Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change is published as a book and collates evidence presented by scientists at a conference hosted by the UK Meteorological Office last February.

The conference predicted that greenhouse gases would raise global temperatures by between 1.4C and 5.8C over this century.

"It is clear from the work presented that the risks of climate change may well be greater than we thought," Mr Blair wrote in the forward to the book.

"It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialisation and economic growth from a world population that has increased six-fold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable."

The book includes concerns expressed by the head of the British Antarctic Survey, Professor Chris Rapley, that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet may be starting to disintegrate.

Scientists believe such an event would raise sea levels around the world by almost 5m (16 ft).

Prof Rapley writes that a previous report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dismissing worries about the ice sheet's stability had to be revised: "The last IPCC report characterised Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would say it is now an awakened giant. There is real concern."

The report also warns that the EU may have to adopt tougher climate change targets. It is committed to preventing global temperatures rising by more than 2C, but the report warns that such a rise would trigger the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, prompting the extinction of the polar bear and the walrus.

The environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, said today's report highlighted the "tipping point" beyond which climate change could be expected to become irreversible.

This made it even more urgent to halt the change quickly, and meant that current targets - such as reducing carbon emissions by 60% by the middle of the century - may not be ambitious enough, she said.

"What is disturbing about the Exeter report is that it suggests that what has been a long-term policy framework, maybe even that is something that is going to cause more major difficulties than people imagined," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mrs Beckett said she hoped to publish the government's climate change strategy - initially pencilled in for last year - in the near future, and certainly by the end of 2006.

She denied that the government had already decided to invest in new nuclear power stations as a way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but said the option had to be considered because of the role it could play in meeting the UK's long-term climate change targets.

"The reason we need to look at it very seriously is that the one thing you can say about nuclear power is that, once you have put in all the energy required to construct the nuclear power stations, it is actually a low-carbon form of energy," she said.

Friends of the Earth called for urgent action to cut greenhouse gases.

"Despite Tony Blair's concerns about climate change, UK emissions have risen under Labour," said FoE's climate change campaigner, Roger Higman.

"He should now support mounting calls for a new law requiring the government to make annual cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, and make Britain a world leader in the development of a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy."

Here are the opening paragraphs of the two stories.

*
From The Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin:

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world's fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."

"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."
*

From The New York Times article by Andrew C. Revkin:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Some of Google's aggressive gambits into new businesses have brought angry responses from incumbents, such as Microsoft and Apple, many of which are now allying to stop the steamroller in its tracks. In media-land last week it was Stop Google time, as newspaper groups began talking seriously about locking their content away from Google's "spiders", which raid their sites many times a day, "stealing" their copy to sell on to someone else.

The biggest worry of all, though, was not commercial: it was the abrupt shift in sentiment among its almost messianic customers, who are suddenly asking awkward questions. Google, founded eight years ago by a couple of geeks (each now worth more than $10bn), had always presented itself as the superb search engine which gloriously spread the internet - and free access to vast amounts of information - across the world. It made finding information simple for even the least computer-literate, introduced speedy access to academic books and papers, the ability to search out the best online bargains and a super-fast email site. And then there was Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Book Search and Google just-about-everything-else.

Google broke all the business rules and ignored all the textbooks. It never spent a penny on promoting itself, but grew by word of mouth and the joy of using its irresistible - and free - systems. As a result, it became the epitome of corporate virtue, the good guy prepared to take on big business, all for the greater good of humanity. Its corporate slogan, as every schoolkid knows, is "Do No Evil", and its concept, pursued with brilliance, captured the world's imagination. One commentator remarked: "As far as the internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather."

But not any more - or not so much. The Chinese episode was in many ways the most damaging blow yet received to its reputation for virtue, integrity and courage. Google's PR machine could have had little idea of the storm it was about to unleash as it made its explosive statement: "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn in response to local law, regulation or policy." In other words, Google had agreed to block anything embarrassing to the Chinese regime. For mentions of Tiananmen Square, Tibet or abuse of civil liberties, don't look to Google China.

