Today on New Scientist: 24 November 2009

Today’s stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: a robot arm that opens doors for wheelchair users, the last bastion of Antarctic ice that now seems to be melting, and a competition to win a special edition of Origin of Species

Israeli-Palestinian peace moves at ‘deep and worrying impasse,’ UN official warns

With no Israeli-Palestinian negotiations underway, no agreed terms of reference for such talks, and Israel’s refusal to freeze settlements posing a key challenge, a senior United Nations official today called for “immediate actions on the ground” to prevent Middle East peace efforts from unravelling.

Yemen: head of UN agency voices concern at lack of access to conflict displaced

The Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today highlighted her continued concern about safe humanitarian access to civilians displaced by fighting in northern Yemen.

UN peacekeepers’ hospital brings treatment to hundreds of local Congolese

A hospital set up in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to care for United Nations peacekeepers is also bringing hope to hundreds of local people who might otherwise lack necessary treatment for their illnesses and injuries as well as screening that can ward off preventable sickness.

Cypriot leaders focus on immigration and citizenship in UN-backed talks

The Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders met today to continue discussions on immigration, citizenship and asylum as part of the ongoing United Nations-backed, power-sharing negotiations.

Wall Street Plays Hardball With Municipal Bonds

Wall Street Plays Hardball

Taxpayers are taking another hit as strapped local governments fork over billions in fees on investments gone bad

By Theo Francis, Ben Levisohn, Christopher Palmeri and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300 million budget deficit—and few ways to make up the difference.

Against that bleak backdrop, Wall Street is squeezing one of America’s weakest cities for every penny it can. A few years ago, Detroit struck a derivatives deal with UBS (UBS) and other banks that allowed it to save more than $2 million a year in interest on $800 million worth of bonds. But the fine print carried a potentially devastating condition. If the city’s credit rating dropped, the banks could opt out of the deal and demand a sizable breakup fee. That’s precisely what happened in January: After years of fiscal trouble, Detroit saw its credit rating slashed to junk. Suddenly the sputtering Motor City was on the hook for a $400 million tab.

During late-night strategy sessions, Joseph L. Harris, Detroit’s then-chief financial officer, scoured the budget for spare dollars, going so far as to cut expenditures on water and electricity. “I figured the [utility] wouldn’t turn out our lights,” says Harris. But there wasn’t enough cash, and in June the city set up a payment plan with the banks.

Now Detroit must use the revenues from its three casinos—MGM Grand Detroit (MGM), Greektown Casino, and MotorCity Casino—to cover a $4.2 million monthly payment to the banks before a single cent can go to schools, transportation, and other critical services. “The economic crisis has forced us to move quickly and redefine what services a city can and should provide,” says Bing. “While we face a tough road ahead, I believe we’re on the right path.” UBS declined to comment.

Detroit isn’t suffering alone. Across the nation, local governments and related public entities, already reeling from the recession, face another fiscal crisis: billions of dollars in fees owed to UBS, Goldman Sachs (GS), and other financial giants on investment deals gone wrong.

Charm Offensive

The seeds of this looming disaster were sown during the credit boom, when Wall Street targeted cities big and small with risky financial products that promised to save them money or boost returns. Investment bankers sold exotic derivatives designed to help municipalities cut borrowing costs. Banks and insurance companies constructed complicated tax deals that allowed public utilities, transit authorities, and other nonprofit organizations to extract cash immediately from their long-term assets.

Private equity firms, pointing to stellar historical gains, persuaded big public pension funds to plow billions of dollars into high-cost investments at the peak of the market. Many of the transactions shared a striking similarity: provisions that protected the banks from big losses and left the customers on the hook for huge payouts.

Now, as many of those deals sour, Wall Street is ramping up its efforts to collect from Main Street. “The banks stuffed customers with [questionable investments] and then extorted money from the customers to get rid of them,” says Christopher Whalen, managing director at research firm Institutional Risk Analytics. The New Jersey Transportation Trust Fund Authority, for instance, must pay nearly $1 million a month at least until December 2011 to Goldman Sachs on derivatives deals tied to municipal debt—even though the state retired the debt last year.

