LAWYERSCHILE EL MUNDO INTERNACIONAL DEL ABOGADO

Rodrigo González Fernández y un grupo de egresados de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad la Republica en Chile ha decidido poner al alcance de todo el mundo de la profesion legal importantes materias en Ingles para ir practicando el trabajo en materia de Tratados internacionales y que nuestra profesión estará en primera linea. Invitamos a todos a opinar, debatir, participar activamente.Es el primer blog legal en inglés de latinoamerica.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Roundup: Legal News Worth Noting

LAWYERSCHILE:

Roundup: Legal News Worth Noting

Lawyer denies infiltrating State Farm database. Former federal prosecutor denies wrongdoing in Katrina case.
Skycaps and waiters find a legal champion. Clients call Boston lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan "Sledgehammer Shannon."
O'Connor to hear cases as visiting judge to Hub court. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sits in at the 1st Circuit.
Lawyers would rather fly than download PGP. Has anyone told them about encryption?
China and Russia still piracy hotbeds. So says the U.S. trade representative in the annual policy agenda and report on IP protection.
Judicial candidates seek right to free speech. Project aims to help them participate in voter guides.
Lawyer sanctioned with order to write bar journal article. Judge gives lawyer six months to "publish or perish."
Ohio attorney general's office considering new e-mail policy. Follows reports of "overly informal, sometimes profanity-laced workplace."

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 29, 2008 at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scalia's Write Hand Man

For all the buzz surrounding the 60 Minutes interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one might overlook the fact that this was not his only interview. For example, NPR's legal affairs reporter Nina Totenberg broadcast a three-part interview with Scalia this week. (Part one, part two, part three.) And in the May issue of the ABA Journal, reporter Richard Brust has his own sitdown with Scalia, who is joined in the interview by Bryan A. Garner, co-author of the reason for all these interviews, their new book, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

Garner made a cameo appearance in the 60 Minutes piece, but the ABA Journal interview gives him more of his due. Garner, after all, is the guru of legal writing, the man The New York Times once called, "the persnickety stylist for a linguistically challenged profession." The author of several books on legal writing, he runs LawProse, a company that trains lawyers to be better communicators, and is editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary. His collaboration with Scalia grew out of his earlier project, in which he interviewed eight of the nine Supreme Court justices about legal writing and advocacy and posted the interviews online.

The ABA Journal interviewer talks to Scalia and Garner together and also provides an excerpt from the book and a podcast of the interview. When asked about the legal writers he most respects, Garner answers, "My own heroes there are Charles Alan Wright, author of Federal Practice and Procedure; I love the writing of Grant Gilmore, the great Yale law professor; and Lon Fuller, the Harvard philosopher of law."

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 29, 2008 at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of Virgins and Christians and Net Neutrality

Whatever your position on net neutrality, you have to admit, the debate is getting weird. Witness two items making the rounds of the blogosphere, one tying advocacy for net neutrality to a presidential candidate's supposed denigration of Christians, and the second involving an advocate's promise to deflower every virgin who joins her campaign.

For the first item, we turn to the conservative news blog Redstate, which recently posted a story under the headline, "Obama and Google's Mutual Adviser: Jesus is gay, wears a diaper, and gets run over." The "mutual adviser" in question is none other than Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who Redstate says "really could care less that so many of us revere Jesus." Its evidence is a video, Jesus Christ: The Musical, showing Jesus dancing down a street, lip-syncing to the Gloria Gaynor disco classic "I Will Survive," before being hit by a bus. Given that Lessig supports Barack Obama, Redstate reasons, this somehow links the candidate to denigration of Christianity. More to the point, it proves ... well, something about the net neutrality debate. (Read the post for yourself and try to decipher exactly where it comes down.)

