Wednesday, as police tried to get the situation under control, details of Lee were emerging. His MySpace page shows a 43-year-old who wanted to meet "environmentalists, scientists, readers of Daniel Quinn, and people who want to work toward a real change."

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural
roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the
human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the
planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration
pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people
in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR
these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek
jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO
STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH!
(The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families
are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant
jobs!)

"First, some vocabulary. Let's have some names so we don't have to go on talking about 'the people of your culture' and 'the people of all other cultures.' I've used various names with various pupils, but I'm going to try a new pair with you. You're familiar with the expression 'Take it or leave it.' Using them in this sense, do the words takers and leavers have any heavy connotation for you?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"I mean, if I call one group Takers and the other group Leavers, will this sound like I'm setting up one to be good guys and the other to be bad guys?"

"No. They sound pretty neutral to me."

"Good. So henceforth I'm going to call the people of your culture Takers and the people of all other cultures Leavers."

The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man...The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.

You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds.

“The story the Leavers have been enacting for the past three million years isn’t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn’t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them. This is what you’ll find if you go among them. They’re not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and what forbidden, not forever accusing each other of not living the right way, not living in terror of each other not going crazy because their lives seem empty and pointless, not having to stupefy themselves with drugs to get through the days, not having a new religion every week to give them something to hold on to, not forever searching for something to do or something to believe in that will make lives worth living. And – I repeat – this is not because they live close to nature or have no formal government or because they’re innately noble. This is simply because they’re enacting a story that works well for people – a story that worked well for three million years and that still works well where the Takers haven’t yet managed to stamp it out.”

Ishmael thought for a moment, "Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?"
"Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."
"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world."
"Yes, that's so."
"Why don't you stop?"
I shrugged, "Frankly, we don't know how."
"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."

When reached in Houston on Wednesday afternoon, Quinn told TBD that he had never heard of Lee, and his wife could not recall any type of correspondence from him.

"Good God," Quinn said. "Well, I'm certainly surprised and distressed that he had somehow or other taken my book as a model for this kind of behavior."

When asked what he would tell Lee if he could talk to him, Quinn said: "I guess I would ask him what he thinks he's doing and what he thinks he's accomplishing and then go from there. What's in his mind is what's paramount right now. Sort of wish I could talk to him."

Look behind the curtain on the controversy and you'll find habitual violator Jack DeCoster, whose rap sheet of violations of state and federal laws regarding food safety, human rights, labor rights, the environment and animal cruelty is a mile long.

The voluntary recall was announced by Hillandale Farms. The company is located about 100 miles from the Wright County Eggs, based in Galt, Iowa, which has previously ordered a recall of 380 million eggs in one of the largest egg recalls in history.

"There have been laboratory-confirmed salmonella enteritidis illnesses associated with the shell eggs," Hillandale Farms noted in a press release. "[T]he investigation is ongoing."

As scientists would predict in a hotter world, some of the indicators—such as ocean heat content and temperature over land—are increasing. Others, such as sea ice cover and snow cover, are decreasing.

The influx of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere has also hit oceans particularly hard, the NOAA report says. (See an interactive on the greenhouse effect and global warming.)

New evidence suggests that more than 90 percent of that heat trapped by greenhouses gases over the past 50 years has been absorbed into the oceans.

Because water expands as it warms, the added ocean heat is contributing to sea level rise as well as to the rapid melting of Arctic summer sea ice. That melting in 2010 is on track to be worse than 2007, when Arctic ice cover reached its lowest point on record.

Such climatic shifts are already ushering in extreme weather, which plagued much of the globe in 2009, according to the report. (See a world map of potential global warming impacts.) For instance, Australia experienced its third hottest year on record.

On one February 2009 day—labeled "Black Saturday"—in Australia, 400 wildfires swept across the state of Victoria, killing 173 people and destroying 3,500 buildings. (See pictures of the Australian fires.)

The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

"A sign of global cooling? This past “decade set a record for largest average global snow extent,” Taylor said."

Easterbrook spoke before a group of about 700 scientists and government officials at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man's role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations' latest report on climate change.

Position Statement. Decades of scientific research have shown that climate can change from both natural and anthropogenic causes. The Geological Society of America (GSA) concurs with assessments by the National Academies of Science (2005), the National Research Council (2006), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) that global climate has warmed and that human activities (mainly greenhouse‐gas emissions) account for most of the warming
since the middle 1900s. If current trends continue, the projected increase in global temperature by the end of the twenty first century will result in large impacts on humans and other species. Addressing the challenges posed by climate change will require a combination of adaptation to the changes that are likely to occur and global reductions of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Public policy should include effective strategies for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Cost‐effective
investments to improve the efficient use of Earth's energy resources can reduce the economic impacts of future
adaptation efforts. Strategies for reducing greenhouse‐gas emissions should be evaluated based on their impacts
on climate, on costs to global and national economies, and on positive and negative impacts on the health, safety
and welfare of humans and ecosystems.

Comprehensive local, state, national and international planning is needed to address challenges posed by future
climate change. Near‐, mid‐, and long‐term strategies for mitigation of, and adaptation to climate change should
be developed, based in part on knowledge gained from studies of previous environmental changes.

Public investment is needed to improve our understanding of how climate change affects society, including on local
and regional scales, and to formulate adaptation measures. Sustained support of climate‐related research to
advance understanding of the past and present operation of the climate system is needed, with particular focus on
the major remaining uncertainties in understanding and predicting Earth's future climate at regional and global
scales. Research is needed to improve our ability to assess the response and resilience of natural and human
systems to past, present, and future changes in the climate system.

The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.

Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined

We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.

Even the U.N. Environmental Program's Jan Liu agreed to such a possibility in a previous article I wrote for AlterNet on intensifying weather events and thermohaline shutdown. "While the general average trend is one of a warming climate," he said, "this does not mean that extreme cold events or snowstorms will not take place. In fact, as you rightly point out, climate change may even contribute to an increasing intensity of snowstorms, as moisture levels in the atmosphere rise."
...
But somehow, the idea that global warming, which is admittedly monkeying with global atmospheric pressures and flows, has nothing to do with either a weakening Arctic Oscillation, currently as negative as it's been since the '50s, or weakening Gulf Stream, that could possibly lead to a decrease in thermohaline circulation capable of plunging Europe into another ice age, is a non-starter among not just deniers but also climate-change true believers. Which is ridiculous, if you think about it.

Both are always careful to remind the would-be dot-connectors that we are confusing weather with climate, even though they admit they have little scientific clue as to where one begins and the other ends. Logic dictates you can't have weather without a climate, and right now, ours is off its moorings. Anthropogenic warming has thrown what was once a stable climate into disarray, and may be leading as much to ruinous droughts as to record-breaking freezes. And arbitrarily separating them into linear camps utterly misses the point of global warming's greatest lesson: Volatility is the new normal, in weather, in the economy, in politics, in whatever. And woe to those who aren't ready to adapt to the new normal.