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), having entered into complex arrangements to lease its equipment to outside investors and then lease it back, could face termination fees of $30 million. The investors could collect penalties because American International Group (AIG), which backed the arrangement, has seen its credit rating tumble. “These [sorts of deals] are potentially huge liabilities,” says Stanford Law School’s Joseph Bankman. “Investors aren’t going to be settling for chump change.” Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

The financial struggles of America’s cities and towns stand in stark contrast to Wall Street, where bonuses at some firms are expected to reach record levels in 2009, less than a year after the peak of the financial crisis. To keep public outrage from reaching a boiling point, banking chiefs are embarking on a charm offensive. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who recently sparked controversy when he told a Times of London reporter that his firm was “doing God’s work,” pledged on Nov. 17 to invest $500 million in small businesses and charities. (That amounts to roughly 3% of the $16.7 billion Goldman expects to pay its employees this year.)

Politicians have launched their own campaign. Federal lawmakers, troubled by the rising payouts, are trying to limit the damage to municipalities and prevent them from falling prey in the future. Pending legislation in Congress, introduced by Representative John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), would impose a 100% tax on termination payments like those in the CTA deals to dissuade banks from going after struggling municipalities. Another proposal would limit the use of derivatives by localities with less than $50 million in assets; lawmakers figure small towns and cities don’t have the resources to vet the risks of exotic investments adequately.

Without a federal fix, strapped municipalities like Detroit could be forced to slash vital services even more. The city’s public schools, which had been putting off paying textbook suppliers and other vendors, aren’t likely to see their funding rise now that banks are taking a bite out of the city’s budget. The Royal Oak school district is eliminating after-school music programs and asking parents to pay $100 per child to play sports. “We’ve had to demolish programs because of the squeeze,” says Thomas L. Moline, the district’s superintendent.

Detroit’s public transportation system is also feeling the pinch. Because of budget restraints, bus routes have been canceled and equipment hasn’t been fixed. On a cold day in early November, a group of students stood shivering as they awaited the No. 30 bus. The bus comes only once an hour now, compared with every 45 minutes a year ago. Longtime driver Linda Martin, whose bus broke down five times in the past year, helped organize a demonstration in August. Months later, the 56-year-old grandmother of eight was among 113 transportation workers laid off. “These are hardworking people, juggling three jobs sometimes,” she says. “If they lose their income, there’s a ripple effect throughout the whole community.”

Of course, many of the municipal-finance investments blowing up now were fairly standard contracts that clearly spelled out the pitfalls. “Municipalities knew the risks,” says James S. Normile, a New York partner at law firm Winston Strawn. “They just didn’t think they were going to happen.”

But some public entities, lacking the financial expertise, proved to be willing buyers for Wall Street’s more dubious ideas. Consider the plight of Hoosier Energy Rural Electric Cooperative. In 2002 a group of attorneys and investment bankers presented the tiny nonprofit utility, indirectly owned by its 800,000 mostly rural customers, with a quick way to earn some money.

Hoosier Energy leased a power plant near the Wabash River in Sullivan County, Ind., to John Hancock Financial Services. Hancock then turned around and leased it back. As a result, the utility netted $20 million while Hancock planned to reap tax benefits on the facility. The bankers and lawyers, meanwhile, made $12 million. The transaction was part of a broader trend: Over the past decade dozens of utilities, transportation agencies, and other public nonprofit entities struck so-called leaseback deals to collect cash on their assets.