Of course, Lessig had nothing to do with producing the video. Rather, as Ars Technica explains, he showed the video during a recent lecture he gave at Google about copyright and "remix culture." The maker of the film, Javier Prato, is being sued by the owner of the rights to Gaynor's song, and Lessig showed it to illustrate the tension between fair use and intellectual property. In his own response to Redstate, Lessig writes, "It will be interesting (in a root canal kind of way) to see how far or deep PC-ism runs in this society."

As if testing that very point, another supporter of net neutrality legislation has launched the Web site and campaign, Save the Internet ... Don't Stay a Virgin. Belgian Tania Derveaux is doing her part for net neutrality by issuing this promise: "I will make love with every virgin who defends the Internet." Here is how she explains it:

Net neutrality is paramount to safeguard free speech and innovation on the Internet. With only one arguably negative side-effect: an unusual amount of today's Internet users are virgin. That's a problem I intend to solve. In history, man has always waged war for freedom. Now it's time to obtain our freedom with love.

Before leaping to proclaim your support for net neutrality, be sure to review Derveaux's terms of service, which, among other things, requires proof of activity in defense of net neutrality and limits the encounter to "no longer than 30 minutes." Derveaux is spokesperson for the Belgian activist group I Power, and this is not the first time she has offered sexual favors in exchange for activism, MSNBC reports. In 2007, she ran as I Power's candidate in the Belgian general election, with a promise of 40,000 jobs, with "jobs" suggesting relief both economic and of another sort.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 29, 2008 at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American Lawyer Launches New Site

Tomorrow brings the release of the Am Law 100, The American Lawyer magazine's annual ranking of the nation's largest law firms by revenue. This year, the release will also bring the official launch of the magazine's redesigned Web site. While much of the new site is already up and running, tomorrow's debut is slated to feature extended coverage of the Am Law 100 rankings, including Web-exclusive charts that will project firms' profitability through 2025. An announcement last week gave this overview of the site:

The new site will feature daily news coverage of the legal business, including breaking news reporting on developments at the world's leading law firms, and on the lawyers and professionals working in and with those firms. News will be spotlighted in The Am Law Daily, focusing each day on topics related to 'The Firms,' 'The Talent,' 'The Work,' 'The Management,' 'The Score' and 'The Life.'

Online subscribers and registered users will receive a free daily e-newsletter highlighting top stories. A second e-newsletter, focused on litigation news, will launch in June. The site will also feature full access to each month's print issue and a searchable content archive of past issues. Current issues and the site archives will be available free to registered users until July 31.

Depending on when you are reading this, you may still be able to catch today's free webinar in which Aric Press, editor-in-chief of The American Lawyer, will give a preview of the Am Law 100 results. The 15-minute webinar is at 3 p.m. Eastern time and requires advance registration.

The American Lawyer is, of course, owned by ALM, which also owns Law.com and the blog you are reading, Legal Blog Watch. For anyone interested in reading more about ALM's future, in print and online, I recommend Rob La Gatta's interview with ALM's CEO William L. Pollak, published at the blog Real Lawyers Have Blogs. Among other points, Pollak says that the Web has leveled the field between journalists and readers:

In the pre-web era the paradigm was simple -- editors figured out what was important, presented it to the reader, and the reader took it in. Now, there is much more back-and-forth, and much more user participation in the process of news gathering and analysis. Journalists may still be subject-matter experts on various topics, and their voice may be one which readers still want to hear. But the journalist now has to listen and react to users in a more direct way, and can no longer assume that their word will be the last heard on a given topic.

