What’s worse than getting swine flu? Getting it twice, within two months.

Here’s an update from Recombinomics—the flu blog.

Debra Parsons, a pediatrician at Kid Care West in Cross Lanes, first came down with the virus, complete with all the telltale symptoms, in August.

Her son became ill at the same time with the same symptoms. Figuring they had the same bug, Parsons tested herself to see what it was.

The test came back positive for Influenza A, so the lab at Charleston Area Medical Center sent it to be sub-typed. Parsons was positive for H1N1.

Parsons and her son recovered, but in October they started having the same symptoms, but they became much worse.

They were both tested this time, and the results were the same — they were positive for Influenza A and then H1N1.

“It was swine flu both times,” Parsons said.

In many areas, including Ukraine, this wave is subsiding, but the holiday season will lead to new infections by viruses with regional markers, leading to a third wave in early 2010.

A Texas man died a day after his roommate, sparking fears of a pandemic.

A hospital spokesman has confirmed the second recorded H1N1 related death in Nacogdoches County. The 53-year-old oil rig worker from Enid, Oklahoma died Friday at 3:50 p.m.

The victim checked into Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital last week when he began experiencing severe symptoms. This update follows the death of his roommate, a 55-year-old oil rig worker from Mississippi, who passed away Thursday morning as a result of H1N1.

Since the vast majority of H1N1 infections are mild, the death of two roommates within 24 hours of each others raises concerns that they were infected with a lethal contagious form of the virus.  Recent reports out of Ukraine has raised concerns that H1N1 with the receptor binding domain change D225G, is such a virus.

The increasing number of deaths, including the cluster described in Texas raises concerns that D225G is gaining traction.

In Ukraine, the numbers are stacking up, and it’s not in a positive way. The death toll is now more than 400 and almost 100,000 are hospitalized. The mutated D225G version of the virus is gaining traction, they say.

Here are the numbers:

1,679,237 Influenza/ARI

99,661 Hospitalized

397 Dead

Read Full Article

Rising sea levels, ocean warming, cyclones and droughts caused by climate change is set to hit hard food security in the Pacific islands, the United Nations’ food agency said, urging governments to take immediate actions.

Climate change is expected to act as a “threat multiplier” in the Pacific region, home to 14 Pacific island countries and five territories (PICT), the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a special report issued ahead of U.N. climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.

“Despite the fact that PICTs make negligible contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions rates (0.03 percent), they find themselves — unfairly — facing the frontline of climate change impacts,” the reports said.

The region which relies on imported fuel and food and is susceptible to natural disasters, faces more frequent tropical cyclones and droughts, degradation of land and marine ecosystems and rising risks to local food production, the FAO said.

The region’s vital fishing industry was under pressure from climate-triggered changes, it said.

Forests which provide important staple crops in the region, such as breadfruit, mangoes, citrus fruits and coconuts, were also threatened by climate change and overexploitation, it said.

“Farmers should not be left alone when it comes to climate change,” FAO’s Assistant Director-General Alexander Muller said.

“International climate change negotiations should consider the close linkages between food security and global warming,” Muller said, adding Pacific islands should be supported in implementing their National Adaptation Programmes of Action.

Read Article

Australian politics is in turmoil because MPs and senators are refusing to back action on global warming – on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Change summit.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd regularly says his hot, dry country would be among the first, and the worst affected, by rising temperatures.

But he is meeting fierce opposition in the Federal Parliament. At least he will keep his job – the leader of Australia’s opposition is unlikely to survive the row.

Liberal party leader Malcolm Turnbull has backed proposed legislation, which punishes polluters and rewards those who clean up their industries.

But he has failed to convince half of his party – who are in open rebellion – and already survived one attempt to oust him as leader.

A group of party heavyweights, including Tony Abbott, have now resigned their front bench jobs in protest at Mr Turnbull’s support for the policy.

At a news conference where the media thought he might announce his resignation, the Liberal leader instead went on the attack.

He launched an impassioned attack on his critics, saying “no credible, responsible political party can have a no-action policy on climate change”.

