Cow Farts Major Contributor to Global Warming!

A Swedish university has received $590,000 US in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows burp and fart.

About 20 volunteer cows will participate in the project run by the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, about 65 kilometres north of Stockholm, officials said Monday.

Cattle release methane, a greenhouse gas believed to contribute to global warming, when they digest their food. Researchers believe the level of methane released depends on the type of food they eat but that worldwide, cows add 3 to 5% of greenhouse gases to the environment!

Project leader Jan Bertilsson said that the cows involved in the study will have different diets and wear a collar device measuring the methane level in the air around them.

"This type of research is already being conducted in Canada so we will be in contact with Canadian agricultural researchers in the near future," he said.

The research will be funded by a grant from the government's Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning.

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Global Warming.

From the air, Greenland's ice sheet, the second largest on Earth, appears to be perfectly still.

A boat sails by an iceberg floating in the Jacobshavn Bay near the town of Ilulissat, Greenland.

But below the surface, the ice sheet is in constant motion, as ice built up in the interior pushes toward the coast in the form of massive glaciers. During warmer months, ice from these glaciers melts into the ocean. It's an age-old process that scientists say has speeded up in recent decades because of global warming.

The fear is that melting ice from Greenland and other Arctic areas could cause sea levels to rise enough to flood low-lying cities, such as Shanghai, China, and New York City, displacing millions of people in the process.

A recent report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of scientists from around the world, estimates the sea level rise by 2100 could be as much as 1½ feet.

"That sea level rise is only based on melt from ice sheets, and does not include a new fast flow of ice we have detected in Greenland that is generating additional icebergs," said Dr. Konrad Steffen, a climate scientist with the University of Colorado, Boulder. Steffen estimates sea levels could rise three feet over the next century, a stark prediction that could wreak havoc around the world if it comes to pass. Greenland holds enough ice to cause sea levels to rise 23 feet if the entire ice sheet melted, a development few scientists expect to happen anytime soon. But global sea levels have been rising at the rate of three millimeters per year since 1993.

For each of the past 17 years, Steffen has spent one month at a remote research site called Swiss Camp, located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland. He monitors the changing ice sheet through a network of global positioning systems and weather stations, which have recorded a dramatic rise in temperatures since the mid-1990s.

"When we came here in 1990, the first two, three years were actually colder than normal. Then in 1994, 1995, it started to warm steadily and since then, we've had a temperature increase during the winter months of 4.5 degrees centigrade, 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very large, the largest temperature increase on earth," he said.

The rising temperatures feed what scientists call a "positive feedback loop." As the air warms, it melts ice on the sea and snow on land. This exposes more water and land to the sun. Those surfaces in turn absorb more of the sun's heat, leading to more snow melt and ice melt.

"When you look at our satellite analysis, we can see the melt area of Greenland over 30 years has increased by 30 percent," Steffen said.

Despite all the changes in Greenland, this is not the first time temperatures have risen on the world's largest island. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a significant warming trend that occurred without the level of man-made greenhouse gases recorded in our atmosphere today. The majority of scientists say greenhouse gases are the chief cause of global warming.

The fact Greenland has warmed before leads some scientists to question how worried we should be about the current warming trend. Dr. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist, is part of a small group of climate change skeptics. He said Greenland's warm past didn't cause the ice sheet to disappear.

"The current warming trend in Greenland is very extensive and is not likely to be explained by natural variability alone," he said. Zwally said the warming is consistent with scientific predictions about the effects of man-made greenhouse gases.

Last year, satellite data collected by NASA scientists revealed Greenland is losing 100 billion tons of ice each year, more than it is gaining from snowfall in the interior. Steffen and others have also detected a new, faster movement of the ice sheet, causing the glaciers to dump more ice into the ocean, where it melts and contributes to sea-level rise.

Part of this faster flow is caused by moulins, deep holes in the ice sheet that allow water to flow beneath the surface. "During the summer months, as the ice sheet melts, large running rivers of melt water snake down through the ice, to the bedrock base below," Steffen said.

Last year, researchers lowered a camera into a moulin to explore the depth and flow of the melt water. Once the melt water from the surface reaches the bedrock below the ice, it can lift the ice sheet and provide a layer of viscosity for the ice to move faster toward the sea, a process that could accelerate as Greenland continues to warm.

Steffen hopes his prediction of a three-foot rise in global sea level by 2100 won't become a reality. But he warned that even if we are able to reduce the world's carbon output from cars and power plants, it will take a long time for Earth's climate to stop warming and seas to stop rising.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Global Warming!

Saturday Morning Confusion!

