More science? More on emissions or energy or economics? Tell us where we should we take the FAQs next • FAQ homepage • Read about the project Five months ago, we launched The ultimate climate change FAQ with an aim to build up an archive of answers to lessen the confusion surrounding global warming. Unlike most of the other background guides out there, we wanted the answers to be both accurate and lay-friendly, and to cover not just science but the whole topic, including impacts, economics, emissions sources, energy technologies and international negotiations. More than 750 of you have already submitted the questions that you’d like to see answered and although we’ve got a very long way to go, we have now dealt with many of the most frequently requested topics. The resulting collection of Q&As is, I hope, starting to grow into a genuinely useful resource. The answers so far have covered subjects ranging from big-picture background ( What exactly is the climate? , Are humans definitely causing global warming? ) and scientific context ( What is the carbon cycle? , How do volcanoes affect the climate? ) through to possible impacts ( Will rising seas put cities such as New York and London under water? , Will climate change cause wars? ), societal responses ( What is the economic cost of climate change? , What is the Kyoto protocol and has it made any difference? ) and proposed solutions ( What is carbon capture and storage? , What is geo-engineering? ). You can see a full list of questions and answers, arranged by topic, here . We feel the project is going well – and plenty of you are reading and sharing each article – but we’d love to get your feedback. And we want to know where you think we should be putting our energy going forward. More science? More impacts? More on emissions or energy or economics? Give us your thoughts in the comments thread below or – if you have a specific question that you’d like to see answered – submit it using the form under this post. The FAQ was designed to be a collaborative project, not just between Guardian readers and journalists, but also partners such as the Met Office (whose experts have been fact-checking our science questions) and the members of the Guardian Environment Network , who have been providing some of the content. We’ve also partnered with Rough Guides to reproduce some content from Bob Henson’s Rough Guide to Climate Change . If you think there’s a brilliant potential partner that we should be hooking up with – or indeed a way that the growing body of content could be more widely distributed – then let us know about that, too. We hope in the end that this resource will be useful far beyond the Guardian’s own site. Climate change Duncan Clark guardian.co.uk
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Digital Outreach is helping marginalised communities to get online. Chief executive Ian Agnew explains why it matters At a sheltered housing complex in Skelmersdale, residents are enjoying their daily coffee morning in the communal lounge. Normally this is a chance for people to catch up with each other’s news but today is different. Today the conversation turns to dongles. Eleven elderly residents crowd around a laptop with their cups of coffee while a local volunteer plugs in a dongle. They learn how to use price comparison websites and send emails. Soon they are using Google Earth to look at a relative’s home in Australia. Most of the residents at this sheltered housing scheme would never have tried the web if this session hadn’t been brought to their coffee morning. The majority are over 75 and many have mobility problems. Seeking out opportunities to get online, be that at the local computer centre or library, just isn’t an option. Some are fearful as they lack computer skills and have worries about online security. Others just don’t see the internet as relevant to them. Over in Manchester, Anne who is 64, lives in Tameside Court, a sheltered housing complex for people over 50. She attends the Ladies Friendship Group and twice a week they meet for bingo. Anne went online for the first time at her bingo night – in between games. She admits she wouldn’t have tried the internet had the taster session not been brought to her group. Having the class take place in the building where she lives made her feel more comfortable as she was learning alongside people she knows. Like most of her fellow bingo players, Anne didn’t think the internet could offer her anything. But Clare Planter, who delivered the web session to residents, knows the Ladies Friendship Group well and the class focused on things they like such as online brain games and staying in touch with family. Clare works for Hattersley and Mottram Community Media . Like hundreds of voluntary sector organisations around the country, HMCM was engaged by social enterprise Digital Outreach to get local older people online. This model of mobilising the trusted voluntary sector to communicate messages is one that Digital Outreach had already used effectively to raise awareness of digital TV switchover amongst 600,000 older and disabled people. With 9 million people in the UK still offline, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills asked Digital Outreach to test whether this model could be used to boost web use. During the Get Connected, Get Online project, web taster sessions were delivered to more than 1,142 people at existing community events. Many of these sessions took place at social housing schemes – from residents’ meetings to domino clubs and keep fit groups. The results speak for themselves. Over 77% of participants reacted positively to the session when it was delivered