Scientists have discovered extraordinarily precise data on rainfall in the Mediterranean region from 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. which suggests that the decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires may have been partly caused by climate change. It is not likely to end the debate among historians, some of whom believe the fall was more of a transformation than a collapse, but it is a tantalizing bit of evidence. And the way it was collected is as intriguing as the fact that researchers can now analyze rainfall on a year-to-year basis, season to season, even many thousands of years ago.
For more than 15 years scientists at the Geological Survey of Israel and Hebrew University have been studying stalactites from a cave near Jerusalem. Recently,Ian Orland and geology professor John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison began the study of oxygen isotopes in these samples.

The Israeli scientists have dated some of the stalactites to about 185,000 years ago, and they have reconstructed broad climate fluctuations over many years because the formation of the calcite deposits depends partly on rainfall.  But those records indicate averages over long periods of up to a century, and Valley wanted more precise data because of the current interest in global climate change. He can do that now, thanks to a new instrument that he has been trying to develop for over 20 years. The first in a new generation of “ion microprobes” in the world arrived in his lab two years ago, just as an enterprising graduate student, Ian Orland, started working on his master’s degree in geology. “The advantage of the ion microprobe is it allows us to analyze samples that are a million to a billion times smaller than we could in the past,” Valley said in a telephone interview. It the old days, say a couple of years ago, scientists used dental drills to collect samples from the stalactites, but those samples were about the size of a pencil point. A pencil point, in the growth of stalactites, can cover an entire century. The ion microprobe uses a tightly focused beam of ions to analyze microscopic points in a cross section of a stalactite. These samples were first imaged with a laser to show annual bands that look somewhat like tree rings. Orland developed techniques to use the laser to image those points, even separating a single year down to individual seasons. The age is determined by measuring isotopes of uranium and thorium that decay at a known rate.  “We’re measuring samples that are a million times smaller than you could measure in the past,” Orland said in an interview.  That has enabled the Wisconsin team to reconstruct the climate record, year by year, during the time when both the Roman and Byzantine empires were struggling to survive. That’s not what the scientists had set out to do, but the coincidence was just too great to pass up.  “The downfall of the Byzantine empire lies right in the middle of one of the samples,” Orland said.

President elect Barack Obama used his speech at a Los Angeles summit last night to reinvigorate a push for the revival of a frightening proposal to slash carbon emissions by 80 per cent, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status.
“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” Obama said in a video message to governors and others attending a Los Angeles summit on the issue.
“In the roughly four-minute message, Obama reiterated his support for a cap-and-trade system approach to cutting green house gases. He would establish annual targets to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050,” reports the Associated Press.
Obama’s mission is to revive and expand the defeated 2007 Lieberman/Warner bill, “America’s Climate Security Act,” which proposed a cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions 70 per cent by 2050.

Obama’s mission is to revive and expand the defeated 2007 Lieberman/Warner bill, “America’s Climate Security Act,” which proposed a cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions 70 per cent by 2050.

Now that Obama is our new fearless leader, everything is going to be just fine. There will be no more war, we’ll have Government Health Care, all our mortgages will be forgiven. It will all be just Rainbows and Butterflies. And now we can finally address Global Warming, we aren’t going to need anymore coal fired power plants and we will totally be off gasoline by 2015. How are we going to do this you ask? Well we’re all going to run our cars on happy butterfly pee, that’s how.

