These quotes are from the Telegraph. You can download all the emails on Megaupload or have a glance at them on this forum.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Lauren Johnson is a typical 12-year-old girl – except that she can’t stop sneezing. It is so bad that she sneezes up to 20 times a minute, or 12,000 times a day. The non-stop sneezing began two weeks ago when Lauren from Virginia in the U.S. caught a cold.

Lauren can’t go to school and is even struggling to eat. The only relief she gets is when she falls asleep each night. Her condition has left doctors baffled.

Fewer than one in eight British men (12 per cent) and just three in 20 women (15 per cent) who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted as members.

Existing members of the website rate how attractive potential members are over a 48 hour provisional period, when applicants upload a recent photograph and a short personal profile.

They are rated by members of the opposite sex, who have four options to describe how attractive they think the hopeful is – ‘Yes definitely’, ‘Hmmm yes, OK’, ‘Hmmm no, not really’ and ‘NO definitely NOT’.

Swedish men have proved the most successful applicants, with two-thirds (65 per cent) of those putting themselves forward being accepted.

Norwegian women are considered the most beautiful with more than three-quarters (76 per cent) making the grade.

Since the website was opened to UK members 295,000 people have applied, with only 35,000 being approved.

The website was founded in 2002 in Denmark and since then it has spread to other countries – becoming available in the UK in April 2005.

The ‘elite dating site for beautiful people only’, went live across the globe on 26 October this year. Over the past two weeks, the site has rejected nearly 1.8 million people from 190 countries.

Yeah, I realize Mike Myers is Canadian. But Austin Powers is a British character, so he stays.

(Click photo to enlarge.)

I saw this yesterday at the Airport, with the version in French being right beside this poster.

Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported.

The unusually early snow blanketed the capital from Sunday morning and kept falling for half the day, helped by temperatures as low as minus 2 Celsius (29 Fahrenheit) and strong winds from the north, Xinhua news agency reported.

“We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” the report quoted Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, as saying.

That’s how they’re going to shut it down:

The Pentagon will offer the H1N1 vaccination to detainees at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, officials there said Friday.

The Pentagon made the decision based on U.S. government assessments that people held in detention facilities are at high risk for the pandemic, said Maj. Diana R. Haynie, a spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, which is in charge of holding the suspected terrorists.

The vaccination is mandatory for all uniformed personnel, she said. The vaccinations will be voluntary for the detainees, who will be briefed on the virus and the vaccine prior to deciding whether to receive the latter.

Some of the detainees have already voluntarily taken the seasonal flu shot, Haynie said.

The “Bush is dumb” meme was always unfair. Those who’ve known him, and not just his loyalists, have always disputed such a characterization. First off, something I didn’t know, “Bush scored a 1200 on the SAT (roughly equaling 1300 on today’s re-normed SAT), placing him in the top 16% of all college applicants.” We also know he had better grades than the smarter-seeming John Kerry at Yale…the best estimate of Bush’s IQ at 120-125, in the top 10% of the population and above average for a college graduate — about the same as estimated for Eisenhower and Ford.

The problem with Bush’s leadership style was never lack of intelligence. It was something much closer to intellectual laziness or lack of curiosity. As the authors put it: “Critics charge that President Bush does not seek out information or opposing viewpoints; disdains complexity, nuances, and expert opinion; views policy issues in black-and-white terms based on his own preconceptions; and, refuses to rethink problems or change his views. The research largely bears out these popular perceptions.”

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

iRobot’s soft, shape-shifting robot blob can roll around and change shape.