Yes friends and neighbors it's time once again to have a look at all the stuff that goes on around us.

Ah, those crazy Aussies.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for anyone that can stand up and say; "Every once in a while ya just gotta say, What the Fuck!"

A man has gone on a rampage in an army tank in Sydney Australia's West end overnight, destroying six mobile phone towers and an electricity sub-station.

Police Chief Inspector Guy Haberley says officers followed the tank through several suburbs as it left a path of destruction in its wake.

"The vehicle continued to other locations within the Mount Druitt local area command and continued to destroy mobile phone tower communications sheds by crashing through the perimeter fence and colliding with structures, causing significant damage," he said.

Police say the pursuit ended in Dean Park about 90 minutes later when the tank stalled as it was being driven towards another mobile phone tower.

(Not a word on where he got the tank in the first place!)

It’s not just Christians who find Jesus or the Virgin Mary on pieces of toast - a Muslim man from Bradford in England has found the arabic script for Allah, the Muslim God, on a chapatti.

He showed it to his stunned family and since then neighbours and members of the Muslim community have flocked to view it. All agree that the markings on the food appear to spell out the holy name.

Mr Iqbal said: “It was definitely an unusual event. A lot of religious leaders have come to check it and they have confirmed that it is very clearly the name of Allah in Arabic.

“In every other respect it is just a normal chapatti. We left it as it is, but unfortuantely, while no one was looking, the dog got a hold of it and ate it.”

I can well relate to this since I had my own miracle about ten years ago on a cold winters night in January.

As I was sitting in the living room watching television when the window started to frost up and as it did so an image of my next door (dead) neighbor George started to appear.

Amazed, I called my wife and she saw it too!

The next morning we called a guy from the paper to have a look but by the time he got there it had warmed up outside and the frost had melted.

This left us slightly embarassed but certainly fulfilled spiritualy since these are all matters of faith, and I had mine renewed! [sic]

A few elephants packed their trunks and left town.

Garden Bros. Circus is appearing through this weekend in Toronto.

Three Asian elephants, had a compound set up in the parking lot where they were cared for by trainer Billy Morris.

Morris said someone seems to have tripped over the power cord to the fence after he checked on the elephants just before 2:30 a.m. "The next thing I knew, the cops came to get me," he said. "Susie and Bunny had gone on the lam."

Susie wasn't far away, sampling the grass on the edge of the complex. Bunny kept going. A York Region Police dispatcher told patrol cars to be on the lookout for "one outstanding elephant . . . last seen heading north on Crossland Gate."

An officer radioed in that he had the "outstanding elephant" in view. "It's just eating someones tree."


That was Shu Mei's tree and Bunny made an untidy meal out of her lilies, too, scattering leaves around.

"It didn't wake me," she said. "My neighbour heard something, but she thought it was kids."

How do you get an elephant to stop eating and come home to bed?

"You just call their names and they'll follow you," Morris said. "They're good girls. It's probably best that no one was out on the sidewalk, but they wouldn't have hurt anyone. They love people."

Someone passing in a car spotted Susie and called police to say, "We've found an elephant."

"Sorry?" said the dispatcher, perhaps thinking it was one of those little pink ones that some people see. "How big are we talking here?"

Ian Garden, president and ringmaster of the Mississauga-based circus, said he believed this was the first elephant escape in its 70-year history.

"Obviously, you don't want elephants loose in the neighbourhood and we'll be taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said.

As Garden spoke, Morris was soaping up and hosing down the truants to get them ready for their two performances yesterday. The elephants lifted their feet, laid down and rolled over on command, opening their mouths for a drink from the hose and clearly enjoying being brushed behind their ears.

"My wife Carolina rides one of them in the ring," Garden said. "They're lovely, affectionate animals. And their dung makes very good fertilizer."

Shu Mei wasn't impressed.

"I didn't touch it," she said, ruefully eyeing her chewed-up lilies. "The circus sent someone to pick it up. They gave me tickets for the show. I'll see the elephants there."

Next, do we have..... an elderly man nearing death who wants to give something back to the world, or just a prankster?

The mystery of who is leaving envelopes of 10,000 yen ($82) bills in men's toilets at government offices around Japan has gripped the nation this week despite the existence of far weightier issues, such as a looming election.

Since April 9, some 4 million yen ($32,720) has been found in men's rooms from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to the southern island of Okinawa, Japanese media say.

Virtually all has been found in government office buildings.

The bills are individually wrapped in traditional Japanese "washi" paper with the word "remuneration" handwritten on the outside in ink.