To be fair, none of its critics seemed to care that Google had actually held out longer against the Chinese than any other media group. Microsoft and Yahoo! surrendered a year ago, CNN is often seen as a Chinese mouthpiece and even Rupert Murdoch, in his search to get his Star TV established in China, sold his highly profitable South China Morning Post for fear it would anger the Chinese. (Even then he had to throw in the towel last year after almost 20 years of trying.)

Google's problem is that the world expects better of it. It had stood up to the US government and championed free speech, but now, in a single move, it has lost the high ground. One freedom of expression advocacy group, Reporters sans Frontières, accused Google of hypocrisy: "They have two standards. One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal information, and one for China, where they are helping the authorities to block thousands of sites." As a result of the cave-in, China now controls the one medium that many thought would elude them. "Google were the only ones who held out," remarked the freedom of speech campaigner Peter Pain last week, "so the Chinese government had to block information itself. But now Google will do it for them."

It seems to Google-watchers that the problems "come not single spies, but in battalions". Its very size and speed of growth already made it a target for those who favour the underdog. The beginnings of the backlash were apparent well before last week, but now it has begun in earnest.

For over a year, media analysts have been warning that, left unchecked, Google has the ability to demolish entire industries wherever it operates: retailers, book publishers (already in dire trouble) and, of course, newspapers and magazines. It would positively wreck the high street as we know it. Google's ambitions, they claimed, knew no bounds, and Google was blithely prepared to prove them right. In recent weeks it announced deals that will quickly grow its new media tentacles, from buying and selling magazine and newspaper ad space to the radio and television advertising market. It has threatened Microsoft (no one will blame it for that), Apple, Sun Microsystems and even the big telephone companies with rival systems and a new way to make internet calls. Google has not yet moved into oil or farming, but other than those no business is out of its reach.

Every company contains the seeds of its own destruction, and it may be that even Google, the miracle of the new media age, has reached the tipping point in the past week. Yahoo! and other rival search engines are getting their acts together and working to out-Google Google with new products and even better sites. From Korea comes the news of a new rival, NHN Corp, which has profits of $86m against Google's $1.7bn, but which has seen off Google in its local market, delivering far more relevant search results. "NHN's user-friendly approach outshined its rivals," said an analyst from Samsung Securities in Seoul. Other local sites are trying to outshine it too, pinpricks in the skin of the giant, but between them adding up to a significant threat.

Until a few weeks ago, Google seemed on track to achieve a mission of world dominance in areas that went way beyond the traditional internet. Its stock market debut in 2004 was the most successful in history and the performance since has been even more breathtaking. Its shares started life on the Nasdaq exchange at $179 each, valuing the company at nearly $100bn - more than the entire American motor industry. Wise old Wall Street hands, who had seen too many bubbles grow and burst, shook their heads in disbelief - no company, they reckoned, could possibly sustain such a valuation on the basis of a mere $4bn of sales. But for every soothsayer of gloom, there were a dozen Google buffs who scrambled into the most successful market debut the world has so far seen. The shares moved up - and up, through $200 and $300 to an extraordinary $471. Even then there were projections of it hitting $600, and one broker projected a price of $1,000. He still does.

And then it stopped. The shares dropped 8.5 per cent in one day last week, knocking $20bn off its market value, the first real setback since the launch. Its fans say it is only a breathing space before the next dizzy climb, and maybe it is. But there are plenty of others who say reality is catching up, it has made too many enemies and has simply grown too unwieldy and arrogant. In other words, Google has experienced, in just a matter of months, the same phenomenon that overtakes all market leaders over decades. Now it has become the number one target for all the littler guys.

By an odd irony, on Thursday General Motors, for many years the biggest company in the world and the symbol of American business and capitalism, announced record losses of $8.6bn and sought relief from a pension fund deficit that totals an unpayable $64bn. The phrase "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has long lost its resonance.