Forbes.com reports companies such as Chiquita Brands are considering costs of being sued – or criminally prosecuted – under the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley Act for not accurately disclosing “carbon footprints” to investors. Chiquita would have to calculate greenhouse gas emissions created by fertilizing banana trees in Central America, and emissions generated transporting fruit by truck or ship. Then different types of farms and varying sizes of fruit must be factored in, differentiating organically grown from traditionally grown. Energy, waste, water use, travel, storage in refrigerated containers and even transport in retailers’ trucks are all factors in determining the so-called carbon footprint.
Ironically, environmentalists now oppose creation of a 150-mile route crossing the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to deliver electricity from a planned collection of 30,000 38-foot-by-40-foot solar dishes near El Centro. The double irony is they claim not only would the route ravage habitat, but, by supporting polluting facilities, the project would increaseglobal warming more than it prevents. The solar farm, of course, is a direct response to the government’s global-warming-inspired mandate that utilities provide 20 percent of electricity from renewable power sources by 2010.
Global warming alarmists aren’t only short-sighted. They are menacing. The U.N.’s chief climate scientist implies unintended consequences are worth the cost because “we have a window of opportunity of only seven years” to avoid catastrophe.
Maybe that’s why James Hansen, the NASA scientist given much credit for whipping up global warming alarmism, has called for corporate executives to be tried for high crimes against humanity for spreadingdoubtabout global warming. Who would have thought challenging an idea might result in a prison term?
A California newspaper columnist has suggested we can curb global warming and still build concrete freeways by replacing greenhouse gas-emitting cement with something else. The problem is that the recommended substance is a byproduct of burning coal. Apparently the columnist missed the report that a Georgia judge recently blocked a coal-burning plant construction because burning coal emits greenhouse gases.
We need no more recent example of unintended consequences than the diversion of corn crops to create ethanol, which turns out to be no more green-friendly than gasoline, but has created food shortages and driven up prices.
Such shortsightedness may explain the I-was-for-it-before-I-was-against-it flip-flop of presidential candidate John McCain, who first called ethanol a “vital, vital alternative energy source,” but now says it “does nothing to increase our energy independence.”
Unintended consequences keep multiplying. But global warming alarmists may finally have gone too far. Now they blame flat-panel, big-screen TVs for accelerating global warming. We suspect a lot of people will see the unintended consequences behind that looming ban.

In Tehran last week, representatives of the Russian natural-gas monopoly Gazprom met with counterparts from Iran and Qatar and agreed to create “a big gas troika.” The group will meet quarterly to discuss pricing and supplies. Between them, these three countries hold an estimated 55 percent of known global gas reserves. The possibility of a cartel has long been opposed in Washington and European capitals.

The new cartel plan may be finalized Nov. 18, when Russia hosts a forum of gas-exporting countries in Moscow, including possible additions to the group such as Algeria, Indonesia, Libya, and Venezuela.

For Russia, which blames the US for causing the current global financial crisis and the attendant collapse of oil and other commodity prices, forging new energy-based international relationships holds political promise. “There is a clear desire in Moscow to work toward breaking what it perceives as US dominance of the world economy, but it’s way too soon to predict where this global crisis is leading,” says Masha Lipman, an expert with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. “If the US should really go into decline, I suppose we shall see new groups of states, and new contenders, come forward.”

As global energy prices plunge, cooperating with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to stabilize markets has gained fresh traction in the Kremlin while the long-discussed idea of creating a “gas OPEC” of leading producers is suddenly getting a big push from Moscow.

Russia has earned huge profits in recent years amid soaring prices for its key exports, mainly oil and gas, which have enabled the government to accumulate significant currency reserves, now at $530 billion. Russia is one of the world’s largest oil exporters, accounting for about 12 percent of the global supply. But even before prices began tumbling, Russian oil production was stagnating at under 10 million barrels per day, raising doubts about Kremlin claims that Russia was to become an “energy superpower.”

“This is a crisis, one that’s concentrating minds in Moscow,” says Mikhail Krutikhin, a partner with RusEnergy, an independent consultancy in Moscow. “All Russian state budget projections are based on the assumption that crude prices will remain above $70 per barrel for the next two years, but they’re already below that. It means that we’ll have to tax those foreign currency reserves, and perhaps cut social spending. It’s being viewed as a very serious challenge.”

