In the first of a new series of book focuses for SEPA View, Alistair Dawson describes how his new book So Foul and Fair a Day: a History of Scotland's Weather and Climate traces the history of climate conditions in Scotland, showing that dramatic changes have played an important part in shaping Scotland's history.

Read through any history syllabus in any school and you will find few references to the impact of climate and weather on history. Text books on Scottish history are no different. There are descriptions of death and famine but there is nowhere to be seen any consideration of whether specific periods of hardship might also have something to do with extremes of weather and climate. For those trying to understand Scotland's present weather and climate and how it might change in the future, we can learn a great deal by looking back in time, beyond living memory, and attempt to decipher past patterns of change. Over the last thousand years some remarkable changes have taken place

Radical change

A big change in Scotland's weather took place between AD 1400 - 1410, before which it was rarely stormy in winter. Thereafter, there seems to have been a radical change in atmospheric circulation across the northern hemisphere. Scotland started to endure winter storms brought in from the North Atlantic and began to experience a much greater frequency of easterly winds during winter that brought low temperatures and plentiful amounts of snow. The country started to experience what was later to be known as 'the Little Ice Age'.

Many area residents reported a possible meteor flying across the sky over southern Wisconsin on Wednesday night.

Authorities were flooded with curious callers after a meteor streaking across the Midwestern sky looked like a huge fireball. National Weather Service offices in La Crosse, Wis., Des Moines, Iowa, and Kansas City, Mo., received numerous reports of the fireball from law enforcement officials and the public.

The flash of light in the sky was reported just after 10 p.m. People from Iowa to Ohio have apparently reported seeing a fireball.

Well, we all knew it would be a second whitewash of CRU and its climate alarmist pseudo-data; but even the most hard-headed sceptics among us probably thought that Lord Oxburgh's inquiry would be a tad more sophisticated in its brushwork, that it would make some effort to persuade rather than patronise, that its bland conclusions would be a little less blatant and in-your-face.

Not so. If you want incontrovertible evidence that it is business as usual for the arrogant academic establishment, today has provided it. In the popular jargon, they still don't get it. They imagine the AGW scam will go on forever, along with all the other lies with which the political class deluges the public. This effort is too sloppy really to merit the term whitewash: the sceptical graffiti are still clearly visible through the transparent white coating.

"We found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention," said Oxburgh. I love that. It paints a moving (in the way a Disney animated cartoon is tear-jerking) picture of some loveable boffins, unversed in the ways of the world, being dragged out, blinking, into the glare of publicity, like embarrassed lottery winners. All it needs is Snow White. Here were we thinking that Phil Jones was a ruthless manipulator blocking the publication of colleagues' sceptical views, but he turns out to be Susan Boyle in a white coat.

Space shuttle Discovery left Earth this morning at 6:21 am EDT in a spectacular dawn launch from Cape Canaveral. The combination of sunrise colors and the comet-like appearance of the departing shuttle astonished onlookers. "It was an awesome sight," says Michael Fertic, who sends this picture from Spring Hill, Florida:

The show continued even after the shuttle was out of sight. Tiny ice crystals in Discovery's lingering exhaust caught the rays of the rising sun and formed an artificial noctilucent cloud of startling brightness. Even veteran observers were impressed. "It was the most incredible launch I have ever seen," says long-time shuttle watcher and part-time NASA medic Dr. Mark Staples of Shands Hospital. "Definitely, it was one of the most spectacular!" agreed Jim Burchfield of nearby St. Cloud, Florida. And Terry Allshouse of Leesburg, Florida, ranked it as "the best of the ten I have witnessed." More images of the launch from photographers:

Forecasting The NSIDC News

Barring an about face by nature or adjustments, it appears that for the first time since 2001, Arctic Sea ice will hit the "normal" line as defined by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for this time of year.

NSIDC puts out an article about once a month called the Sea Ice News. It generally highlights any bad news they can find about the disappearance of Arctic ice. Last month's news led with this sentence.

In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average, and near the levels observed for February 2007.

But March brought good news for the Polar Bears, and bad news for the Catlin Expedition and any others looking for bad news. Instead of ice extent declining through March like it usually does, it continued to increase through the month and is now at the high (so far) for the year.

If it keeps this trend unabated, in a day or two it will likely cross the "normal" line.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual show in Washington would hardly be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie; picture a giant hall crammed with 7,500 very powerful people regimented by a very powerful lobby - plus half of the United States Senate and more than a third of the congress - basically calling in unison for Palestinian and Iranian blood.

The AIPAC 2010 show predictably was yet one more "bomb Iran" special; but it was also a call to arms against the Barack Obama administration, as far as the turbo-charging of the illegal colonization of East Jerusalem is concerned.

The administration has reacted to the quarrel with a masterpiece of schizophrenic kabuki (classical Japanese dance-drama) theater. Corporate media insisted there was a deep "crisis" between the unshakeable allies. Nonsense. One just has to look at the facts.

Only 10 days after scolding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 43 minutes over the phone, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up at AIPAC spinning the usual platitudes. At least she talked about a "change of facts on the ground" in Palestine and stressed the current status quo is untenable. Netanyahu for his part apparently told Clinton in private (and later Obama as well) that Israel would take "confidence-building measures" in the West Bank, but would continue anyway to build settlements like there's no tomorrow.

Despite the best advice of the world's top experts, Australian documentary-maker Ian Walker was naive to think he could study a psychopath in the wild and not get hurt.

"I didn't really understand how manipulative a psychopath can be," the director of I, Psychopath now admits. "I thought it would be a fair fight. After all, the filmmaker has the power, really. The power of the camera and the edit."

But, as it turns out, Walker chose his subject well. 47 year-old Israeli-born Sam Vaknin is a former corporate criminal and a self-proclaimed master of manipulation and reinvention. Walker first interviewed him several years ago as the author of the book Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Walker was intrigued by a throwaway line where Vaknin professed he thought himself a "corporate psychopath". Afterwards, the film-maker spent several years researching the subject, but always wanted to make a film which might show psychopathic behaviour in action. Because of his narcissism, Vaknin was almost certain to say "Yes".

So, in February 2008, joined by Vaknin's long-suffering but ever-loyal wife Lidija, the threesome embarked on a diagnostic road trip to the world's top experts in psychopathy. Via a battery of psychological testing and brain scanning experiments, Vaknin becomes the world's first civilian to willingly seek a diagnosis for psychopathy.

Defense attorneys say an alleged plot to bomb New York synagogues was hatched and directed by a federal informant.

Lawyers for four men from Newburgh have filed a motion to dismiss the terror indictment against them.

They said the informant badgered the defendants until they got involved in the plot.

They said the informant chose the targets, supplied fake bombs for the synagogues and a fake missile to shoot down planes. The motion said he also offered to pay the defendants, who attorneys alleged weren't inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them.

The government well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking weapons or targets," the motion said.

Now that celiac disease has been allowed official entry into the pantheon of established medical conditions, and gluten intolerance is no longer entirely a fringe medical concept, the time has come to draw attention to the powerful little chemical in wheat known as 'wheat germ agglutinin' (WGA) which is largely responsible for many of wheat's pervasive, and difficult to diagnose, ill effects. Not only does WGA throw a monkey wrench into our assumptions about the primary causes of wheat intolerance, but due to the fact that WGA is found in highest concentrations in "whole wheat," including its supposedly superior sprouted form, it also pulls the rug out from under one of the health food industry's favorite poster children.

Below the radar of conventional serological testing for antibodies against the various gluten proteins and genetic testing for disease susceptibility, the WGA "lectin problem" remains almost entirely obscured. Lectins, though found in all grains, seeds, legumes, dairy and our beloved nightshades: the tomato and potato, are rarely discussed in connection with health or illness, even when their presence in our diet may greatly reduce both the quality and length of our lives.

Although significant progress has been made in exposing the dark side of wheat over the past decade, gluten receives a disproportionate share of the attention. Given that modern bread wheat (Triticum Aestivum) is a hexaploid species containing three distinct sets of chromosomes capable of producing well over 23,000 unique proteins, it is not surprising that we are only now beginning to unravel the complexities of this plant's many secrets.¹ What is unique about the WGA glycoprotein is that it can do direct damage to the majority of tissues in the human body without requiring a specific set of genetic susceptibilities and/or immune-mediated articulations. This may explain why chronic inflammatory and degenerative conditions are endemic to wheat-consuming populations even when overt allergies or intolerances to wheat gluten appear exceedingly rare. The future fate of wheat consumption, and by implication our health, may depend largely on whether or not the toxic qualities of WGA come to light in the general population.

This email forward arrives with a series of photographs that depict a yacht's encounter with a large area of floating volcanic stones and the apparent birth of a new volcanic island in the South Pacific Ocean. Although the images are certainly unusual, they are genuine. Both the phenomena of the floating stones and the newly formed volcanic island have now been well documented by a variety of reliable sources including NASA.

The images in the email were taken from a post on the blog operated by Fredrik Fransson and the crew of the yacht 'Maiken'. In August 2006, the Maiken was sailing in the South Pacific near Tonga when it came across a large area of floating volcanic stones (pumice). When lava with a high gas and water content erupts from a volcano and then cools it can produce pumice, a very light rock material filled with gas bubbles. Pumice is the only kind of rock that can float on water. A large mass of pumice floating on the ocean surface is known as a "pumice raft".