After GM, IBM was the big threat, its control of the emerging computer sector giving it a power far too dangerous for one company. The theory was that IBM engineers were developing computers which in turn would design even bigger computers and eventually create its own form of Big Brother. Two years ago what remained of the IBM personal computer business was sold to the Chinese for a pittance. Even Microsoft, the big bad bogey as recently as two years ago, has run out of steam - and threat. It too produced disappointing profit figures caused by glitches in the global launch of its new Xbox 360 video game system. Bill Gates, too, is fallible.

To Google it must seem that, after the magic honeymoon, the world is ganging up on it. Almost every area of its business is being challenged, every potential victim fighting back, every competitor gearing up and new ones emerging.

The company is still a mighty force, both for good and for evil. But the gloss is off. After last week, Google will never be the same again.

Ivan Fallon is the Chief Executive of Independent News and Media (UK)

How it works

1. Google is used by 82 million people a month, many of whom have it as the internet home page on their laptop or home computer. Keywords are typed into the Google search page: in this case, those being sought are 'China' and 'democracy'

2. The search speeds off to the nearest Google server, which may be in the same country or on the same continent. Google employs 4,183 people. Many of them are engineers who help to service an estimated 100,000 computers at 30 data centres around the world

3. The server sends the query - 'China' plus 'democracy' - to the Google Index, a database containing details of all the web pages on the company records. Instead of using huge mainframe computers, Google stores information a fragment at a time on thousands of linked machines, similar to ordinary PCs

4. The index identifies the pages it needs, and goes off to look for them. Google does not search the internet. It searches one of several copies of the internet which it makes for itself and constantly updates. Each copy contains more than eight billion pages and is stored, again a fragment at a time, on thousands of linked computers

5. Google's copies of the internet are made using its web crawlers, pieces of software that roam all over the net and send what they find back to the company. The pages are evaluated, indexed and ranked according to which words occur where, and how many other sites are linked to them

6. Google generates a summary of each page. It also uses more than 100 criteria to give the page a relevance rating between one and 10. A list is produced, to which Google attaches advertisements bought by companies that want their products to appear beside certain key words

7. The results appear on the Google search page, back at the original computer, usually within half a second. This one took 0.08 seconds to produce 30,600,000 results. Google keeps permanent records of all the searches made

The recommendation included in the panel's final draft report is consistent with its preliminary finding, which went beyond the EPA's own determination that there was only "suggestive evidence" from animal studies that perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts are potential human carcinogens.

"The predominant panel view was that the descriptor 'likely to be carcinogenic' was more consistent with currently available data, while a few panel members reached the conclusion that the current evidence fails to exceed the descriptor 'suggestive,' of carcinogenicity," the panel said in a draft report released Monday.

Officials with Wilmington, Del.-based DuPont Co., the sole North American producer of PFOA, took issue with the panel's conclusions.

"We disagree with the panel's recommendation on the cancer classification, and we continue to support the EPA's draft risk assessment," said Robert Rickard, director of health and environmental sciences for DuPont.

"This reflects recommended classification; what's more important is risk, and we are confident that PFOA does not pose a cancer risk to the general public," added Rickard, who said the carcinogenicity classification was based on animal data and does not reflect data from human studies.

PFOA is a processing aid used in the manufacturing of fluoropolymers, which have a wide variety of product applications, including nonstick cookware. The chemical also can be a byproduct in the manufacturing of fluorotelomers used in surface protection products for applications such as stain-resistant textiles and grease-resistant food wrapping.

Besides disagreeing with the EPA on the potential carcinogenicity of PFOA, also known as C-8, a majority of members on the review panel also recommended that the EPA's risk assessment include additional data on PFOA's potential to cause liver, testicular, pancreatic and breast cancers. A majority of panel members also recommended that the chemical's effects on hormones and on the nervous and immune systems be included in the risk assessment, and that studies should not be limited by age, gender or species in assessing human risk.

The findings of the panel, which was established by the EPA's Science Advisory Board, will be reviewed by SAB officials in a Feb. 15 teleconference.

"The real outcome of this is the panel going back and saying `You've got to include this extra stuff here; it wasn't really a rigorous analysis," said Tim Kropp, senior scientist for the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization whose work has prompted increased government scrutiny of PFOA.

