56 Protein on comet suggests that life is seeded from Living parts of Universe to Dead parts

(1) Protein on comet suggests that life is seeded from Living parts of Universe to Dead parts
(2) Comets harbored oceans in which life could have flourished - Chandra Wickramasinghe
(3) Greenpeaceleader admits claim that Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was "a mistake"
(4) Victorian Government "risking lives by using volunteers instead of paid firefighters"
(5) Council ignored warning over trees before Victoria bushfires
(6) Lessons lost in ash
(7) Closure of Australia's biggest cotton farm would devastate inland economy
(8) Country Alliance, new political party for Rural areas

(1) Protein on comet suggests that life is seeded from Living parts of Universe to Dead parts

{ie that the Panspermia theory of Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe is correct}

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE57H02I20090818

Building block of life found on comet
Tue Aug 18, 2009 9:37am EDT

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.

Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.

Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets.

The initial detection of glycine, the most common of 20 amino acids in proteins on Earth, was reported last year, but it took time for scientists to confirm that the compound in question was extraterrestrial in origin.

"We couldn't be sure it wasn't from the manufacturing or the handling of the spacecraft," said astrobiologist Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the principal author of the latest research.

She presented the findings, accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, to a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., this week.

"We've seen amino acids in meteorites before, but this is the first time it's been detected in a comet," she said.

Chains of amino acids are strung together to form protein molecules in everything from hair to the enzymes that regulate chemical reactions inside living organisms. But scientists have long puzzled over whether these complex organic compounds originated on Earth or in space.

The latest findings add credence to the notion that extraterrestrial objects such as meteorites and comets may have seeded ancient Earth, and other planets, with the raw materials of life that formed elsewhere in the cosmos.

"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said Carl Pilcher, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute in California, which co-funded the research.

Glycine and other amino acids have been found in a number of meteorites before, most notably one that landed near the town of Murchison, Australia in 1969, Elsila said.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

(2) Comets harbored oceans in which life could have flourished - Chandra Wickramasinghe

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090805/comets_space_090509/20090809

Could comet strikes be spreading seeds of life?

Updated Sun. Aug. 9 2009 7:42 AM ET

Jonathan Fahey, Forbes.com

Comets have been blamed for a lot of death and destruction over the years. Showers of them are thought to have triggered at least one and maybe even several of the major and minor mass-extinction events that have wiped out millions of species in the 4 billion years since life on earth first began.

But new research from the University of Washington defends comets, those gassy balls of ice and dust that swing by earth every once in a while to show off their tails. Doctoral student Nathan Kaib ran some data that suggests that the number of comets available to rain down on earth from time to time has been hugely overestimated.

"Comets are a convenient explanation for extinction events," says Kaib, whose work was published in the online edition of the journal Science. But his calculations argue that comets may have caused only one minor extinction event in 4 billion years.

While Kaib has been working for the comets' defense, Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, has been comet's PR man: He has been gathering evidence to support his long-held belief that comets are not only not menacing, they are responsible for life on earth.

Wickramasinghe, who has spent his career helping modernize the ancient theory of panspermia, the idea that seeds of life are scattered throughout the universe, published a study recently that he says shows that comets harbored oceans in which life could have flourished.

"It is almost a certainty in the early days of comets that they consisted of huge oceans of warm liquid water," he says. "Even if a handful of bacteria spores were incorporated in these huge oceans, they could have reproduced rapidly and the oceans would soon be swarming with microbiology."

Maybe Hollywood had it backward. In the 1998 thriller Deep Impact, civilization was threatened by an approaching comet.  Maybe earthlings should have welcomed their neighbors.

Comets were formed along with the solar system in the aftermath of a nearby supernovae explosion. Energy from the star's explosion spurred the gas and dust in our neighborhood to coalesce into our sun and the planets about 4.5 billion years ago.

The rocky stuff that didn't coalesce into planets formed asteroids that hang out between Mars and Jupiter. The gassy stuff that didn't coalesce into planets formed the comets that live beyond Neptune, in a region called the Kuiper belt. And the gassy stuff that nearly escaped the sun's orbit completely formed comets in what is known as Oort cloud, a sphere of comets surrounding us at the very furthest reaches of our solar system, 300 billion miles to 20 trillion miles from the sun.

We've long had an idea about the composition of comets by studying the wavelengths of light reflected off them. In 2004, NASA's Stardust Mission collected material from a comet's coma, the dust cloud around the comet that produces the comet's tell-tale tail. Then, on July 4, 2005, the NASA program Deep Impact got a closer look -- it smashed into a passing comet and studied the resulting explosion.

