Don’t sleepwalk into Big Brother surveillance, schools warned

The Herald | Jan 14, 2009

By Stephen Naysmith

Schools which employ biometric technologies such as fingerprint patterning to manage libraries or dinner queues should put surveillance and privacy issues on the curriculum, according to university experts.

An analysis submitted by Strathclyde University to a Scottish Government consultation warns that schools should not “uncritically” accept bio- metric identification systems or other surveillance systems.

The authors claim it is not realistic or desirable to halt the development of such technologies.

With society moving towards the use of iris scanning and facial recognition at airports and biometric passports and possible ID cards, pupils need to be prepared for the world we live in.
On the other hand, potential security benefits may mean schools could be seen as irresponsible if they don’t adopt such systems, they add.

However, the report concludes: “Schools must prepare pupils for life in the newly emergent surveillance society’, not by uncritically habituating them to surveillance systems used in schools, but by critically engaging them in thought about the way surveillance technologies work in the wider world and the implications of being a surveilled subject’.”

The report is also cautious about the potential response of children to the new technologies and argues schools should be careful, as pupils are likely to regard biometric technologies as “cool” and futuristic and to be uncritically enthusiastic about them.

The idea that schools should engage pupils with the realities and prospects of a surveillance society, the document says, is “premised on a belief that through informed understanding the worst excesses of the over-surveilled, over-controlled society may yet be avoided”.

However, it is not just pupils who appear to be embracing the technology. Companies which provide biometric “solutions” for schools say that 99% of parents back the technology when it is introduced.

Schools spoken to by The Herald bear this out. Renfrewshire Council has installed finger scanners in 12 primary schools after a pilot scheme at Paisley’s Todholm Primary School was judged a success. The headteacher at one, Moorpark Primary in Renfrew, says only three pupils out of a school roll of 127 have opted out – and they are all from the same family.

“I don’t think it’s because of Big Brother’ type fears, but their mum just felt they were too small to be putting their fingers on a scanner,” head Frances Boyd explains.

The Renfrewshire schools are using the system to manage mealtimes, with pupils or parents putting credit in the system which children can then access to pay for their dinner, verifying their identity by scanning their index finger.

The local authority says schools do not keep an image of any pupil’s fingerprint, with a set of points on the finger being used to generate a unique number against which subsequent scans are checked. Along with the system’s manufacturers, they claim it is impossible to “reverse engineer” a print or set of prints from the numbers on the system.

Boyd also cites anonymity as one of the benefits: “We are a school where 30% of pupils have free meals. But with this system no-one knows who those children are – which takes away the stigma.”

Boyd said there used to be a definite stigma attached to school meal tickets, and some secondary pupils would rather not take up school meals than be singled out in this way.

Pupil take-up has been enthusiastic, she says, but there has been no formal attempt to discuss issues such as civil liberties with them. “Work like that would come in through personal and social development lessons. We work on the belief that if children ask a question we will answer it,” she said.

Graham Herbert is headteacher at Lockerbie Academy, where school library cards have been replaced by a finger scan for three years now. He cites an uptake rate of 95% from parents.

“Those whose parents don’t consent can still borrow books in the conventional way,” he adds. “Kids in the main enjoy using it. It is technology and they are growing up in a world where it will be increasingly familiar in airports and banks, for example. Those I’ve spoken to don’t accept the civil liberties argument at all.”

The system has resulted in savings, Herbert claims, particularly through eliminating the problem of lost cards and the costs of replacing them. It has also led to improved rates of book borrowing, particularly amongst boys.

Responding to the Strathclyde University paper, he said: “Whether they debate it in modern studies subjects, I don’t know. I can see where the civil liberties argument comes in with ID cards, but not with this particular system.”

He added that it was important to stress that the system is not fingerprinting in the traditional sense. “People associate that with prison and permanent records, and that can cause an emotional reaction, but that is from people who haven’t found out how the system actually works.”

“Staff use the system too and I haven’t had any teachers approaching me and saying this is an infringement. To me it is no different from showing your passport in an airport.”

Teaching unions have objected, however, and the EIS warned in responding to the government consultation that the issue could turn schools into a civil liberties battleground.

