A new U.S. government report projects Iraq’s oil revenue will top a record $70 billion this year. It’s now time to have the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for rebuilding their country.

The report from Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen, which will be released today, highlights the windfall Iraq stands to reap this year because of soaring oil prices. The cost of a barrel of Iraqi oil has increased by 250% since 2003, and Iraq earned more than $18 billion from oil sales in the first quarter of 2008, the report found.

If Iraq is able to maintain its current levels of production and exports for the entire year, its oil revenue will be double what the Iraqi government had anticipated even a few months ago.

“Iraq’s oil income, forecasted in 2003 to be the primary pool of capital for post-war reconstruction, now has become the chief funding source,” the report found.

Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine), Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) and Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) are drafting legislation requiring future U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq to come in the form of loans, rather than grants.

“The time has come to end this blank-check policy and require the Iraqis to invest in their own future,” the senators wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The report noted Iraqi ministries in Baghdad spent 51% of their capital budgets for 2007, or about $4 billion. The figures were even lower at the provincial level, where local officials spent an average of 31% of their capital budgets.

The inspector general’s report, based on data from American officials monitoring the industry in Baghdad, highlighted two records: Exports for March averaged slightly more than two million barrels a day, the highest average since the start of the war. And production for February hit a high of 2.5 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. data.

The report also found Iraq’s output in the last two quarters held steady at 2.38 million barrels a day.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Enjoying the frost on your early April garden? Enjoying the cold rain storms followed by forecasts of an “icy mix”? Ahhhhhhhh Spring following by one of the coldest years in recent memory.

Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut. Here are some points from Mr. Chapman on global warming and the coming ice age:

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.

Mr. Chapman’s Solution:

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.

For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.

We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.

Reality:

The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.

All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.

In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Indeed!

Source: The Australian

John McCain (R-AZ) said he would run a respectful campaign for President but does the Senator actually believe he will get the same courtesy in return?

Mr. McCain was part of the ridiculously finance reform law known as McCain-Feingold, which was a form of censorship during elections. McCain-Feingold has come back to bite McCain in the pocketbook.

Sen. McCain demanded that the North Carolina Republican Party pull a TV ad using statements from Barack Obama’s controversial pastor Jeremy Wright Jr., calling last Thursday for all GOPers in the state to echo his call and repudiate their own leadership.

“I cannot in my role dictate to the North Carolina Republican Party what their message is but I can condemn it,” McCain said.

“I can appeal to the overwhelming majority of Republicans in North Carolina who also repudiate that kind of activity and I am calling on them to repudiate the people the small handful of people that have refused to understand that we are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and that party–that Republican Party–there is no room for this kind of activity.”

McCain made the statement condemning an ad he had not seen. The Democrats were all over the ad complaining and asking for “leadership” from McCain.

Meanwhile, more inflammatory remarks by Rev. Wright from past sermons are coming to light, and he has taken to explaining away everything as “soundbites” taken out of context. On Sunday, John McCain said Rev. Wright’s commentary is likely to be “a political issue.” The Obama campaign cracked back that Mr. McCain had broken his word to run a “respectful campaign.”

Mr. McCain better get his flack jacket on, or better yet, a rain suit because this is simply the beginning of Democrat mudslinging.

The Republican National Committee demanded Monday that television networks stop running a television ad by the Democratic Party that falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq.

The ad says President Bush has talked about staying in Iraq for 50 years, and then plays a clip of McCain saying, “Maybe 100. That’d be fine with me.”

The GOP should develop some intestinal fortitude and possibly some other parts of the anatomy and be prepared for election war. Politics is a contact sport and if Mr. McCain thinks playing nice works both ways he is doomed in November.

Mr. McCain spoke on Sunday about remarks made by Barack Hussein Obama’s spiritual advisor, Rev. Wright, saying it was “beyond belief” that Mr. Wright had likened the Romans at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion to the Marines and had suggested that the United States was acting like Al Qaeda under a different color flag.

Mr. McCain took a different approach at a news conference when he criticized Mr. Wright for, as the senator paraphrased him, “comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior, I mean being involved in that” and for “saying that Al Qaeda and the American flag were the same flags.”

While McCain was standing around trying to explain his comments and “apologize” to the other side the Obama campaign went into attack mode accusing McCain of breaking a campaign promise.

However, Mr. Obama had made the subject fair play by declaring in an interview shown over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday” that questions about Mr. Wright were “a legitimate political issue.” Legitimate only if Obama and his surrogates talk about Rev. Wright, for the rest of us it’s not fair game and racist.

Mr. McCain had better regroup and understand he is now covered in mud but by November 5th he may be covered in election blood. Indeed!