Is Obama about to blow his climate credentials?

The US president could be poised to approve the doubling of imports of tar sands oil, one of the filthiest fuels on Earth

FACED with rising anger from environmentalists last year over his plans for a transcontinental pipeline to deliver treacly Canadian tar sands to Texas oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the CEO of TransCanada, Russ Girling, expressed surprise. After all, his company had laid 300,000 kilometres of such pipes across North America. "The pipeline is routine. Something we do every day," he told Canadian journalists.

But that's the point. It is routine. The oil industry does do it every day. And if it carries on, it will wreck the world.

We need not rely on climate-changing fossil fuels. Alternative energy technologies are available. But fossil fuels, and the pipelines and other 20th-century infrastructure that underpin them, have created what John Schellnhuber, director of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, describes in a new paper as "lock-in dominance" (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1219791110). Even though we know how harmful it is, the "largest business on Earth" has ossified and is proving immovable, he says.

The question is how to break the lock and let in alternatives. Schellnhuber, a wily and worldly climate scientist, has an idea, to which I will return. But first the tar-sands pipeline, known as Keystone XL in the parlance of outsize clothing. Proponents say it would create jobs and improve US energy security. But for environmentalists in the US, the decision - due any time - on whether it should go ahead is a touchstone for Barack Obama's willingness to confront climate change in his second term.

Superficially, Keystone XL doesn't look like a huge deal. Since 2010, there has been a cross-border pipe bringing oil from tar sands in northern Alberta to the US Midwest. But this second link would double capacity and deliver oil to the refineries of the Gulf for global export. It looks like the key to a planned doubling of output from one of the world's largest deposits of one of the world's dirtiest fuels. And because the pipe would cross the US border, it requires state department and presidential sign-off.

Environmentalists are up in arms. They fear leaks. No matter what its sponsors suggest, this is no ordinary pipeline. The tar-sands oil - essentially diluted bitumen - is more acidic than regular oil and contains more sediment and moves at higher pressures. Critics say it risks corroding and grinding away the insides of the pipes. The US National Academy of Sciences has just begun a study on this, but its findings will probably be too late to influence Obama.

If there is a leak, clean-up will be difficult, as shown by the messy, protracted and acrimonious attempt to cleanse the Kalamazoo river in Michigan after tar-sands oil oozed into it in 2010.

To make matters worse, the pipeline would cross almost the entire length of the Ogallala aquifer, one of the world's largest underground water reserves, from South Dakota to Texas. Ogallala is a lifeline for the dust-bowl states of the Midwest. While TransCanada has agreed to bypass the ecologically important Sand Hills of Nebraska, where the water table is only 6 metres below the surface in places, a big unseen spill could still be disastrous.

Climate change is still the biggest deal. Extracting and processing tar sands creates a carbon footprint three times that of conventional crude. Obama would rightly lose all environmental credibility if he were to approve a scheme to double his country's imports of this fossil-fuel basket case. Yet he may do it. Why? Because of fossil-fuel lock-in. Changing course is hard. Really hard.

Part of the reason for the lock-in is the vast infrastructure dedicated to sustaining the supply of coal, oil and gas. There is no better symbol of that than a new pipeline. Partly it is political. Nobody has more political muscle than the fossil fuel industry, especially in Washington. And partly it is commercial. As Schellnhuber puts it: "Heavy investments in fossil fuels have led to big profits for shareholders, which in turn leads to greater investments in technologies that have proven to be profitable."

The result is domination by an outdated energy system that stifles alternatives. The potential for a renewable energy revolution is often compared to that of the IT revolution 30 years ago. But IT had little to fight except armies of clerks. Schellnhuber compares this lock-in to the synapses of an ageing human brain so exposed to repetitious thought that it "becomes addicted to specific observations and impressions to the exclusion of alternatives". Or, as Girling puts it, new pipelines become "routine".