Meanwhile, Geraint Bevan, of No2ID Scotland, the anti-ID card campaign, says there are issues which schools simply haven’t thought through. He added that he didn’t believe the introduction and upkeep of complex computer system would be outweighed by the cost of replacing library cards in the past. “These systems are a waste of money and there are big security issues. It is a fingerprint system, and it is not true to say that you cannot reverse engineer finger-prints from these algorithms.”

“Schools and local authorities should consider what happens if the police want to access their records because a serious crime has been committed. Would they say no, and can they legally? If not, they should be raising that with parents right from the start.”

He said of Strathclyde University’s idea that surveillance should be on the curriculum to help pupils engage with the issue: “That is the best idea I have heard in years. It really does raise important issues that children are going to have to deal with in their future lives.

“They would then be in a much better position to give informed consent, rather than just say: this is a cool toy’. I’d be very interested to see how kids views changed as a result.”

Professor Mike Nellis, one of the authors of the Strathclyde paper said: “Our view was that you can’t just stop this technology being used in schools. But if it is going to happen we said you have to not just have consultations. You have to actually turn it into a topic on the curriculum and talk through thoroughly the technology, privacy and civil liberties issues.”

Prof Nellis is currently working on a project entitled Surveillance and Society in the 21st Century, which will include a particular focus on schools. He argues that discussion of surveillance in schools should also encompass non-biometric measures such as CCTV. The topic will be explored through lectures aimed at secondary pupils, an exhibition at the Glasgow Science Centre and a surveillance symposium in spring and summer this year.

Biometric testing: the way forward?

The Scottish Government has published draft guidelines for local authorities on introducing biometric technologies.

The move comes after schools in Dumfries and Galloway and Renfrewshire installed fingerprint scanning systems for pupils to identify themselves when borrowing books or accessing dinner money.

It isn’t clear how widespread the technology is in Scotland, but it is clearly less advanced than in England, where thousands of children use fingerprint scanners in libraries.
Examples of biometric systems cited by technology firms include finger scans, vein recognition, facial biometrics, gait analysis and speech recognition.

They argue that such systems can improve school security and are easier and more reliable, eliminating the problems caused by lost library cards, dropped dinner money and forgotten passwords.

Civil liberties campaigners suggest the technologies tend to be unnecessary and are part of a creeping surveillance society.

Not all such developments involve biometrics. Two years ago a Doncaster secondary began experimenting with “smart threads” containing radio- frequency ID (RFID) tags embroidered into uniforms. These were used to track pupils as they move around the school.

Scientists use their children for research

Darius Sinha was an early participant in his father’s research. (Courtesy of Pawan Sinha)

IHT | Jan 18, 2009

By Pam Belluck

Even before his son was born, Pawan Sinha saw unique potential.

At a birthing class, Sinha, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stunned everyone, including his wife, by saying he was excited about the baby’s birth “because I really want to study him and do experiments with him.” He did, too, strapping a camera on baby Darius’s head, recording what he looked at.

Sinha is one of a new crop of scientists using their children as research subjects. Other researchers have studied their own children in the past, but advanced technology allows modern-day scientists to collect new and more detailed data. The scientists say that studying their children allows for more in-depth research and that the children make reliable participants in an era of scarce research financing.

“You need subjects, and they’re hard to get,” said Deborah Linebarger, a developmental psychologist at the Children’s Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania who has involved her four children in her studies of the effect of the media on children.

Arthur Toga, a neurology professor at the medical school of the University of California, Los Angeles, studying brain change, scanned his three children’s brains using magnetic resonance imaging.

Stephen Camarata of the medical school at Vanderbilt University has involved all seven of his children in studies of learning problems and speech.

And Deb Roy, at MIT, embedded 11 video cameras and 14 microphones in ceilings throughout his house, recording 70 percent of his son’s waking hours for his first three years, amassing 250,000 hours of tape for a language development study he calls the Human Speechome Project.

Some research methods are clearly benign; others, while not obviously dangerous, might not have fully understood effects. Ethicists said they would consider participation in some projects acceptable, even valuable, but raised questions about the effect on the child, on the relationship with the parent and on the objectivity of the researcher.

