Study: Polluted Air Harms Women's Hearts

What part of pollution and evolution is not yet understood?

"It's important because it points to the fact that environmental factors are related to heart disease and that pollution is something that we all have to be concerned about," said study author Dr. Joel Kaufman of the University of Washington.

Study: Polluted Air Harms Women's Hearts
BOSTON, Jan. 31, 2007
(CBS/AP) The fine grit in polluted air raises the risk of heart disease in older women much more powerfully than scientists realized, a big U.S.-funded study has found, raising questions of whether U.S. environmental standards are strict enough. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened its daily limit for these tiny specks, known as fine particulates, in September. But it left the average annual limit untouched, allowing a concentration of 15 millionths of a gram for every cubic meter of air. In the study of 65,893 women, the average exposure was 13 units, with two-thirds of the women falling under the national standard. But every increase of 10 units, starting at 0, raised the risk of fatal cardiovascular disease by about 75 percent. That is several times higher than in a study by the American Cancer Society. "There was a lot of evidence previously suggesting that the long-term standard should be lower, and this is adding one more study to that evidence," said Douglas Dockery, a pollution specialist at the Harvard School of Public Health. It has long been known that particulates can contribute to lung and heart disease, with women perhaps more susceptible than men to heart problems, perhaps because of their smaller blood vessels and other biological differences. But the degree of risk for older women was less clear. The study started with women who had gone through menopause and were 50 to 79 years old. Dockery wrote an accompanying editorial for the study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The University of Washington-based researchers worked from data collected for the Women's Health Initiative, a well-respected research project that previously showed the heart dangers of hormone supplements. Researchers believe that when dirty air is inhaled, invisible pollutants can become embedded in the lungs or travel through the bloodstream, CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook. They may then harden arteries or cause inflammation leading to cardiac disease or stroke. The pollutants are so small that it would take about 30 to equal the thickness of a human hair. These particles — made of dust, soot and various chemicals — come from burning fuel in cars, factories and power plants. While individual particles are too small to see, they can be observed collectively as urban haze. Unlike earlier studies, this one looked not just at deaths, but also at heart attacks, coronary disease, strokes and clogged arteries. The problems were 24 percent more likely with every 10-unit rise in particles. Almost 3 percent of the women suffered some kind of cardiovascular problem. "It's important because it points to the fact that environmental factors are related to heart disease and that pollution is something that we all have to be concerned about," said study author Dr. Joel Kaufman of the University of Washington. The risk varied along with the varying levels of these particles in different neighborhoods within the same city. In their calculations, the researchers tried to adjust for lower income and other health problems that have been blamed for the higher rates of disease in past studies. "I think the major contribution is answering the critics of the prior studies," Kaufman said. "The effect seems large and important and should be taken seriously." States and other groups demanding a lower annual standard sued the EPA last year, accusing it of disregarding the advice of its own scientists. Some agency scientists are also pushing for tighter rules on ozone, the chemical that creates smog and contributes to asthma and lung disease. "It's too soon to say how much weight any single study will have, but this study will be considered as part of this continuous process," said EPA spokesman John Millett.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc.

Groups Say Scientists Pressured On Warming

Science no longer defines Reality? That don't make no lick of sense!! What's the new Freedom definition?

"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger."
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Groups Say Scientists Pressured On Warming
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30, 2007
(CBS/AP) Two private advocacy groups told a congressional hearing Tuesday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming. The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report. The questionnaire was sent by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private advocacy group. The report also was based on "firsthand experiences" described in interviews with the Government Accountability Project, which helps government whistleblowers, lawmakers were told. The Democratic chairman of the House panel examining the government's response to climate change said Tuesday there is evidence that senior Bush administration officials sought repeatedly "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming." Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said he and the top Republican on his oversight committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, have sought documents from the administration on climate policy, but repeatedly been rebuffed. "The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security," said Waxman, opening the hearing. "We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists." "We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," Waxman said. The top Republican on the committee criticized the survey (by the Union of Concerned Scientists) and told CBS News, "The survey is what I would call garbage because they pre-selected the number of people that they would survey—probably members who had been disgruntled." The administration denies it's trying to mislead anyone about global warming, reports CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller. A spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality said the accusation that the administration pressured scientists into downplaying the findings of their research are not true. She said the oversight committee has so far been given 10,000 pages of the documents they've requested and still more will be turned over. Also Tuesday, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., sought to gauge her colleague's sentiment on climate change. She opened a meeting where senators were to express their views on global warming in advance of a broader set of hearings on the issue. Among those scheduled to make comments were two presidential hopefuls — Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. Both lawmakers favor mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, something opposed by President Bush, who argues such requirements would threaten economic growth. The intense interest about climate change comes as some 500 climate scientists gather in Paris this week to put the final touches on a United Nations report on how warming, as a result of a growing concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, is likely to affect sea levels. They agree sea levels will rise, but not on how much. Whatever the report says when it comes out at week's end, it is likely to influence the climate debate in Congress. At the Waxman hearing, the two advocacy groups said their research — based on the questionnaires, interviews and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act — revealed "evidence of widespread interference in climate science in federal agencies." The groups report described largely anonymous claims by scientists that their findings at times at been misrepresented, that they had been pressured to change findings and had been restricted on what they were allowed to say publicly. NASA scientist Dr. Drew Shindell said that although he has had concerns about the public affairs policy at NASA in the past, he believes there is a new policy of openness at the space administration and he encourages other agencies who study climate change to adopt similar practices, CBS News reports. Shindell's major complaint had to do with a press release that NASA issued to advertise a study he did. Initially he said it was titled, "Cool Antarctica May Warm Rapidly." But he says this was watered down by his superiors to read, "Scientists Predict Antarctic Climate Change." He said the new title was a "very milk toast title that didn't inspire any interest." The Union of Concerned Scientists survey involved scientists across the government from NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency to the department's of Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, Defense and Interior. In all the government employees more than 2,000 scientists who spend at least some of their time on climate issues, the report said. President Bush mentioned global warming in his recent State of the Union speech – the first time he's done that, CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss reports. But Democrats are ready to do something about it. Boxer has offered the most aggressive bill, one that is touted as reducing these greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by mid-century. Obama and McCain are sponsoring a bill along with Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who usually votes Democratic, that would cut emissions by two-thirds by 2050. Another bill, offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., would halt the growth of carbon emissions by 2030 and then is expected to lead to reductions. All three would require mandatory caps on greenhouse gas releases from power plants, cars and other sources. They also would have various forms of an emissions trading system to reduce the economic cost.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc.

Bush pressure seen on climate experts

Lawmakers received survey results of federal scientists that showed 46 percent felt pressure to eliminate the words “climate change,” “global warming” or similar terms from communications about their work.The scientists also reported 435 instances of political interference in their work over the past five years.