What might free us from this addiction? With politicians weak, an obvious answer is to hold companies more financially accountable for environmental damage, including climate change. But Schellnhuber says this won't be enough unless individual shareholders become personally liable, too.

Here, he says, the problem is the public limited company (PLC), or publicly traded company in the US, which insulates shareholders from the consequences of decisions taken in their name. Even if their company goes bankrupt with huge debts, all they lose is the value of their shares. The PLC was invented to promote risk-taking in business. But it can also be an environmental menace, massively reducing incentives for industries to clean up their acts.

"If shareholders were held liable," he says, "then next time they might consider the risk before investing or reinvesting." More importantly, it could prevent us being locked into 20th century technologies that are quite incapable of solving 21st century problems. Fat chance, many might say. But just maybe Keystone XL and its uncanny ability to draw global attention will help catalyse growing anger at the environmental immunity of corporate shareholders.

Fred Pearce is a consultant on environmental issues for New Scientist

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Man in "trolley bag" case pleads guilty to failing to report death

SINGAPORE: The lover of a businessman acquitted of murder in the "trolley bag" case pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to report the death to the police.

Pee Weai Hong, 33, admitted on Monday that he did not report the death of 28-year-old Dylan Wong Teck Siong on 2 April 2011 when he learnt about it the next day.

Mr Wong's decomposed body was stuffed in a trolley bag and was found in the waters off Sentosa on 16 April.

A businessman, Teo Boon Leng, was acquitted on 24 January of murdering Mr Wong.

The court heard on Monday that the three men were involved in a love triangle, which started two months before Mr Wong's death.

On the night Mr Wong died, Pee was not at the Keppel Bay apartment where the three men lived.

- CNA/xq

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Meet the man who would make BlackBerry apps cool

The fate of Research in Motion rests on the success or failure of BlackBerry 10.

(Credit:
Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

LAS VEGAS--Alec Saunders needed a little bait.

Soon after Saunders took over the developer relations team, he asked Research In Motion's then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in October 2011 for 25,000 BlackBerry PlayBook
tablets. When Lazaridis asked why, Saunders said he intended to give them away.

"His jaw just dropped to the floor," Saunders told CNET. "He stood there flabbergasted."

Lazaridis ultimately agreed, and Saunders began giving PlayBooks out to developers. He followed that up by giving away more than 8,000 units of RIM's Dev Alpha devices, which ran an early version of BlackBerry 10.

Saunders knew he needed to get the long-ignored BlackBerry developer base excited again. In 48 out of the last 52 weeks, he has been on a plane circling the globe in an effort to drum up interest in every corner. Combine the mileage he and his team of nearly 100 evangelists have logged for RIM, and there would be enough to travel to the moon and back five times over, or 2.5 million miles.

"I took December off and took the time to get to know my wife," he quipped.

Saunders has embraced a concept that RIM had long ignored: that developers and a healthy app "ecosystem" can make or break an operating system. He's tried to make it more accommodating and responsive to developers. It's the touchy feely stuff RIM execs never thought was important.

"Development sentiment is crucial," he said. "Developer interest is a leading indicator of success for any platform."

There's a lot riding on BlackBerry 10, which after a series of delays is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday in New York. Having had no significant new product in more than a year, RIM needs a hit. Badly. Simply put, the BlackBerry operating system is in free fall. In the third quarter, the BlackBerry OS accounted for 5.3 percent of the market, a tick above Samsung Electronics' homegrown Bada OS (little more than a glorified experiment for the Korean handset giant), and less than half the 11 percent share it held a year ago, according to a Gartner study. In the same period,
Android's market share surged to 72.4 percent from 52.5 percent a year ago.

Now RIM has has to win back consumers who have long abandoned their BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android devices. It's planning a media blitz, complete with Super Bowl commercial. At the same time, BlackBerry has to compete against another upstart mobile operating system, Windows Phone by Microsoft, which is also seeking to be the No. 3 platform behind Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

Indeed, RIM has a long, tough road ahead of it, but credit Saunders for connecting with the developer community. When the operating system is unveiled, it will have 70,000 applications, which the company boasts is the most apps for a mobile platform at launch. Android had a little more than 50 apps at launch, but that was before the explosion of app development.