Perhaps that’s also why Russia, which has long been cool to OPEC, now says it wants to cooperate with the 13-nation oil cartel.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hosted OPEC’s Secretary-General Abdalla Salem el-Badri last week and announced that Russia will henceforth interact with the global oil cartel as a “key area of Russia’s energy policy aimed at maintaining stable and predictable prices,” in the petroleum market.

Of course, energy industry experts point out that OPEC has never been very good at controlling oil prices – except when it was used as a political weapon against the West during the 1970s – and that Moscow’s newfound interest in the group may reflect the Kremlin’s shifting global political strategies. “You cannot separate economics from politics. After all, this is energy, and it obviously has a national security dimension,” says Artyem Konchin, an oil and gas analyst with Unicredit-Aton, a Moscow investment bank. “Russia is unlikely to join OPEC, but its interest in the organization at this moment is not coincidental. It wants to cooperate at some level.”

Many experts also say that even if Moscow does succeed in creating a gas cartel, the gas market is different than the oil market. Most supplier-customer relationships are locked in by expensive pipeline infrastructure and long-term contracts. Russia now provides about 20 percent of Europe’s natural gas and is making huge investments in two new pipelines: Nordstream, which will connect Russia with Germany via the Baltic Sea, and South Stream, which will run from Russia’s Black Sea coast to Bulgaria and southern Europe.

But Russia and other gas producers may see a way to change the dynamic. Emerging liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology, of which Qatar is a pioneer, makes the gas a more easily traded commodity, like oil. Currently about 8 percent of natural-gas supplies are delivered in LNG form, Mr. Krutikhin says, but that will grow in the future. Russia is close to completing a big LNG facility at Gazprom’s Sakhalin-2 project on Russia’s Pacific coast, and Gazprom is reportedly mulling construction of another near St. Petersburg.

Still, some analysts are skeptical that a natural-gas cartel will yield the political benefits that the Kremlin anticipates. “It’s understandable that the idea of a gas OPEC sets up tremors in the West, where the idea of Russia controlling gas supplies has long been a source of disquiet,” says Ms. Lipman. “But these players are very diverse. Moves to consolidate Russia’s position as a leading gas producer are not identical to mustering anti-American forces around it.”

But that isn’t preventing the Kremlin from reconsidering many of its energy positions.

Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, Russia’s top energy official, startled many industry observers last week by saying that the Kremlin may create a vast storage facility for oil, which would be modeled on the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of almost three-quarters of a billion barrels of oil.

The idea behind the Russian reserve would be to stabilize oil prices by holding back or releasing stocks as necessary, Mr. Sechin said. Some experts scoff that the idea is impractical for an oil- exporting country, and a possible sign of Kremlin desperation. “It would be much safer to just keep that oil in the ground. Why invest millions into a storage facility?” says Krutikhin. “It’s really hard to understand what they’re thinking in the Kremlin sometimes.”

59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favored Senator Barack Obama… The increase in the number of voters who said that Ms. Palin was not prepared was driven almost entirely by Republicans and independents … 8 in 10 Democrats viewed her as unprepared, as well as more than 6 in 10 independents, and 3 in 10 Republicans.

My italics. If the GOP decides that Palin is the future of their party, the GOP won’t have a future. Simple, really. And the same goes for those who promoted her. Getting rid of Kristol and all he represents is a prerequisite for conservative renewal.

The vice president, as a member of the executive branch of the government, has no official role in developing legislation or determining how it is presented to or debated by the Senate, which is part of the legislative branch. In all meaningful ways, the leader of the majority party runs the Senate.
Traditionally, the vice president appears in the Senate for ceremonial events and in case of a tie vote. Although the vice president can preside over the Senate, vice presidents have left that day-to-day chore to senators themselves. In the past, each president has determined the role of the vice president in an administration.
The subject of the vice president’s duties came up as Palin sat for an interview with KUSA-TV in Denver, which has a feature called “Question from the Third Grade.” The interviewer asked, “Brandon Garcia wants to know, ‘What does the vice president do?’”
“That’s a great question, Brandon, and a vice president has a really great job, because not only are they there to support the president’s agenda, they’re like the team member, the team mate to that president,” Palin said.
“But also, they’re in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it’s a great job and I look forward to having that job,” she said.

