria Kleymeyer, Argentina's lead negotiator at the meeting.

"This is a way for the World Bank and its donor members to get credit back home for putting money into climate change in a way that's not transparent, that doesn't involve developing countries and that ignores the UNFCC process," she said.

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Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.                    

The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.                   

But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.                   

The WMO points out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C.

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