Bush pressure seen on climate experts
Lawmakers get survey of scientists, half of whom report political pressure

MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 2:07 p.m. CT Jan 30, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Democratic-controlled Congress on Tuesday stepped up its pressure on President Bush’s global warming strategy, hearing allegations of new political pressure on government scientists to downplay the threat of global warming.
Lawmakers received survey results of federal scientists that showed 46 percent felt pressure to eliminate the words “climate change,” “global warming” or similar terms from communications about their work.
The scientists also reported 435 instances of political interference in their work over the past five years.
Bush in his recent State of the Union address acknowledged that climate change needs to be addressed, but he opposes mandatory caps on carbon emissions, arguing that industry through new technologies can deal with the problem at less cost.
The intense interest about climate change comes as some 500 climate scientists gather in Paris this week to put the final touches on a United Nations report on how warming, as a result of a growing concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, is likely to affect sea levels.
The new allegations were made at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
Waxman said he and the top Republican on the committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, had sought documents from the administration on climate policy, but were repeatedly rebuffed.
"The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security," said Waxman, opening the hearing. "We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."
"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," Waxman added.
Waxman said his committee had not received documents it requested from the White House and other agencies, and that a handful of papers received on the eve of the hearing "add nothing to our inquiry."
Nearly half cited editsThe Union of Concerned Scientists, a private advocacy group, and the Government Accountability Project, a legal-assistance group that represents whistle-blowers, sent out the survey to 1,600 scientists. Surveys were returned by 308 scientists. Not all answered every question, but the survey found that:
· 43 percent of respondents reported edits during review of their work that changed the meaning of their findings.
· 46 percent felt administrative requirements that impaired climate-related work.
· 67 percent said the environment for federal government climate research is worse now than five years ago.
The groups urged lawmakers to ensure “scientists’ constitutional right to speak about any subject in their private lives and allowing scientists to make ultimate decisions about the communication of their research.”
“The new Congress must act to prevent the continued interference with science for political purposes,” said GAP attorney Tarek Maassarani. “A good first step would be for Congress to amend current whistle blower protections to specifically protect the rights of federal government scientists.”
Hearing witnesses included a NASA official and a former senior official of the office that coordinates the government’s climate programs. That former official, Rick Piltz, quit his job in 2005, charging that scientists’ climate documents were being edited by political appointees to tone them down.
Administration officials were not scheduled to testify. In the past, the White House has said it has only sought to inject balance into reports on climate change.
At the hearing, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, criticized the survey as self-selecting and flawed.
Allegations of political pressure have been at the center of a controversy involving James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the country’s top experts on climate change. Hansen had accused NASA of trying to keep him from speaking publicly about global warming, and the agency later backed off.
Climate legislation comingSince Democrats took control of Congress this month, there has been a rush to introduce climate legislation.
In the Senate, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was holding an open meeting Tuesday for her colleagues to express their views on climate change, in advance of a broader set of hearings on the issue.
Among those to make comments were two presidential hopefuls — Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. Both lawmakers favor mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, something opposed by President Bush, who argues such requirements would threaten economic growth.
Boxer has offered the most aggressive bill, one that is touted as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by mid-century.
Obama and McCain are sponsoring a bill along with Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., that would cut emissions by two-thirds by 2050. Another bill, offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., would halt the growth of carbon emissions by 2030 and then is expected to lead to reductions.
All three would require mandatory caps on greenhouse gas releases from power plants, cars and other sources. They also would have various forms of an emissions trading system to reduce the economic cost.
In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to create a new select-committee to hold hearings and recommend actions on climate change. That proposal has been met with resistance from chairmen of committees with jurisdiction over various aspects of the matter, but nevertheless has indicated the new importance the issue has taken in Congress.
2007 MSNBC InteractiveThe Associated Press contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16886008/?GT1=8921

Climate Report: Global Warming Effects Could Be Seen in 10 Years

A Critical Year: U.N. Pushes for World Summit on Global Warming
Spurred by damning new reports and growing concerns about the effects of global warming, the United Nations wants to hold a summit on climate change in September.

Climate Report: Global Warming Effects Could Be Seen in 10 Years
Giant Mirrors to Deflect Sun Suggested as One Possible Solution
ABC Jan. 30, 2007 — - A major new report on global warming slated to be released Friday raises new fears that the earth's climate is changing faster than anyone thought possible.
Today, 500 of the world's top scientists are meeting behind closed doors to finish a landmark report on global warming, and the picture they paint is not pretty. They say changes in the climate could start happening within the next 10 years.
ABC News has obtained a preliminary draft of the upcoming report on climate change, which shows a grim outlook on the effects of global warming and emphasizes that scientists are more convinced than ever that humans are causing it.
"We're hoping that it will convince people, you know, that climate change is real," said Kenneth Denman, co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
'Sun Shade' in Space?
The report predicts an increase in heat waves, intense tropical storms and hurricanes, a sharp rise in sea level and continued melting of the world's snow and glaciers.
According to a British newspaper, American scientists want the final version of the report, which is due in June, to recommend new technologies called geo-engineering, some of which would block sunlight to the earth and combat global warming. One proposed idea recommends using giant mirrors to deflect some of the sun's rays getting to earth.
With NASA funding, University of Arizona professor Roger Angel is researching using small discs to create a giant "sun shade" in space.
"The effect would or could take our temperature back to pre-industrial level," Angel said.
But these ideas are still considered a last resort. Most scientists believe we need to focus on reducing carbon emissions before resorting to alternatives.
"I don't think geo-engineering is a magic bullet," said Mike MacCracken, head of Climate Institute's Climate Science and Impacts. "We just haven't found anything that's come close to being able to do anything that doesn't have other side effects that you just wouldn't want to have happening."
But we may already be at a point of no return. On Monday, Indonesia's environmental minister warned that rising sea levels stand to inundate some 2,000 of his country's more than 18,000 islands by 2030.
2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

The Long Road to Energy Independence

An interesting educational, promotional point - beyond 'no child left behind': You don't give a loaded gun to a two year old. "...and yet, by secrecy and silence, the death sentence was also sealed, as the new energy concepts beyond nuclear, required for evolutionary survival, were denied, deemed too dangerous to a population being 'dumbed' down - see Evolution Blog

NYT January 28, 2007 - The Basics
The Long Road to Energy Independence
By MATTHEW L. WALD
President Bush never used the phrase “energy independence” in his State of the Union address last week, and it is just as well. His program for cutting gasoline demand is ambitious in scope, but modest in effect, according to experts.
The reason is that the United States has fallen down a very deep well, and it’s hard to get out. Last year, the United States imported 60 percent of the oil it consumed. If, as Mr. Bush proposes, we cut gasoline consumption 20 percent by 2017 — about 2.1 million barrels a day — then the share of oil imported will fall only by 4 or 5 percentage points.
In fact, the government expects the share of imported oil to fall anyway, to less than 56 percent, because of a rise in domestic production, mostly from the Gulf Coast.
Domestic production has fallen sharply since the mid-1970s, but the Energy Information Administration, which is part of the Energy Department, expects production to rise to almost six million barrels a day by 2017, up from a little over five million barrels a day now.
Mr. Bush is also proposing an increase in fuel-economy standards and an increase in the production of ethanol and other gasoline substitutes, hoping to keep oil consumption relatively steady. Without such intervention, oil consumption is forecast to rise to just over 23 million barrels a day in 2017, from nearly 21 million barrels a day today.
“It’s an enormous challenge,” said John Felmy, the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade association.
Production of ethanol from corn has already put pressure on food prices, according to some agriculture experts, but Mr. Bush’s plan involves tripling the production of corn ethanol, and making huge amounts of ethanol from cellulose, which is not now done commercially.
Integrating that much ethanol into the fuel supply will involve many more rail-tanker cars or trucks, because ethanol cannot be shipped in conventional pipelines. In addition, the gasoline formula with which it is mixed has to be changed, or the mixture evaporates too easily, causing air pollution.
The actual amount of ethanol produced will depend on what is technically feasible and on the price of oil. But at the rate of change suggested by the Bush plan, energy independence is about a century away.