Each comes with a handwritten letter in formal wording evoking Buddhist language, saying the giver hopes the money will be "useful for your pursuit of knowledge."

Newspapers have devoted lengthy articles to speculation about the identity of the unknown benefactor, and the mystery dominated evening news programs Wednesday. One domestic news agency even sent out urgent alerts as the number of bills found mounted.

The only thing everyone agrees on, given where the money is found, is that the person leaving them is a man.

THE LATEST IN FOOTWEAR TO HELP COPE WITH GLOBAL WARMING!
And finally, new studies have shown that people with a lot of MOLES seem to live a lot longer.......... and alone!

Your "confused as hell" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Global Warming Is No Joke!!!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

It's about the oil, stupid!

I think we can all agree on a few things about the American Administration's policies.

First, the Middle-East is all about the oil. End of story!

Next, in spite of what the U.S. Administration says, Iraq is in a civil war and those S.O.B.'s are out of control. The U.S. should just get out and let them sort it out themselves. End of Story!

Global warming is a fact in spite of what Georgie says and it might be partly due to increased sun activity but is mostly from greenhouse gases. End of story!

Evolution is a fact and the best way to prove it is by what Lewis Black keeps saying, pure and simple, FOSSILS..... fossils, fossils, fossils! Damn it! End of story!

And now as the icing on the cake, this piece from Reuters News;

LOS ANGELES - The Bush administration wants to eliminate federal support for geothermal power just as many US states are looking to cut greenhouse gas emissions and raise renewable power output.

The move has angered scientists who say there is enough hot water underground to meet all US electricity needs without greenhouse gas emissions.

"The Department of Energy has not requested funds for geothermal research in our fiscal-year 2008 budget," said Christina Kielich, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy. "Geothermal is a mature technology. Our focus is on breakthrough energy research and development."

The administration of George W. Bush has made renewable energy a priority as it seeks to wean the United States off foreign oil, but it emphasizes use of biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel for vehicles and nuclear research for electricity.

"In spite of its enormous potential, the geothermal option for the United States has been largely ignored," a recent study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.

Story by Bernie Woodall

Now, here is the kicker, boys and girls. Just as the Bush Administration has promoted the largest military budget in history to keep his Republican allies at Haliburton and other military contractors happy, he has cut funding for Geothermal and is concentrating on Biofuels and Nuclear instead.

Why? Because Biofuels and Nuclear have huge lobbies and Geothermal has NONE! Right now the score looks like this:

Nuclear and Biofuel Lobby = Billions

Geothermal = None

Just so you know!

Your "enquiring mind" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

What's All This Talk About Global Warming?

The people in this town obviously haven't heard about it!

Mild, Isn't It? (With apologies to Mad magazine)

Bush and Buddies Inc. might not believe in Global Warming, but 500 scientists and officials are meeting in Paris this week to present a report on how fast it's happening!

The report by the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released Friday, could influence what many governments and businesses do to fight global warming!

It will be watched closely in the United States, so you closely watch here this weekend for any developments!

Your "sizzling" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

(P.S. If you own any seaside property......MOVE!!!!)

Bush Swelters, We Simmer!

If some old guy (like me!) tells you how cold the winters were when he was a kid..... believe him!

The world's 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1994 in a temperature record dating back to 1850, according to the United Nations weather agency.

A UN report issued two months ago said greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2005 and were expected to increase in 2006.

High levels of greenhouse gases and the reappearance of the cyclical warming trend El-Nino make it likely 2007 will go down as the world's hottest year ever recorded, British climate scientists said Thursday.

“There is no sign that [the greenhouse gases] are starting to level off," said World Meteorological Organization climate specialist Geir Braathen. "It looks like it will just continue like this for the foreseeable future."

"This new information represents another warning that climate change is happening around the world," the office said.

"Because of the warming due to greenhouse gases, even a moderate warming event is enough to push the global temperatures over the top," said Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia.

(Me on a hot day!)

One of the UK's best-known scientists, Professor James Lovelock, says only a catastrophe will prompt the world to tackle the threat of climate change.

Professor Lovelock won acclaim for developing the Gaia Hypothesis, which suggests the Earth functions as a single organism which maintains the conditions necessary for its survival.

Professor Lovelock said global warming was "the response of our outraged planet", and "the consequences for humanity were likely to be far worse than any war!"

"We are at war with the Earth itself", he said. "We are Gaia's target now." Professor Lovelock added that we had still to wake up to the seriousness of our plight, with some people continuing to deny that global change exists.

The Bush government, meanwhile, is still telling everyone that "Global Warming" evidence is "inconclusive!"

