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Beijing Getting Thirsty

(July 8, 2010) ‘Dashengzhuang, in Xihongmen town in Beijing’s Daxing district, has guards at its entrance and people are only allowed in after showing a pass which includes the holder’s name, sex, ethnic background, hometown, occupation, identity card number and mobile phone number. The village is closed between 11pm and 6am.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Climate Change

(July 19, 2010) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing its Fifth Assessment Report, with the input of 831 experts selected from among 3,000 nominations. As Andy Revkin reports on Dot Earth, these 831 experts have been sent a letter from IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri which, without mentioning ClimateGate by name, acknowledges the very charged atmosphere surrounding the media’s portrayal of climate science.

Bad politics

(July 17, 2010) A few week ago the U.S. National Academy of Sciences published a paper that claimed to have found evidence that scientists who support official climate change theory are vastly more numerous and expert than scientists who do not. Those who do not, often called skeptics or deniers, were said to be in such a minority as to be insignificant in number, making up only 2% or 3% of climate scientists. That tiny fraction of climate scientists was found to have much weaker levels of scientific "credibility" and "expertise."

Before the crisis: When Beijing was rich with water

(July 16, 2010) In “Daxing County’s Water Gone Forever,” the eleventh in a series of oral histories produced by a team of investigative environmental historians and water experts in Beijing and led by China’s prize-winning journalist Dai Qing and Probe International, Li Zhenwe, a former engineer at the water bureau in the Beijing’s southern Daxing County talks about his childhood in one of the county villages where annual floods and a surfeit of water were once an integral part of village life.