“The role of the parent is to protect the child,” said Robert Nelson, director of the Center for Research Integrity at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Once that parent becomes an investigator, it sets up an immediate potential conflict of interest. And it potentially takes the parent-child relationship and distorts it in ways that are unpredictable.”

Researchers themselves acknowledge the challenge of being simultaneously scientist and parent.

“I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable, like I’m invading their privacy,” said Linebarger, who ultimately set some boundaries. “When you mix being a researcher with being a parent, it can put your kids in an unfair place.”

Children have been subjects for some well-known scientist-parents, including Jean Piaget, the child-development theorist. But some past examples would probably not pass ethical muster today.

Jonas Salk injected his children with his polio vaccine. Clarence Leuba, a psychologist, wondering if laughter in response to tickling was learned or innate, forbade tickling of his infant son and daughter, except when he tickled them, wearing a mask to hide his expression. (It is innate, he found.)

These days, American scientists using human subjects are expected to seek approval from institutional review boards, which consider federal regulations on risk, coercion of subjects and researcher bias.

Some scientists said that in studies with multiple subjects they considered it unnecessary to report that their children were participants because they would face no greater risk than others. Some asserted that involving their children proved that risks were minimal.

Toga said some nonscientists have said: “Why would a parent subject their kid to the dangers of MRI? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

His response: “All I’m doing is taking a picture. Nobody loves my kids more than me. Would I ever do something that would endanger them?”

“I sign my own permission slips,” Gedeon Deak of the University of California, San Diego, said of the required parental consent forms.

His three sons have participated in his cognitive science studies. He tells review boards that his subjects are a “sample of convenience,” not randomly selected, but he has seen no need to specify that his sons are among the participants. “If they’re your kids and you want to ask them questions, you can,” he said. “If you want to put your kid into a drug trial, that’s different.”

Michael Caligiuri, who oversees UCSD’s review boards, said researchers should disclose their child’s role. He said panels might allow it but would probably require that investigators “can’t be present” when their children participate and “can’t view identifiable data” from their children.

Some scientists use their children only in pilot studies, not published ones, in case their child’s performance skews the results. Linebarger changed some of her procedures after her son Alec, at about age 5, answered a question by saying “his parents didn’t listen to him and that sometimes he felt lonely,” she recalled.

“I was just floored,” she said. “I sort of assumed that we have this wonderful son-mother relationship. I decided I needed to be more careful. I was worried I would be biasing anything I did.”

Now, her husband handles forms, and staff members usually conduct the testing.

“We videotape and I look at it after, and sometimes I don’t even like to do that,” she said, because it is tempting to question them on their answers.

MIT’s review board chairman, Leigh Firn, said that Roy’s project did not raise concerns about risk, because parents routinely videotape children, but that its scale prompted questions about privacy, not only for his son, but also for visitors to the home.

The board consulted an independent expert and urged safeguards. Cameras and microphones had to be easily turned off. Visitors signed consent forms. People can have their video segments erased, including his son, once he is 18. The expert recommended not videotaping toilet training, to avoid later embarrassment.

Roy has students who catalogue recordings sign confidentiality agreements, and each handles only video or audio, in 15-minute, randomly ordered snippets. They are asked to report anything “potentially embarrassing,” he said, but usually “when there’s something juicy or controversial the recording is off, and if it isn’t, good luck finding it.” Plus, every room has an “oops button” to erase regretted utterances instantly.

Now, as he analyzes his son’s vocabulary, tracks how a single word progressed from “gaga” to “water,” and studies interaction between his son and adults, he said some scientists say: “My God, this is such a valuable database. Why don’t you share it more openly?” He said he had been denied a federal grant because he would not. Like Sinha, he is expanding the project to include other children, applying the research to autism.

Ann Coulter endorses Ron Paul in 2012

YouTube | Jan 17, 2009

By FR33AGENTS

Global cooling leaves U.N. with snow on its face

Press Connects | Jan 17, 2009

By Todd Keister

Even while the United Nations was conducting its annual Chicken Little fright fest over the global warming menace at the end of 2008, snow was blanketing Houston and New Orleans. Did this development deter the U.N.’s scientists from proclaiming man-made global warming an incontrovertible fact?

Of course not; global warming has nothing to do with concern over climate change. It is a backdoor way of attacking the capitalist economic system in general and the United States in particular – what writer Eric Englund has termed “socialism’s Trojan horse.”

The media continually report that man-made global warming is proven fact despite the reality that no scientist has ever been able to demonstrate that human activities have any effect on the Earth’s climate. News coverage of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference made no mention of the report submitted by 650 prominent scientists – including several former IPCC scientists – that debunks the myth that human activities cause global warming.

Even the record cold global temperatures of 2007 and 2008 cannot dissuade the disciples of the Church of Global Warming. The cooling trend, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Association’s director, is caused by La Nina, and is only temporary; ” …part of what we call ‘variability’.”

The IPCC and the media also are mute when it comes to more than 4,000 scientists who signed the Heidelberg Appeal against the rampant pseudoscience surrounding the issue. Likewise for the Oregon Petition, the Leipzig Declaration, and The Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming – cumulatively bearing the signatures of more than 35,000 climatologists and meteorologists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners who deny the existence of man-made global warming.

Neither will their reporting ever quote Reid Bryson, the “Father of Climatology” and the founding chairman of the meteorology department at the University of Wisconsin who has stated with regard to global warming, ” …there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We’ve been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years…It’s been warming up for a long time.”

Global warming hype is nothing more than tool for further dismantling the American way of life. One clue is the myth’s leading proponents – a rogue’s gallery of leftists and communists including Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Muammar Al Gadhafi. All have all written books on the evils of capitalist carbon emissions and its dire consequences.

If the leaders of the Global Warming Church don’t convince you of the true agenda, read the Kyoto Protocols, that require “developed” countries (namely the United States) to vastly reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide, while “developing” nations like India and China can continue to spew enormous amounts into the atmosphere. And, in true Marxist fashion, the agreement requires the “developed” nations to help pay the costs of emissions-reducing measures in the less-fortunate countries.

The provisions of Kyoto would place crushing burdens on American industries. The politicians who decry U.S. jobs being sent overseas are same ones who push for unfair agreements like Kyoto, which would drive more companies abroad, where they would not be subject to such harsh regulation.

The global warming charlatans are not only anti-capitalist, and anti-freedom, but essentially anti-human. The latest trend among the greens in Europe is having themselves sterilized to avoid “contaminating” the planet with any more humans. Time magazine ran a story in May 2008 with the headline, “Growing Up Green. No way around it: your child is an environmental disaster.”

The article begins, “Want to wreck the environment? Have a baby. Each bundle of joy gobbles up more of the planet’s food, clogs garbage dumps with diapers, churns through plastic toys, and winds up a gas-guzzling, resource-consuming grown up like the rest of us.”

I don’t view my children as “environmental disasters.” You and I, and all our children have as much right to this planet’s resources as beavers, spotted owls, and the “developing” world. And I am certainly not willing to cripple what’s left of American industry, double my gasoline and electricity costs, and pay a tax on the carbon dioxide I exhale every day on the basis of a demonstrably fraudulent myth called global warming.

Keister is a former U.S. Navy Intelligence Specialist and an 18-year veteran of the New York State Police. He lives in the Town of Binghamton.

Obama says he always thought Bush was a ‘good guy’

(L-R) Former President George H.W. Bush, President-elect Barack Obama, U.S. President George W. Bush, former President Bill Clinton and former President Jimmy Carter meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington January 7, 2009. Reuters

CNN | Jan 16, 2009

BEDFORD HEIGHTS, Ohio (CNN) — After two years of traveling around the country and criticizing President Bush, President-elect Barack Obama said Friday that he “always thought [Bush] was a good guy.”

“I mean, I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country,” Obama said in an exclusive interview with CNN’s John King.

During the election season, Obama frequently campaigned against what he called Bush’s “failed policies” and promised a “clean break” from the past eight years.

Asked if there was anything he wanted to take back, now that he has spent more time with the president, Obama praised Bush’s team for helping with a smooth transition and said part of what America is about is being able to have “disagreements politically and yet treat each other civilly.”

Obama also said he thought Bush made “the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances.”