While the EPA is free to accept or reject the panel's recommendations, Kropp said it rare for the EPA to dismiss an advisory board's advice.

"They've asked them to do a more rigorous analysis, to do a more scientific method of determining risk, and you can't argue with that," he said. "That's just good science."

EPA officials declined to say how the agency might respond to the report.

"It's sort of what we expected," said EPA deputy administrator Marcus Peacock, adding that he had not read the full report. "There's more we don't know here than what we do know."

Susan Hazen, EPA's acting assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, said much of the work aimed at better understanding PFOA already is underway.

Hazen and Peacock also pointed to an EPA initiative announced last week asking DuPont and seven other companies that manufacture or use PFOA, its precursors, and similar compounds to reduce environmental releases and levels of those chemicals in products by 95 percent no later than 2010, using the year 2000 as a baseline.

The EPA also wants the industry to work toward the elimination of PFOA and related chemicals from emissions and products by no later than 2015.

The study, by Whigham, Barbara A. Israel and Richard L. Atkinson, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens. This finding builds on studies that two related viruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, also cause obesity in animals.

Moreover, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity, leading researchers to suspect that Ad-37 also may be implicated in human obesity. Whigham said more research is needed to find out if Ad-37 causes obesity in humans. One study was inconclusive, because only a handful of people showed evidence of infection with Ad-37 � not enough people to draw any conclusions, she said. Ad-37, Ad-36 and Ad-5 are part of a family of approximately 50 viruses known as human adenoviruses.

Researchers now must:

• 
  
• identify the viruses that cause human obesity
• 
  
• devise a screening test to identify people who are infected
• 
  
• develop a vaccine
• 
  

Screening test and vaccine still a long way off

The Whigham et al. study prompted an editorial in the same issue of AJP-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology by Frank Greenway, professor in the Department of Clinical Trials, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

"If Ad-36 is responsible for a significant portion of human obesity, the logical therapeutic intervention would be to develop a vaccine to prevent future infections," Greenway wrote. "If a vaccine were to be developed, one would want to ensure that all the serotypes of human adenoviruses responsible for human obesity were covered in the vaccine."

"If one could predict the potential of an adenovirus to cause human obesity by using an in vitro assay or even by animal testing, screening of the approximately 50 human adenoviruses might be accelerated, shortening the time required for vaccine formulation," Greenway wrote. "Human antibody prevalence in obese and lean human populations appears to be the only reliable method to screen adenoviruses for their potential to cause obesity in humans at the present time," he noted.

Obesity contagion theory slow to catch on

The notion that viruses can cause obesity has been a contentious one among scientists, Whigham said. And yet, there is evidence that factors other than poor diet or lack of exercise may be at work in the obesity epidemic. "The prevalence of obesity has doubled in adults in the United States in the last 30 years and has tripled in children," the study noted. "With the exception of infectious diseases, no other chronic disease in history has spread so rapidly, and the etiological factors producing this epidemic have not been clearly identified."

"It makes people feel more comfortable to think that obesity stems from lack of control," Whigham said. "It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity." However, other diseases once thought to be the product of environmental factors are now known to stem from infectious agents. For example, ulcers were once thought to be the result of stress, but researchers eventually implicated bacteria, H. pylori, as a cause.

"The nearly simultaneous increase in the prevalence of obesity in most countries of the world is difficult to explain by changes in food intake and exercise alone, and suggest that adenoviruses could have contributed," the study said. "The role of adenoviruses in the worldwide epidemic of obesity is a critical question that demands additional research."

Ad-37 third virus implicated in animal obesity

The theory that viruses could play a part in obesity began a few decades ago when Nikhil Dhurandhar, now at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, noticed that chickens in India infected with the avian adenovirus SMAM-1 had significantly more fat than non-infected chickens. The discovery was intriguing because the explosion of human obesity, even in poor countries, has led to suspicions that overeating and lack of exercise weren't the only culprits in the rapidly widening human girth. Since then, Ad-36 has been found to be more prevalent in obese humans.