"I can't describe what (Saunders) achieved in one and a half years," CEO Thorsten Heins said in a recent interview. "I can't speak highly enough of him."

Of course, RIM will be going up against two ecosystems with an entrenched following. Apple, for instance, boasts of more than three-quarters of a million apps for iOS, while Android has more than 700,000 apps in the market. The Windows Phone Store has 125,000 apps, having doubled in size after the launch of Windows Phone 8 late last year.

Fresh start

I sat with Saunders earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show to talk about his efforts to convince skeptical developers to give BlackBerry another chance. I had arranged to meet with with him in the Rojo lounge of the Palms Place hotel, an extension of the Palms Casino Resort.

Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations.

(Credit:
RIM)

Rojo is a small, dark, and smoke-filled bar awash in red-neon accent lighting. A downed air-conditioning system meant a stiflingly hot environment, despite the windy and cold weather outside. It looked like hell, and that night, it felt like it too.

When I finally met up with Saunders and his entourage, which included a few public relations representatives and another developer evangelist, Tom Anderson, the heat in the bar forced us out to the minimalist and slate-dominated lobby for our sit-down chat.

Saunders wore a black suit jacket, button-down shirt, and blue jeans, and had just come in from a flight from Ottawa, Canada.

Saunders, a family man who leads a scout troop in his off hours, can't help but to come off as a nice, normal guy. He spoke in a calm and even tone with a slight Canadian accent. But his jovial and seemingly laid-back manner gave way to enthusiasm when talking about RIM's developer efforts.

"We're building a good head of steam behind us," he said. "Good things are happening."

Saunders had roots at RIM even before he joined the company in June 2011. He had previously worked at QNX before leaving to run his own start-up, a Web conferencing provider called iotum. QNX was eventually bought by RIM in April 2010, and its software forms the foundation for BlackBerry 10.

So it was a homecoming of sorts for Saunders when he joined RIM, right about when its market share started to collapse.

"It seemed like a good challenge to me," he said.

He made it clear he was a different sort of RIM exec. At one of his first public outings as vice president of developer relations, Saunders made the highly unusual move of posting his e-mail address while on stage at one of the company's many developer conferences.

"That was huge," said Jeremy Wall, a part-time BlackBerry developer who was in attendance at that conference and dabbled with the platform for the past decade. He, like everyone else in attendance, immediately grabbed his phone to update his contact list.

The result: a flood of e-mail that occupies a good chunk of Saunders' time. He received 14,793 e-mails -- in the last quarter alone. More recently, he's also taken to Twitter to answer questions, where he tweets under the user name @asaunders.

"My wife wasn't too happy with me," he joked during an interview with CNET shortly after that conference.

Fixing a broken system

The old RIM wasn't exactly friendly to developers. From complications signing up to fragmentation in the different versions of the BlackBerry operating system, creating an app for the platform could be a nightmare. One developer politely called it "rough," and said the company previously had the tendency to drop or ignore questions or concerns.

At the same time, iOS was beginning to generate interest from app developers. RIM executives, meanwhile, clung to the idea that e-mail and security were more important to users.

"Sometimes a good (butt)-whoopin' is what you need," said Michael Nowlin, who works for a cable set-top box manufacturing company but is an enthusiast and part-time developer known as "BlackBerry Hank."

"We're building a good head of steam behind us. Good things are happening.""
--Alec Saunders.

When Saunders joined, he knew RIM had big problems. So he made his pitch to the most loyal BlackBerry developers first before expanding to a broader audience.

