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The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. (snip) In the 20th century, humanity has pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning the carbon stored in coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the process, we've also been consuming oxygen...

Fortunately, the odds are good that the next one will fall over one of our oceans, which take up more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, or the planet’s still-vast stretches of uninhabited lands. How much in taxpayer dollars should be invested to pinpoint such hazards is one of the toughest risk-management exercises around.

If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the project is composed of a 17-mile circular tunnel beneath Geneva, containing thousands of magnets meant to send beams of subatomic particles hurtling toward each other. The resulting collisions are expected to release matter similar to that present at the "Big Bang" that created the universe.

This is the 2nd poll where Hussein leads by 15, within a couple of days...

That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments — those of you who still have them. A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be...

The world's largest particle collider is designed to do its job largely under the surface-and that under-the-surface status also applies to much of the progress in the legal case challenging whether the collider should actually be allowed to do its job.

Lawsuit stirs fear of 'strangelets' destroying the Earth; 100,000 chips deployed SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible.For companies like Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which have helped develop a system to send the resulting data surging through a sprawling network, the project is already providing a chance to test some of their most cutting-edge technologies. Video: Tech giants aid project Some of the biggest...

Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse? A dramatic preview of an unprecedented ABC News event called "Earth 2100." According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now. This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the...

In Charles Krauthammer's May 30 must-read column, "Carbon Chastity," he rightly lambastes environmentalists as resurrected communists/socialists who have latched on to the environment and climate change as a means to advance their anti-people social agenda. The specific occasion for his justifiable outrage is a recent proposal by a British parliamentary committee to institute a personal carbon ration card for every citizen. The plan would place limits on food and energy consumption in the form of credits not to be exceeded — except through the potential for heavy-carbon users, often the wealthy, to purchase credits from lower-carbon users, often the less...

If there indeed is a second Great Depression to come, this will be the government measure that guarantees it arrives with a devastating gut punch. The U.S. Senate returns to session this week and will take up something deceptively labeled "America's Climate Security Act of 2008." It's a bill designed to combat man-made global warming. But anybody with a brain should be able to understand that the only thing this bill would "secure" would be our national demise. Not only is it one of those sadly classic bureaucratic "solutions" in search of a problem, it is a sad exercise...

European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory's head said Tuesday. If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle." The "Higgs," named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain...

"Far from normal". Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand. The...

Rising global temperatures could lead to an increase in kidney stones, according to research presented at the 103rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA). Dehydration has been linked to stone disease, particularly in warmer climates, and global warming will exacerbate this effect. As a result, the prevalence of stone disease may increase, along with the costs of treating the condition. Using published data to determine the temperature-dependence of stone disease, researchers applied predictions of temperature increase to determine the impact of global warming on the incidence and cost of stone disease in the United States. The Intergovernmental...

GENEVA (Reuters) - Obesity contributes to global warming, too. Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says. This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school's researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet on Friday. "We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility," Edwards said in a telephone interview. "Obesity is a key part of the big picture." At least...

An open letter to Mr Ben Bernanke, chairman, US Federal Reserve: Sir, Decades back, one of your predecessors splendidly captured the post-gold standard and the consequent free float of the US dollar scenario rather succinctly when he termed the US dollar as 'our currency, others' responsibility.' It is this responsibility cast on outsiders like me that compels me to write this open letter to you. As I write this, I am fully conscious of the fact that we are living in exceptionally troubled times. I am equally conscious of the fact that being the chairman of the US Federal Reserve,...

GORDON DANIELS John Clapp stands in front of his Chesterfield Road home in Northampton that is off the electric grid, relying instead upon solar, propane and wood. The family has been off the grid for almost 10 years. NORTHAMPTON - Harnessing the sun. Dee Boyle-Clapp and her husband, John Clapp, talked about it on their first date, back in October 1987. 'He was most interesting carpenter I'd ever met,' said Dee, a sculptor from Wisconsin who spent many of her formative years protesting nuclear power plants on Lake Michigan. 'He said he wanted the next house he built to be...

By now you should be conversant with the fact that ice ages happen on an eerily regular basis (Part I), that they are associated with earth’s rickety orbit and have nothing to do with carbon dioxide (Parts II and III). Additionally, in Part III we did the math and realized that you just can’t get to global warming with CO2. It is on the wrong side of the decimal point in terms of concentration (0.04%) to be much of a player unless you imbue it with superpowers that would also make it the darling of the insulation and energy conservation...

We have seen how all those eerily regular and severe climate changes are the result of earth’s rickety orbit and how the other planets cause this bullying. Not too much we can do about that. We have also seen how carbon dioxide was a spectator at these events and not the agent provocateur some would have us believe. We will now take a last turn through the ice ages to better understand what these events actually meant to us. Call it climate change in your face. There will be a great many of you (88.9%, to be precise) that will...

In Part I many were possibly quite stunned to see just how regular, frequent and dramatic natural climate change is on Spaceship Earth. Four hundred foot sea level changes, abrupt climate change, at the end of 100,000 year long deep freezes (global warming events), the most regularly occurring thing we know of in all geology. Sixteen of these in the last 1.6 million years (The Pleistocene Epoch), and dozens more in the Pliocene which preceded it ...In Part II, we confronted the fact (oops! I am loosing 88.9% of you here) that in order to do this with Greenhouse Gases...

In Part 1, we examined the remarkably regular Pleistocene climate clock. We learned that sixteen times in the last 1.6 million years we would drop into 100k year long deep freezes and nearly instantaneously come out of them, working up 400 foot sea level rises, only to start another long slow slide into the next one, with the interim being just a few tens of thousands of years, if that. With the detailed Vostok ice core data, we saw that the entry into an ice age is a long slippery slope, but quite a bumpy ride, with warm spells that...