Pollak also talks about RSS feeds, the Law.com Blog Network, and the future of ALM's print publications.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 29, 2008 at 09:05 AM | Permalink |

Consulten, opinen y escriban
Saludos
Rodrigo González Fernández
DIPLOMADO EN RSE DE LA ONU
www.Consultajuridicachile.blogspot.com
www.lobbyingchile.blogspot.com
www.el-observatorio-politico.blogspot.com
www.biocombustibles.blogspot.com
Renato Sánchez 3586
teléfono: 5839786
e-mail rogofe47@mi.cl
Santiago-Chile

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Friday, April 25, 2008

LEGAL WATCH BLOG

'Green' Trademarks -- A Sign of More Green From Environmental Businesses

How can you tell that environmental business is the next dot-com? Look no further than the number of green trademark applications filed -- nearly 300,000 in 2007, according to this story at Sustainable Life Media. Use of the word "green" dominated applications, appearing in 2,400. Other top usages included:

Clean : 900 applications, up from 800 in 2006
Earth : 900, up from from 550 in 2006
Eco : 900 applications, more than doubling in number from 2006
Organic : 700 applications, up 57 percent over 2006
Environment : 450 applications, up from 325 in 2006
Friendly : 180 applications, up 88 percent over 2006

As the story points out, the term "green" is not particularly distinctive and thus, many of the applications may not result in the grant of a trademark.

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Posted by Carolyn Elefant on April 24, 2008 at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Suing for China, the American Way

CNN is discovering the hard way that there's a major difference between Chinese and American visions of justice -- and restitution. As reported in Reuters, a group of Chinese lawyers have filed suit against CNN in Beijing, alleging that derogatory remarks by commentator Jack Cafferty violated the dignity and reputation of the Chinese people. During a discussion over the spate of recalls of goods manufactured in China, Cafferty termed Chinese products "junk," and added that "They are basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." CNN has since claimed that Cafferty was expressing an opinion of the Chinese government and not the people of China. The Chinese lawyers bringing suit sought the restoration of the Chinese people's reputation through publications and in the media and asked for 100 yuan ($14.31) in damages.

What a difference a forum makes, however. Today, Reuters reports that a Chinese primary school teacher and a beautician have filed a suit against CNN in New York over Cafferty remarks. As damages, they are seeking $1.3 billion in compensation -- $1 per person in China. (In case you're wondering whether $1.3 billion in the United States has the same purchase power as 100 yuan in China, it doesn't -- according to this item, 500 yuan is the price of a dog).

I'm not sure how the Chinese primary school teacher and beautician have standing to sue on behalf of persons in China, given that they don't live there. But who cares about technicalities when reputation is at stake? Ironic, though that those outside of China appear to place a higher value on damage to the reputation of the Chinese than those living in the country.

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Posted by Carolyn Elefant on April 24, 2008 at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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'Armenia: April 24 -- Genocide Memorial Day'

'Armenia: April 24 -- Genocide Memorial Day'
by Onnik Krikorian

Yesterday marked the 93rd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. Often described as the first Genocide of the 20th Century, the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin invented the term in the 1940s with the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts in mind.

Every year on 24 April, a date marking the roundup of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in what is now Istanbul, Armenians commemorate the massacres and deportations worldwide. In Yerevan, this is particularly the case with hundreds of thousands marching up to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial overlooking the capital to lay flowers and pay their respects.

This year was no different, but as my Caucasus Knot describes, the event started the night before with a candlelight procession by youth affiliated to the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation -- Dashnaktsutyun (ARF-D) holding their own march.

[T]housands of young Armenians affiliated with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashnaktsutyun (ARF-D) assembled in Yerevan's Liberty Square before embarking on a now traditional candlelight procession to the memorial overlooking the capital. Of course, this being the most nationalist of commemorative events, the Turkish flag was doused in petrol and set alight first. Interestingly, but not convincingly at all, Armenian Public Radio

You may view the latest post at
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/04/25/armenia-april-24-genocide-memorial-day/

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

LEGAL WATCH BLOG

SI ERES LITIGANTE CHILENO EN EEUU LEE ESTE BLOG

Survey Ranks West Virginia Courts Worst

Congratulations to West Virginia. It's spot stands secure as the worst state in which to be sued. So says Lawsuit Climate 2008, the annual ranking of state liability systems published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. West Virginia ranked 50 out of 50 for the third straight year, according to this announcement, and "has languished near the bottom of the rankings" since they began seven years ago. At the top of the list, as it is every year, is Delaware, described as "first among all fifty states in the fairness of its litigation environment."