A new spin on comet strikes

Stardust and Deep Impact revealed complex organic material as well as clays, which Wickramasinghe says almost certainly need liquid water to form. Using data from Stardust and Deep Impact and other recent observations, Wickramasinghe calculates that radiation from a radioactive form of aluminum produced in the supernovae melted water that formed oceans that lasted a million years. "You can work out how the comets behaved since they were born," he explains.

For most of earth's history, it has been protected from comet strikes by Jupiter and Saturn. The planets are so big that when comets are pushed into an orbit that would send them toward the inner solar system, where earth sits, the giant planets' gravity deflects them safely askew.

About 4 billion years ago, however, the orbits of the new planets, which hadn't yet settled into a stable path, are thought to have shifted suddenly, causing gravitational havoc. This is thought to have sent a deluge of comets and asteroids to earth called the Late Heavy Bombardment. Coincidently -- or not, says Wickramasinghe -- just after this period is when the first chemical evidence of life shows up on earth.

Wickramasinghe argues that life is extremely difficult to start and, given the increasingly inhospitable places researchers have found life lately, also extremely difficult to destroy. He says it is possible that life formed on a planet around the star that exploded to help form our solar system. Life could have survived the star's death in a spore-like form, and flourished in the oceans inside comets that later smashed into earth.

"This appeared to be a way-out theory 20 years ago, but it's become a real possibility," Wickramasinghe says. "We do not have any knowledge about how to turn non-life into life. Once that transformation took place, somewhere in a galactic context, it spread inexorably because bacteria have all these marvelous properties. Life is a continuous process that's unstoppable." ...

(3) Greenpeaceleader admits claim that Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was "a mistake"

From: north-pennine rainbows <pennine.rainbows@btinternet.com> Date: 21.08.2009 02:46 AM

EXCLUSIVE: Lies Revealed — Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration

by Phelim McAleer & Ann McElhinney?

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/amcelhinney/2009/08/19/exclusive-lies-revealed-greenpeace-leader-admits-arctic-ice-exaggeration/

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization's recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was "a mistake."  Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled "Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts," which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.

Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the "Hardtalk" program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

"I don't think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake," he said.

Sackur said the claim was inaccurate on two fronts, pointing out that the Arctic ice is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle, and that it had survived much warmer periods in history than the present.

The BBC reporter accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing "misleading information" and using "exaggeration and alarmism."

Leipold's admission that Greenpeace issued misleading information is a major embarrassment to the organization, which often has been accused of alarmism but has always insisted that it applies full scientific rigor in its global-warming pronouncements.

Although he admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization's practice of "emotionalizing issues" in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion.

Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.

"We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model," Leipold said. "If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary."

(You can watch the full BBC interview with Leipold here, and to learn more about Greenpeace-style global warming hysteria and its potential toll on the American dream, go to www.noteviljustwrong.com, the Web site for the forthcoming documentary "Not Evil Just Wrong," by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney.) ==

http://windfarms.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/greenpeace-choking-on-its-own-bullshit/

Greenpeace Choking on its Own Bullshit!

Posted on August 20, 2009.

Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold has been forced to admit that his organization issued misleading and exaggerated information when it claimed that Arctic ice would disappear completely by 2030, in a crushing blow for the man-made global warming movement.

In an interview with the BBC's Stephen Sackur on the "Hardtalk" program, Leipold initially attempted to evade the question but was ultimately forced to admit that Greenpeace had made a "mistake" when it said Arctic ice would disappear completely in 20 years.

The claim stems from a July 15 Greenpeace press release entitled "Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts," in which it is stated that global warming will lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2030.

Sackur accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing "misleading information" based on "exaggeration and alarmism," pointing out that it was "preposterous" to claim that the Greenland ice sheet, a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle that has survived much warmer periods in history, would completely melt when it had stood firm for hundreds of thousands of years. ==

http://www.infowars.com/greenpeace-leader-admits-organization-put-out-fake-global-warming-data/

Greenpeace Leader Admits Organization Put Out Fake Global Warming Data

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, August 20, 2009

Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold has been forced to admit that his organization issued misleading and exaggerated information when it claimed that Arctic ice would disappear completely by 2030, in a crushing blow for the man-made global warming movement.

In an interview with the BBC's Stephen Sackur on the "Hardtalk" program, Leipold initially attempted to evade the question but was ultimately forced to admit that Greenpeace had made a "mistake" when it said Arctic ice would disappear completely in 20 years.

The claim stems from a July 15 Greenpeace press release entitled "Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts," in which it is stated that global warming will lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2030.