One senior member of his party watched his performance on TV and texted Sky News Australia’s political editor David Speers, who relayed the message live on air.

Read Full Article

White House energy and environment czar Carol Browner tried Wednesday to shrug off the swirling controversy over purloined British emails suggesting collusion on the part of climate scientists trying to stoke up fears of global warming. She hadn’t read them, she said, and besides, only a few have come to light – second hand.

But with President Barack Obama now committing to attend the international climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, Browner couldn’t escape the debate that easily. The emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia are being used by climate change skeptics to castigate the very purpose of the United Nations summit.

“There has been for a very long time a very small group of people who continue to say this isn’t a real problem, that we don’t need to do anything,” Browner said at the White House. “On the other hand, we have 2,500 of the word’s foremost scientists who are in absolute agreement that this is a real problem and that we need to do something and we need to do something as soon as possible. What am I going to do, side with the couple of naysayers out there or the 2,500 scientists? I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists.”

The controversy is not likely to go away too soon. Republicans in Congress are launching their own investigation. Conservative newspapers and Web sites are buzzing. Of particular note has been the exchange between Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, and Professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University.

Among the emails tapped by a hacker is one in which Jones talks to Mann about the “trick of adding in the real temps to each series … to hide the decline [in temperature].”

“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone,” Jones allegedly told Mann.

The University of East Anglia said Tuesday it will conduct an independent review – addressing data security, how it responded to “a deluge of Freedom of Information” requests as well as “and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed.”

In an accompanying statement, Jones wrote: “My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well… Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.” He added that he and colleagues “have always been scrupulous in ensuring that our science publications are robust and honest.”

Read Full Article

Prisons prepare for an influx of detainees during the UN Climate Change Conference happening in two weeks

Overcrowding in the country’s prisons means protestors arrested during the climate conference will be held in uncomfortable conditions.

Climate activists are gearing up for the UN Climate Change Conference in two weeks, but face harsh jail conditions if arrested.

Legislation was recently tightened to allow police to hold protestors for up to 40 days if they hinder police work and the already overstretched prison service is gearing up for new arrivals.

Vestre Fængsel prison in Copenhagen is preparing to house those who are being held in custody by doubling up on cell-space and holding others in the prison gym and workshop areas.

The prison houses many pre-trial detainees and if climate protestors are added to the current population, prison warden Peter Vesterheden warned that conditions would not be ideal.

‘There’s no doubt that they’ll be bored and really surly,’ Vesterheden told DR News.

The warden said they plan to convert the gym to house 40 inmates temporarily, sleeping on mattresses on the floor at night. Single person cells of 8sqm will double up to house two inmates – one on the bunk and one on the floor.

A further 30 temporary detainees may be housed at the Ellebæk detention centre next to the Sandholm Asylum Centre in North Zealand.

Activists have also been warned by police not to spread advice that could lead to criminal behaviour.

A number of manuals on how to avoid the police and deal with them in case of arrest have been circulating on activists’ websites.

The manuals give details on usual Danish police operating procedures and advise activists not to answer police questions or allow their mobile phones to be confiscated.

‘These recommendations are aimed at people with a criminal agenda. It’s a little like the gang conflict – not that I’m comparing the two groups – where people are also advised not to talk with police,’ Mogens Lauridsen, deputy chief superintendent of Copenhagen Police, told Politiken newspaper.

‘If you haven’t done anything wrong then there’s no problem informing us what you’re doing in Denmark and why you’re here,’ he said.

The umbrella organisation for activists’ demonstrations, Climate Justice Action, is meeting with police today to discuss their plans and Lauridsen said they would be required to provide an explanation for the manuals.

Read Article

Houston is on the world map — the World Bank map, that is.

The city was chosen as the site for a World Bank Group post that will open in January.

The bank provides loans, credits and grants to developing countries for investments in education, health, infrastructure, development and other projects across the globe. Every year, more than 40,000 World Bank Group contracts worth $25 billion are awarded.

Houston is the third U.S. city after Chicago and Seattle to host a World Bank public sector liaison officer. Globally, there is a network of 100 such officers who help locals learn about the bank’s contracts.

