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"An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.
The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.
Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons'".
Comment: Scientists generally agree that from about the 1300s to the 1890s our planet was still under the influence of a little ice age. On top of that there were a variety of factors, both cosmic and on earth, that would have contributed to drastic swings in the climate. It's notable that in our own time where serious cooling is occurring, once again we're seeing both extreme drought and epic flooding along with great upheavals in society:
For an idea of just how turbulent the century was, and some of the possible contributing factors, Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow: See also: