Cllimate Change, Waihopai , Rice, Colossal Squid

Global Warming has been cancelled:
...just kidding, folks. What this may mean is that absent record high temperatures soon, Climate Change campaigns may well falter. Which leaves us with the much more immanent Peak Oil crisis, the fear of which is causing food riots right now, even after a high global grain crop.
It seems civilization will fall due to fear of oil shortages, long before the crops wither they will lack trucks, or be converted to chimpy's ethanol.

we make the following forecast: over the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged. Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.
Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector
N. S. Keenlyside1, M. Latif1, J. Jungclaus2, L. Kornblueh2 & E. Roeckner2

nature
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Felt my first home-coming earthquake
# Reference Number: 2902957# NZST: Sat, May 3 2008 3:12 am# Magnitude: 4.0# Depth: 30 km# Details: 10 km west of Porirua
Only 2 seconds, but I definitely got shook...
geonet
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BLENHEIM, New Zealand, April 30 Waihopai spy base on a foggy night
Anzac Ploughshares spokesperson Manu Caddie said the three used wire cutters to cut through an electrified fence and razor wire, then evaded motion sensors before deflating the dome covering the satellite.
dishes.
Dominican Friar Father Peter Murnane, organic gardener Adrian Leason and Hokianga farmer Sam Land.

"Waihopai is not a US base but forms part of a US-led global intelligence sharing network known as the UKUSA alliance."
aka "echelon" - the absurd response of authority here is that Waihope doesnt collect NZ phone/emails. Only 'other nations' - so The Aussies collect ours from Intelsat 703 and its all sent to Room 641A in Folsom Street,
"ironically, using violent means to disable warplanes and military equipment. (NZHerald)"

- Nothing ironic here, the NZHerald evidently doesn't grasp the concept of non-violence. The only irony perhaps, is that the Dominicans 16th century were the torturers for the inquisition, and destroyers of indigenous cultures.
Father Murnane is redeeming this history by this magnificent act against the USA war machine. NZ is one of the very few nations that has no USA bases or ship visite, but some bases are local in name only.



Two 2m cuts were sufficient to deflate the dome. - the cost is claimed as $1M - perhaps its a Haliburton no-bid replacement? why not $20 of rubber cement, the cuts were presumably low, at the horizon level for the dish
fas
scoop

one word people: PGP. Actually since intercepts are kept based on automated key-words, any simple cipher would do.
Yesterday I heard someone tallkng on RNZ about Blackberrys, or rather he said "we wont talk about that", when the interviewer mentioned encryption.
So Balckberries are encrypted. It would be interesting to know if its more effective than GSM phones, which are almost real-time breakable, its said.
Blackberry state "Data remains encrypted in transit and is never decrypted outside of the corporate firewall." ... who would trust 'TotalInformationAwareness" not to suborn that corporate firewall. ie it seems you have to trust the key that youre given. I have no idea what users are doing vs point-to-point. I dont know how open theBerry OS is.
Blackberry also say
blackberry
"End-to-End Mode connections most appropriate for applications where only the transaction end-points are trusted."
which sounds good.

freeprotocols claim that BBerry being closed OS, cant be secure, but mobiletracker claims that "While there will be an extra cost associated with the service, PGP provides sender-to-recipient email security in the form of high-grade public key encryption." which sounds great. Caveat: I have never laid eyes on a BBerry.

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wordpress
Global rice stocks have halved since hitting a record high in 2001 while demand is continuing to rise
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RP, Philippines
The government aims to achieve 92.38-% sufficiency in rice production this year, rough rice production is projected 17.32 million metric tons.

..yield 4.04 metric tons per hectare from 3.07 metric tons in 2000. And rice production reached a record 16.24 million metric tons last year..
manilastandardtoday
RP spends $1.6B on rice subsidies, hoping to keep those 84M people quiet
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In Asia rice prices have almost tripled this year alone

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Russia is doing too little to reverse a critical decline in its population driven by increasing alcohol abuse, poor diet and social change, a United Nations report said. Karl Kulessa, the United Nations Population Fund’s chief in Russia, said Russia’s population could fall to 100 million, from 142 million, in 40 to 50 years. Russia lost 400,000 to 650,000 people a year from 1992 to 2006. Life expectancy for men among the population of 142 million was 55 years in the 1990s,
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"Ahmadinejad examined a carbon rotor for a new generation of centrifuges known as the IR-2,"
I hope this is a demo model.. The NYT goes on to say that some rotors failed due to imbalance from bacteria from ungloved workers hands.
- a terrific series of pics in the NYT, rubbing the USA's nose in it.
nytimes
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New Lead Level in USA
On Thursday, the E.P.A. proposed a standard between 0.1 and 0.3 micrograms per cubic meter, or one-5th to one-15th of the old level.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, said the proposed standard was not strict enough to protect children. “Once again, the Bush administration has failed to heed its scientists,” Mrs. Boxer said.
NYT
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yet another herb I've never smokled:
Subjective effects of Salvia divinorum
ncbi
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Collosal Squid thawes in Te Papa. Some disappointment it wasnt '20000 leagues' big but I got impressed by the rotating teeth on its tentacles
Te Papa webcams at
r2
- I havnt seen them, my phone bill is unpaid so my bandwidth is choked
Change, Waihopai , Rice, Squid,