by someone they already knew. Some 62% reported that having the session take place as part of their group meeting encouraged them to find out more about the web, while 64% said that taking part in the Get Connected, Get Online session helped them to see the personal benefits of the internet. Six months on and Digital Outreach revisited the project to test its longevity. Researchers found that even after the programme had finished, session leaders who had been trained to give people information about the web were continuing to encourage a wide range of groups to get online. This was particularly prevalent in social housing schemes, where there is often a strong network of community organisations working with residents. By training voluntary sector staff who regularly visit sheltered housing complexes and other local groups, support to get online remained in the community for many months after the project had finished. This ability to embed knowledge and support within trusted voluntary sector networks holds the key to changing people’s attitudes to the internet and getting the final third of the population online. Ian Agnew is chief executive of Digital Outreach This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more like this direct to your inbox. Housing network blog Tenants guardian.co.uk
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There is no more personal, and flexible, literary form – and we need more of them What is an essay? For most people the word conjures up memories of the things you were forced to write at school by people like Miss Peecher the teacher , in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, whose essays were “always according to rule”. Yet in fact the essay is one of the least rule-bound forms in literary history, a genre that can encompass everything from the 600 pages of systematic philosophy in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the handful of paragraphs which make up GK Chesterton’s freewheeling mini-masterpiece, A Piece of Chalk . Ben Jonson may have dismissed the essay as “a few loose paragraphs and that’s all”, but its history shows it to have been the most elastic of forms, able to incorporate all sorts of prose – and indeed, in the case of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, poetry. For the Viennese modernist Robert Musil , Essayismus was much more than a literary form: it was both a philosophy of life and an epistemology; a way of making provisional sense of experience in a fragmentary world. Zadie Smith pointed to something similar when – in a Guardian article in 2009 – she called the essay the prose form which can best reflect ” messy reality “. Though the essay constantly resists definition – and has never accrued a corpus of academic critical commentary like that given to, say, the novel – it is unusual among literary forms in that its birth can be traced to a single moment and a single man: Montaigne , whose Essaies first appeared in 1580, arguably heralding the birth of the modern idea of the author as subject (in both senses). The word meant, literally, an “assay”, a trail or test or even “experiment”. Whatever Miss Peecher may have thought, the essay has, over its history, remained a defiantly individual form, a space outside institutional authority or generic constraints. Montaigne used the essay as an arena in which to observe his own mind at work. The great Romantic essayists – Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle – used it to assert the value of the individual human voice in a world increasingly felt to be dominated by “abstraction”. For Emerson the essay was “man thinking” . Wilde and Beerbohm used it to subvert conventional values, while for Orwell – whose essays in Tribune appeared under the banner ” As I Please ” – it embodied his own rigorous anti-authoritarianism. The essay is the ultimate outsider genre. If it is making a comeback, it may be that, in our age of information overload, there is a hunger among readers for the individual voice. Michel de Montaigne guardian.co.uk
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NPR anchor Steve Inskeep denied NPR’s liberal bias in The Wall Street Journal in March: “Most listeners understand that we're all figuring out the world together, calmly and honestly, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. NPR's audience keeps expanding because Americans want more than toxic political attacks. They want news.” But that’s not really the case. On Tuesday, the Journal’s James Taranto cited an April 28 All Things Considered interview with former Washington Post reporter David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, where mutual respect wasn’t on the menu: Donald Trump, who wanted to make a name for himself yet again, and to – he's the kind of exhibitionist, a moral or immoral exhibitionist. And he was willing to play this really ugly game and he got exactly what he wanted — higher TV ratings, attention, lots of microphones in front of him. And he's a clown. Remnick sounded like a garden-variety left-wing radio talker like Randi Rhodes or Ed Schultz. He was furious that anyone would attempt to “delegitimate” his hero Obama. Taranto mined this interview for his theory that “The Left Needs Racism”: [W]e wouldn't say we “deny” that the birthers are racist. Some of them may be. Our position is simply that it is wrong to throw around such accusations without evidence. Yet prominent liberals have been doing just that. Last week in an interview with NPR, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and author of the Obama hagiography “The Bridge,” had this to say about Donald Trump's birtherian