PRESTON BRADY 251.366.1222

prestonbrady@prucooper.com

Update 9:45 AM Tuesday.08/27/08

Passage over Haiti has weakened Gustav to TS status but once it enters the Gulf of Mexico it is expected to strengthen significantly. Although it is too soon to predict with good accuracy, the present track of the storm takes it to Louisiana/Mississippi state line . .  .Unfortunately there is no major warning in process to residents in these areas, although they have been told a strike is possible. What this typically indicates is that by the time residents are warned of a real possibility, they will have only a few days to react and this causes traffic jams and general confusion throughout the area. Since the storm is still so far off shore it could wobble or shift to the west or east . . but even now it is causing the price of oil to rise as investors expect oil rigs in the Gulf to shut down. Some companies indicate evacuations could begin as early as today. (MobileNews.org, Preston Brady)

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Greenhouse Gases Trapped in Arctic Soil

(Original source of report AFP, Paris. This article by Preston Brady , MobileNews.org, 08/24/08)

Every week we read of huge chunks of rock solid glaciers breaking apart from shelves, cracking, threatening to melt under "unusually" warm temps in the Arctic region of the world. Still, an impressive number of people - mostly politically conservative people and many of them from the United States - say hogwash to global warming and greenhouse gases. They make jokes about liberals and their carbon footprints and scary stories of the planet gradually then suddenly warming up immensely and causing thousands of problems with life and habitat. They just laugh and fill up the tank. One major question arises: just how much proof would a skeptic need to believe it could be true, that Earth as we know it is warming up at an alarming degree, that ice that shouldn't be melting is and that now, underneath thousands of acres of  ice in the Arctic is soil that has been tested and found to have extremely high content of carbon materials. Once exposed these carbon materials can become greenhouse gases and contribute strongly to global warming. Very strongly say some experts. One wonders just how many alarms must go off before more people will pay attention and work as a world to decrease emissions and hope that it's not to late. Right now in the USA talk of drilling for more oil is back in the news, this time even a few Democrats are softening their position. The greed of a small few may destroy the lives and world of the many, a classic tragedy but this time not fiction.

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