City students risk fires rather than freezings -- Shanghai Daily

AS the temperature falls, desperate university students are using banned appliances like electric blankets and electric hot-water bottles to keep warm on campus.

Some bring electric rice-cookers or electric stoves into their rooms to make porridge or hot-pot to help them warm up.

While the fire that killed four students in the Shanghai Business School last month has made some students abandon these appliances, others are still using them.

The fire started in their dormitory, near Zhongshan Road W., close to the Shanghai Stadium. The four students fell from a balcony as they tried to escape the flames.

Climate scepticism is good - Opinion - Editorial - General - The Canberra Times

Many proponents of climate change policy are obviously uneasy about admitting the level of doubt that surrounds the science. The recent conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change, that evidence of climate change is unequivocal and that greenhouse gases are ''very likely'' (90per cent or more probability) to be the cause of such warming, surely overstate the case. The experts clearly fear that no action will be taken unless public opinion believes in the certainty of human-induced global warming.

More on the alleged case for Steven Chu at energy - James Fallows

That's why one of my own main hopes for Chu is that on behalf of science, and from his new bully pulpit, he can re-start the technocivic discussion concerning the nature of the AGW consensus. It seems to me that lots of reachable AGW skeptics could use some teaching from a scientist with Chu's newly highlighted stature. That teaching can't wisely be the kind of preaching that scoffs at all AGW skepticism, re-asserts the consensus's perfect finality, and redoubles the alarms.