Wednesday 3 February 2010 23.43 GMT

The American scientist who produced the “hockey stick graph” showing a sharp rise in global warming was largely cleared of misconduct by an academic investigation today.

The board of inquiry at Pennsylvania State University said it found no evidence that Michael Mann, a leading climatologist, had suppressed or falsified data, tried to destroy data or emails, or misused information. It will convene a second panel to investigate whether he had violated academic practices, including those governing exchanges between scholars.

The university ordered the investigation by three senior faculty members after Mann’s name appeared in more than 375 of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit. Climate change sceptics jumped on one email which describes Mann’s solution to a problem as a “trick”, a shorthand among scientists and mathematicians, as evidence of an effort to distort data.

The panel dismissed the charge. “The so-called ‘trick’ was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field,” the panel said.

It also cleared Mann of purposely hiding or destroying email relating to an IPCC climate change report.

It said it found nothing to support the charge that Mann had conspired with like-minded scholars to block competing scholars.

Mann said he was pleased with the decision. “After a thorough review, the independent Penn State committee found no evidence to support any of the allegations against me. Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely,” he said. “Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation was found, the university administrators thought it best to convene a separate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remaining questions about academic procedures. This is very much the vindication I expected since I am confident I have done nothing wrong.”

Environmental organisations also welcomed the decision, saying the controversy over the climate hack had been a dangerous distraction.

“This is a step in the right direction that should help us move past the manufactured controversy over the stolen emails,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of climate policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The truth is that global warming is here, it’s dangerous, and it is already affecting us.”

But Mann has become a favourite target of climate change deniers because of the powerful image of his hockey stick graph, which shows a sharp rise in average global temperature in the 20th century – and they are unlikely to stop now. The graph assembled data from hundreds of studies of past temperatures using tree rings, lake sediment, and glacier ice cores. It was first published in 1998.

AP / Suzanne Goldenberg / Regulation S-P

Hidalgo County, Feb. 01 — Dead animals are being dumped on the road at 6 Mile Line, north of Mission says the residence in the area.

On man in the locality said, “It doesn’t make me feel right. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who feel the same way I do.”

The person also mentioned that the dumped dead animals are smelly and it can also lead to some health hazard. However, the man didn’t wanted to make his identity published.

The man added further that when he informed the county then they directed him to inform the animal control department who in return said that they don’t handle farm animals.

The media got in touch with Lupe Trevino, the Hidalgo County Sheriff, who said that his department will be looking for the matter of illegal dumping and also the evidence of health hazard in the area when any of the residence people files a report in his office.

According to residents of the area, they planned to do that Saturday morning.

On the eve of the fullest moon of the year, NASA scientists were told they won’t be able to visit any longer. In his new budget, President obama plans to eliminate the space program’s manned moon missions.

When the president releases his budget on Monday, a White House official confirmed on Thursday, there will be a big hole where funding for NASA’s Constellation program used to be. Constellation is the umbrella program that includes the Ares rocket — the replacement for the aging space shuttles.

NASA will receive an additional $5.9 billion over five years, some of which will be used to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020. The official said it also will be used to entice companies to build private spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station after the space shuttle retires.

The story was first reported in the Orlando Sentinel, which detailed that the forthcoming budget will include no funding for lunar landers, no moon bases, and no Constellation program at all. Instead, NASA will outsource space flight to other governments (such as the Russians) and private companies.

NASA’s Constellation program aimed to create a new generation of spacecraft for human spaceflight, consisting primarily of the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, the Orion crew capsule and the Altair Lunar Lander. These spacecraft would have been capable of performing a variety of missions, from International Space Station resupply to lunar landings.

But according to the Sentinel, White House insiders and agency officials say NASA will eventually look at developing a new “heavy-lift” rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit years in the future — and possibly even decades or more.
In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the solar system possible.

There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis, reports the Sentinel. These companies may take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years.

NASA’s budget, just over $18.7 billion this year, is still expected to rise again in 2011, reports Space.com, though by much less than the $1 billion increase NASA and its contractors have been privately anticipating since mid-December. A White House-appointed panel, led by former Lockheed Martin chief Norm Augustine, urged these changes on the administration in December.

The panel also said a worthwhile manned space exploration program would require Obama to budget about $55 billion for human spaceflight over the next five years, some $11 billion more than he included in the 2011-2015 forecast he sent Congress last spring.

Continued here:
Dispute over navigational markers in Clam Bay headed to Tallahassee

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) — A rare and nearly complete dinosaur skeleton stolen from private property in Montana and stored in an evidence locker for more than two years has been turned over to researchers.

Scientists at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota say the 70-million-year-old turkey-sized predator could be a new species of raptor.

“It’s a mean and nasty little dinosaur,” said Peter Larson, president of the institute. “Even though it’s not very big, you wouldn’t want to meet it in a dark alleyway.”

Researchers say it’s unusual to find the skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur, and especially one that’s so small.

“So many things can happen to a small-bodied animal,” Larson said.

The commercial fossil hunter who dug up the dinosaur removed it without the knowledge or permission of the property owners. Nathan Murphy was convicted last year in state court of felony theft for taking the raptor fossil from a ranch in northern Montana and sentenced to 60 days in jail.