As we watch the conventions, we should recognize that we’ve entered an era of fantasy politics. Like fantasy football and baseball, fantasy politics is an exercise in make-believe that is intended to keep its players occupied and to make the winners feel good. Barack Obama and John McCain emit pleasing slogans and programs that, as often as not, are disconnected from the country’s actual problems they’ll encounter in office.

Last week, I viewed “I.O.U.S.A.,” an 87-minute documentary exploring the grim budget outlook. It is unbalanced budgets that, in many ways, define the political deadlock. The persistence of deficits over so many years (42 of the past 47) can have only one basic cause: Politicians of both parties prefer spending to taxing. As everyone knows, the disconnect will worsen, because aging baby boomers will bloat outlays for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs already total nearly two-fifths of the $2.9 trillion federal spending in 2008.

The documentary’s sponsors hope to arouse public opinion on budget issues just as “An Inconvenient Truth” did on global warming. Maybe, but I’m skeptical. It’s not merely that melting icebergs are more compelling images than charts of mounting government debt. The mismatch between the government’s existing spending commitments and the present tax base is so great that we cannot simply tinker a little with government. By 2030, federal taxes could rise 50 percent if all spending programs are kept on automatic pilot, notes Andrew Yarrow in his book “Forgive Us Our Debts.”

That would be, I think, an unconscionable burden on workers (the main taxpayers) and a huge threat to the economy. Over the years, I’ve suggested changes to minimize these dangers. Eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare should gradually rise to 70; people now live longer and should work longer. Medicare premiums for middle-income and richer retirees should increase; the young shouldn’t bear most of the expense of growing health costs. Government programs that have outlived their usefulness or are wasteful should end: farm subsidies and Amtrak, for instance.

But “I.O.U.S.A.” barely mentions choices and solutions. Ideally, of course, our political leaders would assume the task of choosing. Unfortunately, they don’t.

The most exhaustive examination of the McCain and Obama budget proposals I’ve found comes from the Tax Policy Center, sponsored jointly by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. It’s discouraging reading. Though details differ, neither plan would realistically limit spending or eliminate deficits. For example, both their health proposals would cost far more than $1 trillion over a decade, says the Tax Policy Center.

Obama and McCain have each embraced symbolic gestures that falsely suggest they’ve made tough choices. Democrats blame deficits on Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and the Iraq War. OK, let’s whack the rich. Obama would restore the 36 percent and 39.6 percent income-tax rates for couples with taxable incomes above $200,300 and $357,700. He’s suggested higher capital-gains taxes and Social Security taxes for those with incomes exceeding $250,000. Together, these changes might generate about $80 billion of revenue in 2010, says the Tax Policy Center. By contrast, the 2008 budget deficit is reckoned at $389 billion. Even saving $125 billion by winding down the Iraq War — a highly optimistic estimate — wouldn’t erase the deficit.

McCain denounces wasteful spending, citing congressional “earmarks.” These are projects usually designated by individual members of Congress for their districts. OK, let’s scrub them all. In 2008, earmarks numbered 11,610 and cost $17.2 billion, estimates Citizens Against Government Waste. That’s less than 1 percent of federal spending.

Elections serve, in civics textbooks, to reach collective decisions about the future. The real world is different. Many campaign proposals are so unrealistic or undesirable that they may never be enacted. McCain would cut taxes again for the rich. Is that needed or likely? No. Obama would create more special tax breaks for homeowners, college students, workers and retirees, among others — further clutter in an already complex tax system.

All this makes sense only as fantasy politics. Proposals aren’t necessarily intended to be adopted. They’re selected to win applause and please voters — just as quarterbacks, in fantasy football, are selected for their accuracy. In November, one candidate will win this game. But the country as a whole may lose.