The survey is conducted for ILR by the market research firm Harris Interactive. Harris asked nearly 1,000 in-house counsel and senior corporate litigators to evaluate up to five states in which they were familiar with the litigation environment. Based on their responses, Harris added up the scores and assigned each state a ranking. The five states with the most favorable litigation environments for business, the survey concluded, are:

Delaware
Nebraska
Maine
Indiana
Utah

The five worst (starting with number 50) are:

West Virginia
Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Illinois

A state's ranking, the survey notes, may not reflect the "nuances" of its various courts. "For example, several studies have documented very high litigation activity in certain county courts such as Madison County, Illinois and Jefferson County, Texas, revealing that these counties have 'magnet courts' that are extremely hospitable to plaintiffs."

Over at opposing counsel's table, the American Association for Justice called the report "phony" and "propaganda." "U.S. Chamber's goal is to make sure people can't get justice in the courtroom, especially against the corporations that finance this front group," said AAJ CEO Jon Haber. AAJ has put together a response to the ILR report, The Truth About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Further reading: Chamber survey on state 'legal climates' draws flak from plaintiffs' attorneys.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 23, 2008 at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jet Maker Subpoenas Blog Critics

In the latest case of corporation-versus-blog, the manufacturer of a line of "affordable" jets is seeking to uncover the identity of persons who posted critical comments on an aviation industry blog. Eclipse Aviation has served a subpoena on Google Inc. seeking to out the identities of more than two dozen people who have posted anonymous comments to the blog Eclipse Aviation Critic NG, which is hosted on Google's Blogger service.

According to the aviation-industry news site AINonline, the president and CEO of the Albuquerque, N.M., company, Vern Raburn, claims that lies posted by the anonymous commentators have irreparably damaged his company. But AINonline adds that "the blog hasn't been far off the mark on several occasions," indicating that some of the anonymous posters could be Eclipse employees.

Meanwhile, the operator of the blog, Shane Price of Dublin, Ireland, tells another industry news site, AVwebBiz, that he is "feeling left out" because he was not personally named in the subpoena. He says that Google told him it would give Eclipse the requested information unless it is notified by May 9 that the anonymous posters intend to fight the action. According to news reports and comments on the blog, the posters do, indeed, intend to fight the subpoena and will file a motion to quash in the Santa Clara, Calif., Superior Court where it was filed.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 23, 2008 at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is This Law Firm Ad Unethical?

The Nixon Peabody quarter-page ad that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal showed a thoughtful-looking man above the headline, "I need lawyers who are more concerned about managing my risks than their own." Below that, the body of the ad said, "If your lawyers seem more concerned about enumerating your options than helping you choose among them, you might wonder whose interests are really being served."

The ad "really disturbed me," writes legal-marketing professional (and self-described contrarian) Bruce W. Marcus at his blog The Marcus Perspective. Why? Because he sees it as an example of the kind of dirty-tricks advertising that characterizes political campaigns seeping into the legal profession. Most law-firm advertising is bad and appears to be written by agencies that are clueless about the legal profession, Marcus contends.

But this one looks like it was written by someone trained in political dirty tricks advertising. Does the advertising law firm really thinks it has to insult the profession to make its point? Does it really need to put down other lawyers, as if they were opposing candidates in an election campaign?

The ad may raise ethical questions, Marcus believes, "but even before that is a question of professionalism and taste. I would be surprised if half the profession doesn't feel sullied by this ad."

The very tag line that concerns Marcus appears prominently on the Nixon Peabody home page and the firm's series of print ads is displayed elsewhere on the site. Marcus's comments point to a quandary firms face in their advertising. They are ethically prohibited from directly comparing themselves to other firms unless the comparison can be substantiated factually. At the same time, as competition among firms grows more intense, they must somehow distinguish themselves from the lawyers across the street. Of the four ads shown on the firm's Web site, only the one Marcus describes strikes me as getting too close to crossing the line. With a little rewriting, the ad could have made the same point with a bit more subtlety.

