Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie Even a compromised agreement to reduce emissions could devastate the economy - and all for a theory shot full of holes, says Christopher Booker.   By Christopher Booker
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The moves now being made by the world's political establishment to lock us into December's Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler's Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train. What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn't happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.
Faced with a "consensus" view which looks increasingly implausible, a fast-growing body of reputable scientists from many countries has been coming up with a ''counter-consensus'', which holds that their fellow scientists have been looking in wholly the wrong direction to explain what is happening to the world's climate. The two factors which most plausibly explain what temperatures are actually doing are fluctuations in the radiation of the sun and the related shifting of ocean currents. Two episodes highlight the establishment's alarm at the growing influence of this ''counter consensus''. In March, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has a key role in President Obama's plans to curb CO2 emissions, asked one of its senior policy analysts, Alan Carlin, to report on the science used to justify its policy. His 90-page paper recommended that the EPA carry out an independent review of the science, because the CO2 theory was looking indefensible, while the "counter consensus'' view – solar radiation and ocean currents – seemed to fit the data much better. Provoking a considerable stir, Carlin's report was stopped dead, on the grounds that it was too late to raise objections to what was now the EPA's official policy. Meanwhile a remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the "consensus'' bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing "cap and trade'' scheme, which would…

 Google Buzz: social networking for the anti-social By Shane Richmond Social media Last updated: February 10th, 2010 It’s hard not to be underwhelmed by Google Buzz, which was widely trailed earlier this week as being Google’s Facebook/Twitter-killer. It’s unlikely to kill either of those services since it doesn’t seem to add anything significant to what they do and it appears not to take any of the existing functions of Facebook and Twitter and do them better.Google Buzz is better thought of as simply another social media aggregator. As Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who created Gmail and founded social aggregator FriendFeed, put it: “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail.”Still, as with most new social networks, it’s hard to judge Google Buzz at this point. It’s like being one of the first at a party. Perhaps nobody will come or perhaps everyone will show up and it will be great.Google has gone some way to dealing with this problem by turning Buzz on for anyone with a Gmail account and then auto-following certain people on your behalf based on who you email most often. This is the one key advantage Buzz has – the potential to tap into a huge, already-existing network. The problem is that unless those people actually do something there remains disappointingly little buzz.There are plenty of possibilities for how Google Buzz will develop but it looks, at this point, like a service for people who spend most of their time using email and very little on social networking sites – if they’re even on them at all. However, these people have lots of friends on social networks and Buzz provides them with a lightweight way to keep up without leaving the comfortable surrounds of their email.For it to be anything more than that, Google needs to offer some killer features.   

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 How does James Cameron do it?First Titanic, now Avatar. The director's knack for hitting a nerve in the two biggest films ever isn't a total mystery  

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