Sackur accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing "misleading information" based on "exaggeration and alarmism," pointing out that it was "preposterous" to claim that the Greenland ice sheet, a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle that has survived much warmer periods in history, would completely melt when it had stood firm for hundreds of thousands of years.

"There is no way that ice sheet is going to disappear," said Sackur.

"I don't think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake," Leipold was eventually forced to admit.

However, Leipold made no apologies for Greenpeace's tactic of "emotionalizing issues" as a means of trying to get the public to accept its stance on global warming. ...

(4) Victorian Government "risking lives by using volunteers instead of paid firefighters"

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25960810-12377,00.html

Burning deaths 'linked to understaffing'

August 21, 2009
Article from:  Australian Associated Press

FIREFIGHTERS sent to a house blaze that killed a woman and four children near Geelong last Sunday arrived well outside the standard response time, the firefighters' union says.

United Firefighters Union national secretary Peter Marshall said the fatalities might not have occurred if the Victorian government had acted on warnings of understaffing at Ocean Grove fire station, which sent a tanker to the fire.

"The standard (response time) is eight minutes to maximise the potential for saving life," Mr Marshall said.

"The response time to that fire was 13 minutes. You may as well send the coroner ... because you're going to deal with a fatality," he said. ...

The union says 23 Victorian fire stations urgently need more staff and other upgrades before the fire season starts in just 68 days.

The union will ask the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission in a submission to help enforce an independent board's ruling made in April to improve the stations.

The stations are located in 34 of the 52 hotspots identified by the State Government earlier this week.

Mr Marshall said the ruling had sat idle for 136 days without any action from the Victorian Government.

He said claims by Victorian Premier John Brumby that the union had rejected his offer to meet were false.

"They have not asked us to meet," he said. "I had to crash the Premier's press conference the other day to get their attention.

"We say very clearly ... that if the Premier had have acted on those particular locations, then perhaps we wouldn't be dealing with five fatalities."

(5) Council ignored warning over trees before Victoria bushfires

12th February 2009, 08:01 PM

http://www.treeworld.info/f6/council-ignored-warning-over-trees-before-6959.html

One of Australia's leading bushfire experts, Rod Incoll, warned Nillumbik Shire Council in a 2003 report that it risked devastation if it went ahead with changes to planning laws proposed by green groups that restricted the removal of vegetation.

Mr Incoll, the Victorian fire chief from 1990 to 1996, and David Packham, a former CSIRO bushfire scientist and academic who also produced a report on the issue, argued against the regulations, which actively encouraged the builders of new homes to plant trees around the houses for aesthetic reasons.

Mr Incoll told The Australian yesterday the proposed planning rules were "foolhardy and dangerous and ought not to be proceeded with".

"But they were nevertheless instituted," he said. "That is certainly one of the things that people will be looking at as an aftermath of this tragic event."

Mr Packham, now an honorary senior research fellow at Monash University's school of geography and environmental science, wrote in his report, after inspecting the Kinglake to Heidelberg Road: "The mix of fuel, unsafe roadsides and embedded houses, some with zero protection and no hope of survival, will all ensure that when a large fire impinges upon the area a major disaster will result."

Mr Incoll said that in 2003, green groups were pushing for changes to planning laws that included restrictions on the removal of vegetation, "and worse still, the requirement for planting vegetation around and almost over houses, as part of any planning permit to build a house in the shire of Nillumbik, so it gave the appearance from the outside of being a forest".

In 2003, the Nillumbik Ratepayers Group asked Mr Incoll to assess the bushfire risk, and the proposed planning rules.

Council elections were looming, and planning was a major issue. "The green group carried the day in council and the rules came to pass," he said. ...

(6) Lessons lost in ash

Christopher Pearson | February 14, 2009

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25051445-7583,00.html

ALMOST everyone who lived in bushfire-prone country or a rural hamlet used to know the drill. Whatever the local council might have to say about not touching native vegetation, one way or another the grounds around a house have to be cleared and the fuel load kept to a minimum in the summer months.

Garden waste should generally end up on autumn and winter bonfires rather than be turned into mulch. A three-bedroom house needs tanks capable of holding a couple of thousand gallons of water and petrol-driven pumps to draw on them if the power is cut off. For older people, a sprinkler system on the roof is a fairly foolproof way of protecting it, extinguishing airborne embers and wetting verges.

How many of the long-term residents of the Victorian countryside devastated by last Saturday's fires took ordinary precautions is not known. Nor is it yet known what steps the various shire councils took to offer timely advice about bushfires to newly arrived tree-changers. There's also a sense in which all this hardly matters. Because what's clear is that, even if all the normal precautions had been observed, it might not have been enough to save many of the lives lost and the buildings burned down. Some of these were not normal fires but firestorms.