A Pocket Nuke

PREHISTORIC methods of conflict resolution are not an option in an age of nuclear tools - and the use of prehistoric conflict resolution methods today stems solely from "The Trouble With Physics", i.e., disconnected scientific principles creating a naive and shortsighted world view reality of resource/energy and human evolution survival requirements

Georgian Sting Seizes Bomb Grade Uranium
Offer of Weapons-Grade Uranium an Unsettling Reminder of Nuclear Material on Black Market
By DESMOND BUTLER
ABC - The Associated Press
A Pocket Nuke: Sting Turns Up Bomb-Grade Uranium
WASHINGTON - It was one of the most serious cases of smuggling of nuclear material in recent years: A Russian man, authorities allege, tried to sell a small amount of nuclear-bomb grade uranium in a plastic bag in his jacket pocket.
The buy that took place last summer, it turned out, was a setup by Republic of Georgia authorities, with the help of the CIA. Their quiet sting operation neither U.S. nor Georgian officials have publicized it is an unsettling reminder about the possibility of terrorists acquiring nuclear bomb-making material on the black market.
No evidence suggests this particular case was terrorist-related.
"Given the serious consequences of the detonation of an improvised nuclear explosive device, even small numbers of incidents involving HEU (highly enriched uranium) or plutonium are of very high concern," said Melissa Fleming of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Details of the investigation, which also involved the FBI and Energy Department, were provided to The Associated Press by U.S. officials and Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili.
Authorities say they do not know how the man acquired the nuclear material or if his claims of access to much larger quantities were true. He and three Georgian accomplices are in Georgian custody and not cooperating with investigators.
Merabishvili said Georgian attempts to trace the nuclear material since the arrest and confirm whether the man indeed had access to larger quantities have foundered from a lack of cooperation from Russia.
Merabishvili said he was revealing the story out of frustration with Russia's response and the need to illustrate the dangers of a breakdown in security cooperation in the region.
A message left with the press office of the Russian Embassy was not returned. A duty officer at the Russian Foreign Ministry told The Associated Press that there was no one authorized to comment Wednesday night.
In Moscow, the Interfax news agency cited an unidentified source at Russia's nuclear agency as saying Georgian authorities had given Russia too small a sample to determine its origin and had refused to provide other information.
Russia has tense relations with Georgia, like Russia a former Soviet republic. Georgia has been troubled by Russia's support for separatists in two breakaway Georgian border regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The sting was set up after Georgian authorities uncovered extensive smuggling networks while investigating criminal groups operating in the breakaway republics, Merabishvili said.
"When we sent buyers, the channels through Abkhazia and South Ossetia began to expand, and we started seeing a huge flow of materials," he said. "Sometimes it was low-grade enriched materials, but this was the first instance of highly enriched material."
According to his account, during an investigation in South Ossetia, a Georgian undercover agent posing as a rich foreign buyer made contact with the Russian seller in North Ossetia, which is part of Russia.
After the Russian offered to sell the sample, the agent rebuffed requests that the transaction occur in North Ossetia, insisting the Russian come to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
At a meeting in Tbilisi, the man pulled out from his pocket a plastic bag containing the material.
"He was offering this as the first stage in a deal and said he had other pieces, Merabishvili said. "We don't know if that was true."
Uranium has a low level of radioactive emission and can be transported more safely than other radioactive materials.
The man was arrested and sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison on smuggling charges. His accomplices were sentenced on lesser charges.
Russian authorities took a sample of the material but failed to offer any assistance despite requests for help from the Georgians, Merabishvili said.
"We were ready to provide all the information, but unfortunately no one arrived from Russia, not even to interview this person," Merabishvili said. "It is surprising because it is in Russian interests to secure these materials. There are terrorist organizations in Russia who would pay huge amounts of money for this."
The Georgians asked for U.S. assistance. Agents from the FBI and the Energy Department took the material back to the United States, where it was tested by the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration.
"The material was analyzed by agency nuclear experts and confirmed to be highly enriched uranium," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the agency.
Fleming, of the IAEA, said the agency was aware of the Tbilisi seizure and was expecting formal notification from Georgia soon.
The CIA would not comment on the case, and the FBI confirmed its involvement in the investigation but nothing more.
Merabishvili, who was visiting Washington this week, said he did not have some details of the investigation, including the exact date the arrest was made or the full name of the suspect. Further efforts to clarify with the Georgian Embassy were not successful.
None of the U.S. officials would confirm the weight of the seizure or its quality, but Merabishvili said it was about 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of uranium enriched by more than 90 percent.
Uranium enriched at 90 percent is weapons grade.
A nuclear bomb of a design similar to the one exploded over Hiroshima in 1945 would require about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of uranium enriched at over 90 percent, according to Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate who focuses on nuclear theft and terrorism at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Bunn said that a more sophisticated implosion type nuclear bomb would require 15 to 18 kilograms (33 to 40 pounds).
According to an IAEA database, there have been 16 previous confirmed cases in which either highly enriched uranium or plutonium have been recovered by authorities since 1993.
In most cases the recoveries have involved smaller quantities than the Tbilisi case. But in 1994, 2.72 kilograms (6 pounds) of highly enriched uranium intended for sale were seized by police in the Czech Republic. In 2003, Georgian border guards using detection devices provided by the United States caught an Armenian man with about 170 grams (5 ounces) of HEU, according to the State Department.
Fleming said examples of stolen or missing bomb-grade nuclear material, including highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are rare and troubling.
David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said that lacking help from Russia, the CIA may be looking to other allies to help identify who has access to lost nuclear material.
"Russian cooperation in answering these questions is critical, but it has not been forthcoming," he said. "One way to identify who is active in trading these materials is to conduct sting operations."
Associated Press Writer Katherine Shrader contributed to this report.

Energy Research on a Shoestring

The lab’s fitful history reflects a basic truth: Despite a lot of promises, no one so far has wanted to pay the extra costs

THIS CRIPPLING OF LIFE's PROMISE & FUTURE STEMS FROM THE "TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS" AND TOP SECRECY IN SCIENCE IN FREEDUMB LAND. With science (and teachers) not getting the attention of Super Bowl footsybally, continuation of this trend has the potential to destroy all human life. Expanding the idea, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH PROFIT?" reveals a prehistoric economic/corporate profit model totally disconnected from LIFE and required evolutionary SURVIVAL parameters - scientific principles notoriously missing in science and education. CONNECT PROFIT WITH LIFE & EVOLUTIONARY SURVIVAL parameters, and profit becomes as beautiful and natural as the sunrise.