Around the same time the Hoosier agreement was finalized, the IRS began cracking down on leaseback deals. The federal agency in a memorandum called them a “sham” that lacked any business purpose beyond tax evasion and amounted to a circular exchange of assets and cash. Legally speaking, a transaction that merely reaps tax rewards and has no other economic purpose is often considered an abusive tax shelter. Although the IRS hasn’t ruled on Hancock’s tax breaks, U.S. District Court Judge David F. Hamilton concluded in an opinion last fall that they looked “abusive.” Hancock says it believes it’s entitled to the tax benefits.

Vulnerable Public Transportation

Now Hancock is exploiting a technicality in the 3,000-page pact with Hoosier that could allow the financial firm to wiggle out of the contract and collect a fat fee. Even though Hoosier has continued to make all of its payments, it fell into technical default after Ambac Financial Group (ABK), which backed the transaction, suffered a credit-rating downgrade. Having not found a suitable replacement, Hoosier faces a $120 million penalty, a sum that could exhaust its cash and credit lines. “It’s a huge challenge for us,” says Donna L. Snyder, Hoosier’s vice-president for finance. “We’re a small not-for-profit.”

Hoosier may have to pay up soon. In September the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the utility had to find a new guarantor this year or pay Hancock the money. If the latter happens, residents could face higher electricity rates. Already, Hoosier has hiked rates 3% because of the uncertainty of the deal. In the meantime the utility is conserving cash by postponing environmental upgrades to its coal plants and putting off payments to other power companies in the co-op. Says Jonathan Chiel, John Hancock’s general counsel: “We’ve acted reasonably, and we believe no party to the transaction should seek to gain an unfair advantage.”

Public transportation systems around the nation could be vulnerable to leaseback blowups. Moody’s Investors Service (MCO) estimates that 25 big municipal transportation authorities entered into deals similar to Hoosier’s. The fallout could be more than just financial. In recent years the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority tied up a third of its subway fleet—almost 300 cars, some 30 years old—in a series of pacts with investors, some of which required keeping the same equipment running until 2014.

To avoid violating the terms, the transit authority rejected a 2006 recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to replace or retrofit older cars. The NTSB warned at the time that in the event of a crash the old cars posed a higher risk of injury to passengers than newer models. One of the old cars was involved in a wreck in June that killed nine people. A spokeswoman for the transit authority said it lacks the funds to replace the cars.

Even public institutions that entered into relatively common investments are getting hurt. Many chased risky deals only in the later years of the credit boom and now are paying hefty fees on those underwater assets.

In 2006 the Teacher Retirement System of Texas hired T. Britton Harris IV to overhaul the $100 billion pension fund. The portfolio, one of the 20 largest pension funds, was still recovering from the dot-com bust earlier in the decade. Harris, a veteran of investment firm Bridgewater Associates and the Verizon Communications (VZ) employee pension plan, told board members: “My approach has never been incrementalist.”

True to his word, Harris revamped the pension fund. For years, Texas Teachers had focused on stocks and bonds, relying on in-house managers to invest the money. The new investment officer proposed a huge shift into risky investments that promised better returns, including private equity and real estate.

In April 2008—right after the fall of Bear Stearns—Wall Street chiefs flocked to Austin to seal their investment deals with the pension fund. Harris even hosted a dinner at a local steakhouse for Morgan Stanley’s (MS) John Mack, Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld, and Laurence Fink of BlackRock (BLK). “Being novices, there’s a certain level of trust with decision-makers,” says Tim Lee, executive director of the Texas Retired Teachers Assn. The pension fund’s target stake in alternatives swelled to 29%, from 8%.

Then the crash came. Texas Teachers recently reported that its new private equity and real estate investments had dropped by 15% and 33%, respectively, in the first nine months of the year. Among the clunkers: Colony Capital VIII, a fund that invested in the buyout of Station Casinos, a Las Vegas casino operator that later went belly-up, and Neverland Ranch, the estate of the late Michael Jackson. It likely will take a while for the portfolio of alternative investments to recover.