Saunders laid out a model of responsiveness for which developers have expressed appreciation. When Wall, a part-time developer who also works at a manufacturer of weather stations, was setting up a local meet-up between BlackBerry developers and a RIM executive, he had hit a wall with the usual company contacts. When he e-mailed Saunders, he got a response back in 10 minutes and had an executive on his way to the meetup.

"I'll sing the praises of Alec Saunders all day for that," Wall said.

That new-found enthusiasm also attracted Nowlin, who is a relative newcomer to the BlackBerry ecosystem. He hopped on the bandwagon after seeing the kinds of tools and support available to him during a developer conference in June.

He likewise praised Saunders for his responsiveness and willingness to listen.

"He made me feel like he really cared, and he showed it," said Nowlin, a San Antonio native who works support for a set-top box manufacturer and develops BlackBerry 10 apps on the side.

The BlackBerry PlayBook wasn't exactly a hot seller.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

While relations between developers and RIM improved, it was largely moot. With the older BlackBerry platform showing its age and the company moving to an unproven next-generation operating system, developers weren't too keen to take a chance, especially with the exploding potential coming from iOS and Android.

It was Saunders' idea of the PlayBook giveaway that got developers taking a more serious looking at RIM again.

Looking back, the PlayBook was ultimately more valuable as a relationship-building tool than a product. The much-hyped tablet launched in early 2011 with a thud, with only modest sales coming after heavy discounts and several software updates. To be fair, the PlayBook continues to sell, and the company shipped 255,000 units in the last reported quarter.

Early in the giveaway, RIM wasn't terribly choosy when handing over the PlayBooks -- a move Saunders said bought a lot of goodwill. But more recently, the company raised its standards and sought out developers with a genuine interest in the platform. At the last SXSW conference, developers were pitching RIM execs with half-finished apps before they were rewarded with a PlayBook to complete their work.

"RIM has done an astonishing job of getting developers to back a company which many people have completely written off," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis.

Time and money

While both the iOS and Android platforms can boast of massive user bases, RIM could only point to the PlayBook, a few thousand developer units and some fleeting glimpses of actual BlackBerry 10 products, which have faced multiple, frustrating delays.

As a result, there are still legions of developers who still veer away from RIM, considering it a risky bet next to the larger platforms. According to a June report by market analytic firm VisionMobile, the BlackBerry platform (old and new) is "very close to becoming an endangered species," with 41 percent of developers surveyed saying they were dumping the platform.

So Saunders and his team have shifted the conversation to address two other key concerns for developers: time and money.

A peek at BlackBerry 10 software on the pre-release developer device.

(Credit:
Lynn La/CNET)

RIM promised a much easier development process with BlackBerry 10. Regardless of the code or platform, it could easily be moved over to BlackBerry.

"Bring your code, and we'll find a way to make it happen," Saunders said.

RIM evangelist Anderson said he had gotten use to getting greeted with looks of skepticism when he went to talk to developers about BlackBerry. Now, he said he can turn them around after just a few minutes by showing them the simplified process of development and porting.

Equally important was the potential monetary return on a BlackBerry app. RIM executives told developers at a conference in May that it would guarantee that an app would generate $10,000 in revenue in their first year, or the company would make up the difference. (The fine print is that the app would have to be certified and generate at least $1,000 from downloads).

RIM has argued that its platform is a deceptively lucrative place for developers -- if you exercise a little math. If you remove the top 5 percent of highest-grossing apps, then BlackBerry's platform actually generates the most revenue, Saunders said. So for little-known developers without big brands, BlackBerry may prove to be a better home, he argued.

While fairly negative on BlackBerry's prospects, the VisionMobile report did note that a BlackBerry developer made an average of nearly $4,000 a month, or 4 percent better than the next best performing platform, iOS.

"The developer community that's behind them now is organic. They built it."
--George McKinney, an independent app developer.

Beyond those factors, Saunders and his team has tried to directly talk to as many developers as possible. Since June, it has held 44 developer-focused BlackBerry Jam World Tour events and 11 Enterprise Jam events in more than 40 countries, hosting a total of nearly 10,000 developers. In addition to the launch on Wednesday, Saunders is preparing for BlackBerry Jam Europe next week.