The as-yet-unnamed officer will provide Houston businesses with these international funding opportunities in emerging markets and developing nations.

“This office is an important opportunity for Houston businesses that are looking for putting deals together with the World Bank,” said Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership. “This will be a tool for helping our businesses get a better understanding for these loans that are processed annually.”

On Wednesday, the partnership will announce more details about the creation of this position. The partnership will provide office space and funding for the position. In return, the bank, which fights global poverty, will train the liaison.

It took about a year of negotiations before Houston was selected by the bank, Moseley said.

Read Full Article

One of the most striking revelations to immediately emerge from the “climategate” scandal has been references to efforts by scientists espousing the human-caused warming theory to exclude contrary viewpoints from important scientific publications.

Among the thousands of emails and documents hacked or leaked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University last week are several references to an agenda to shut down scientific debate on global warming by stifling counter-evidence from other scientists.

Dating back to 1996, the emails show that both U.S. and U.K. based scientists referred to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation”,“misinformation” or “crap” that needs to be kept out of the public domain.

The emails include deliberations amongst the scientists regarding efforts to make sure that reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change include their own research and exclude that of dissenting scientists.

In one of the emails, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

This is a startling quote, given that Jones and Mann as climate scientists have the authority to review papers and determine whether they are eligible to be published by scientific journals.

Mann even discussed how to destroy a journal that had published papers with contrary views, telling his colleagues that he believed it had been “hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board” who had “staged a coup”.

“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Mann wrote.

In another of the emails, Tom Wigley, climate scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), says that the journal in question, Climate Research, “encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’”.

Wigley noted that the publisher of the journal should be told that it is being “perceived” as a vehicle of “misinformation”, adding that the word “perceived” should be emphasized because “whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about– it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.”

Wigley also wrote that a group of 50+ scientists could be gotten together to put their names to a letter to add weight to the claim and hopefully help to remove the editorial board of the journal.

Other emails show that some of the scientists declined to make their data available to independent scientists whose views they disagreed with, clear evidence that they were simply unwilling to engage in scientific debate – a core ethic of the scientific community.

Renowned climate scientist Dr Tim Ball sums up the stunning gravitas of the leaks with regards to the process of peer-reviewing and the publication of papers on climate change in journals.

“What you’ve got here is confirmation of the small group of scientists who, by the way, Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick, he identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peer-reviewing each other’s literature.” Dr Ball explains.

“So there’s a classic example of the kind of thing that bothered me. About twenty years ago, I started saying ‘Well why are they pushing the peer review?’… And now of course we realise it’s because they had control of their own process. That’s clearly exposed in these emails.”

“On a global scale it’s frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they’ve manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on….”

We have long covered the fact that the so called “scientific consensus” on global warming is wholly manufactured and that there are thousands of scientists who have differing viewpoints to the human-induced warming theorists.

Indeed, over two years ago we reported the fact that a survey of over 500 peer reviewed scientific research papers on climate change, written between 2004 and 2007, concluded that less than half endorsed the “consensus view,” that human activity is contributing to considerable global climate change.

We now have clear evidence that a concerted effort has been made by the IPCC connected climate scientists to block dissenting opinion on climate change, regardless of it’s scientific merit.

“This is horrible,” said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is directly threatened with physical violence in the emails. “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.”

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, “It’s disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested.”

The theft and web publication by climate change deniers of private emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is an extremely worrying development in the tortured politics of global warming.

Although high-profile individuals have been targeted and unfairly vilified before – Pennsylvania University’s Michael Mann comes to mind, with his “hockey stick” palaeoclimate graph – most of the ire of the denial movement has so far been reserved for big-hitters like Al Gore. Gore can take it. Politics is his job.

But the “exposure” of private correspondence from a much larger group of scientists – and the out-of-context quotation of certain sentences as “revealing” some hidden subterfuge – suggests a dangerous shift in strategy. Instead of targeting the science communicators (myself included), the deniers are now declaring war on the scientists themselves. Like the creationists they unconsciously mimic, they make no distinction between the political and the scientific sphere – it is open season in both.