What do you think? Do these ads read like a dirty-tricks campaign? Or do they make legitimate points that fall short of comparisons?

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 23, 2008 at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like a Grunge Concert, Only With Lawyers

Lollapalooza made its debut in 1990 as a farewell concert for Jane's Addiction and gathered steam over the following years as a touring festival of grunge and alternative rock music. Given that grunge had its roots in Seattle, home to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, it is only fitting that Seattle should host the not-so-alternative lawyer version of Lollapalooza, a/k/a Lawyerpalooza.

That's right. Tomorrow at 5:30 p.m., various lawyers will shed their suits and briefcases, pick up their guitars and drumsticks, and demonstrate to Seattle that the legal profession rocks. Rock bands drawn from Seattle law firms will perform at The Showbox, all to raise money for elementary school music programs in the city. Performing will be bands No Rules from Karr Tuttle Campbell, HalfTimes from Robert Half Legal, Perkins Coie from (how'd you guess?) Perkins Coie LLP, Morris Can Fly from Lane Powell PC and McNaul Ebel Nawrot & Helgren PLLC, Ruby's Basement from Groff Murphy PLLC, Dave DeCordoba from Ryan Swanson & Cleveland PLLC, Garth Olson from Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt, and Eric Laschever Group from Stoel Rives LLP.

This will be the sixth Lawyerpalooza. It was founded by "a group of friends in the Seattle legal community who just wanted to stretch themselves creatively and have some fun." Among them were the lawyer members of the band The Big Lubersky, who are not performing this year but promise to be on hand to "poke good natured-fun at their fellow law-oriented musicians." Tickets to the event are $20 and anyone outside the Seattle area can contribute a donation through the Web site. Several businesses are also providing support: Robert Half Legal, Iron Mountain, Avvo and Dorsey & Whitney. As grunge icon Kurt Cobain might have said, "Come as you are" -- but lose the tie.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 23, 2008 at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

fron legal watch blog

Blawg Review Gets a Second Life

Benjamin Duranske hosts Blawg Review #156 this week at his blog Virtually Blind. Duranske writes about the law and its relation to virtual worlds such as Second Life at his blog and in his new book, Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, published by the American Bar Association. And since not everyone has as firm a grasp as Duranske on all this virtual stuff, he structures this Blawg Review as a set of questions and answers about virtual law. Here is your chance to learn all about avatars, 3D networked environments and "swamps of sexual content," all while catching up on the best in the week's blog posts.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 21, 2008 at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stickin' With My Suit, Goshdarnit!

The Internet Bubble and Casual Fridays were just the start of the slippery slope that led us to the wrinkled knit shirt of a mess we're in today. Not like the good ol' days, says Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice partner Pressly M. Millen, writing in The National Law Journal, when a suit was a suit and "colors ran the gamut from gray to blue." Today, he says, few law firms have the stomach to tell young lawyers that they should dress like lawyers. But Millen is bucking the trend and sticking to his suit:

Now, I often find myself the only one in the room -- and, sometimes, it's a big room -- who's dressed the way lawyers used to dress. But I've decided I don't care anymore. When I go to the doctor or dentist, he or she better be wearing a white lab coat. The meal tastes better somehow when the chef wears a white coat, apron and toque. I feel good when my auto mechanic is wearing a jumpsuit with his name stitched on the pocket.

My suit is my uniform. Like the robe and wig of the English barrister, it marks me off from the rest. I'm comfortable with that. And every morning I'll wake up and put on my uniform, just like that barrister's wig, with no complaints.

Of course, in those good ol' stuffed-shirt days, no respectable law firm would feature a bulldog and doghouse on the front page of its Web site, as Womble Carlyle does, let alone have a Web site. Yes, times have changed. But when it comes to meetings with clients or adversaries or other such occasions, I agree with Millen that lawyers should dress like lawyers.