antics: He's race-baiting. He's hatemongering. It's very clear what he's doing. He's trying to arouse half-buried feelings in many people that are unfortunately still there….Just as everybody thinks that they have a sense of humor, no one ever thinks that they're a racist. But I–my concern here, my fiercest words are for the people who do the active arousing of these feelings, that there are latent racial anxieties or feelings about otherness, or whatever they may–we know that. “No one ever thinks they're a racist”–including, it is safe to surmise, David Remnick. For him, white guilt is directed outward; he is certain that other people are racist. His “evidence” is the assertion that they have “feelings” that are “half buried” and “latent.” Could we get The New Yorker's storied fact-checking department to confirm that, please? Baselessly accusing their political foes of racism is a way in which today's liberals attempt to incite fear and loathing of “the other.” As we argued last year, this serves a political purpose in that it helps persuade blacks not to consider voting Republican. But it serves a psychological purpose as well. It reinforces white liberals' sense of their own superiority. Yet that sense of superiority is not as secure as it once was. Here is Remnick's most telling quote from that interview: “Really, I'm not in the habit of screaming racist at every turn. I don't think you [interviewer Michele Norris] are and I don't think most people are.” It used to be that people expressing politically incorrect views about race felt compelled to preface their statements with a defensive denial: “I'm not a racist, but…” The editor of The New Yorker, speaking to an NPR audience, now has a similar compulsion to deny that he is “in the habit of screaming racist.” The tables have turned. Now it is the left that is on the defensive over “racism.” Their outdated attitudes about race put them in the absurd position of arguing that the most powerful man in the world is a victim of oppression because of the color of his skin. Men like David Remnick turn out to be the ones who aren't ready for a black president.
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Venture is latest stage in online retailer’s growing expansion into publishing its own titles Amazon.com has announced plans to move further into publishing with the launch of a new romance imprint, Montlake Romance, “bringing readers the freshest, most innovative and compelling love stories possible”. Montlake, named after a neighbourhood in central Seattle, is the online retailer’s fourth imprint, following its flagship venture Amazon Encore, literature in translation imprint Amazon Crossing and bestselling author Seth Godin’s The Domino Project, “a series of manifestos by thought leaders”. Launching in November with the award-winning writer Connie Brockway’s The Other Guy’s Bride – in which a budding archaeologist in turn-of-the-century Egypt poses as another man’s fiancée – Montlake will publish across the romantic fiction spectrum, from romantic suspense to paranormal romance and fantasy. The “broad range” of new titles will be available to readers in North America in print, Kindle and audio formats from Amazon’s website and from bookshops in the US. “Romance is one of our biggest and fastest-growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers, so we can’t wait to make The Other Guy’s Bride and other compelling titles available to romance fans around the world,” said Amazon Publishing vice president Jeff Belle, announcing the news. Brockway said the new imprint was giving her “the opportunity to write romances that capture the imagination as well as the heart and I’m thrilled to invite readers to join me on this exhilarating journey. There are so many stories I’ve been dying to tell you, and people you simply have to meet.” Amazon.com is also looking into launching imprints focusing on other fiction genres, including mystery, science fiction and thrillers, according to US books magazine Publishers Weekly , and is recruiting staff to increase its publishing presence. “We also know our customers enjoy genre fiction of all kinds, so we are busy building publishing businesses that will focus on additional genres as well,” said Belle. The Bookseller’s news editor Graeme Neill said that Amazon was “definitely becoming more aggressive in its publishing business”, pointing to the news last month that the online retailer “came close to winning a multi-million dollar auction for self-published author Amanda Hocking , the first time it has bid on a frontlist title”, and to its new hiring strategy. “If you go onto Amazon’s website, they are currently hiring acquisition editors, publicists, marketing staff. This is something they weren’t looking at several years ago,” he said. The move into romance is a good one for Amazon, he added, particularly digitally, as “romance and crime readers were the first to really buy into ebooks, so Amazon having its own romance imprint makes a lot of sense as it will only sell its romance ebooks through its own Kindle e-reader”. Publishers, however, will be eyeing the retailer’s increased publishing presence uneasily. “Publishers will be concerned Amazon is increasingly encroaching on what they see as ‘their’ business,” said Neill. Publishing Amazon.com Internet E-commerce Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Venture is latest stage in online retailer’s growing expansion into publishing its own titles Amazon.com has announced plans to move further into publishing with the launch of a new romance imprint, Montlake Romance, “bringing readers the freshest, most innovative and compelling love