Is global warming a lot of hot air?

By Julian Sudre

This time the landing is meant to be unprecedented and not only because terra firma has shown signs of conditional elements that distract the scrutinising eye of scientists but the looming and mostly important report on science of climate change that is released on February 2.

According the the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, temperatures are expected to jump by 2.0 C to 4.5 C by 2100 along with sea-level rise of between 28 and 43 centimetres by the same date.

Similarly, the report will lay stress on the fact that it has been poorly understood the impact pollution has had on the Greenland ice sheet. Considered it would have taken hundred of years for it to melt right the way through, now satellite data suggested the ice sheet was melting three times three times faster than previously thought.

"I hope this report will shock people and governments into taking more serious action as you really can't get a more authentic and more credible piece of scientific work. So I hope this will be taken for what it's worth" said the IPPC chairman, R K Pachauri.

It was also pointed out that food production did as much damage as private transport and housing, Environment minister Ben Bradshaw has warned. The consumption of meat and dairy products does in fact contribute to global warming -- methane gas is emitted by cows and sheep -- because of the energy and land needed to rear animals.

Food production and preparation alongside transport and housing actually account for 25 per cent of global warming. Flying accounts for only 2 per cent.

The weather, appropriately, has turned public opinion with Hurricane Katrina and the heatwave that torched America's west coast last year accompanied by the constant staccato of new research has only strengthened the belief that something must be done.

During the state-of-the-union address, President Bush announced the reduction of America's petrol consumption by 20 per cent by 2017. That is the US will have to rely on a greater use of alternative fuels.

Ethanol stands to be ineffcient due to heavy subsidies and high tariffs on import of foreign ethanol and liquified coal remains filthy because of high carbon emissions.

Mr Bush so far has rejected both clean and efficient solutions to climate change. The first measure is a carbon tax and the second is a cap-and-trade system of the sort Europe introduced to meet the Kyoto targets.

Such measures would limit companies' emissions while allowing them to buy and sell permits to pollute. Either system, should, by setting a price on carbon, discourage its emission; and in doing so, encourage the development and use of cleaner-energy technologies.

America has not taken a green leaf out of the eco- book but has seemed to have closed the book on it.

In due time, world leaders would have to get tearing leaves out of that book and play catch-up before the pollutant wave closes its curl over our dear planet Earth.

Celebrity Big Blogging!

By Julian Sudre


Being a writer evidently bears the brunt of critics; sometimes the latter are positively constructive or challenging but others can be as vacuous and insipid as junk mail shoved down your trash.
But don't writers accept with a degage attitude the dispiteful comments lobbed at them and surmise hypothesises why their pieces would inflame people's mind?

Publishing an article is like throwing a stone in a pond and ripples would come ruffling the thin layer of water. We are not tentatively meaning to get a reaction, although it has a certain flattery in itself to be aware of the fact that we have a readership. That, is ether to writers.

Writing pertains to art of expression; we toss and spin words out, and neatly we select old terms to bring them back to life on the page; a constant reminder that we are the guards that inject life into obscure words. The dancing of our wording becomes in the eye of the beholder.

But writers are not there to flaunt their prose allright; because the interpretation of actual prose indisputably varies according to the individual who is expounding it. Therefore, in my own eyes, prose is no more.
Nevertheless, when it comes to blogging, the average blogger would shoot from the hip by sourcing their inner-self and spurting it out on to a webpage.
Blogging enhances the flux of ideology through the writer without constraining his own freedom of expression . No editor is to be putting a spanner in their works, hence the blogging goes on and eventually will encounter the angry voices of would-be editors who will be more than happy to make a hatchet job of our work.
This is where Celebrity Big Blogging comes in; we become stalked and watched over in our blogging world and the comment of one sparks off the reaction of another. The acorn becomes an oak among people who seem to be barking up the wrong oak tree!

Now if the reader does not sit well with the way I spin my narrative, why as a result would he become a staunch reader of my blog? Perhaps because curiosity has been engendered by the unusual, if yet eccentric patterns of my word-weaving awoke his inner emotions to reveal his true self; his naked intelligence. That is, a sense of jealousy for not being in my shoes.

Objecting my style is rejecting his own existential acceptance to being not as capable as me; otherwise there would be no objection but instead a wittier, more demanding explanation of how I had reached a level of single-handed individuality.

Today, If I get some impetuous comments on my columns, it would only be because I have gained the status of Celebrity Big Blogging!

Saddam Hussein's execution is changing the face of the media

By Julian Sudre

The fall of a dictator made public through a you tube generation has exacerbated many a nation across the globe; and the ignominious broadcasting of the video and the photos published in the newspapers spur me into thinking that humanity retains the stain of sensationalism that degrades journalism and our own self-esteem.

The execution of Saddam Hussein was ill-timed with the holiest day of the Muslim year; many Arab Muslims said that the hanging was provocatively timed with the feast of Eid al-Adha and would elicit increased violence in Iraq.

Obviously the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is taking a lot of flack for pressuring the White House to give its assent over the hanging of the former dictator. Now he can't wait to finish his tenure at the head of the Iraqi Government.
The result has become a morass of divergent views over the execution -- and the death penalty -- since an across-the-board insurgency may trigger a sweeping pandemonium in the Middle East. Sectarian and ethnic violence will be mostly taking place in doomed Baghdad for some time yet.

The culmination has had a vicious and corrupt flavour due to the arrest of Iraqi guards who used their mobile phones to film the grisly episode.
The question remains how they managed to have their phone on the premises as they were seized by american security prior to entering the gallows room.

As a result, a formidable media wave came crashing down to capture the goverment-approved video clip of the execution and to debate over the mobile phone illegal film that injected much convulsion everywhere.

Should not such pictures simply and squarely be banned for the sake of propriety and civilities until the very end?

I am afraid to observe a deliberate detoriation of the media today as our society is inured to crass reporting and journalism has deviated from the tracks of proper interpretation of current affairs.

Not only democracy should have bounderies to separate how to view the news from a particular angle instead of throwing glaring light on to abominable deeds such as publishing an execution but also impose a more strigent editing before we accept unwittingly the projection of news-writing with increasing greed.

Again decisions we may take attract intense attention from the media but the spiralling descent into misjudgement would prove catastrophic relatively soon if we don't re-establish our standards.
We are shifting our attention towards a form of Hollywoodian reporting and the mediation of such stories ensure that we know in advance when a scoop becomes a blockbuster, bar the moral ethics that we were supposed to appreciate.

In the meantime, when a former dictator fall from graces, we will never forget that Saddam Hussein has gained the status of martyr after his death and will be marked forever with sensationalism and money- grubbing media on his head.