And the strategy is simple. Given that scientists are one of society’s most trusted groups (unlike journalists or politicians), the climate denial movement has begun a battle to undermine public trust in climate scientists themselves. No more will the legions of anonymous researchers who collect and interpret data from meteorological stations, satellites and ice cores be considered above the fray – they now run the risk of personal attacks, exposure of their private lives and vilification.

It is important to understand the significance of this. Scientists are not politicians. They are not used to communicating publicly. They trust in their objectivity, the objectivity of their peers, and the rigour of only citing work published in learned journals. They will have private views, but are very used to keeping these out of their work – indeed the entire scientific method is based on conducting research which can be replicated by peers in order to check its accuracy and objectivity.

Like the 9/11 conspiracy theories before it, the global warming conspiracy is palpably absurd. The idea that scientists have teamed up with governments and the United Nations to foist some kind of social control project on an unwary public is laughable – it would need conspiratorial activities involving thousands of people, for a start..

None of this would matter if the public weren’t fooled. But they are. Polls show climate “scepticism” is rising, perhaps even to a majority position, on both sides of the Atlantic. Presumably public trust in climate change scientists is falling commensurately. This will in turn undermine consensus in mitigating climate change – which is of course the very intention of the deniers in the first place.

Read Full Article

Critics are trying to use hacked emails to discredit climate change scientiests – but however that campaign plays out, UK companies will still have to deal with carbon credits next year, says Peter Judge

The more we look at the email hack at the Climatic Research Institute (CRU), the more it’s obvioulsy an orchestrated campaign to tarnish the reputation of climate scientists.

Comments on our site have suggested that the original theft was actually an inside job by a whistle blower – on the basis that the information looks like the kind of data that would be revealed in response to a “freedom of information” inquiry.

Whatever the source, there’s no doubt that climate change critics – or deniers, if you prefer – seized on the data and made the most of any item that could make it look as if climate scientists were massaging the data.

In the process, of course, they failed to find the really big smoking gun that a conspiracy theory says should be there. There is no email where Dr Phil Jones says “OK, we’re making it up,” or acknowledges bribes from turbine makers.

The realclimate blog – which originally alerted CRU to the theft – says the real insteress is what is not in the emails:  “no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP [mediaeval warm period]‘, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.”

Without anything more substantial, this is a smear campaign, pure and simple.

The selection of evidence looks similar to the approach of those keen to deny evolution. Science operates on consensus, but critics overstate their opposing views, and require the mainstream to have more than a consensus. If it’s not unanimous, then it’s “just a theory”.

And the timing is obviously designed to interfere with the UN Copenhagen summit, where the world witll be attempting to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol.

Read Full Article

Congressional Republicans have started investigating climate scientists whose hacked emails suggest they tried to squelch dissenting views about global warming.

An aide to Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said investigators are studying the documents, which unknown hackers stole last week from the computer of a prominent British climate-research center.

Investigators are focusing on the correspondence of White House Science Adviser John Holdren, he said. Mr. Holdren, a point man for the Obama administration on climate change, sent one of the hacked emails. In the 2003 email, Dr. Holdren, then at the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass., defended research by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a scientist who believes global warming is man-made and who also sent some of the hacked emails.

On Monday, Dr. Holden said: “I’m happy to stand by my contribution to this exchange. I think anybody who reads what I wrote in its entirety will find it a serious and balanced treatment of the question of ‘burden of proof’ in situations where science germane to public policy is in dispute.”

The aide said investigators are also probing the contributions of dozens of climate scientists to reports published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Environmental Protection Agency, in its recent move to boost regulation of greenhouse gases, based its conclusions on IPCC reports.

The IPCC has said the climate is heating up and humans are almost certainly to blame. Those who disagree that the globe is warming, or on the cause or extent of any warming, complain that their views have been excluded.

The documents, hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K., show that some climate researchers declined to share their data with fellow scientists, and sought to keep researchers with dissenting views from publishing in leading scientific journals.

Separately, Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), an outspoken critic of the view that humans are causing global warming, said that in light of the emails, he will call for an investigation into the state of climate science if the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works doesn’t act soon.

Read Full Article