In the current study, Whigham et al. attempted to determine which adenoviruses (in addition to Ad-36 and Ad-5) might be associated with obesity in chickens. The animals were separated into four groups and exposed to either Ad-2, Ad-31, or Ad-37. There was also a control group that was not exposed to any of the viruses. The researchers measured food intake and tracked weight over three weeks before ending the experiment and measuring the chickens' visceral fat, total body fat, serum lipids, and viral antibodies.

Chickens inoculated with Ad-37 had much more visceral fat and body fat compared with the chickens infected with Ad-2, Ad-31 or the control group, even though they didn't eat any more. The Ad-37 group was also generally heavier compared to the other three groups, but the difference wasn't great enough to be significant by scientific standards.

The authors concluded that Ad-37 increases obesity in chickens, but Ad-2 and Ad-31 do not. "Ad-37 is the third human adenovirus to increase adiposity in animals, but not all adenoviruses produce obesity," the study concluded.

There is still much to learn about how these viruses work, Whigham said. "There are people and animals that get infected and don't get fat. We don't know why," she said. Among the possibilities: the virus hasn't been in the body long enough to produce the additional fat; or the virus creates a tendency to obesity that must be triggered by overeating, she said.

Mass screening for these viruses is impractical right now because there is no simple blood test available that would quickly identify exposure to a suspect virus, Whigham et al. said. More work is needed to develop such a test, Whigham said.

For the first time, those who suffer chronic déjà vu can help provide sustained research into the problem. “So far we’ve completed the natural history side of this condition - we’ve found ways of testing for it and the right clinical questions to ask. The next step is obviously to find ways to reduce the problem,” he said.

PhD student Akira O’Connor, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is working with Dr Moulin to find ways of creating the phenomenon in the laboratory. Akira has begun inducing déjà vu in Leeds students using hypnosis, asking students to remember words, hypnotising them to forget and then showing them the same word again to induce a feeling that they’ve seen it before. The students are then asked to make subjective reports - how déjà vu actually feels - in addition to the data about what they can and cannot remember.

This new programme of research, the Cognitive Feelings Framework (CFF), is unique to the University, and is being conducted by Dr Moulin with ESRC professorial fellow Martin Conway. “By considering subjective experience - feelings - from a cognitive science perspective, we hope to better understand everyday sensations like déjà vu, and also to help understand cognitive impairment, for example in older adults,” said Dr Moulin.

“People might suffer from chronic déjà vu, but be unwilling to discuss this with their doctor - any hint of ‘mental illness’ is, particularly to older people, a taboo subject. But as soon as we found this first patient, we discovered that if you ask the right questions, you find other people have experienced the same thing.”

Chronic déjà vu can be distressing to the point of causing depression, and some sufferers have been prescribed anti-psychotics. But Dr Moulin’s group believe it is not a delusion, but a dysfunction of memory: “The challenge is to think about what this means. We can use it to examine the relationships between memory and consciousness.

“The exciting thing about these people is that they can ‘recall’ specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred. It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work.” Dr Moulin believes a circuit in our temporal lobe fires up when we recall the past, creating the experience of remembering but also a ‘recollective experience’ – the sense of the self in the past. In a person with chronic déjà vu this circuit is either overactive or permanently switched on, creating memories where none exist. When novel events are processed, they are accompanied by a strong feeling of remembering.

A new collaboration launching this month with the University of York’s neuro-imaging lab will provide objective evidence to the subjective reports supplied by the CFF. “When examining someone’s subjective experience, it’s important to have an idea of whether their subjective account is comparable to other people’s,” said Dr Moulin. “The neuro-imaging facilities allow us to see if the same areas of brain are activated in different people when they report certain subjective states. Ultimately, we may even be able to pinpoint the neural areas important for conscious states such as remembering.”

Dr Moulin is keen to develop a network of patients in Leeds and across the globe who experience chronic déjà vu. “We’re finding people all over the world with these problems. Chronic déjà vu sufferers need the reassurance that they’re not alone, and we need them to help us learn more about who has it, what causes it, and why.”

For more information on Dr Moulin’s work