stories possible”. Montlake, named after a neighbourhood in central Seattle, is the online retailer’s fourth imprint, following its flagship venture Amazon Encore, literature in translation imprint Amazon Crossing and bestselling author Seth Godin’s The Domino Project, “a series of manifestos by thought leaders”. Launching in November with the award-winning writer Connie Brockway’s The Other Guy’s Bride – in which a budding archaeologist in turn-of-the-century Egypt poses as another man’s fiancée – Montlake will publish across the romantic fiction spectrum, from romantic suspense to paranormal romance and fantasy. The “broad range” of new titles will be available to readers in North America in print, Kindle and audio formats from Amazon’s website and from bookshops in the US. “Romance is one of our biggest and fastest-growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers, so we can’t wait to make The Other Guy’s Bride and other compelling titles available to romance fans around the world,” said Amazon Publishing vice president Jeff Belle, announcing the news. Brockway said the new imprint was giving her “the opportunity to write romances that capture the imagination as well as the heart and I’m thrilled to invite readers to join me on this exhilarating journey. There are so many stories I’ve been dying to tell you, and people you simply have to meet.” Amazon.com is also looking into launching imprints focusing on other fiction genres, including mystery, science fiction and thrillers, according to US books magazine Publishers Weekly , and is recruiting staff to increase its publishing presence. “We also know our customers enjoy genre fiction of all kinds, so we are busy building publishing businesses that will focus on additional genres as well,” said Belle. The Bookseller’s news editor Graeme Neill said that Amazon was “definitely becoming more aggressive in its publishing business”, pointing to the news last month that the online retailer “came close to winning a multi-million dollar auction for self-published author Amanda Hocking , the first time it has bid on a frontlist title”, and to its new hiring strategy. “If you go onto Amazon’s website, they are currently hiring acquisition editors, publicists, marketing staff. This is something they weren’t looking at several years ago,” he said. The move into romance is a good one for Amazon, he added, particularly digitally, as “romance and crime readers were the first to really buy into ebooks, so Amazon having its own romance imprint makes a lot of sense as it will only sell its romance ebooks through its own Kindle e-reader”. Publishers, however, will be eyeing the retailer’s increased publishing presence uneasily. “Publishers will be concerned Amazon is increasingly encroaching on what they see as ‘their’ business,” said Neill. Publishing Amazon.com Internet E-commerce Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
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Internet phone service in negotiations over link-ups that could delay Wall Street flotation, according to reports The internet phone service Skype is entertaining partnership talks with both Facebook and Google – delaying its $100m (£60m) Wall Street flotation – according to reports . A deal to buy Skype outright is not thought to be in the pipeline, although one source “with direct knowledge of the discussion” told Reuters that billionaire Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg had “been involved in internal discussions” about snapping up the video chat service. Such a deal could be worth between $3bn and $4bn, according to the Reuters source – which, if plausible, is illuminating about how much cash the social network has in the bank. More likely is a joint venture between Skype and Facebook/Google. The Luxembourg-based company has longstanding partnerships with TV manufacturers including LG, Panasonic and Samsung to embed Skype into their products. It is not hard to imagine Skype calling integrated into Facebook, for when the likes, wall posts and private messages just won’t do. Both firms, too, have sizeable communities of engaged users: Facebook has more than 600 million registered accounts; Skype has 560 million, of whom about 124 million make calls in the average month. Most troubling for Skype is its low conversion rate – only about 6% of its users actually pay for the service, something the company explicitly vowed to boost in its initial public offering prospectus last year. However, we shouldn’t expect tie-ups with Facebook and Google to involve paid-for premium services – that’s not how those companies operate. A tie-up with Google is slightly less obvious. The Mountain View company already has GChat video-and-voice calling embedded into Gmail, though the feature is a little hidden behind regular instant messaging. Then again, Skype would slot nicely into the so-far-underwhelming Google TV and already has a place on Android smartphones . Skype declared its intention to go public way back in August last year , since when a slew of new generation internet firms – including Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter – have worked up investor appetite for social media firms. China’s answer to Facebook, Renren, yesterday raised $743m with its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares immediately rocketing in the loss-making social network. Unlike Renren, which has the added allure of a booming Chinese internet market, Skype is hoping to raise $100m with its initial public offering in the second half of this year. The IPO will value the eight-year-old firm at $1bn, according to reports . The Canadian pension fund, Silver