January 25, 2007 NYT - The Energy Challenge
Energy Research on a Shoestring

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
GOLDEN, Colo. — Thirty years after it was founded by President Jimmy Carter, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at the edge of the Rockies here still does not have a cafeteria.
Evaporation chambers for new solar energy systems look like they belong in an H. G. Wells movie. Technicians had to knock out a giant door from a testing facility to fit modern wind turbine blades, which now stick out like a bare toe from an old sock.
The hopes for this neglected lab brightened a bit just over a year ago when President Bush made the first presidential call on the lab since Mr. Carter and spelled out a vision for the not-too-distant future in which solar and wind power would help run every American home and cars would operate on biofuels made from residues of plants.
But one year after the president’s visit, the money flowing into the nation’s primary laboratory for developing renewable fuels is actually less than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. The lab’s fitful history reflects a basic truth: Americans may have a growing love affair with renewables and the idea of cutting oil imports and conserving energy, but it is a fickle one.
Riding that wave, the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, just promised committee hearings on how lawmakers could help limit climate change and enhance energy independence; Congressional Democrats pledged to find more research dollars for clean energy. [And President Bush, in his State of the Union address, called for greater federal mandates to increase use of homegrown alternative fuels.]
But the intertwined goals of developing domestic energy resources and reducing global warming gases are not necessarily in step with each other. Despite a lot of promises, no one so far has wanted to pay the extra costs to make wind and solar more than a trivial energy source. Research is uncertain and expensive, and the benefits seem far away.
So while all kinds of domestic energy technologies are being advanced in the name of energy independence, most of the money and attention are still focused on the dirty but cheaper standbys: offshore oil, oil sands and coal, in all its various incarnations, from straight out of the pit to black-coal liquid.
“You have fossil fuels competing with renewable fuels,” said Benjamin Kroposki, a senior scientist at the Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Renewables lose every time.”
One example is the shotgun approach to tax incentives, loan guarantees and other spending in the 2005 energy act, the first major energy legislation enacted by Congress in a decade: $13.1 billion for oil, gas and coal, $12 billion for nuclear energy and $7.7 billion divided up among a wide assortment of renewables like ethanol, hydroelectric, wind and solar.
Now that they are in control of Congress, Democrats have promised to increase the amount going to renewable energy sources, taking the money from tax breaks for oil companies.
But even additional money for renewable energy will be going up against government tax policies that encourage more energy consumption. Companies can still deduct purchases of sport utility vehicles and utility bills, for example, while consumers get a break to build bigger homes with deductions for interest payments on mortgages, even on second homes, that far outweigh their energy saving credits.
Meanwhile, fuel efficiency standards for automobiles have changed only slightly over the decades, and the federal government still does not have a building code to encourage energy efficiency.
It is a policy mix that goes back many administrations and appears difficult to shake, partly because dirty sources of energy like coal and shale are what the United States has in abundance.
“We are going dirtier,” said Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “If you need to come up with a fuel source other than drilling for oil under the ground in the Middle East, what is the most obvious thing with today’s economy, today’s infrastructure and today’s technology? Oil shale, liquefied coal and tar sands. It’s all dirty but it’s fast.”
Renewable energy today supplies only 6 percent of the country’s energy needs, and much of that comes from decades-old dams supplying hydropower. Under current policies, the Energy Information Administration estimates, renewables will increase only slightly in importance in the decades ahead. They would supply 7 percent of United States energy supplies by 2030, while coal would increase over the same period from 23 percent to 26 percent.
“Denmark gets 22 percent of its electrical energy from wind today and we get 0.5 percent,” noted Robert Thresher, director of the lab’s National Wind Technology Center. “That shows you what you can do when you really want to.”
Meanwhile imports of oil and gas are set to continue to rise in the decades ahead, as domestic production slows and the population grows.
“The current trends do not seem sustainable,” said Faith Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency. “For me the most important thing that is missing from current consideration is an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency.”
As they have in the past, higher prices for oil and gas have driven the renewed interest in alternative energy sources. With prices falling, some of that momentum may falter.
Still, President Bush advanced his call last year to end the nation’s oil addiction, providing some of the strongest rhetoric since President Carter called energy independence the moral equivalent of war.
[Mr. Bush set a goal of reducing gas use by 20 percent in the next 10 years. “To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017; this is nearly five times the current target,” he said Tuesday night.
[On Wednesday the administration sought to put some teeth into the goal by proposing $1.6 billion in new financing for renewable energy, with a focus on research and production of “cellulosic” energy from nonfood crops and agricultural waste.]
The Democratic Congress appears ready to put clean energy front and center in its agenda.
Prominent Democrats are talking about doubling the budget of the renewable energy lab, and otherwise greatly increase the priority of producing clean energy.
“You’ve got to invest in this new energy future that everybody pays lip service to, but when push comes to shove do we really stand there?” said Representative Mark Udall of Colorado, a senior Democratic spokesman on energy issues. “This is the country’s economic future not to mention the national security ramifications.”
Institutional investments in private clean energy companies in North America and Europe are rising quickly, from $500 million in 2004 to $1.3 billion in 2005 to $2.7 billion in 2006, according to Venture Business Research, an independent group based in Britain.
But even while top energy companies are also beginning to invest significant amounts in wind, solar and plants, those investments pale in comparison with the resources they are pouring into making synthetic fuels out of oil sands, a process that emits significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil.
Likewise energy companies are stepping up research and investments into oil sands, deep-ocean oil and gas drilling, and gasifying and liquefying coal — all with significant environmental consequences.
For instance, Royal Dutch Shell has invested $1 billion over the last five years in clean energy like biofuels for transportation, solar and wind for electrical generation and hydrogen. That is one of the biggest commitments to clean energy by any company, but it is less than one fifth of what Shell invested over roughly the same period with Chevron and another partner in a giant oil sand mining project in Canada.
The companies say they can contain emissions through a process called carbon capture and sequestration. But most experts say development of technologies to bury significant amounts of carbon gases effectively could take decades.
At the lab here, signs of change are mixed. Last year, the institution opened its first building in a decade, although meager budgets could leave its main laboratory as much as 80 percent vacant of equipment for the next several years unless Congress suddenly comes to the rescue.
Congressional earmarks that redirected Energy Department financing last year slowed or even shelved many research projects, including ones to develop bigger and more efficient wind turbines, to make hydrogen power out of a mix of algae and water, and to plant matter.
Its scientists are also doing ground-breaking work on finding environmentally benign ways of generating electricity to produce hydrogen from water to power cars; they are working on new materials and designs to make devices powered by solar cells cheaper; and they are developing enzymes and more efficient machinery to convert switchgrass and corn stalks into biofuels to reduce oil consumption.
When Chevron decided last year that it wanted to develop the next generation of ethanol and renewable plant-based diesel fuels from trees and agricultural waste, it turned to the lab here for a scientific partnership. Now Chevron and scientists from the federal laboratory are working to make hydrogen energy out of decomposed plants. DuPont, Cargill and the National Corn Growers Association look to the lab for help in producing ethanol.
But it is hardly the kind of crash program that government labs have conducted in the past to build an atomic bomb or go to the moon. Rather, the lab gingerly hands over slices of its yearly budget of $200 million to a smorgasbord of programs in solar, wind, plant matter, geothermal, hydrogen and fuel cells, efficient buildings, advanced vehicles and fuels and electric infrastructure.
“Our budget is nothing compared to the price of a B2 bomber or an aircraft carrier,” Rob Farrington, manager of the lab’s advanced vehicle systems group, said.