“That does not detract from my assessment that over the last several years, we have made a series of bad choices and we are now going to be inheriting the consequences of a lot of those bad choices,” Obama said.

In addition to his relationship with Bush, Obama also discussed some key issues that he will face in the first days of his administration, including national security and the economy.

Even before taking the oath of office, Obama has already faced a showdown with Congress over releasing what remains of the $700 bailout bill that Bush and Congress authorized before the election.

The $350 billion that the Senate approved will come with specific conditions, Obama said.

“There’s nothing wrong with us placing some conditions, making sure that the money’s not going to executive compensation, making sure you’re not seeing big dividend payoffs to shareholders and making sure that money is being left so that we can get credit flowing again, not just for individual homeowners who are losing their homes, but also small businesses who are the lifeblood of this economy.

“If they can’t get credit, then they end up having to shutter their doors. And when they shutter their doors, people lose jobs. They then can’t pay their mortgage, and you start down the road that we’re on. We want to reverse that path, and that means that’s the way we use the next $350 billion that Congress voted on, and that was a very tough vote for a lot of people. And it was tough for me to have to request it,” he said.

Obama sat down with King after he took a factory tour in Bedford Heights, Ohio.

The interview will air in full at 6 p.m. Friday on “The Situation Room.”

Israel born out of Jewish terrorism: British parliamentarian

IANS | Jan 16, 2009

London, Jan 16 (IANS) A veteran British-Jewish parliamentarian has compared the latest Gaza conflict to the Nazi Holocaust and said Israel too was created out of Jewish terrorism, IRNA reported Friday.

“Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and massacred 254 Palestinians in Deir Yassin village in 1948,” Sir Gerald Kaufman said.

“The present Israeli government’s ruthless and cynical exploits are due to its continuing guilt over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust,” he told the British parliament during a debate on Gaza attacks Thursday.

Referring to his ancestors, who were killed by the Nazis in Poland, he said: “My grandmother did not die to protect Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.”

The toll in Gaza shows Jewish lives are more precious than the lives of Palestinians, he said in condemnation.

Responding to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, Kaufman said, her (Livni’s) father was a “chief operations officer of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun Zvai Leumi”.

He added that the group was responsible for the bomb blast in King David Hotel in al-Quds that killed 91 people, including four Jews.

No matter how many Palestinians they (Israel) kill in Gaza, there won’t be an end to the conflict, as it cannot be solved through the military might, he warned.

He blamed the Israeli government for the mass killings in Gaza. According to an estimate, at least 1,133 people have been already killed in the latest Israeli operation against the Hamas-led militant groups in the Gaza Strip, since it was launched Dec 27.

“It is time for our (British) government to make clear to the Israelis that their conduct and policies are unacceptable,” he said.

“It is time for peace, but real peace, and not a solution through Israeli conquest of Gaza,” Kaufman told the British parliament. He also called for a total arms ban on Israel.

Anthony’s still selling “missing” toddler t-shirts

Fox News | Jan 17, 2009

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35, Orlando) — Weeks after the remains of missing toddler Caylee Antony were found, t-shirts bearing her likeness and asking for information on her whereabouts are still being sold.

The place? The MySpace website set up by the Anthony family shortly after Caylee went missing. The website said it was updated on January 13th.

The message says that in response to folks who want bracelets and shirts from the search for Caylee there are some left and they are for sale. All you have to do is write a check to the Anthony’s.

That isn’t setting well with some people.

“I don’t think they should be profiting, I think it’s wrong,” said one visitor to the makeshift memorial set up where the toddler’s remains were found.

Then there are blogs with dozens of email from folks, who say things such as ” they (the Anthony’s) are sick individuals, morbid” they say since Caylee is no longer alive.

But according to Michelle Bart the woman in charge of the website, she put the message up at Cindy Anthony’s request.

“Since dr. G’s announcement on December 19th,” Bart said. “I have had numerous requests still for bracelets and shirts.”

The money Bart made from the items she said will go to nonprofits that helped with the search.

Bart added that said she would be talking with Cindy to see if they should close the sale.

Big chill: Blast of Arctic air stuns eastern US

AP | Jan 17, 2009

By JAY REEVES

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Alabama was colder than Alaska, water fountains froze into ice sculptures in South Carolina and Florida shivered through a brush of Arctic air blast that deadened car batteries in the Northeast and prompted scattered Midwest power outages.