There's little choice: These developers are essentially working on blind faith, with no actual products to work from and no proof that consumers will even buy them. Saunders and his team has had to apply a personal touch.

At least among its hardcore devotees, it's working.

"The developer community that's behind them now is organic," said George McKinney, an independent app developer based in Los Angeles. "They built it."

McKinney, who employs three people in a small development shop, primarily does work on iOS and Android apps, but said he works on BlackBerry 10 apps "because we have a lot of fun with it."

Singing a different tune

Saunders and fellow executives Chris Smith, vice president of application platform & tools, and Martyn Mallick, vice president of global alliances and business, were certainly having fun when they shot a music video set to REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You."

When it was released on YouTube, the video -- and RIM -- became the target of ridicule from the press, who called it "awful" and feared it was a desperate and awkward attempt to woo developers.

Saunders' eyes lit up when I asked him about it, and it was clearly a labor of love. He said the developers enjoyed the video, and were captivated when it aired during its conferences. He said it was an attempt to break away from the usual "stupid energy clip" that precedes speeches and demos.

"We had a lot of fun with it," he said, teasing that one more music video was in the works.

Less light-heartedly, in the past few weeks, RIM has started to contact developers through e-mails and blog posts, pushing them to step up and get their apps ready in time for the launch this week.

In a last-minute scramble, Saunders earlier this month helped run an online "Portathon" that netted the submission of 15,000 apps for BlackBerry 10 after more than a day and a half.

"Well, there you have it...Feel like I've run a marathon," Saunders tweeted after the event.

For Saunders and the rest of RIM, the marathon to get the company back on track has just begun.

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Doomed Dolphin Speaks to New York's Vibrant Wildlife

By the time New Yorkers spied a dolphin swimming through the superfund sludge of the Gowanus Canal last Friday, it was too late. The marine mammal didn't even survive long enough for a rescue plan to come together. First sighted on Friday afternoon, the dolphin perished at 6:00 p.m.

The reason the marine mammal died, and why the dolphin swam up the polluted waterway in the first place, is as yet unknown. But the sad story of the wayward creature highlights the strange nature of New York City, the global epitome of urbanity. Hidden within Gotham are native carnivores, marine mammals, and even species that have scarcely been seen before.

Marine mammals are arguably the most high-profile of New York City's wild residents and visitors. The Gowanus Canal dolphin was only the latest to venture within city limits. Just a month ago, a 60-foot-long finback whale (Balaenoptera physalus) became stranded in the Rockaway Inlet of Queens. The emaciated animal died the day after it was discovered.

There seems to be no singular reason explaining why marine mammals such as the Gowanus dolphin and Queens' finback whale wander up the city's rivers or strand on beaches. Each case is unique. But not all the city's marine mammal visitors suffer terrible fates.

In 2006, a hefty manatee (Trichechus spp.) took a long jaunt from its Florida home up the East Coast, including a detour down New York's Hudson River. The sirenian survived the trip, continuing on to Cape Cod before reportedly turning back south to a destination unknown. Hopefully the manatee didn't encounter any great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) on the return journey, a marine predator we know patrols the waters off New York.

Of course, New York City's whales, seals, and occasional manatee can only skirt the city along its shores and canals. You likely won't see a seal caterpillaring its way along Broadway.

Yet the city's interior also hosts a strange accumulation of wildlife, including native animals that are carving out spaces for themselves in the concrete corridors and exotic species that we have introduced to city life.

Coyotes (Canis latrans) may be the cleverest of New York City's hidden wildlife. Thanks to camera traps, and the occasional police chase through Lower Manhattan, researchers are keeping track of the wily canids and studying how they are so successfully taking up residence in many of the nation's cities. "Most small, urban parks will likely hold a pair and their offspring at most—coyotes are very territorial," said Cornell University ecologist Paul Curtis.

