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Politics : Support the French! Viva Democracy! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (4541)	1/8/2004 8:17:56 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7834

Almost ignored by the American media... guardian.co.uk Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings. The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls for acommission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims. According to the report, the absence of any imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical or nuclear programmes was "knowable" before the war. There was greater uncertainty over biological weapons but no evidence strong enough to justify war. The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq's capabilities grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of dissenting views by intelligence officials. The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq. The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes". Last night aWhite House official responded by pointing to Mr Bush's comment on December 15 when he was pressed on the absence of Iraqi WMD. He claimed evidence had been found that contravened UN resolution 1441 calling for Saddam to disarm, a possible reference to signs that Iraq had been trying to extend the range of its missiles beyond UN limits. Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees intelligence assessments, also defended the 2002 NIE. "We did not, in any area, hype our judgments. We made our calls based on the evidence we had. We never used the word 'imminent' in the ... estimate." But Joseph Cirincione, lead author of the Carnegie report, said: "This is the first thorough review of the intelligence threat assessments, administration statements, findings of UN inspectors and nine months of US searches in Iraq. It shows the threat assessment process is broken. The NIE was wildly off the mark."

To: cosmicforce who wrote (4541)	1/8/2004 8:31:06 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7834

Scientists Predict Widespread Extinction by Global Warming By JAMES GORMAN Published: January 8, 2004 An international group of 19 scientists, analyzing research around the globe, has concluded that a warming climate will rival habitat destruction in prompting widespread extinctions in this century. By 2050, the scientists say, if current warming trends continue, 15 to 37 percent of the 1,103 species they studied will be doomed. Advertisement They did not extend their prediction to all species worldwide, but they said that the sample was large enough to show that climate change could be disastrous. In addition to current efforts to create parks and reserves, they added, efforts to decrease global warming will be necessary to reduce rates of extinction. The analysis is built on layers of computer models of climate change and other models of the ways species become extinct, each having varying degrees of uncertainty. Consequently, the authors say, the numbers cannot be taken as precise. They are described in the paper as a "first pass" at quantifying the extinction threat posed by a global warming trend. "There's a huge amount of uncertainty," said the primary author of the paper, Dr. Chris D. Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Leeds in England. Dr. Daniel B. Botkin, professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, an ecologist who has done extensive research on climate change, said the paper was "a valiant effort" to address the effect of warming trends on living things, an area of research he said had been slighted in favor of creating climate models. And he acknowledged that the authors themselves presented their numbers as a beginning and a spur to further research. He said, however, that the analysis was based on "a lot of steady state assumptions that lead it to the most pessimistic forecast," including the notion that things will stay as they are in terms of the ways animals migrate and respond to temperature change. Scientists have been predicting drastic extinctions for years, largely because humans are steadily taking land that other creatures live on and turning it to their own purposes. By different estimates species are now becoming extinct at rates 100 to 1,000 times as great as would be expected without human interference or a catastrophic event. The analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, raises the status of global warming from that of contributor to habitat loss to full-fledged force for extinction. Dr. Thomas said that despite the significant uncertainties, the researchers assessed the raw data on species numbers, current habitats and past extinctions from as many angles as possible. They included species in different terrestrial environments around the world — in Central America, South America, Australia and Africa. They used predictions of increased temperature ranging from mild to extreme and applied three different methods for predicting extinction, all based on the relationship of species disappearance to loss of livable habitat. They also considered two different possibilities for gauging how well the different species would be able to disperse as temperatures at home became uncomfortable. Although the results vary widely, Dr. Thomas said, even the most conservative estimates show that global warming, which he and most other scientists attribute to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the burning of fossil fuels, presents a "very serious risk to huge numbers of species and at least ranks alongside habitat destruction" as a threat. The paper does not predict that all the extinctions will occur by 2050, but that by that time these species will have reached the point of no return.