Virginia Senator Jim Webb Offers the Democratic Response

"a sharply-worded address that must have startled millions of TV viewers accustomed to Democrat vacillation" - Oh, my, a crack in the use of the psychological brainwashing tool of "Milgram Experiment, version 8.0"? (see Revisiting the Nature of Power)

______________________

Virginia Senator Jim Webb Offers the Democratic Response

Published on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Jim Webb Offers the Democratic Response. . .to Hillary and Obama
by Jeff Cohen

If you watched freshman Virginia Sen. Jim Webb deliver the Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union speech, you witnessed something historic -- a Democrat on national TV unabashedly ripping into six years of Bush rule for an uninterrupted 10 minutes.
With no O’Reilly or Hannity to disrupt or out-shout him.
Webb offered a populist, anti-corporate stand on economics and a blunt attack on Bush for “recklessly” dragging our country into the Iraq war – a sharply-worded address that must have startled millions of TV viewers accustomed to Democrat vacillation.
It was the kind of stirring appeal, both progressive and patriotic, that could win over voters at election time -- including swing voters, NASCAR dads, soccer moms, even Republican leaners. The new Senator – a novelist and former Secretary of the Navy -- reportedly discarded the speech handed him by Democratic leaders, and wrote his own.
But Webb’s speech was not just a rebuttal to Bush. It was also a pointed response to the tepid pablum that comes out of the mouths of mainstream media-anointed Democratic presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
TV viewers could easily see the contrast between Webb’s words and those of Clinton and Obama, since the two candidates were featured one after another on TV network after network soon after Bush and Webb. Yet they said so little.
Clinton and Obama were the only two Democrats so heavily spotlighted last night – which is how corporate media shape and bias the Democratic race while pretending to just be covering it. John Edwards appeared on a couple shows last night, and was more forceful.
Dennis Kucinich was invisible, though Webb seemed to be channeling Kucinich on economics.
In case you missed it, here’s a bit of what Webb said.
When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.
Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. . .
In the early days of our republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American-style democracy: that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street. We must recapture that spirit today.
And Webb, a Marine in Vietnam, offered a blistering attack on the Iraq adventure:
The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command. . .and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.
Webb called for reversing direction in Iraq: “an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.”
Webb ended his speech with references to two Republican presidents. He praised Dwight Eisenhower for recognizing the Korean War as a “bloody stalemate” and quickly bringing that war to an end.
And Webb invoked Teddy Roosevelt for standing up to “improper corporate influence” at the beginning of the 20th century:
America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.
Whether intended or not, Webb was offering a way for Democrats to win elections -- a script for any presidential candidate who wants to distinguish him or herself in the primaries, and then defeat the Republicans in Nov. 2008.
And if taken from the realm of mere rhetoric to actual policy, a means to reform our country in a way that would give Democrats majority support for years to come.
Jeff Cohen is a media critic, recovering TV pundit and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media”. He consults for Progressive Democrats of America

U.S. image around world sharply worsens: BBC poll

PREHISTORIC methods of conflict resolution are not an option in an age of nuclear tools. The prehistoric conflict resolution use today stems solely from "The Trouble With Physics" presenting a shortsighted, naive, and skewed view of Reality - sponsoring the notoriety of historical corporate squeeze and greed, Enron-like outcomes, including "what to do with people who live on land that has OUR required resources?"

U.S. image around world sharply worsens: BBC poll
ABC - Reuters LONDON

The image of the United States has deteriorated around the world in the past year because of issues such as Iraq and prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to a poll by the BBC World Service released on Tuesday.
The proportion of people believing the United States has a mainly positive influence in world affairs dropped seven points from a year ago -- to 29 percent from 36, the results from 18 countries that were also polled the previous year showed.
Fifty-two percent thought U.S. influence was mainly negative, up from 47 percent a year ago, the poll found.
The survey, released on the day President George W. Bush gives his State of the Union speech to Congress, found sharp disagreement with U.S. policy on Iraq which is ravaged by violence nearly four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
In all, 26,381 people were questioned in 25 countries. Almost three in four people disapproved of U.S. policy on Iraq, while two-thirds disapproved of U.S. handling of terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba.
"The U.S. administration's recent decision to send more troops to Iraq is at odds with global public opinion ... This policy is likely to further hurt America's image," Doug Miller, president of pollsters GlobeScan, said.
Sixty-five percent disapproved of U.S. policy on last year's war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas, 60 percent of its handling of Iran's nuclear program, 56 percent of its stance on global warming and 54 percent of its policy on North Korea's nuclear program.
More than two-thirds believed the U.S. military presence in the Middle East provoked more conflict than it prevented and only 17 percent thought U.S. troops there were a stabilizing force.
The poll found that the American public also seemed to have serious doubts about U.S. foreign policy. Majorities of Americans polled disapproved of how the United States was handling the war in Iraq (57 percent) and global warming (54 percent) while half disapproved of U.S. policy on Guantanamo and Iran.
Fifty-three percent of Americans said the U.S. military presence in the Middle East "provokes more conflict than it prevents," the survey said.
The poll found U.S. policy was regarded poorly in Britain, Bush's closest ally in Iraq. A majority (57 percent) of the British public saw U.S. influence in the world as mainly negative and 81 percent disapproved of U.S. actions in the war in Iraq, the BBC World Service said.
The poll, carried out between November 3 and January 9, covered Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United States.
Copyright 2007 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Report: Global Warming Is Here, Now

Analogy: WARNING, Tsunami coming, everybody grab a spoon go to the beach and get ready to bail out and save ourselves, corresponds to the news reports presented in this blog, "an umbrella to shade the earth, "monster bugs to eat CO2"to solve global warming. These are the crippling ideas stemming from the foundational "TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS" problems, and top secrecy in science in our new freedumb land. Is it possible with science (and teachers) not getting the attention of Super Bowl footsybally, that this freedumb trend can destroy all human life? Extending the prior news article in this blog, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH PROFIT?" there is nothing wrong with profit unless this prehistoric economic/corporate profit model is totally disconnected from LIFE and required evolutionary SURVIVAL parameters - scientific principles notoriously missing in science and education.



Report: Global Warming Is Here, Now
CBS WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2007
(AP) Human-caused global warming is here — visible in the air, water and melting ice — and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week. "The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling." Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles." The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday. That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said. Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report says. They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by government officials for several days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later. The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001. Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer." Look for an "iconic statement" — a simple but strong and unequivocal summary — on how global warming is now occurring, said one of the authors, Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder. The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel. An early version of the ever-changing draft report said "observations of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the ocean, and in snow and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of warming." And the early draft adds: "An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation." The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for the United States. The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets in Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic melting; and sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in the past decade. Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report — to be released in April — will for the first time feature a blockbuster chapter on how global warming is already changing health, species, engineering and food production, said NASA scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, author of that chapter. As confident as scientists are about the global warming effects that they've already documented, they are as gloomy about the future and even hotter weather and higher sea level rises. Predictions for the future of global warming in the report are based on 19 computer models, about twice as many as in the past, Solomon said. In 2001, the panel said the world's average temperature would increase somewhere between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit and the sea level would rise between 4 and 35 inches by the year 2100. The 2007 report will likely have a smaller range of numbers for both predictions, Pachauri and other scientists said. The future is bleak, scientists said. "We have barely started down this path," said chapter co-author Richard Alley of Penn State University.
© MMVII The Associated Press

Iran Warns Of Possible Faceoff With U.S.