In a separate federal case last year, Murphy was sentenced to four months in a halfway house and three years probation after pleading guilty to stealing fossils on federal land, and was ordered to pay $17,325.

After Murphy’s conviction in state court, the raptor fossil was turned over to the owners of the property, Bruce and Barb Bruckner, and they in turn sent it to the institute in South Dakota.

Larson wasn’t upset at the delay in getting the fossil.

“What’s a few years here and there when you’re talking about a dinosaur that’s 70 million years old,” he said. “The science could wait. It’s more important to do things properly and make sure the proper owner was identified.”

Institute officials say they hope to finish work on the skeleton by May. Two large museums are interested in buying it for display and study. Larson said he was unsure how much the fossil might be worth to the museums.

The institute will recover the hundreds of hours it spent restoring the fossil by selling replicas. Larson said the replicas will cost about $12,500 each.

He said one replica will be donated by the Bruckners and the institute to the new Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station in Malta.

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified

By David Rose
Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.

‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.

Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”

The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.

“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.

The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding.

He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”, and published the update in the New Scientist.

Cogley said: “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was “immensely lazy” and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970

By David Rose

Last updated at 11:17 AM on 10th January 2010

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.

Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz  Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

‘They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.

Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

‘They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

‘We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

‘Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.
In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.

For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’

Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

‘These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.

He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’

He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?

Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.

Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

‘This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

Florida Orange Growers Brace for Possible Killing Freeze

By TOM SELLEN

Florida orange growers are bracing for possible crop damage as an arctic blast plunges temperatures to record lows Saturday and Sunday nights.

Sleet and snow mixed with rain has been reported Saturday from the Tampa Bay area to near and north of Orlando, the first time snow or sleet has occurred in west-central Florida since Jan. 8, 1996, the National Weather Service in Tampa said.

Icicles hang from an orange tree after it was sprayed with water throughout the night in Plant City, Fla., earlier this week. The water was sprayed to protect the other plants in the nursery from cold weather in the state.

The immediate Tampa Bay area hasn’t seen snow since Dec. 23, 1989.

While citrus growers fared well on Friday night as temperatures remained above critical levels in the heart of the citrus belt, worries are intensifying as a strong high pressure system bears down on the area.

The NWS has issued a freeze warning for much of central and southern Florida from 9 p.m. EST Saturday to 9 a.m. EST on Sunday, meaning temperatures are expected to dip from 27 F to 32 F for three or more hours over a widespread area.

Citrus sustains damage when the mercury falls below 28 degrees Fahrenheit for three or more hours.

“We will undoubtedly suffer some damage to this season’s crop tomorrow [Sunday] a.m. and again on Monday a.m.,” said Fran Becker, president of Lakeland-based Florida Citrus Mutual and vice president of fruit procurement for Peace River Citrus Products Inc. in Arcadia, Fla.

He anticipates the cold will target the fruit, and that the trees themselves will not suffer widespread harm.

Readings of 24 F or below for any stretch of time will begin to kill the leaves, particularly the young ones, Mr. Becker explained. Readings in the teens, which he does not expect, would produce significant tree damage.

Temperatures in the Sunshine State have run 10 to 30 degrees below normal this week.

Florida’s citrus industry has been under extreme pressure to start the year owing to the freezing temperatures, which have so far caused only isolated damage to the 2009-10 orange crop. Prices for frozen concentrated orange juice futures have gained 17% amid fears that crop damage could be substantial, something that hasn’t happened in two decades.

Orange juice prices at the supermarket have not risen due to the cold snap but would be expected to appreciate if a widespread freeze affects the crop.

While Florida does grow fresh fruit of the peel-and-eat variety, it is predominantly a juice market. About 95% of the state’s orange output is crushed into juice.

Florida’s main citrus belt lies south of the Interstate 4 corridor that runs from Tampa Bay on the gulf side of the state, through Orlando and up to Daytona Beach on the Atlantic Coast.

Readings near the coasts are expected to fall to around 30 F, but inland areas will likely see mid-20s F readings for six to 10 hours, the NWS said.

“The only areas that may escape freezing temperatures are long the immediate Gulf Coast and around Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor,” the NWS said.

The coldest readings are expected to remain in place Sunday night, with long durations of subfreezing temperatures likely.

Orange growers continue to irrigate their groves during the worst of the cold to help lift the temperature by a few critical degrees. The ice that is formed will help to protect the trunk and lower branches of the trees.

Growers also continue to harvest as much of the early orange crop as possible before the cold has a chance to affect the fruit.

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.

More fierce criticism of the eminent scientist is expected as he embarks on a number of engagements to promote a new book ‘Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science’. Among his first commitments is a speech to a London audience at the Science Museum on Friday. The event is sold out.

Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission is studying Dr Watson’s remarks “in full”.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said today: “It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments.

“I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson’s personal prejudices. These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exist at the highest professional levels.”

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA.

He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

He has served for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics.

Dr Watson is no stranger to controversy. He has been reported in the past saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.

In addition, he has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos.

He also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

Commenting on Dr Watson’s current views about race, Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University, said: “This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain.

He added: “If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

A spokeswoman for the Science Museum said it was looking into “things” concerning the security of the event on Friday.

She said: “This kind of thing always generates debate.”