Wall Street, though, will keep collecting its share. Private equity firms and hedge funds typically charge a hefty 1% to 2% fee on the total pool of assets under management even if their strategy loses money. On Texas Teachers’ $13.5 billion portfolio, that amount to tens of millions a year. The fund says it remains committed to alternative investments. “We are long-term and very liquid,” says Harris. “This should be a time when the investments we make should prove rewarding.”

Many of the million-plus educators who rely on the pension fund for their retirement benefits are worried about their financial fate. The fund’s obligations exceeded its assets by $22 billion this year. To make up the difference, the fund’s board asked Texas legislators this summer to increase contributions both from taxpayers and active teachers, but lawmakers rejected the proposal. That means retired teachers, who haven’t seen a cost-of-living increase since 2001, aren’t likely to get a bump anytime soon. Says Bill Barnes, a retired school principal from Fort Worth: “The whole question is: Where’s the money going to come from?”

In its ongoing coverage of the crisis in Jefferson County, Ala., Bloomberg reported on Nov. 13 that the municipality sued JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and a former city official. The county alleges that the bank and ex-official refinanced $3 billion of debt to generate fees and interest payments: “This is a suit…against those who have brought the county and its citizens to the brink of financial disaster while lining their own pockets.”JPMorgan says the claims are “meritless.”

To read the full article go to http://bx.businessweek.com/municipal-bonds–/reference/

Francis is a correspondent in BusinessWeek’s Washington bureau. Levisohn is a staff editor at BusinessWeek covering finance and personal finance. Palmeri is a senior correspondent in BusinessWeek’s Los Angeles bureau. Follow him on Twitter @chrispalmeri . Silver-Greenberg is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

Not to be underestimated

In a letter in the Evening Standard yesterday we argued that the EU’s new President, Herman Van Rompuy, should not be underestimated.

Just looking through Nicolas Sarkozy’s press conference in Brussels last week, this is reinforced.

Sarko describes Van Rompuy as “an extremely determined man who knows exactly where he’s going, he’s a perfect connoisseur of European politics.”

He says:

“I genuinely find that Herman’s views reflect mine: he’s a man who knows very precisely where he’s going. And if people are criticizing him for not being determined and being too flexible, they risk having some rude surprises, some rude surprises. Don’t confuse things, thinking that a tolerant man who’s a bit reserved, perhaps a bit modest, can’t have firm beliefs. So talk to those who know him well about them and you’ll see. I’m going to tell you something: I think he’s one of the strongest personalities around the Council table. Don’t see that as in any way belittling the others.”

There are a couple of other telling quotes in there too.

Asked why Cathy Ashton got the job of EU Foreign Minister, Sarkozy is clear that this was about rewarding her for pushing the Lisbon Treaty through Parliament and seeing off calls for a referendum:

“Listen, really, this is important, she played an essential role in getting the Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords, which wasn’t nothing, you will agree. She is one of the British political figures – though it’s in no way up to me to judge – who most strongly promoted the Lisbon Treaty issue. I’ve also had occasion to express my gratitude to Gordon Brown for the responsibilities he shouldered, but right the way through the Lisbon process – and you know how fiercely it was discussed in the United Kingdom, it isn’t a secret for anyone – she was constantly in favour of it, she supported him courageously. And, after all, we were very happy to find British political women and men to get it through when a section of the British political class was asking for a referendum, as you know as well as I do.”

Lastly, check out his tone here:

“remember Nice and look where we’ve got to now, the Irish had to be consulted twice, we had to have the presidential election in France to overcome the ‘no’, same thing in Holland. Then, in the space of a few weeks we had to choose a team; it’s been done, without drama, without scandal, without fuss. It’s done.”

Tsk - those pesky Irish getting it wrong eh - they “had to be” consulted twice…. !

Yeah, Sarko, just like last week’s seamlessly smooth EU summit - what a success that was - not a total embarassment at all… not a monumental contradiction of everything you’ve been saying about making the EU more democratic, nooo…! A great success, no scandal or fuss at all, we’re quite sure the citizens of Europe are all perfectly happy with the whole thing.