I keep telling myself,
current events have nothing to do with Nostradamus, et al.

Iran Warns Of Possible Faceoff With U.S.
TEHRAN, Iran, Jan. 22, 2007
(CBS/AP) Iran conducted missile tests Monday as its leadership stepped up warnings of possible military confrontation with the United States. Hard-liners said an American attack would spark "hell" for the United States and Israel, with some threatening suicide attacks against U.S. forces. The drum-beating suggests Iran does not intend to back down as tensions mount on both fronts of its confrontation with the United States and the West — the nuclear issue and the turmoil in neighboring Iraq. In another defiant move, Iranian officials on Monday said Tehran had rejected 38 U.N. nuclear inspectors from a list of potential inspectors — apparently in retaliation for a Security Council resolution last month imposing limited sanctions on the country. Others on the list would be allowed to enter the country, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, without giving the reasons for the bans. Iran's leaders have increasingly touted the possibility of a U.S. attack since President George W. Bush announced on Jan. 9 the deployment of a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf region, a move U.S. officials have said is a show of strength directed at Iran. The leadership's warnings could aim to rally the public behind the government and silence increasingly bold criticism of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at home. Iranian reformers and conservatives have accused him of hurting Iran with his virulent anti-U.S. rhetoric in the nuclear standoff with the West, while failing to repair Iran's weakening economy. "Iran is ratcheting up the pressure and showing its defiance of U.N. sanctions by conducting missile tests and blocking inspectors," says CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "but Ahmadinejad is beginning to feel the heat at home." "The Security Council gave Iran 60 days to comply back in December," said Falk, "and is now discussing next steps, ones that will take more of a toll on Iran's economy." In a significant move, a paper close to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday joined the voices threatening retaliation for any U.S. military action — suggesting the highest levels are involved in ringing the alarm over the American deployment. The top editor of the Keyhan daily warned that Iran will turn the Middle East into "hell" if America takes military action against Iran. "The U.S. military is within our range both on the east and the west," Hossein Shariatmadari wrote. "With missiles fired from Iran, Israel will turn into a scorching hell for the Zionists." Shariatmadari, who was named to his post by Khamenei, also warned that Iran could block oil through the strategic Hormuz Strait at the mouth of the Gulf if the United States initiates a war. The Iranian military on Monday began five days of maneuvers near the northern city of Garmsar, about 62 miles southeast of Tehran, state television reported. The military tested its Zalzal-1 and Fajr-5 missiles, the TV reported. The Zalzal-1, able to carry a 1,200-pound payload, has a range of 200 miles, making it able to hit anywhere in Iraq or U.S. bases in the Gulf as well as into eastern Saudi Arabia. The Fajr-5, with a 1,800-pound payload, has a range of 35 miles. Neither could reach Israel, but Iran is known to have missiles that can. It is not known if either missile tested Monday is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The Iranian show of strength came as the American aircraft carrier USS Stennis was heading toward the Gulf region, joining the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in a beefed-up American military presence. The Stennis is expected to arrive in late February. The United States is also deploying Patriot missiles and nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf and F16 fighter planes to the Incirlik base in neighboring Turkey. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the buildup aimed to impress on Iran that the four-year war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable. The United States accuses Iran of backing militants fueling Iraq's violence and has vowed to cut off its support. Washington and its allies also accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, an allegation Tehran denies, insisting it only wants to produce energy. In Iran, the U.S. buildup has sparked loud warnings from officials that the United States will attack. U.S. officials have long refused to rule out any options in the faceoff with Tehran, but say military action would be a last resort. On Thursday, Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, appeared on state television saying the Americans "have made their decision to attack Iran" — possibly in late February or early March. Iran's military has been put on high alert in reaction to the possibility of a U.S. attack, a military official told the Associated Press. The official did not elaborate on what high alert entails. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the press. The hardline daily newspaper Hezbollah warned of suicide attacks against American targets if the United States attacks. "We have tens of thousands of volunteers who have registered for martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) ... We have to organize our partisan attacks as of now," it said in a commentary Saturday. The chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, was quoted on a Web site close to the force as saying Monday that Iran had "full intelligence dominance" over U.S. forces and that Iran will "suppress invaders" if it is attacked. Ahmadinejad said last week that Iran is "ready for anything" in its confrontation with the United States — at the same time that he soundly rejected criticism at home over his policies. Rising prices have fueled anger against Ahmadinejad — from both reformists and conservatives who were once his allies. Iran's most senior dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, joined the criticism, saying the president's provocation "only creates problems for the country." "One has to deal with the enemy with wisdom, not provoke it," he told a group of reformists and opponents of Ahmadinejad on Friday in the holy city of Qom, 80 miles south of Tehran.
CBS Interactive Inc.

China's Missile Test Has the World's Attention

Theresa Hitchens, with the Center for Defense Information, said knocking out a satellite like this creates about 300 to 800 pieces of debris the size of a baseball. Debris that size is big enough to do serious damage to the space station. A crack in the space station could mean loss of pressure. NASA's own tests have shown a tiny piece of debris could penetrate the space shuttle, and a hairline crack could have catastrophic results

China's Missile Test Has the World's Attention
ABC - Analysts Say the Test Underscores China's Military and Space Ambitions
By GINA SUNSERI
Jan 19, 2007 — - When China launched an anti-satellite weapon to destroy one of its old weather satellites, it also launched an avalanche of speculation around the world. What is the ultimate goal of the Chinese?
The incident is believed to have happened around 5:28 p.m. EST, on Jan. 11, according to Craig Covault of Aviation Week & Space Technology. Covault broke the story late Thursday night, reporting that "the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA and other government organizations have a full court press under way to obtain data on the alleged test."
Covault reported the test is believed to have occurred as the weather satellite flew 520 miles above China's Sichuan province.
Blasting a satellite into bits is one way to get attention.
Covault said this test has significance on several levels. "Although more of a 'policy weapon' at this time, to me the test shows that the Chinese military can threaten the imaging reconnaissance satellites operated by the U.S., Japan, Russia, Israel and Europe," he tells ABC News.
What has many analysts worried are the 26,000 satellites orbiting the earth, from weather satellites to communications satellites. Even the International Space Station is a satellite, which orbits at about 220 miles, well within range of the Chinese anti-satellite weapon. Analysts also worry about the debris of a satellite's destruction.
Theresa Hitchens, with the Center for Defense Information, said knocking out a satellite like this creates about 300 to 800 pieces of debris the size of a baseball. Debris that size is big enough to do serious damage to the space station. A crack in the space station could mean loss of pressure. NASA's own tests have shown a tiny piece of debris could penetrate the space shuttle, and a hairline crack could have catastrophic results when the shuttle re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
Hitchens' concern is if there is some kind of "space shoot out" with two countries targeting the other's satellites, the fallout from debris could conceivably destroy satellites, or at least render their orbits unusable.
Covault said the Chinese test has significance for its own space program. "China has a very ambitious space program and is increasing it dramatically," he said. "They are in the process of developing many unmanned satellites and in fact a whole new line of powerful boosters. China is really on a roll with increasing potency of its space program."
Joan Johnson Freese is an analyst with the Naval War College who has closely followed the Chinese space program. She believes the Chinese have long felt left out of the space race. "The Chinese have long felt the U.S. isolates them in terms of space. It is a real thorn in their side," she said.
ABC News Ned Potter contributed to this story.