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 21, 2008 at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Metadata: Read at Your Own Risk

Mining for metadata in documents received from opposing counsel is unethical, says a new ethics opinion from the New York County Lawyers' Association. "A lawyer who receives from an adversary electronic documents that appear to contain inadvertently produced metadata is ethically obligated to avoid searching the metadata in those documents," the opinion concludes. The opinion is notable for its disagreement with a 2006 American Bar Association Ethics Committee opinion that reached the opposite conclusion, permitting review of metadata in documents opposing counsel sends electronically. Instead, the NYCLA ethics committee sides with the New York State Bar Association, which found that a lawyer may not ethically use technology to "surreptitiously examine" electronic documents.

This Committee finds that the NYSBA rule is a better interpretation of the Code's disciplinary rules and ethical considerations and New York precedents than the ABA's opinion on this issue. Thus, this Committee concludes that when a lawyer sends opposing counsel correspondence or other material with metadata, the receiving attorney may not ethically search the metadata in those electronic documents with the intent to find privileged material or if finding privileged material is likely to occur from the search.

The opinion adds two caveats. First, it does not apply to e-discovery, where documents may contain metadata "that by agreement may be viewed by attorneys in the course of litigation." Second, it does not prohibit a lawyer from investigating metadata for purposes other than "to uncover attorney work product or client confidences or secrets."

For example, if a lawyer is facing a pro se litigant and suspects that a lawyer is nonetheless drafting the pleadings for the pro se litigant, the lawyer who searches the properties to see whether a lawyer has drafted the material is not likely to uncover attorney work product or client confidences or secrets and may not be intending to uncover such material because a pro se litigant does not have the attorney work product protection.

The opinion emphasizes that attorneys who are sending electronic documents to their adversaries have the responsibility "to take due care in appropriately scrubbing documents prior to sending them." But when an attorney neglects to scrub a document, opposing counsel may not "take advantage of the sending attorney's mistake and hunt for the metadata."

[Hat tip to Legalethics.com.]

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 21, 2008 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For BigLaw, Change is Good

At his blog Adam Smith, Esq., Bruce MacEwen reports from Georgetown Law School's symposium on the future of the global law firm, where an international assemblage of academics and law firm leaders considered global competition, ownership and capital structure, ethics and professional values, cultural dynamics and related issues. If he were to boil down the theme of the two-day conference to just one word, MacEwen says, it would be "change."

Lawyers are notoriously poor at coping with change. ... Yet change is in our futures, like it or not. More than once the observation was made that from the invention of the Cravath System around the turn of the 20th Century through about 1985, the profession looked remarkably stable, but that the last 20 years have seen revolutionary changes and the next decade promises further departures at least as radical as those we've just experienced.

If change is the theme for global firms, it is also the mantra of firms here in the United States, according to an article by Leigh Jones in today's National Law Journal. "Change is a good thing," Dechert chairman Barton J. Winokur tells Jones. In this case, the change taking place is the reshuffling under way in large law firms "as they move lawyers out of faltering practice areas into those that are less vulnerable -- or even thriving -- during the economic slump." But if change is good, it can also cause "some jitters" among the lawyers going through it, as a Thacher Proffitt & Wood partner told the NLJ.

Where is all this change leading? MacEwen writes that he has never before attended a conference at which "so many readily admitted to so few answers." But he is not concerned by that, believing that experimentation is at the core of entrepreneurship. "As I said in a prior life as CEO of a dot-com, 'mid-course corrections are my middle name.'"

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Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on April 21, 2008 at 10:

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess

by Patrick J. Michaels

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2008.

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resident George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.

Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further — by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy.

Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of environmental sciences at University of Virginia.

More by Patrick J. Michaels

Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall emissions by 66%.

The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.

For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.

These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce Department.

The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming — from largely the same data.

The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In 2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling the initial overall rate.

Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none.

