This edition is based on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, Linux 2.6.27, Xorg 7.4 and it comes with KDE 4.2 and Amarok 2.0. For a complete list of new features read: Whats new in Felicia KDE CE?

System requirements and known issues:

You need 256MB RAM to run the Live CD or install. To install, you need a minimum of 4GB of free space on your hard disk. Once installed, Linux Mint 6 KDE CE can run with 256MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 512MB RAM.

Order Linux Mint 6 KDE on CD:

You can order the Linux Mint 6 KDE live DVD for $10 from our partner on-disk.com:

http://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/709

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Download Linux Mint 6 KDE:

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Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-6-KDE.iso.torrent
HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=37

Europe:

* http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (Portugal)
* http://mirrors.cytanet.com.cy/linux/mint/stable/6/community/ (Cyprus)
* http://mirror.sov.uk.goscomb.net/linuxmint.com/stable/6/community/ (UK)
* http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/6/community/ (Ireland)
* http://ftp.klid.dk/ftp/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (Denmark)
* http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (Greece)

Northern America:

* http://mirror.amarillolinux.com/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (USA)
* http://linuxmint.secsup.org/stable/6/community/ (USA)
* http://linuxmint.sourcemirrors.org/stable/6/community/ (USA)
* http://distroplanet.com/dists/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (USA)
* http://mint.ez.by/linuxmint.com/stable/6/community/ (USA)

Asia & Oceania:

* http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (Australia)
* http://mirror-fpt-telecom.fpt.net/linuxmint/stable/6/community/ (Vietnam)

Have fun!

Enjoy this new version of the KDE edition and don’t hesitate to send us your feedback. Congratulations and thanks to the maintainer, Jamie Boo Birse, for the excellent work done on this release.

Have a lot of fun and thanks for using Linux Mint.

Harvard sent out a press release and Ruvkun prepared for an onslaught of media attention. But it never came. Two days before his team’s paper came out, scientists analysing a meteorite from Mars called ALH84001 made headlines worldwide. Then-US president Bill Clinton even got in on the announcement.

“My grad student leans in the door and says, ‘They’ve just announced life on Mars,’” recalls Ruvkun. “That would really f— us,” Ruvkun replied, thinking his student was joking.

Scientists have since raised serious doubts about the existence of the purported fossilised microbes in the meteorite (see image).

But now, more than a decade after his work was overshadowed by news of possible life on Mars, Ruvkun has joined the hunt to find it. Moreover, he and his colleagues want to sequence its DNA.
Toehold for life

Today, Mars is a frozen, barren world. Ultraviolet light and energetic space particles stream in through its thin atmosphere, sterilising any life – at least as we know it – on its bone-dry surface.

But recent research suggests life might find a niche just below the surface, where liquid water could be widespread. The discovery of plumes of methane in the planet’s atmosphere also hints at subsurface life, since some terrestrial microbes produce the gas.

Chemical signs of life can be ambiguous, but Ruvkun and his team hope to find its unequivocal signature by sending a DNA amplifier and sequencer to Mars in the next decade. They’re betting that any life on the Red Planet shares an evolutionary heritage with life on Earth, and therefore contains a similar genetic code – a requirement that other scientists say is too narrowly focused, since Martian life may have evolved independently and therefore may have very different chemistry.

“This is a pure jackpot scheme. You either discover the most important thing for a long time, or you discover nothing,” says Ruvkun, who in 2008 won the Lasker Award, an honour shared by 75 scientists who later went on to nab a Nobel.
Interplanetary travel

Why would Martian life be similar to that on Earth? About 4 billion years ago, when terrestrial life probably got its start, rocky bodies were flying through the solar system and slamming into the planets. These impacts threw pieces of the planets into space, and some of these pieces landed on other planets as meteorites.

Ancient microbes might have hitched a ride to or from Mars on these meteorites. While in space, the surfaces of these rocks would have been sterilised by UV radiation and then singed to a crisp entering the atmosphere. But a large enough rock could support life beneath its surface, Ruvkun says.

And life originating or landing on Mars some 4 billion years ago may well have found the environment there hospitable. The planet may have boasted a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface, possibly in the form of oceans.

“Mars was probably fit for life,” says Paul Davies, a cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who is not involved in the sequencing project.
Early prototype

NASA has bought into the possibility that life may have once travelled between the two planets and is supporting early development of the sequencing project, called the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG).

The agency has already provided just under $2 million in funding for the project, says Christopher Carr, an engineer in Ruvkun’s lab who is spearheading development of the device.

The latest prototype rests on a metal breadboard at one end of Carr’s lab bench, connected to a series of hydraulic pumps, electric wires and cables. A more svelte, compact version of the instrument may one day travel to Mars, perhaps on a mission planned for launch in 2018.
DNA glow

How would such an instrument work? Carr divides the project into four distinct stages.

The first is preparing a sample from soil or ice that a future Mars lander gathers from burrowing into the planet’s surface.

After this sample is reconstituted in liquid and mixed with a dye that fluoresces when it binds onto DNA, the device will funnel the sample through a glass microfluidic chip filled with hundreds of tiny channels. If one channel glows positive for DNA, its contents will move on to the next stage – amplification.

It’s no understatement to say that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) revolutionised the practice of biology when it was invented in the 1980s. The technology allows researchers to create billions of identical copies of a short stretch of DNA, simply by knowing the genetic sequence of its two ends.

It’s also astonishingly sensitive and simple, requiring little more than a single ‘template’ DNA molecule, a heat source and some raw chemical materials. “PCR is done in junior high school,” Ruvkun told New Scientist. “That’s the definition of what you want to send to Mars.”
Sequencing technologies

To determine whether DNA on Mars shares ancestry with terrestrial life, his team will amplify a gene called the 16S ribosomal RNA subunit. It encodes an RNA molecule that’s part of the ribosome, a cell’s crucial protein factory.

Ruvkun’s team isn’t yet sure how they’ll decode the amplified DNA. The same sequencing technologies that might deliver a $1000 complete human genome sequence in the next few years could also read much shorter stretches of DNA on Mars. But simpler and slower gene-sequencing technologies might also do the job, Carr says.

If the experiment isolates, amplifies and sequences Martian DNA, the next step will be to determine how the sequence relates to Earth life and to rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination, a major concern with PCR.
Contamination test

If Earth and Mars exchanged life 3-4 billion years ago, Mars life will stand out like an island species that has been isolated from the mainland. Ruvkun’s team will make the call by comparing any 16S sequences they find on Mars with those known on Earth.

Because of its essential role in building cells’ ribosomes, the gene has barely mutated over the past 4 billion or so years, allowing geneticists to gauge evolutionary relationships between distantly related organisms.

If the Martian DNA is distantly related to Earth life, its 16S sequence should plant it near the base of Earth’s tree of life. On the other hand, a sequence that looks closely related to earthly organisms, such as E. coli or Salmonella bacteria, for instance, would be evidence for contamination.
Field tests

Team members are wrangling for a spot on a NASA Mars mission tentatively scheduled for liftoff in 2018. They plan to begin field-testing their device in Mars-like conditions on Earth, such as the Copahue Volcano in Argentina or Antarctica’s dry valleys, in the next three years.

But the researchers admit they are a long way, not to mention tens of millions of dollars in funding, from launch. “Our goal is to make this instrument small enough that they can’t say no to put it on a lander,” Ruvkun says.

Others are taking SETG seriously, too. NASA has renewed the project’s initial grant, and MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber has taken a leading role in the team. “Maria is totally in the loop at NASA, and it lends [SETG] a level of credibility that could never come from us,” Ruvkun says.
First things first

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who studies life in extreme places on Earth, is more sceptical. He says sequencing DNA on Mars is “technologically feasible”, but he thinks DNA searches should come after scientists discover other signatures for life on Mars.

“If you have DNA from Mars, it’s worth sequencing,” Pace says. “But having DNA from Mars is about as practical at this stage of the game as having DNA from that planet around Alpha Centauri.”

Paul Davies worries that searching for DNA opens too narrow a window to the past. “If what you’re hoping to do is look for traces of past life on Mars, then DNA isn’t a very good biomarker – it’s not going to survive for very long.”

Indeed, SETG could only detect existing or recently extinct life on Mars. Carr puts the outer boundary under 1 million years, though it could be far less.
Generalist approach

Davies argues that searches for extraterrestrial life should instead focus on more general features of life. All amino acids that make up biological proteins, for instance, display a left-handed orientation, or chirality. “That, to me, is the most urgent thing,” he told New Scientist. “You look for chirality, then mess around with DNA.”

An instrument to search for signs of chirality, called Urey, may launch on Europe’s ExoMars lander, which is now set to launch in 2016. Researchers will try to use its data to determine whether any chirality found is from life.

Would Urey be able to test, like SETG, whether any life on Mars has a common origin with that on Earth? Possibly, says instrument team leader Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego. “If the structural variety of amino acids was identical to that on Earth and they were also left-handed, we might well be related,” Bada told New Scientist.
Definitive test

However, Ruvkun and his colleagues brush aside such concerns, saying that Martian DNA detection will go hand-in-hand with efforts to find more generic chemical signatures of life. They also contend that their experiment would provide a definitive test of the hypothesis that Earth and Mars exchanged life that still lives on Mars.

AT&T put out a press release stating that there was a fiber cut, but to make this happen, there had to be several cuts. According to several employees that work at AT&T, it may have been done by the very people that repair this stuff, the Communication Workers of America Union (CWA).

This of course is speculation on behalf of these individuals. The cuts could have also been framed to make it look like it was done by a competent group, someone that knows where the major fibers are sitting inside specific manholes. However, the CWA contract to do work for AT&T expired last Saturday night. According to various press releases from CWA, “five of CWA’s six agreements with various AT&T companies expire at midnight, April 4, 2009″. The cuts were clean, done apparently by a hacksaw. The first major cut went down around 2 AM in the South East Bay which isolated the city of Santa Cruz. Another cut around 4 AM took out the major Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN) in the San Francisco bay area as well.

Regardless of who did it - someone did it.

These areas are within driving distance of each other.

What’s more terrifying, the cuts were clean and easy to fix, but what would happen if they were mangled and more calculated? What happened if rather than going down into the manhole, the perpetrator poured many gallons of gasoline down the hole, and tossed a match on it? It could have melted all the fiber/glass/plastics together, causing complete mess making the problem much worse.

Fiber maps such as the one below show details on exactly where fiber runs are and how to locate perfect targets, found directly off of almost every network provider’s web site:

Now, what would happen if someone were to coordinate with a group of people and demolish key areas where fiber concentrations are very thick in major cities around the world. What if it were done all at the same time?

If that were to have happened, more than just Silicon Valley would have been impacted: Globally people would be waking up to find out their land lines don’t work, 911 calls fail, their email is down, and yes no Twitter.

Sound improbable? Well, three undersea cables: FLAG, SMW-3, and SMW-4 where all cut at the same time on January 5th 2009, which crippled communications to several countries. Traffic had to be re-routed and it really was a mess, but nobody was left in the dark.

Realistically it would be a few days of an outage, but it would not be great given society is depending more and more on the Internet for day-to-day things such as the DMV, voting, work, and daily life. Our society is becoming dependent on something very fragile and somewhat unprotected.

Now scientists have attached some numbers to the situation.

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

“Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time,” says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. “However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don’t get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

There are key variables to note in the new study.

Couples who lived together before marriage experienced more problems after the birth of a child than those who lived separately before marriage, as did those whose parents fought or divorced.

However, some couples said their relationships were stronger post-birth. They tended to have been married longer or had higher incomes.

Children don’t ruin everything, Stanley points out.

“There are different types of happiness in life and that while some luster may be off marital happiness for at least a time during this period of life, there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building,” he said. “This type of happiness can be powerful and positive but it has not been the focus of research.”

The new research, funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

It’s so memorable that when thinkgeek.com offered a tauntaun sleeping bag last week—”complete with saddle, internal intestines and LED Luke Skywalker Lightsaber zipper pull”—the company was flooded with orders.

The only problem: The sleeping bag is as real as Jar Jar Binks. It was part of thinkgeek’s annual April Fool’s Day presentation. It doesn’t exist.

Well, not yet, anyway.

As a message posted on the company’s Web site explains: “Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life.”

It goes on to say that the company would work with Lucasfilm to try to get the sleeping bags produced (in adult sizes too!).

“I’m not 100 percent sure [if contact has been made],” says Shane Peterman, thinkgeek’s public relations manager. “That’s in the hands of the merchants who are trying to figure it out. I’m sure there’s been some initial contact, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to iron out.”

But Peterman is confident it will happen.

“I’m hoping the huge response and the current amount of visibility it has gotten online will work in our favor. We’ll be, like, here are countless examples of people saying, ‘I need this sleeping bag.’ ”

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is betting on high-speed rail. The Authority is planning to build an 800-mile steel-wheel bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This new line is designed to make train travel as convenient as airplane travel, says Quentin L. Kopp, chairman of the Authority. The state’s plans were designed “in the context of California having 50 million people by the year 2030,” Kopp says. “The equivalent of what the high-speed rail will deliver would require 3000 new miles of freeway plus nine runways and 90 new gates at airports.”

While Amtrak could potentially upgrade the speeds of its existing California-based trains to 110 miles per hour (from a 79-mph average), at that speed they won’t get travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2-1/2 hours—as fast as an airplane would if you count time for check-in, security and transport from airports to city centers. Still, the price for the bullet train line is far higher than all available funds from the stimulus. This project will need at least $27.5 billion ($12 billion to $16 billion in federal dollars, $9 billion from bonds raised by the state of California and $6.5 to $7.5 billion in private capital) just for the first phase—building track that will run from San Francisco to Anaheim (San Diego and Sacramento are not included in this phase). The total cost for the project is estimated to be between $40 billion and $45 billion.

This kind of hefty price tag has experts outside California thinking twice about a future American landscape full of high-speed trains. The U.S. doesn’t need new 200-mph-train routes to divert passengers from airlines, says John Stilgoe, Harvard professor and author of Train Time. Stilgoe believes that there will be a huge resurgence in train travel in the next fifty years, without high-speed projects that require entirely new track to be laid down. His research models, based on real-world travel patterns, show that “a lot of people want to travel at [speeds no faster than] 100 miles an hour for distances up to 150 miles,” he says. “Improving the current train infrastructure, and in some places really upgrading it (so there can be Acela trains between cities like Chicago and St. Louis or between San Francisco and L.A.) can be done with existing technology.”

Cliff Black, Amtrak’s head of communications agrees. “Absolute top speed is not as important as reduction in operating time,” Black says. “An incremental speed improvement from 79 mph, which is our normal top speed outside the Northeast, to 110 mph will give us many hours of reduced running time over a broad spectrum of routes.”

While Amtrak plans to spend most of the stimulus money earmarked for it specifically on projects that fix deteriorating infrastructure, such as replacing a 102-year-old drawbridge in Connecticut, it will use some of the funds to upgrade running times. For example, $60 million of Amtrak’s $1.3 billion is dedicated to advanced signaling technology that will help minimize delays on routes between New York and Washington and between Indiana and Michigan.

While trains are expensive, so are roads, highways and airports—California’s plan relies on the idea that investing in trains now could save money on other transportation infrastructure changes that it would otherwise need to make down the road. Other parts of the country, however, have dense networks of neglected railroads that need to be repaired and upgraded. The best solution for rail in the United States is not likely to be found in one technology—with bullet trains, maglevs or advanced signals winning out. The way trains have historically been successful is when they serve the transportation needs of local populations (see the Long Island Railroad, Philadelphia and Reading Railroad)—accommodating growth and competing with road traffic and local airlines.

But he also warned people to watch out for scam artists, cautioning, “If somebody is asking you for money up front before they help you with your refinancing, it’s probably a scam.”

Rates on 30-year mortgages inched upward this week but remain near the lowest level in decades, allowing borrowers with strong credit and stable jobs to save money if they refinance.

The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 4.87 percent this week, up from 4.78 percent last week, Freddie Mac reported Thursday. That was the lowest in the history of the survey, which dates back to 1971.

Low rates have sparked a surge in refinancing activity, with nearly 80 percent of new home loan applications coming from borrowers seeking to refinance. Freddie Mac’s sibling company, Fannie Mae, refinanced $77 billion in loans last month, nearly double February’s volume.

“The main message we want to send today is there are 7 to 9 million people across the country who right now could be taking advantage of lower mortgage rates,” Obama said in a photo opportunity in the Roosevelt Room. “That is money in their pocket.”

Foreclosures and defaults continue to break records. A record 5.4 million American homeowners with a mortgage, or nearly 12 percent, were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year. And nearly half of homeowners with a risky subprime adjustable-rate mortgage were in trouble.

Last month, the Obama administration launched a new plan to provide $75 billion in incentives for the mortgage industry to modify loans to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. On Thursday, the president encouraged people to take advantage of a government Web site — http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov — to see how they can get help.

In recent weeks nearly 200,000 homeowners have contacted Bank of America to find out if they are eligible to refinance under the Obama administration’s new guidelines, said Vijay Lala, the bank’s product management executive. “We’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest.”

In historical order, from oldest to newest, here’s my own personal list of the top (bottom?) 10 OS stinkers.

OS/360, 1964

No, no, I’m not talking about the later versions of OS/360 that some of us used on IBM 360 mainframes back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. For its day, it was fine. Indeed, my very first operating system was an OS/360 descendant with TSO (Time Sharing Option) running on top of it.

What I’m talking about is the very first version of OS/360 — the one that led its project manager, Fred Brooks, to write The Mythical Man-Month, his classic book on how software development fails. That first version of OS/360, to paraphrase Brooks, came in late, had flaws in its control programs, required more memory than planned, was over budget by several times the original estimate, and, oh yeah, it was slow too.

On the other hand, we did get a classic book on how not to develop software, which included such nuggets as “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Brooks likes to describe it as a software developer’s Bible, because “everybody reads it, but nobody does anything about it.” As the rest of this tale shall reveal, he was right.

ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System), late 1960s

What can one say about an operating system written in DEC PDP-6 and PDP-10 assembly language that supported one mono-case, six-character filename … per directory? (Yes, you read that right: Each file resided in its own separate directory.) And security was nil — for example, no passwords were required, and you could log into anyone’s active session and do pretty much anything you wanted with it.

What’s amazing is that despite being an incredible pain to use and with no security whatsoever, ITS actually was an important operating system in its day. While it was eventually forced out by the rise of Unix, many programs still in use today, such as the Emacs editor and the Lisp language, got their start on ITS.

For more on ITS and the early days of computer hackers, check out Steve Levy’s classic book, Hackers. You’ll find it entertaining and amusing, and you’ll be very glad you didn’t have to use ITS.

GNU Hurd, launched in 1983, still incomplete

Ever wonder why some people refer to Linux as GNU/Linux? The official explanation is that Linux is merely an OS kernel that relies on GNU software to make a complete operating system. GNU was announced in 1983 as a future replacement operating system for Unix, to be made up entirely of free software.

But after more than 25 years in development, GNU remains incomplete: Its kernel, Hurd, has never really made it out of the starting blocks. (I’ll refer to the complete OS as “GNU Hurd” to avoid confusion with other GNU software.) Almost no one has actually been able to use the OS; it’s really more a set of ideas than an operating system.

And that’s why I’m naming GNU Hurd as one of my top 10 stinker operating systems — because after a quarter century, it has still failed to deliver on its promise of an entirely free Unix replacement. By incorporating ideas and software from GNU (and other sources such as Minix and BSD Unix), on the other hand, Linux has stepped in to pick up GNU Hurd’s slack, providing an advanced operating system that is ready to use right now, in numerous distributions.

I, for one, am not willing to wait another 25 years for a chimera. Could we please just drop the dream of the GNU Hurd OS as an idea whose time will never come?

Data received from the U of C-designed instrument sent to space on a NASA launch from Alaska about two years ago was able to help pinpoint the so-called edge of space: the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

With that data, U of C scientists confirmed that space begins 118 km above Earth and the results were published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The instrument – called the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager – was carried by the JOULE-II rocket on Jan. 19, 2007. It travelled to an altitude of about 200 kilometers above sea level and collected data for the five minutes it was moving through the “edge of space.”

The Canadian Space Agency invested $422,000 in the development of the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager instrument on JOULE-II.

The ability to gather data in that area is significant because it’s very difficult to make measurements in this region, which is too high for balloons and too low for satellites.

“It’s only the second time that direct measurements of charged particle flows have been made in this region, and the first time all the ingredients – such as the upper atmospheric winds – have been included,” says David Knudsen, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary.

Knudsen and his former PhD student Laureline Sangalli are the lead authors of the paper. Co-authors include: JOULE-II lead scientist Miguel Larsen of Clemson University, Robert Pfaff and Douglas Rowland of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and T. Zhan of Conseco Inc.

“When you drag a heavy object over a surface, the interface becomes hot. In JOULE-II we were able to measure directly two regions being dragged past each other, one being the ionosphere — being driven by flows in space — and the other the earth’s atmosphere,” says Knudsen, who also is the head of the Space Physics Division of the Institute for Space Imaging Sciences (ISIS). The institute is a research partnership between the University of Calgary and University of Lethbridge.

The measurements confirmed what other scientists consider the boundary or edge of space.

“The results have given us a closer look at space, which is a benefit to pure research in space science,” Knudsen says. “But it also allows us to calculate energy flows into the Earth’s atmosphere that ultimately may be able to help us understand the interaction between space and our environment. That could mean a greater understanding of the link between sunspots and the warming and cooling of the Earth’s climate as well as how space weather impacts satellites, communications, navigation, and power systems.”

The U of C-designed instrument has been adopted by COM DEV, an Ontario-based global designer and manufacturer of space hardware, and is being used as a prototype for three instruments currently being readied to fly on the European Space Agency’s “Swarm” satellite mission, set to launch late next year and to collect data for four years. The JOULE-II instrument is one in a long list of more than a dozen instruments designed by U of C scientists in the past forty years which have flown in space. There are at least five more being readied to go on missions in the next two years.

“Understanding the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is fundamental to the bigger picture of the effects of space on the Earth’s climate and environment,” says Russ Taylor, the director of ISIS and head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the U of C. “This detection is part of a long history of success by ISIS researchers in designing and building innovative instruments flown on rockets and satellites to image the flow of matter and energy between the Earth and Space.”

They found the higher a mother’s level of exposure in early and late pregnancy, the more likely it was that the baby would not grow properly.

The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked at 336,000 babies born in New Jersey between 1999 and 2003

UK experts said much more detailed research into a link was needed.

Exposure

The researchers, from the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey, used information from birth certificates and hospital discharge records.

They recorded details including each mother’s ethnicity, marital status, education, whether or not she was a smoker - as well as where she lived when her baby was born.

Daily readings of air pollution from monitoring points around the state of New Jersey were taken from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The scientists then took data from the monitoring point which was within six miles (10 km) of the mothers’ homes to work out what their exposure to air pollution had been during each of the three trimesters of pregnancy.

It was found that mothers of small, and very small, birth weight babies were more likely to be younger, less well educated, of African-American ethnicity, smokers, poorer, and single parents than mothers with normal birth weight babies.

But, even after these factors had been taken into account, higher levels of air pollutants were linked to restricted foetal growth.

Two kinds of pollution produced by cars - tiny sooty particles and nitrogen dioxide - were found to have an impact.

Particulate matter is produced from vehicle exhausts and can lodge in the lungs. Fine particles, such as PM 2.5s, which penetrate deep into the lungs, have been linked to deaths from heart and respiratory diseases.

Nutrients

The risk of a small birth weight baby rose significantly with each increase in particulate matter of four micrograms per metres squared, during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy.

Similarly, the risk of a very small birth weight baby rose significantly with each 10 parts per billion increase in nitrogen dioxide.

Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the team led by Professor David Rich, said: “Our findings suggest that air pollution, perhaps specifically traffic emissions during early and late pregnancy and/or factors associated with residence near a roadway during pregnancy, may affect foetal growth.”

They say it is not clear exactly how air pollution might restrict foetal growth.

But they add previous research suggests that air pollution might alter cell activity, or cut the amount of oxygen and nutrients a baby receives while in the womb.

Professor Patrick O’Brien, of the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: “This is an interesting study because it flags up a possibility of a link.

“But I think it needs to be looked at again in more detail because of the probability of confounding factors.

“The researchers ruled out smoking and social-economic background - other factors which are linked to small babies - but there are many other factors, such as diet, which could have an effect.”

Professor O’Brien added that future research into the effects of pollution should be careful to check if babies are born small because their parents are small, and to ensure pregnancies are dated from scans, where this study did neither.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be “out there,” but more likely it’s concealed inside Area 51’s Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in LA’s March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world’s most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base’s half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51’s restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: “Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane.” Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. “I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board.” The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins’ own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. “They wanted to see if there was anything I’d for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash.” The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

“Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.” The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. “Boy, was she mad,” says Collins with a chuckle.

At the time of Collins’ accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA’s preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.

“It wasn’t always called Area 51,” says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and “rough it” out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. “Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it,” says Lovick. “It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there.”

When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.

Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, “I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA’s classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, ‘You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we’re doing out there.’ ”

Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. “When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, ‘You won’t see me but on the weekends,’ and she said, ‘That’s fine!’ ” At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today.

“We couldn’t have told you any of this a year ago,” Slater says. “Now we can’t tell it to you fast enough.” That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there’s a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART’s specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.

Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.

“The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51,” says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn’t reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. “Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project,” he says.

Harry Martin’s specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. “My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going.”

So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they’d take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country’s most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.

As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: “We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area”—even though the MiG wasn’t shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51’s backyard. “Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground,” he says.

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one’s pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft’s tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun’s rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.

In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. “That’s a lot of UFO sightings!” Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and “when they’d land in California, they’d be met by FBI agents who’d make them sign nondisclosure forms.” But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51’s UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51.

Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America’s most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose.

ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn’t digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she’s snapping together Legos with her two boys.

The Bulls and Hunt Auctions are offering one of two lockers Jordan used at the team’s practice facility in the 1990s during a fundraiser for the team’s nonprofit charity organization April 18 at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago.

Game jerseys and autographed sneakers from Jordan will also be auctioned, along with memorabilia from Boston Celtics legends Bob Cousy and Larry Bird, the Harlem Globetrotters and the 2008 U.S. national team. Proceeds from the U.S. national team memorabilia will go to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame Fund.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as “an emergency summit on climate change” and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, “this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy”.

What worries them are all the signs that when the world’s politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be “much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report”. Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, “much more than previously predicted”. The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting “much faster than predicted”. The number of people dying from heat could be “twice as many as previously predicted”.

None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google “Heartland” and “Quadrant”).

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

A perspective on New York that is like a look back in time

On my first visit to New York 45 years ago I was stunned by its scale and modernity. Not having been there since, it was a shock to see how tatty and dated the city now seems. When I went up the Empire State Building (now 80 years old) with my son Nick, we were struck by how small the city looks, and how soon it gives way to countryside and sea.

I recalled Scott Fitzgerald’s essay My Lost City, describing how he returned two years after the Wall Street Crash to see the “last and most magnificent of towers” rising “from the ruins”. Going up it, he “discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s Box. Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits. From the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of blue and green that was limitless”. New York “was a city after all and not a universe”. “The whole shining edifice he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground”. As Nick, who works in India, observed, “New York is a museum to the 20th century”. But it was still a pleasure to visit.

2 Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays.

3 Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread

4 Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.

5 By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.

6 The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.

7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

8 This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.

9 Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a milli­second every 24 hours.

10 Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.

11 To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve.

12 The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.

13 Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.

14 This caused havoc with the advent of trains and timetables. For a while watches were made that could tell both local time and “railway time.”

15 On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones.

16 Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspired Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time.

17 Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nano­seconds each flight.

18 According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.

19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

The main solutions are widely agreed. The world needs to forge a much tougher treaty this year to replace the failed Kyoto Protocol. Global emissions of carbon dioxide must be cut by at least half by the middle of the century, much more in industrialised countries. Using energy more efficiently is essential, as is rapidly increasing it from renewable sources. Nuclear power and biofuels are much more controversial, but are likely to be used to some extent. But new, much less familiar solutions are also emerging.

Here are 10 of them.
Sweep away soot

Cutting soot emissions from car exhausts, factories and open fires is probably the fastest way to tackle global warming, and there are calls for a treaty to achieve this. Scientists say the pollutant is the second biggest culprit in climate change after carbon dioxide. Black carbon, which gives soot its colour, has two main effects. It heats the atmosphere by absorbing radiation from the sun and releasing it into the air. And it darkens snow and ice when it falls on them, causing them to reflect less sunlight, heat up and melt – in turn exposing land or water, which also warms rapidly. Reducing emissions is fairly easy, using tried and tested technology. And it has a rapid effect as soot stays only days or weeks in the atmosphere, compared with centuries for carbon dioxide.

Save the ozone

Measures to save the ozone layer have so far been the most effective steps to combat climate change, as many of the chemicals that attack the protective layer in the atmosphere are also global warming gases. A 20-year-old treaty, the Montreal Protocol, has almost phased out their production, coincidentally eliminating the equivalent of 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. This puts to shame the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to cut emissions by 2 billion tons. Experts want measures to remove the chemicals from equipment such as old fridges, where they acted as coolants, when these are scrapped, saving the equivalent of 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

Make connections

Renewable energy is often unreliable: the sun does not always shine, the wind does not blow for ever. But the European Commission and other bodies are drawing up plans to get round this by tapping clean sources and linking them up, so that there will always be enough to meet all Europe’s electricity needs. Solar power stations, for example, would be placed in the Sahara, where just a fraction of the desert could provide for the whole continent. Tides would be tapped along Britain’s coasts, the world’s best place for exploiting this resource. Huge wind farms would be erected in the North Sea, and these would be balanced by hydropower in mountainous areas such as Norway, storing water behind dams and releasing it on calm days. It would all be linked by a continent-wide electricity grid.

Wise up the grid

Barack Obama, David Cameron and Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, are all sold on creating a “smart grid”, which the Tory leader describes as like moving from “the plain old telephone system to the internet”. The present “dumb grid” just delivers electricity from generators to consumers; the smart one would enable them to communicate with each other. So, it can make fridges and washing machines and other appliances use power when it is abundant and cheap, and avoid peak times when it would be much more expensive. Smoothing out demand in this way means that the grid needs fewer power stations, and can accommodate renewable energy more easily. It would also provide a huge boost to a “rooftop revolution”, where households generate their own electricity from the sun or the wind and sell what they do not need to the grid.

Rethink cars

Motoring could be revolutionised if cars were marketed like mobile phones – in a manner that would cut carbon dioxide and reduce the cost of driving. Motorists would get subsidised – or possibly even free – electric cars in the same way that customers currently get mobile phone handsets. In return, they would take out a contract for miles, rather than minutes, entitling them to get power either by plugging in to recharging points (at home, in car parks or on the street) or exchanging batteries at filling stations. The idea is the brainchild of a thirty-something former dot-com entrepreneur, Shia Agassi, who believes it would halve motoring costs. It sounds too good to be true, but Israel, Denmark, Hawaii and San Francisco are already starting to put the system in place – and even Gordon Brown has toyed with the idea. But to tackle climate change properly, the electricity has to be provided by renewable sources or nuclear power rather than fossil fuels.

Embrace scum

Slimy scum could prove our saviour, as algae are emerging as one of the most promising and environmentally friendly sources of biofuel. Algae can grow extraordinarily fast, doubling in weight several times a day. They produce at least 15 times as much fuel per hectare as conventional crops like corn or oilseed rape, and do not take up farmland needed to grow food; they can be grown in lakes, the sea or even in the process of cleaning polluted water. Algae take three times their own weight of carbon dioxide from the air while growing, and the fuel they produce packs much more power for its weight than other biofuels. It is therefore being developed as a potential carbon-neutral way of fuelling aircraft: Air New Zealand has already mixed it with ordinary jet fuel for test flights. Cars have run on pure algae biofuel, and big oil companies are investing in it.

Grow houses

Hemp is the world’s second fastest growing plant after bamboo, shooting up four metres in just 14 weeks, rapidly taking carbon from the air. One hectare provides enough hemp to construct a house, if mixed with lime to revive an ancient building material. Limetechnology, the Abingdon-based firm pioneering the practice, calculates that growing it will capture 50 times as much carbon dioxide as would be saved by upgrading a traditional home to modern standards of energy efficiency. Biochar, an ancient technique used by Amazonian Indians to fertilise their land by burying charcoal, has even wider applications. Opponents worry that growing trees for it will take land out of food production, but Craig Sams – the co-founder of Green and Black’s chocolate, who is now developing it – believes that just 21/2 per cent of the world’s productive land would suffice to get carbon dioxide levels down to those of the pre-industrial age by 2050.

Pay for trees

Felling forests, especially in the tropics, is the second biggest cause of carbon dioxide emissions after burning fossil fuels, accounting for a fifth of the world’s total. But people and governments have no incentive to leave them standing when they can make money by selling the timber, or farming the cleared land. Now international negotiators are beginning to work out how the world as a whole could compensate them for setting aside the chainsaw. In practice, of course, the money would end up coming from rich countries. Halving emissions from deforestation is estimated to cost about $20bn (£14.3bn) a year, but would avoid pollution costing at least five times as much. Similarly, Ecuador is seeking international compensation for refraining from developing a huge oil field lying under a particularly important area of Amazonian rainforest in the north-west of the country.

Reform taxation

Green taxes are beginning to come back into fashion after being eclipsed for years by sophisticated schemes for trading carbon emissions. They would work best as part of an “ecological tax reform”, which would reduce taxes on employment – such as income tax and national insurance – at the same time. By shifting the burden from “goods”, such as work, to “bads”, such as pollution, it becomes cheaper to lay off barrels of oil than to fire people, reducing pollution and increasing employment. The European Union has estimated that this could create at least 2.7 million jobs across the continent, while combating global warming. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have both taken up the idea and promised to introduce it if they get into power. But so did Gordon Brown in opposition, and, despite introducing some modest measures in his 1999 Budget, he backed off after the fuel price protests the next year.

Follow a busker

A former busker, Aubrey Meyer, thought up what is increasingly regarded as the long-term solution to global warming – and, through relentless campaigning, he has managed to get his idea adopted as policy by many governments, especially in developing countries. Dubbed “contraction and convergence”, it starts from the principle that everyone on Earth is entitled to emit the same amount of carbon dioxide. It then determines the level of emissions low enough to avoid dangerous climate change. The total amount put into the atmosphere worldwide each year must then be made to “contract” until it reaches this point. Simultaneously, the totals of individual countries have to “converge”, so that each emits the same amount for every one of its citizens; rich countries would have to reduce their totals very heavily, while some poor countries could actually be able to increase theirs. Most experts agree that it is the fairest framework. Persuading Americans to agree to emit the same amount as Ethiopians is another matter.