A New Player at Star Wars

“Outer space is the common heritage of mankind, and weaponization of outer space is bound to trigger off an arms race, thus rendering outer space a new arena for military confrontation,”

January 20, 2007
NYT - News Analysis
A New Player at Star Wars
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, Jan. 19 — China’s apparent success in destroying one of its own orbiting satellites with a ballistic missile signals that its rising military intends to contest American supremacy in space, a realm many here consider increasingly crucial to national security.
The test of an antisatellite weapon last week, which Beijing declined to confirm or deny Friday despite widespread news coverage and diplomatic inquiries, was perceived by East Asia experts as China’s most provocative military action since it testfired missiles off the coast of Taiwan more than a decade ago. Unlike the Taiwan exercise, the main target this time was the United States, the sole superpower in space.
With lengthy white papers, energetic diplomacy and generous aid policies, Chinese officials have taken pains in recent years to present their country as a new kind of global power that, unlike the United States, had only good will toward other nations.
But some analysts say the test shows that the reality is more complex. China has surging national wealth, legitimate security concerns and an opaque military bureaucracy that may belie the government’s promise of a “peaceful rise.”
“This is the other face of China, the hard power side that they usually keep well hidden,” said Chong-Pin Lin, an expert on China’s military in Taiwan. “They talk more about peace and diplomacy, but the push to develop lethal, high-tech capabilities has not slowed down at all.”
Japan, South Korea and Australia are among the countries in the region that pressed China to explain the test, which if confirmed would make it the third power, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to shoot down an object in space.
China’s Foreign and Defense Ministries declined to comment on reports of the test, which were based on United States intelligence data. Liu Jianchao, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, would say only that China opposed using weapons in space. “China will not participate in any kind of arms race in outer space,” he told Reuters.
The silence on the test underscores how much China’s rapidly modernizing military — perhaps especially the Second Artillery forces, in charge of its ballistic missile program — remains isolated and secretive, answering only to President Hu Jintao, who heads the military as well as the ruling Communist Party.
Having a weapon that can disable or destroy satellites is considered a component of China’s unofficial doctrine of asymmetrical warfare. China’s army strategists have written that the military intends to use relatively inexpensive but highly disruptive technologies to impede the better-equipped and better-trained American forces in the event of an armed conflict — over Taiwan, for example.
The Pentagon makes extensive use of satellites for military communications, intelligence and missile guidance, and some Chinese experts have argued that damaging its space-based satellite infrastructure could hobble American forces.
Yet while China’s research and development of such weapons has been well known, the apparent decision to test-fire an antisatellite weapon came as a surprise to many analysts.
“If this is fully corroborated, it is a very significant event that is likely to recast relations between the United States and China,” said Allan Behm, a former official in Australia’s Defense Ministry. “This was a very sophisticated thing to do, and the willingness to do it means that we’re seeing a different level of threat.”
China’s military expenditures have been growing at nearly a double-digit pace, even after adjusting for inflation, for 15 years. China has begun to deploy sophisticated submarines, aircraft and antiship missiles that the Pentagon says could have offensive uses.
Yet with a few notable exceptions, Beijing has avoided sharp provocations that could prompt the United States or Japan to focus more on what some officials in both countries regard as a potential China threat.
Chinese leaders emphasize that they are preoccupied with domestic challenges and intend to focus their energy and resources on economic development, a policy they say depends heavily on cross-border investment, open trade and friendly foreign relations.
Beijing has denied that it intends to develop space weapons and sharply criticized the United States for experimenting with a space-based missile defense system. It forged a coalition of Asian countries to jointly develop peaceful space-based technologies.
Last month it published and heavily promoted a white paper on military strategy that emphasized its view that space must remain weapon-free. “China is unflinching in taking the road of peaceful development and always maintains that outer space is the common wealth of mankind,” the paper said.
Some of such talk amounts to little more than propaganda. But Jonathan Pollack, a China specialist at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., says the Chinese military does in fact act cautiously when it comes to improving its strategic capabilities, like long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, to avoid causing alarm in the United States.
“They have talked about antisatellite weapons,” he said. “But we have always thought that the threat was ambiguous and that China probably wanted it that way. So what was the calculation to go ahead with an actual test?”
Some analysts suggested that one possible motivation was to prod the Bush administration to negotiate a treaty to ban space weapons. Russia and China have advocated such a treaty, but President Bush rejected those calls when he authorized a policy that seeks to preserve “freedom of action” in space.
Chinese officials have warned that an arms race could ensue if Washington did not change course.
At a United Nations conference in Vienna last June on uses of space, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official, Tang Guoqiang, called the policies of “certain nations” disconcerting.
“Outer space is the common heritage of mankind, and weaponization of outer space is bound to trigger off an arms race, thus rendering outer space a new arena for military confrontation,” he said, according to an official transcript of his remarks.
Even so, Mr. Pollack of the Naval War College said that if China hoped that demonstrating a new weapon of this kind would prompt a positive response in Washington, they most likely miscalculated.
“Very frankly, many people in Washington will find that this validates the view of a China threat,” Mr. Pollack said. “It could well end up backfiring and forcing the U.S. to take new steps to counter China.”
Other analysts said the test might have more to do with proving a technology under development for many years than a cold-war-style negotiating tactic.
China maintains a minimal nuclear arsenal that could inflict enough damage on an enemy to guard against any pre-emptive strike, these analysts said. But the increasing sophistication of American missile interceptors, which are linked to satellite surveillance, threatens the viability of China’s limited nuclear arsenal, some here have argued.
That may have prompted the Second Artillery to show that it had the means to protect fixed missile sites and ensure China’s retaliatory capacity by showing that it could take out American satellites.
At the annual military fair in Zhuhai, held last November, the Guangdong-based newspaper Information Times and several other state-run media outlets carried a short interview with an unidentified military official boasting that China had “already completely ensured that it has second-strike capability.” The analyst said China could protect its retaliatory forces because it could destroy satellites in space.
American officials have also noted the development. Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. Michael Mapes of the Army testified before Congress that China and Russia were working on systems to hit American satellites with lasers or missiles. And over the summer, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Donald M. Kerr, told reporters that the Chinese had used a ground-based laser to “paint,” or illuminate, an American satellite, a possible first step to using lasers to destroy satellites.
“China is becoming more assertive in just about every military field,” said Mr. Behm, the Australian expert. “It is not going to concede that the U.S. can be the hegemon in space forever.”