As Southerners awaited an expected weekend thaw, the Northeast persisted under the bitterly cold air from Canada that sent temperatures plunging in some places below minus 30 degrees and left even longtime residents reluctant to venture outdoors.

Quentin Masters braved the chilly weather, making a trip to a Syracuse, N.Y., post office to mail his sister a gift for her birthday Monday.

“It was almost too cold to come down,” he said, but he added, “I don’t want to be late.”

Single-digit temperatures and subzero wind chills were expected in western New York through the weekend, with more seasonable conditions moving in early next week.

To Southerners, who rarely see temperatures so cold, the icebox-like weather was the most jarring. Construction worker Allen Johnson wore a gray beanie, flannel shirt, long johns and boots as he stopped for coffee in Montgomery, Ala., after an overnight low of 22 degrees Friday.

“No matter how bad it is, it could be worse — we could be in Anchorage, Alaska,” Johnson said. Actually, the temperature was about 20 degrees warmer in Anchorage on Friday.

Freezing temperatures threatened to kill picturesque Spanish moss hanging from Gulf Coast trees. In Spartanburg, S.C., a hard freeze coated a water fountain in shimmering icicles. And it was too cold to bet on dogs in West Virginia.

In Tennessee, Heather Davis, of NashvillePAW Magazine, watched her photographer unsuccessfully try to coax their cover model, a white poodle named Cotton, to pose outdoors for the animal publication. Cotton, who is up for adoption, ran to the car and didn’t want to leave.

“I don’t think I realized how cold it was,” Davis said, laughing.

But gusting winds were no laughing matter in Ohio, where temperatures pushed to their lowest this winter and forced scattered power outages. Lows ranged from minus 6 degrees in Cincinnati to minus 14 degrees in Dayton and Toledo — just missing record lows for Friday’s date.

Thousands in Ohio and Illinois lost power for several hours while Charleston, W.Va.-based Appalachian Power, which delivers electricity to more than 1 million customers Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, had record electricity demand as businesses and homes cranked up the heat.

In Columbus, Ohio, 45-year-old Brandon Champney beat the cold by visiting the orchid exhibit at the Franklin Park Conservatory — a deliciously climate-controlled 72 degrees.

“It’s beautiful, warm, great,” Champney said.

The cold claimed at least six lives and contributed to dozens of traffic accidents. One death involved a man in a wheelchair who was found in subzero temperatures stuck in the snow, a shovel in his hand, outside his home in Des Moines, Iowa.

In central Pennsylvania, AAA fielded a spike in calls from motorists whose batteries went dead or door locks froze shut. Wind chills were as low as 25 degrees below zero in greater Pittsburgh.

In Michigan, a winter storm watch was in effect for parts of the Lower Peninsula, where up to 8 inches of snow could fall by Sunday morning, the National Weather Service said.

And in Illinois, where a low of 32 degrees below zero was recorded in a north-central area Friday, the weather service predicted only modest weekend relief — sort of. The mercury was expected to head Saturday into the 20s in northern Illinois and the 30s in southern Illinois.

“The heat wave begins,” meteorologist Tim Halbach quipped.

Associated Press writers William Kates in Syracuse, Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tenn., and David Mercer in Champaign, Ill., contributed to this report.

Pravda reports “Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age”

Scoop | Jan 17, 2009

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today advised Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to heed the scientific evidence that shows the world faces an ice age—not global warming, as reported in Russia’s Pravda this week, before he shuts down Australia’s economy by imposing his fraudulent emissions trading scheme.

On 11th January, Russia’s Pravda online issue carried an article titled “Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age.” The article referenced the regular cyclical pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each lasted about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. “Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age, ” warns the author, Gregory F. Fegel.

The northern hemisphere is now shivering in one of the coldest winters on record. And this follows last year’s freezing temperatures when China battled the coldest winter in a hundred years. Since global temperatures peaked in 1998, the Earth has significantly cooled. Anyone still pushing the global warming theory is not only ignoring recent cooler weather, but more importantly, is ignoring nearly three million years of paleoclimatic evidence where the Earth’s orbital cycles correlate very well with temperature.

Geologists and astronomers know that the Earth’s orbit around the sun is continually changing in cycles. There are three main orbital cycles.

Precession of the equinox—this cycle of approximately 26,000 years is produced by the wobble of the Earth’s axis.

Obliquity—this is a 40,000-year cycle in the change of the angle of inclination of the Earth’s axis, from about 22 to 24.5 degrees.

Ellipticity—this cycle of approximately 100,000 years results from the variation in the dimensions of the elliptical orbit itself, which varies from a nearly circular orbit to a more elliptical orbit.

For nearly a million years, the Earth has experienced Ice Ages correlating with the ellipticity. And before that, the 40,000 year cycle was dominant back to nearly three million years ago. The onset of a glaciation leading to the formation of a new ice sheet can be very sudden—we should thus take the threat of a new ice age very seriously.

Just 12,000 years ago, the undisputed geological evidence shows that New York, Chicago, and all of North America up to the Arctic regions were under a sheet of ice, estimated to have been from 1 to 2 miles thick.

Reduced sunspot activity will also play a key role in cooling our planet. Recently, the index of sunspot activity, a measure which correlates with the output of heat radiation from the Sun, has fallen to lows not seen since 1913. Last year, Russian Academician Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin advised the world to “stock up on fur coats.” Sorokhtin predicted the occurrence of a solar minimum by the year 2040, and a prolonged period of glaciation following.

Iowa braves coldest temperatures in 121 years

Dubuque nears all-time record low temperature 30 BELOW

TH Online | Jan 17, 2009

We haven’t been this cold since 1888

By ERIK HOGSTROM

It’s been colder in Dubuque, but you have to go back 122 years.

Friday’s temperature sank to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit at 7 a.m.

“You tied a record (for Jan. 16) set in 1888,” said Dan Ferry, a meteorologist with the Quad Cities office of the National Weather Service.

Weather service records indicate just one colder day, Jan. 7, 1887, when the mercury plunged to minus 32.

Add Friday morning’s wind, and Dubuque recorded a wind-chill reading of minus 45 at 7 a.m.

The frigid temperatures caused a water main to break uphill from the Jo Daviess County Courthouse in Galena, Ill., resulting in icy conditions and a lack of water for the workers inside. The courthouse was closed.

“It was a health and safety concern,” said Jo Daviess County State’s Attorney Terry Kurt.

Convicted murderer David Damm and his prison guards were traveling to a post-trial hearing, where Damm’s attorneys were to ask for a new trial. A Jo Daviess County judge sentenced Damm to death for hiring a hit man to kill 13-year-old Donnisha Hill, of

Waterloo, Iowa.

Hill’s father, Adonnis Hill, was driving from Waterloo to Galena when Kurt reached him via cell phone to tell him of the postponement.

“Luckily, we have a policy in place so the department heads and the judge and the sheriff were able to make the decision early enough to minimize the inconvenience to the people traveling,” Kurt said. “They were on their way, but they had only just gotten started before they turned around.”

The pipe should be fixed shortly, courthouse officials said, and a new time for the hearing will be set on Tuesday.

Southwestern Wisconsin locations also shivered Friday morning, with Boscobel recording an air temperature of minus 32 and Mineral Point reaching minus 22.

The extreme cold prompted the closure of local schools for a third consecutive day.

“We’re ready for some warm-up,” said Dubuque Schools Superintendent John Burgart.

Dubuque students have missed five days of school because of winter weather. Last year, Dubuque’s record-setting snowfall forced numerous school cancellations and the school board voted to extend school days by a half-hour.

This year, students attend school until early June.

If winter weather causes additional school cancellations, district officials will have to look at the calendar again to determine if other measures can be taken.

“It’s not automatic that we would go to the same model of adding 30 minutes,” Burgart said.

Dubuque’s temperatures should return to normal beginning today.

“Normal for this time of year is mid-20s for highs,” Ferry said.

Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel said lengthy cold stretches seldom occur in the tri-state area.

“We are so far south that the sunshine warms us up,” Angel said. “That is typical for these events.”

— TH staff writers Stacey Becker and Bekah Porter contributed to this story