The secretive carnivorans bring a welcome element to urban neighborhoods—an appetite for rodents—and are experts at cracking open new niches alongside people.

Black bears (Ursus americanus) may be next. The bears have proliferated in northern New Jersey in recent years, and in 2010, a black bear came within three miles of the George Washington Bridge, a major thoroughfare between New Jersey and Manhattan. The bear obviously would have eschewed rush hour traffic and the tolls, but the local population is so bountiful that it's not unreasonable to think some enterprising bear might eventually wander into the big city.

Strangely, you may actually be more likely to run into a crocodylian predator in New York City than a black bear. New Yorkers have a nagging habit of importing—and losing-alligator—like caimans and other reptiles within the city.

In 2010, an 18-inch long caiman took refuge under a parked Datsun in Astoria, Queens. No one knows how the reptile wound up on the street, but given the trend of owners buying cute crocodylians and later dumping them, someone may have abandoned the poor little caiman.

This would hardly be the first time. In 2006, another little caiman was found in the leaf litter behind Brooklyn's Spring Creek Towers, while "Damon the Caiman" swam around a Central Park lake in the summer of 2001. These caimans are only some of the most famous—according to a New York Times report, the Brooklyn-based Animal Care and Control deals with about ten caimans each year.

Many other unusual and exotic animals have romped through New York. Under some of their most notable animal celebrities, the city's Parks and Recreation department lists guinea pigs, boa snakes, and even a tiger that escaped from a circus in 2004 and ran down Jackie Robinson Parkway before his owners were able to get him back.

The Big Apple even contains species that have never been documented before. No, not the ballyhooed "Montauk Monster"—actually a rotted raccoon—but a distinct species of leopard frog. Described early this year, the cryptic amphibian was given away by its unique mating call.

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'Barrier of Bodies' Trapped Nightclub Fire Victims

The bodies of the young college students were found piled up just inside the entrance of the Kiss nightclub, among more than 230 people who died in a cloud of toxic smoke after a blaze enveloped the crowded locale within seconds and set off a panic.

Hours later, the horrific chaos had transformed into a scene of tragic order, with row upon row of polished caskets of the dead lined up in the community gymnasium in the university city of Santa Maria. Many of the victims were under 20 years old, including some minors.

As the city in southern Brazil prepared to bury the 233 people killed in the conflagration caused by a band's pyrotechnic display, an early investigation into the tragedy revealed that security guards briefly prevented partygoers from leaving through the sole exit. And the bodies later heaped inside that doorway slowed firefighters trying to get in.

"It was terrible inside — it was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another," said police inspector Sandro Meinerz. "We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take the bodies away."

Survivors and another police inspector, Marcelo Arigony, said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they are allowed to leave.

Germano Roratto/AFP/Getty Images

Brazil Nightclub Fire: Nearly 200 People Killed Watch Video

"It was chaotic and it doesn't seem to have been done in bad faith because several security guards also died," he told The Associated Press.

Later, firefighters responding to the blaze initially had trouble entering the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance," Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper.

Police inspectors said they think the source of the blaze was a band's small pyrotechnics show. The fire broke out sometime before 3 a.m. Sunday and the fast-moving fire and toxic smoke created by burning foam sound insulation material on the ceiling engulfed the club within seconds.

Authorities said band members who were on the stage when the fire broke out later talked with police and confirmed they used pyrotechnics during their show.

Meinerz, who coordinated the investigation at the nightclub, said one band member died after escaping because he returned inside the burning building to save his accordion. The other band members escaped alive because they were the first to notice the fire.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," she said.

Most victims died from smoke inhalation rather than burns. Many of the dead, about equally split between young men and women, were also found in the club's two bathrooms, where they fled apparently because the blinding smoke caused them to believe the doors were exits.