Baby gorillas in Congo getting a new playpen: Paradise

The only two baby mountain gorillas in captivity — orphaned two years ago after their mothers were slain in massacres — will soon be getting a lush, new playpen, Congo’s wildlife authority announced Friday.

Ndeze and Ndakasi will be romping in a special sanctuary, the Senkwekwe Center now under construction in Virunga National Park, where about 200 of the world’s remaining 700 mountain gorillas live.

“This is paradise for them,” said Samantha Newport, the park’s communications director. “They will be able to play around, climb trees and eat forest food.”

Authorities began building the center in July 2007 but had to stop work after rebels invaded the park during the long-running civil war that raged in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Work resumed in September as hostilities subsided. The center is expected to be ready for occupancy by March.

The babies were found in 2007 when they were 2 months old, one on her slain mother and the other on the back of her brother, who was alive when the baby was found.

Authorities don’t know who killed the mothers, but they suspect that the perpetrators were those engaging in the park’s illegal charcoal industry, in which people cut down trees for fuel so they can cook and boil water.

Newport said park rangers who found the babies hustled them out of the park to the city of Goma, where they have been living on a site with a house and trees.

“If they had not been taken out of the wild, they would have died,” she said.

Newport doesn’t know whether the two will be moved out of the center and into the wild when they get older.

The Senkwekwe Center is a 2.5-acre plot of forest three miles from the mountain gorilla habitat in Virunga.

Emmanuel de Merode, director of Virunga National Park, said that along with sheltering the baby gorillas, the center offers “a unique opportunity to enable the local population to see gorillas, and provides a launch pad for the veterinary activities that are conducted throughout Virunga.”

The center will have a 40-by-40-meter interior holding facility, visitation platforms, an education center and veterinary facilities. The wildlife authority is raising $100,000 for the completion of the center, and donations will be matched by the United Nations Foundation.

Gorillas have been caught in the middle of the civil warfare in recent years, and fighters had occupied large swaths of the 8,000–square-kilometer park. The gorilla section is in a strategically important area near the borders of Rwanda and Uganda.

Source:
Cable Network News, “Baby gorillas in Congo getting a new playpen: Paradise“, accessed November 20, 2009

University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes

Here are a selection of quotes from the emails stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia. Many involve Phil Jones, head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit.

Published: 2:56PM GMT 23 Nov 2009
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999″I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of “trick” has been misinterpreted
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004″I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.
From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009″The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t… Our observing system is inadequate”
Prof Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics - that there is no evidence temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
Prof Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.
From Phil Jones. To: Michael Mann. Date: May 29, 2008″Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.”
Climate change sceptics tried to use Freedom of Information laws to obtain raw climate data submitted to an IPCC report known as AR4. The scientists did not want their email exchanges about the data to be made public.
From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004″Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future.”
The scientists make no attempt to hide their disdain for climate change sceptics who request more information about their work.

Global warming rigged? Here’s the email I’d need to see

The leaked exchanges are disturbing, but it would take a conspiracy of a very different order to justify sceptics’ claims

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 November 2009 21.00 GMT
It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the coffin” of global warming theory? Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence. To bury man-made climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed. Luckily for the sceptics, and to my intense disappointment, I have now been passed the damning email that confirms that the entire science of global warming is indeed a scam. Had I known that it was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn’t have wasted years of my life promoting a bogus discipline. In the interests of open discourse, I feel obliged to reproduce it here.
From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk
Sent: 29 October 2009
To: The Knights Carbonic
Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.
The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis – that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere – had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.
More resistance was encountered (and swiftly dispatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law – that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.
Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.
The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the 10 warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001. From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.
Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.
Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, birdwatchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.
The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been established: world government will be established under the guise of controlling man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.
Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus? Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.
Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.
This is the kind of conspiracy the deniers need to reveal to show that man-made climate change is a con. The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that.