There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small.

hy is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way.

The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don't do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects in land-surface temperatures — GDP per capita, among other things — exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.

Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.'s data when it's adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That's a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's history, and they probably never will be.

The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn't been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.

But every climatologist must know that Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland's ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.

Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, Arctic Riviera, published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.

The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming creates rivers, called moulins, that descend into the ice cap, lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth, there's a wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there."

Really? There's a photograph in the journal Arctic, published in 1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level.

Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?

This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes — raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice — we should be talking about reality.

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This splendid book provides the best account yet of how the Imperial Presidency, abetted by Democrats and Republicans alike, came to pose a clear and present danger to our republic."

This splendid book provides the best account yet of how the Imperial Presidency, abetted by Democrats and Republicans alike, came to pose a clear and present danger to our republic."
—ANDREW J. BACEVICH, Author, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

Dear Friends:

Listening to the current presidential candidates, it's become impossible for me not to wonder: what office are these people running for?

With one contender declaring that the president needs to "be ready on day one to be commander in chief of the US economy," and another stating we can "create a Kingdom here on Earth," while a third tells us that a great president "liberally interprets the constitutional authority of the office" and "nourishes the soul of a great nation," it seems to me something has gone terribly wrong.

The frustration I have been feeling for several years with the decaying state of presidential politics, and the seemingly endless growth of an Imperial Presidency, drove me to take action. It energized and inspired me to write my new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.

Today's vision of the president's role couldn't be further from what our Constitution's Framers intended. Their president wasn't an all-powerful soul-nourishing giant. Instead, the president was a limited constitutional officer with clearly defined powers charged with the faithful execution of the laws.


	AUTHOR BOOK TOUR Gene Healy is touring the United States speaking about his book in such cities as: San Francisco Phoenix Boston Chicago Washington, DC Portland, OR

Contrast that intention with what we hear from today's candidates, who sound as though they are seeking a position that's a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and supreme warlord of the earth. How has this happened?

As I demonstrate in The Cult of the Presidency, presidential contenders talk that way for a reason: Americans have come to see the president as a figure responsible for solving all our problems and fulfilling all our hopes and dreams. Is it any wonder then that the presidency has burst its constitutional bonds and grown powerful enough to threaten American liberty?

Using historical scholarship, legal analysis, and cultural commentary, my book traces the growth of the Imperial Presidency over the course of the 20th century, showing how the Imperial Presidency has been a regularly recurring feature of American life for nearly a century. George W. Bush has, in short, followed a path marked out by history's 'great' presidents.

We've set up a page about the book on the Cato website with more information and you will receive a 25% discount by entering the code "cultpres" when checking out.

Thank you for your support of the Cato Institute.

Sincerely,
Gene Healy

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Monday, April 21, 2008

NEW YOR TIMES: New Threat to Farmers: The Market Hedge

HE FOOD CHAIN

New Threat to Farmers: The Market Hedge

Kristen Schmid Schurter for The New York Times

Fred Grieder, a farmer near Bloomington, Ill., has more to worry about these days than hard work, crops and rain. If the market for commodities futures turns the wrong way, he could be wiped out.

By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

Published: April 21, 2008

Fred Grieder has been farming for 30 years on 1,500 acres near Bloomington, in central Illinois. That has meant 30 years of long days plowing, planting, fertilizing, and hoping that nothing happens to damage his crop.

Articles in this series are examining growing demands on, and changes in, the world's production of food.

Previous Articles in the Series »

"It can be 12 hours or 20 hours, depending," Mr. Grieder said.

But Mr. Grieder's days on the farm in Carlock, Ill., are getting even longer. He now has to keep a closer eye on the derivatives markets in Chicago, trying to hedge his risks so that he knows how much he will be paid in the future for crops he is planting now. And the financial tools he uses to make such bets are getting more expensive and less reliable.