There were questions about the club's operating license. Police said it was in the process of being renewed, but it was not clear if it was illegal for the business to be open. A single entrance area about the size of five door spaces was used both as an entrance and an exit.

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Get cirrus in the fight against climate change

FEATHERY cirrus clouds are beautiful, but when it comes to climate change, they are the enemy. Found at high-altitude and made of small ice crystals, they trap heat - so more cirrus means a warmer world. Now it seems that, by destroying cirrus, we could reverse all the warming Earth has experienced so far.

In 2009, David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, proposed a radical way to stop climate change: get rid of some cirrus. Now Trude Storelvmo of Yale University and colleagues have used a climate model to test the idea.

Storelvmo added powdered bismuth triiodide into the model's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere in which these clouds form. Ice crystals grew around these particles and expanded, eventually falling out of the sky, reducing cirrus coverage. Without the particles, the ice crystals remained small and stayed up high for longer.

The technique, done on a global scale, created a powerful cooling effect, enough to counteract the 0.8 °C of warming caused by all the greenhouse gases released by humans (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50122).

But too much bismuth triiodide made the ice crystals shrink, so cirrus clouds lasted longer. "If you get the concentrations wrong, you could get the opposite of what you want," says Storelvmo. And, like other schemes for geoengineering, side effects are likely - changes in the jet stream, say.

Different model assumptions give different "safe" amounts of bismuth triiodide, says Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. "Do we really know the system well enough to be confident of being in the safe zone?" he asks. "You wouldn't want to touch this until you knew."

Mitchell says seeding would take 140 tonnes of bismuth triiodide every year, which by itself would cost $19 million.

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Protesters march against Hong Kong leader

HONG KONG: Around 1,000 people took to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday to protest against the city leader's policy speech, which they said offered nothing new on tackling a housing crisis and poverty.

Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying pledged, among other things, to increase housing supply in the densely populated city and tackle poverty in his January policy address widely seen as an attempt to halt mass protests against his leadership.

Protesters held up a colourful array of banners, some of which portrayed Leung as a vampire and Pinocchio.

"Leung Chun-ying does not have the heart or the ability to solve the problems for the Hong Kong people," Icarus Wong, vice-convener of one of the protest organisers, Civil Human Rights Front, told AFP.

People were showing their "disappointment and anger" because his speech offered no new ideas on solving the housing crisis and tackling poverty, Wong said.

Protesters also called for universal suffrage in the former British colony, which returned to China in 1997.

Hong Kong maintains a semi-autonomous status but cannot choose its leader through the popular vote.

Beijing has said the chief executive could be directly elected in 2017 at the earliest, with the legislature following by 2020.

Leung, who was chosen by a 1,200-member election committee dominated by pro-Beijing elites, saw his approval rating plunge to a low of 31 percent, according to an opinion poll released in January by the University of Hong Kong.

- AFP/xq

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The ultimate gall of a heartless iPhone thief

An object of desire?

(Credit:
CNET)

One should never expect justice in life.

The best one can hope for is poetry.

And yet, just once or twice, both manage to collide with a deliciousness that moves the soul.

Here is the tale of a teenage girl who had her iPhone stolen.

As The New York Times composes it, the girl had her
iPhone 4S ripped from her by a teenage boy in Brooklyn's notoriously difficult Prospect Park.

iPhone theft is rather popular in New York. Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg recently suggested that it's responsible for an increase in crime in the city.

Anyway, the iPhone-less girl collared a couple of policemen, but the miscreant was not to be found.

However, the thief then decided that he'd try to get some money for the phone. So he met a man on a Flatbush street -- as you do.

The man asked to take a look at the phone. Perhaps he wanted to see whether Siri was still inside.

Then, he ran off with it.

Yes, this is slightly poetic. But we've only just begun.

You see, the boy thief was not very happy. After all, he'd had his recently acquired property stolen. So he went off in search of a policeman to report the crime.

I pause for your sound effects.

Thank you.

