Late freeze shriveled apple crop » Redding Record Searchlight

“We lost everything because of the freeze,” Donna Troxell said.

Canadian canola futures rise

Winnipeg—ICE Canadian canola futures surged to the biggest percentage gain in more than three weeks after killing frost stopped crop growth in north-central Alberta, traders said. Moderate damage seen on Friday with much of affected crops mature, but broader killing frost forecast for Friday night.

Sen. Boxer runs on crusader reputation - MontereyHerald.com :

Boxer touts her work with Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., to buy more [fossil-fueled] C-17 military cargo planes, rebuffing Defense Secretary Robert Gates' effort to terminate the program. The C-17 plant employs 1,700 workers in Long Beach. Boxer's support contrasts with her days as a House member who railed against President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup and criticized the Pentagon's purchase of a $600 toilet seat cover and a $7,622 coffee pot.
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Boxer defended her effort on the climate-change bill.

"I'm the only senator who ever got any climate-change bill through a committee, not only once but twice," Boxer said. "Nobody else has been able to do it, and the reason that I asked John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to work for the 60 votes (needed to avoid a filibuster) is, I knew a broader coalition would be the only way we could get it done, because when you're a senator, you're not a CEO. You're part of a team."

Temperature Turnaround | StarTribune.com

Heavy Jackets in mid September? Wake-up temperatures Sunday morning dipped into the upper 30s over the far northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, including Cambridge and Princeton, the "urban heat island" (more asphalt/concrete) retaining heat in the immediate Twin Cities, keeping temperatures 10-15 degrees milder.

[Mansion-dwelling, high-flying Tom Friedman] - Aren’t We Clever? - NYTimes.com

What a contrast. In a year that’s on track to be our planet’s hottest on record, America turned “climate change” into a four-letter word that many U.S. politicians won’t even dare utter in public. If this were just some parlor game, it wouldn’t matter. But the totally bogus “discrediting” of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution [carbon dioxide!?] every day.”
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So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.

Flashback; Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman's Computer Before He Types Another Sentence | Environment | AlterNet

along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-'stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man, who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated, get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy-inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherf$cking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a "Green Revolution"?