Blowing hot and cold on climate change - The Irish Times - Sat, Jul 21, 2012

Earlier this month Prof Kevin Leyden of West Virginia University was at a lecture on climate change by the contrarian Dr Stephen Peck, who said it had “everything to do with the cycles of the sun” rather than anything we humans had done or were still doing. This very comforting view is a recipe for business as usual.

“I let him have it, but he said the IPCC” – the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – “is ‘full of priests’ etc,” says Leyden. “Turns out that most of the crowd were sympathetic to the ‘natural causes’ theory and [think] that we can wait and see if the ‘doomsayers’ are right – and then we can work on adaptation.”

Much of the media has turned off the issue, even though it must be seen as the greatest single threat facing life on Earth...

There is no doubt that climate-change denial has grown, infecting the corridors of power and inhibiting action by manufacturing doubt...

Biofuels Disaster: Soaring Corn Stirs Up Calls To Curb Ethanol

The world is running short of corn. That is the message being delivered by the market, where on Thursday prices pushed above $8 a bushel for the first time. The biggest potential for a reduction in corn demand comes from the ethanol industry, which is using roughly 5bn bushels of corn, or nearly 40 per cent of the US corn crop, each year to make fuel for cars and animal feed.