More Technically Incorrect

The police reacted with unusual efficiency. They corralled both the boy and the man who had taken Siri from him. But they still assumed the boy was the victim.

Are you ready for verse three?

The phone rang. It was the girl trying to do a deal to get her phone back. The police realized something might be amiss here. This seemed to be a miss who actually owned the phone.

So they waited for her to arrive in Flatbush. She recognized the boy's sneakers. They were pink.

I pause for your further sound effects.

The police decided it was time to play Solomon. They would slice the phone in two if one party didn't renounce their claim to the phone.

No, wait. They asked both the girl and the pink-sneakered boy to unlock the phone with the PIN code.

You're already there, aren't you? Both the actual thieves were brought to justice -- the actual kind. And the girl got her phone back.

There are several morals to this story.

One, don't steal iPhones if you're wearing pink sneakers.

Two, if someone does unto you as you have done unto someone else, take it onto the chin. It will help you understand the feelings of others.

Three, if you're the kind of New Yorker who thinks they can always get away with it, well, you can't. Not always.

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Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

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Squatter, Bank of America Battle for $2.5M Mansion

Bank of America is taking a Florida man to court after he attempted to use an antiquated state law to legally take possession of a $2.5 million mansion that is currently owned by the bank.

Andre "Loki" Barbosa has lived in a five-bedroom Boca Raton, Fla., waterside property since July, and police have reportedly been unable to remove him.

The Brazilian national, 23, who reportedly refers to himself as "Loki Boy," cites Florida's "adverse possession" law, in which a party may acquire title from another by openly occupying their land and paying real property tax for at least seven years.

The house is listed as being owned by Bank of America as of July 2012, and that an adverse possession was filed in July. After Bank of America foreclosed on the property last year, the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office was notified that Barbosa would be moving in, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The Sun-Sentinel reported that he posted a notice in the front window of the house naming him as a "living beneficiary to the Divine Estate being superior of commerce and usury."
On Facebook, a man named Andre Barbosa calls the property "Templo de Kamisamar."

After Barbosa gained national attention for his brazen attempt, Bank of America filed an injunction on Jan. 23 to evict Barbosa and eight unidentified occupants.

In the civil complaint, Bank of America said Barbosa and other tenants "unlawfully entered the property" and "refused to permit the Plaintiff agents entry, use, and possession of its property." In addition to eviction, Bank of America is asking for $15,000 in damages to be paid to cover attorney's expenses.

Police were called Dec. 26 to the home but did not remove Barbosa, according to the Sentinel. Barbosa reportedly presented authorities with the adverse possession paperwork at the time.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Povery Law Center, says police officers may be disinclined to take action even if they are presented with paperwork that is invalid.

"A police officer walks up to someone who is claiming a house now belongs to him, without any basis at all, is handed a big sheaf of documents, which are incomprehensible," Potok said. "I think very often the officers ultimately feel that they're forced to go back to headquarters and try to figure out what's going on before they can actually toss someone in the slammer."

A neighbor of the Boca property, who asked not be named, told ABCNews.com that he entered the empty home just before Christmas to find four people inside, one of whom said the group is establishing an embassy for their mission, and that families would be moving in and out of the property. Barbosa was also among them.

The neighbor said he believes that Barbosa is a "patsy."

"This young guy is caught up in this thing," the neighbor said. "I think it's going on on a bigger scale."

Barbosa could not be reached for comment.

The neighbor said that although the lights have been turned on at the house, the water has not, adding that this makes it clear it is not a permanent residence. The neighbor also said the form posted in the window is "total gibberish," which indicated that the house is an embassy, and that those who enter must present two forms of identification, and respect the rights of its indigenous people.

"I think it's a group of people that see an opportunity to get some money from the bank," the neighbor said. "If they're going to hold the house ransom, then the bank is going to have to go through an eviction process.

"They're taking advantage of banks, where the right hand doesn't know where the left hand is," the neighbor said. "They can't clap."

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