What's New Friday Aug 7, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 6 Aug 09   Washington, DC
	
1.  CLIMATE: LETTERS TO CONGRESS ARE EXPOSED AS "ASTROTURF".
They look like a grass-roots campaign, but they’re fakes.  The letters 
purported to be from registered nonprofit groups.  Rep. Edward Markey (D-
MA), a sponsor of the climate bill, has begun an inquiry into whether the 
fake letters amount to fraud.  The American Coalition for Clean Coal 
Electricity disavowed the scurrilous tactic and said it was considering 
legal action against the Hawthorne Group, a firm it paid to make the 
climate bill disappear.  Hawthorne, however, is only a contractor.  It 
hired Bonner and Associates to make the hit.  The founder of the firm, Jack 
Bonner, laid the blame squarely on a wayward employee who has since been 
fired. Thus was the purity of the legislative process restored. But why had 
this employee taken it upon himself to do such a thing?  A lowly temp, he 
was paid according to the number of fraudulent letters he sent to 
congressional offices.  And nobody supervised his work?    

2.  WEATHER:  BUT WHAT IF IT’S NOT SOME LOW-PAID TEMP?
I am deeply grateful to those who send me news stories I should know 
about.  I often make use of them – if I think they’re true.  This week I 
got an Aug 4 article from Newsmax.com: Record Lows Dispel Global Warming 
Myth by Phil Brennan.  Apparently, the author is unable to distinguish 
between weather and climate.  Ordinarily, I would prefer waterboarding to 
reading this libertarian rag, but it was sent by a Nobel prize-winning 
physicist.  The first words below the title were "Former Vice President Al 
Gore, father of the great global warming hoax…"  I'm pretty sure Al Gore 
did not invent global warming, but these people are consumed by their 
hatred for Gore.  I could guess what was coming next:  A list of American 
cities that have been experiencing unusually low temperatures this summer.  
Seattle and Portland were having their highest temperature ever, which also 
has nothing to do with global warming; of course, they were not mentioned.  

3.  KEPLER: EXOPLANET-HUNTING SATELLITE SNARES ITS FIRST.
Launched in March, the planet-hunting satellite took aim at a yellow star 
in Cygnus named HAT-P-7 and quickly found a planet.  The planet had been 
discovered before by other means, but the ease with which it was found 
bodes well for Kepler's ability to carry out its mission of finding 
earthlike planets.  This was not one; it was too massive and too hot. We 
will never travel to other stars, but there is almost no limit to how 
closely we can learn to examine them. It's the start of our next great 
adventure.

4.  FERTILITY: RICH NATIONS ARE BREAKING THE RULES.
The axiom has been that the wealthier a nation the lower its fertility.  
But above some threshold of development that trend no longer holds, 
according to a report released in Wednesday's Nature.  Australia, Sweden, 
France, the United States and Britain are experiencing modest baby booms.  
Economists, who worry about support for an aging population, hail this as 
good news.  It's not.  Indicator after indicator seems to show that we have 
already exceeded the population we can sustain without severe environmental 
decline.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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