In what little free time he has, Mr. Grieder attends Illinois Farm Bureau meetings to join other frustrated farmers who are lobbying officials in Chicago and Washington to fix a system that was designed half a century ago to reduce uncertainty for food producers but is now increasing it.

Mr. Grieder, 49, is shy about complaining amid so much prosperity. Prices for his crops are soaring on the updraft of growing worldwide demand, and a weak dollar is making those crops more competitive in global markets.

But today's crop prices are not just much higher, they also are much more volatile. For example, a widely used measure of volatility showed that traders in March expected wheat prices to swing up or down by more than 72 percent in the coming year, three times the average volatility for that month and the highest level since at least 1980. The price swing expected in March for soybeans was three times its monthly average, and the expected volatility in corn prices was twice its monthly average.

Those wild swings in expected prices are damaging the mechanisms — like futures contracts and options — that in the past have cushioned the jolts of farming, turning already-busy farmers into reluctant day-traders and part-time lobbyists.

One measure of the farming industry's frustration is the overflow crowd expected at apublic forum on Tuesday at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington. Interest is so high that the commission, for the first time ever, will provide a Webcast of the forum, which it says is being held to gather information about whether key markets for hedging the price of crops "are properly performing their risk management and price discovery roles." The Webcast link is available on the commission's Web site, www.cftc.gov.

The additional costs that stem from volatility in grain prices — higher crop insurance premiums, for example — are not just a problem for farmers. "Eventually, those costs are going to come out of the pockets of the American consumer," said William P. Jackson, general manager of AGRIServices, a grain-elevator complex on the Missouri River.

Prices of broad commodity indexes have climbed as much as 40 percent in the last year and grain prices have gained even more — about 65 percent for corn, 91 percent for soybeans and more than 100 percent for some types of wheat. This price boom has attracted a torrent of new investment from Wall Street, estimated to be as much as $300 billion.

Whether new investors are causing the market's problems or keeping them from getting worse is in dispute. But there is no question that the grain markets are now experiencing levels of volatility that are running well above the average levels over the last quarter-century.

Mr. Grieder's crop insurance premiums rise with the volatility. So does the cost of trading in options, which is the financial tool he has used to hedge against falling prices. Some grain elevators are coping with the volatility and hedging problems by refusing to buy crops in advance, foreclosing the most common way farmers lock in prices.

"The system is really beginning to break down," Mr. Grieder said. "When you see elevators start pulling their bids for your crop, that tells me we've got a real problem."

Until recently, that system had worked well for generations. Since 1959, grain producers have been able to hedge the price of their wheat, corn and soybean crops on the Chicago Board of Trade through the use of futures contracts, which are agreements to buy or sell a specific amount of a commodity for a fixed price on some future date.

More recently, the exchange has offered another tool: options on those futures contracts, which allow option holders to carry out the futures trade, but do not require that they do so. Trading in options is not as effective a hedge, farmers say, but it does not require them to put up as much cash as required to trade futures.

These tools have long provided a way to lock in the price of a crop as it is planted, eliminating the risk that prices will drop before it is harvested. With these hedging tools, grain elevators could afford to buy crops from farmers in advance, sometimes a year or more before the harvest.

But that was yesterday. It simply is not working that way today.

Futures, for example, are less reliable. They work as a hedge only if they fall due at a price that roughly matches prices in the cash market, where the grain is actually sold. Increasingly — for disputed reasons — grain futures are expiring at prices well above the cash-market price.

When that happens, farmers or elevator owners wind up owing more on their futures hedge than the crops are worth in the cash market. Such anomalies create uncertainty about which price accurately reflects supply and demand — a critical issue, since the C.B.O.T. futures price is the benchmark for grain prices around the world.

"I can't honestly sit here and tell you who is determining the price of grain," said Christopher Hausman, a farmer in Pesotum, Ill. "I've lost confidence in the Chicago Board of Trade."

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Friday, April 25, 2008

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess

Monday, April 21, 2008

New Threat to Farmers: The Market Hedge

The Food Chain