Philip Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit, says that if Kinglake and Marysville had had the benefit of prescribed burning to reduce the risk of fire, the fires would have been much less intense. He estimates that in both districts there were between 35 and 50 tonnes of dry fuel per hectare, although even eight tonnes per hectare is usually considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard submissions that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a thirteenfold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Intense heat, driven by high winds and vapourising eucalypts and pines in its path into volatile gases, creates firestorms.

It's obvious state and local government deserve most of the blame. The benefits of prescribed burning to lower fuel loads have been generally acknowledged for at least 40 years. The Bracks and Brumby governments stand accused of insufficient action to reduce fuel loads, especially on crown land and wildlife reserves, and not maintaining permanent firebreaks. They compromised public safety in the hope of ingratiating the Green vote. ...

There's also evidence that in southeastern Australia in the pre-contact era, on Kangaroo Island, which hadn't been inhabited by Aboriginal people for a few thousand years or burned off regularly, catastrophic firestorms were fairly regular events. They serve to remind us that there is nothing terribly mysterious about the combination of tinder-dry conditions, high fuel loads, very hot weather and high winds. ...

(7) Closure of Australia's biggest cotton farm would devastate inland economy

{it's a major employer of Aborigines}

Cubbie closure would 'devastate local economy'

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/18/2659432.htm

Posted August 18, 2009 13:38:00
Updated August 18, 2009 13:37:00

Map: Dirranbandi 4486

A Queensland mayor says the possible closure of the country's biggest cotton farm would devastate the economy in the Balonne Shire.

The 93,000 hectare Cubbie Station is up for sale.

The Federal Government has yet to decide whether or not to buy the property to help boost water flows in the Murray-Darling system.

{the alternative not considered, is bringing water over the flat lands from the Gulf rivers to the north}

Mayor Donna Stewart says Cubbie Station plays a vital role in the community.

"They're tremendous employers," she said.

"They employ many, many people and to my knowledge up to 250 when the seasons are right and to buy up Cubbie and close it down would just make matters worse and I think the Federal Government should be looking at more productivity not reducing it and closing it down."

(8) Country Alliance, new political party for Rural areas

http://www.countryalliance.org/policies.htm

Putting Regional Victoria first
The following are policies of Country Alliance that fit our values and objectives.

   1. Looking after our infrastructure
      - Telstra, Snowy Hydro ... what next ?

Country Alliance policy is to oppose the sale of major assets, such as Telstra, Medibank Private and the Snowy Hydro.

Unlike the other major parties, we have opposed the sale of all three from the start because they all provide basic and essential community services.

We elect Governments to manage our assets, not sell them.

Country Alliance believes that the sale of any major asset must not be allowed to happen unless previously approved by referendum. (6.5.06)

   2. Looking after the well-being of regional communities
      - Poker machines

Country Alliance is heartened by Western Australia's position of limiting poker machines to Perth's Burswood Casino and believes Victoria should follow a similar line.

Country Alliance's position is to limit poker machines to existing casinos and racing venues, and for the number of poker machines in those venues to be reviewed having regard to the impact on problem gambling.

We also believe poker machines should not be able to accept $50 notes, in the same way that they were previously limited from accepting $100. (6.5.06)

   3. Better policy decisions for regional Victoria
      - Decentralisation

Country Alliance supports the moving of management and policy staff of state and federal departments whose impact is on regional areas, to those areas.

At state level, Country Alliance supports the relocation of the head office of the Department of Sustainability and Environment to Ballarat, the relocation of the head office of the Department of Primary Industries to Bendigo, the head office of the Department of Infrastructure to Traralgon.

Country Alliance believes central agencies, and others including human services, education and justice have sufficient responsibilities in the metropolitan areas to justify their continued location in Melbourne. (6.5.06)

   4. Economic development, sustainable environment
      - Dept of Agriculture

Country Alliance believes the role of agriculture is of sufficient importance to justify the creation of a Department of Agriculture (currently residing within the Department of Primary Industries) based in Shepparton. (6.5.06)
 ...
  17. Sustainable environment, Looking after the well-being of regional communities
      - Firewood collection

Country Alliance supports the simplification of the permit system for the collection of fallen timber from public land. We believe:

   1. Collection of fallen timber should be allowed within 500 metres of a road or track in national parks and state forests with a permit;

   2. Owners and occupiers of private properties which adjoin national and state parks should be able to collect fallen timber within 500 metres of their property for domestic use without the need for a permit; ...