China Tests Anti-Satellite Weapon, Unnerving U.S.

" Despite the U.S. protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space."

NYT January 18, 2007
China Tests Anti-Satellite Weapon, Unnerving U.S.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
China successfully carried out its first test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said Thursday.
Only two nations — Russia and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in anti-satellite tests, most recently the United States in the mid 1980s.
Arms control experts called the test, in which a Chinese missile destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow either an anti-satellite arms race or, alternatively, a diplomatic push by China to force the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.
“This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we’ve seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint.”
White House officials said the United States and other nations, which they did not name, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese.” Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space.
At a time when China is modernizing its nuclear weapons, expanding the reach of its navy and sending astronauts into orbit for the first time, the test appears to mark a new sphere of technical and military competition. American officials complained today that China made no public or private announcements about its test, despite repeated requests by American officials for more openness about their actions.
The weather satellite hit by the missile circled the globe at an altitude of roughly 500 miles. In theory, the test means that China can now hit American spy satellites, which orbit closer to Earth than that. Experts said remnants of the destroyed satellite could threaten to damage or destroy other satellites for years or even decades to come.
In late August, President Bush authorized a new national space policy that ignored calls for a global prohibition on such tests and asserted the need for American “freedom of action in space.”
“It could be a shot across the bow,” said Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs. “For several years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war technique.”
Gary Samore, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a proliferation expert, said in an interview: “I think it makes perfect sense for the Chinese to do this both for deterrence and to hedge their bets. It puts pressure on the U.S. to negotiate agreements not to weaponize space.”
Ms. Hitchens and other critics have accused the Bush administration of conducting secret research on advanced anti-satellite weapons using lasers, which are considered a far speedier and more powerful way of destroying satellites than the cruder weapons of two decades ago.
The White House statement, issued by the National Security Council, said China’s “development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area.”
An administration official who had reviewed the intelligence about China’s test said the Chinese missile launch was detected by the United States in the early evening of Jan. 11, which would have been early morning on Jan. 12 in China. American satellites tracked the launch of the medium-range ballistic missile, and later space radars saw the debris and noted that the old weather satellite had vanished.
The anti-satellite test was first reported late Wednesday on the Web site of Aviation Week and Space Technology, an industry magazine. It said intelligence agencies had yet to “complete confirmation of the test.”
The Chinese test, the magazine said, appeared to employ a ground-based interceptor that used the sheer force of impact rather than an exploding warhead to shatter the satellite into a cloud of debris.
Dr. McDowell of Harvard, who twice monthly publishes "Jonathan’s Space Report," an e-mail newsletter, said the satellite is known as Feng Yun, or “wind and cloud.” Launched in 1999, it was the third in a series. He said the satellite was a cube measuring 4.6 feet on a side, and that its solar panels extended about 28 feet. He added that it was due for retirement sometime soon but still appeared to be electronically alive — making it an ideal target.
“If it stops working,” he said, “you know you have a successful hit.”
David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said he calculated that the Chinese satellite shattered into 800 fragments that were 4 inches wide or larger, and millions of smaller pieces.
Jianhua Li, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said he had heard about the anti-satellite report but had no statement or information.
The Soviet Union conducted roughly a dozen anti-satellite tests between 1968 and 1982, Dr. McDowell said, adding that the Reagan administration carried out its experiments in 1985 and 1986.
The Bush administration has conducted laser research that critics say could produce a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.
The largely secret project, parts of which were made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress last year, appears to be part of a wide-ranging effort by the Bush administration to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive. No treaty or law forbids such work.
The administration’s laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by the Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to develop an anti-satellite laser. It would take advantage of an optical technique that uses sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence that seems to make stars twinkle. The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused beams of light upward with great clarity and force.
Michael Krepon, cofounder of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, a private group that studies national security, called the Chinese test very un-Chinese.
“There’s nothing subtle about this,” he said. “They’ve created a huge debris cloud that will last a quarter century or more. It’s at a higher elevation than the test we did in 1985, and for that one the last trackable debris took 17 years to clear out.”
Mr. Krepon added that the administration has long argued that the world needs no space-weapons treaty because no such arms exist and because the last tests were two decades ago. “It seems,” he said, “that argument is no longer operative.”
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

Scientists Warn of Diminished Earth Studies From Space

“This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the Earth,” Dr. Anthes said. “We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can’t count on.”

January 16, 2007
Scientists Warn of Diminished Earth Studies From Space
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The nation’s ability to track retreating polar ice and shifting patterns of drought, rainfall and other environmental changes is being put “at great risk” by faltering efforts to replace aging satellite-borne sensors, a panel convened by the country’s leading scientific advisory group said.
By 2010, the number of operating Earth-observing instruments on NASA satellites, most of which are already past their planned lifetimes, is likely to drop by 40 percent, the National Research Council of the National Academies warned in a report posted on the Internet yesterday at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11820.html.
The weakening of these monitoring efforts comes even as many scientists and the Bush administration have been emphasizing their growing importance, both to clarify risks from global warming and natural hazards and to track the condition of forests, fisheries, water and other resources.
Several prominent scientists welcomed the report, saying that while the overall tightening of the federal budget played a role in threatening Earth-observing efforts, a significant contributor was also President Bush’s recent call for NASA to focus on manned space missions.
“NASA has a mission ordering that starts with the presidential goals — first of manned flight to Mars, and second, establishing a permanent base on the Moon, and then third to examine Earth, which puts Earth rather far down on the totem pole,” said F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who shared a Nobel Prize for identifying threats to the ozone layer.
In an e-mail statement, John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, acknowledged that there were many challenges to maintaining and improving Earth-observing systems, but said the administration was committed to keeping them a “top science priority.”
The report, “Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,” proposed spending roughly $7.5 billion in constant 2006 dollars on new instruments and satellite missions through 2020, saying that would satisfy various scientific and societal priorities while holding annual costs around what they were, as a percentage of the economy, in 2000.
“We’re trying to present a balanced, affordable program that spans all the earth sciences,” said Richard A. Anthes, the co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report and the new president of the American Meteorological Society.
The report is the latest in a string of findings from such panels pointing to dangers from recent disinvestment in the long-term monitoring of a fast-changing planet.
“This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the Earth,” Dr. Anthes said. “We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can’t count on.”
Satellite-borne instruments, using radar, lasers and other technology, have revolutionized earth and climate science, allowing researchers to accurately and efficiently track parameters like sea level and tiny motions of the Earth from earthquakes, the amount of rain in a cyclone and moisture in air, and the average temperature of various layers of the atmosphere.
The committee identified significant gaps in instrumentation or plans for satellites orbiting over the poles, around the Equator, and positioned so that they remain stationary over spots on the rotating Earth.
One of the most important aspects of such monitoring is launching new satellites before old ones fail. Without this overlap, it is hard to assemble meaningful long-term records that are sufficiently precise to uncover trends, the report’s authors said.
The report went beyond discussing ailing hardware and said the White House science policy office should do more to ensure that society and science were benefiting fully from the reams of data flowing from orbiting instruments.
Senior officials at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration welcomed the report and said it would be considered as they sought to sustain Earth observations in a time of tight budgets.