We have to remember that these are the same people who went on about W.M.D. and get Osama,etc. etc! Plus, they are still pissed at, and keep going on about the Dixie Chicks, even though that is four year old news.

The Presidential elections in the good old U.S. of A. can't come soon enough!

Your "summer in the city" type scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Why Didn't I Think of This Sooner!

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but U.S. President Bush and the Republicans have exactly the same outlook as my mother.

They assume the world operates the way they think it should, instead of the way it really IS! (You know what they say, when you "assume," you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me." Ass-u-me.)

For example, that there is no proof of "Global Warming!"
Yea, Right!

Your observant scribe;
Allan W Janssen

The logic (?) behind Arab thinking

GUEST POST By Lee Harris

When 9/11 happened, no one asked me to write an article about it the next day, because no one, outside my immediate circle of friends, had any interest in my opinion. This was fortunate, because I did not need to make a snap judgment about the significance of that fateful morning.

Had I rushed my violent first impressions into print, I might have found it difficult to ever get around to having any second thoughts -- second thoughts like the ones that finally came together in the essay "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," published in Policy Review a full six months after 9/11.

This morning, after Nick Schulz encouraged me to write a piece on the terror attacks in London, I was tempted to put the project off until I had had time to reflect on the events. What else could I say in the immediate aftermath of such an attack than what every other decent man or woman would say about it, namely that it was an outrage against all human decency, and a violation of everything that civilization stands for?

Then a thought went through my mind that has been haunting it for over three years now. A simple idea, really, yet one that when it is clearly stated can offer us a radically different way of understanding events like 9/11, the Bali attack, the Madrid bombings, and now the carnage in London.

Immediately after 9/11, the general consensus was that we were at war. And yet this evocation of the concept of war bothered me because it did not quite fit. Wars were things that Westerners did.

They were fought for economic reasons or for territorial expansion; they were instruments of policy; they had a point and an objective. You knew when a war started, and you knew when it was over. On both sides of a war you had diplomacy -- the breakdown in diplomacy normally started wars, and a recommencement of diplomacy inevitably signaled their termination.

Finally, wars, when they were fought, tended to resolve into a series of increasingly climactic battles, allowing each side to keep score of its position, as in a game of chess, and ending in some well-established gesture, like waving the white flag or slaughtering your enemies en masse.

If you try to make the random and scattered terrorist attacks since 9/11 fit into this pattern, you will soon realize that it takes a good bit of twisting and squeezing to make these events match the profile of Western warfare. Indeed, when I wrote "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," I argued that war was not the appropriate model to employ in order to gain an understanding of the enemy that we faced -- and yet at the time I was still unclear what model of conflict would make more sense.

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past. In the feud you are avenging yourself on your enemy for something that he did in the past. Al Qaeda justified the attack on New York and Washington as revenge against the USA for having defiled the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia by its military presence during the First Gulf War. In the attack on London, the English were being punished for their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging.

In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal.

We in the West cannot imagine a war that goes on forever; but those for whom the blood feud is the established mode of settling difference cannot imagine a world without it. We are puzzled when they attack us viciously on a single day, and then wait for years before they attack us again -- an irrational policy from the point of view of Western military strategy, but perfectly sensible when seen from the point of view of the blood feud.

If your sole interest lies in annoying and irritating your enemy, and not in vanquishing him, then the sporadic and the occasional attack makes more sense to you than a systematic frontal assault. Indeed, to those adept at the blood feud, nothing can be more absurd than provoking a feuding partner into an all out war of annihilation -- which perhaps explains why the Islamic terrorists tend to vary the locations of their attacks and to string them out over the course of years, rather than concentrating on a single target and hammering it repeatedly over the course of days and weeks, as in a normal military campaign.

If the terrorists attacked the same people continuously, day after day, week after week, they would be bound to stir up a fury that would result in their own extermination.

By intermittent and infrequent attacks, on the other hand, they are able to injure and wound their enemy, without the fear that they will be overwhelmed by their enemy's desperate desire to be rid of them once and for all. Even better, such sporadic violence permits the enemy to discount their own suffering, by realizing after each fresh attack that life goes on -- as indeed it does for those who chance to survive.

The art of the blood feud, if it can be called an art, requires the participants in the feud to imitate the random and unpredictable nature of what we in the West call acts of God. Like lightning, you can never predict the next attack; you can never know where it will strike, or who it will strike.

You only know that one day it will happen again, as it happened again today in London. By this means, the victims of the attack are lulled into a sense of impotence and helplessness, accepting the attacks the same way we accept tornadoes and other natural disasters.

Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics.

The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"

Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies