On Thursday Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank or E.C.B. – Europe’s equivalent to Ben Bernanke – lost his sang-froid. In response to a question about whether the E.C.B. is becoming a ‘bad bank

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The great hope among energy wonks is that natural gas is the short-term salve for our climate woes. After all, burning natural gas for electricity emits just half the carbon dioxide that burning coal does. Plus, the United States seems to have an abundance of gas, particularly in the Marcellus Shale, and low natural-gas prices are already prodding many electric utilities to retire their coal plants. That’s why liberal groups like the Center for American Progress have dubbed natural gas a ‘bridge fuel,

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Heat waves, droughts, blizzards and the the rest of the year’s U.S. record-breaking extreme weather, likely enjoyed a boost from global warming, suggests a climate report.

Hurricane Irene this year pushed the U.S. yearly record for billion-dollar natural disasters to 10, smashing the 2008 record of nine. In the ‘Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change’ report, released today by the Climate Communication scientific group, leading climate scientists outlined how increasing global atmospheric temperatures and other climate change effects — triggered by industrial emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane — are loading the dice for the sort of extreme weather seen this year.

‘Greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather,’ says climate projection expert Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at a briefing held by the report’s expert reviewers. ‘Small increases in temperature set the stage for record breaking extreme temperature events.’ Overall, says the report, higher temperatures tied to global warming, about a one-degree global average temperature rise in the last century, have widely contributed to recent runs of horrible weather:

In 1950, U.S. record breaking hot weather days were as likely as cold ones. By 2000, they were twice as likely, and […]

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Anil Potti, Joseph Nevins and their colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, garnered widespread attention in 2006. They reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they could predict the course of a patient’s lung cancer using devices called expression arrays, which log the activity patterns of thousands of genes in a sample of tissue as a colourful picture (see above). A few months later, they wrote in Nature Medicine that they had developed a similar technique which used gene expression in laboratory cultures of cancer cells, known as cell lines, to predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer.

At the time, this work looked like a tremendous advance for personalised medicine-the idea that understanding the molecular specifics of an individual’s illness will lead to a tailored treatment. The papers drew adulation from other workers in the field, and many newspapers, including this one (see article), wrote about them. The team then started to organise a set of clinical trials of personalised treatments for lung and breast cancer. Unbeknown to most people in the field, however, within a few weeks of the publication of the Nature Medicine […]

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There is a huge Washington Post special report on Breakaway Wealth in the US. More than most other industrialized nations, the US has seen the top 0.1% compensated in vastly disproportionate numbers versus the rest of the populace.

There are at least several reasons to be concerned about this, beyond basic fairness: 1) Nations that have extremes wealth disparities tend towards social unrest. Usually, its banana republics and dictatorships, but it could happen in a corporate-owned quasi democracy as well. 2) CEOs and other company insiders have been engaging in a massive grab of shareholders wealth for decades. Its gotten appreciably worse in the 2000s. 3) Management is now trying to hide their compensation from the business owners - the firm’s shareholders

Making matters even more outrageous, these CEOs are trying to pass legislation that would legally allow them to not to disclose executive compensation at public companies:

‘Here’s one financial figure some big U.S. companies would rather keep secret: how much more their chief executive makes than the typical worker. Now a group backed by 81 major companies - including McDonald’s, Lowe’s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills - is lobbying against new rules that would […]

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