Lake and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz own a 56% stake in Skype, with 14% belonging to its original inventors, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Still in Skype’s rear-view mirror is its fruitless $3.1bn acquisition by eBay in 2005 – and sale in 2009 – which will make the internet telephony firm wary of a wholesale buyout. eBay maintains a 30% stake in Skype. Digital media Skype Facebook Google Internet Telecoms Social networking Technology sector Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Internet phone service in negotiations over link-ups that could delay Wall Street flotation, according to reports The internet phone service Skype is entertaining partnership talks with both Facebook and Google – delaying its $100m (£60m) Wall Street flotation – according to reports . A deal to buy Skype outright is not thought to be in the pipeline, although one source “with direct knowledge of the discussion” told Reuters that billionaire Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg had “been involved in internal discussions” about snapping up the video chat service. Such a deal could be worth between $3bn and $4bn, according to the Reuters source – which, if plausible, is illuminating about how much cash the social network has in the bank. More likely is a joint venture between Skype and Facebook/Google. The Luxembourg-based company has longstanding partnerships with TV manufacturers including LG, Panasonic and Samsung to embed Skype into their products. It is not hard to imagine Skype calling integrated into Facebook, for when the likes, wall posts and private messages just won’t do. Both firms, too, have sizeable communities of engaged users: Facebook has more than 600 million registered accounts; Skype has 560 million, of whom about 124 million make calls in the average month. Most troubling for Skype is its low conversion rate – only about 6% of its users actually pay for the service, something the company explicitly vowed to boost in its initial public offering prospectus last year. However, we shouldn’t expect tie-ups with Facebook and Google to involve paid-for premium services – that’s not how those companies operate. A tie-up with Google is slightly less obvious. The Mountain View company already has GChat video-and-voice calling embedded into Gmail, though the feature is a little hidden behind regular instant messaging. Then again, Skype would slot nicely into the so-far-underwhelming Google TV and already has a place on Android smartphones . Skype declared its intention to go public way back in August last year , since when a slew of new generation internet firms – including Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter – have worked up investor appetite for social media firms. China’s answer to Facebook, Renren, yesterday raised $743m with its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares immediately rocketing in the loss-making social network. Unlike Renren, which has the added allure of a booming Chinese internet market, Skype is hoping to raise $100m with its initial public offering in the second half of this year. The IPO will value the eight-year-old firm at $1bn, according to reports . The Canadian pension fund, Silver Lake and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz own a 56% stake in Skype, with 14% belonging to its original inventors, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Still in Skype’s rear-view mirror is its fruitless $3.1bn acquisition by eBay in 2005 – and sale in 2009 – which will make the internet telephony firm wary of a wholesale buyout. eBay maintains a 30% stake in Skype. Digital media Skype Facebook Google Internet Telecoms Social networking Technology sector Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk
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Frontman Gerard Way responds to conservative broadcaster’s claim that song used in Glee episode is propaganda My Chemical Romance have waded into a spat with conservative US pundit Glenn Beck. The Fox News talkshow host chose the New Jersey band as his latest target on his programme last week. Claiming that “our whole culture right now is set up for you and the values that we grew up on to lose”, he discussed the hit TV series Glee – and, in particular, the use of My Chemical Romance’s Sing on an episode that aired in the US in February. Beck accused the band of propaganda, urging parents to remain vigilant against the song, which has just been re-released as a charity single for Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief: “Pay attention to the lyrics,” Beck said. “It’s an anthem saying ‘Join us’. How can you and I possibly win against that?” The track features the lyrics: “Cleaned-up corporation progress/ Dying in the process/ Children that can talk about it/ Living on the railways/ People moving sideways/ Sell it till your last days.” Beck appeared to take lyrics from the song, which is set in a post-apocalyptic California, literally. My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has responded to Beck’s comments via a blog on the band’s website . “I think the word Glenn Beck was looking for was ‘subversion’ not ‘propaganda’, because I don’t know what it would be considered propaganda for – Truth? Sentiment? And I can’t tell what he’s angrier about – the fact that it’s how I feel about the persistent sterilisation of our culture or the fact that it’s on network television for everyone to hear. And railways? Is it 1863? Seen any children living on these lately instead of the internet? “I’m actually shocked that no fact-checking was done on the lyrics,” Way wrote. “I mean Fox is a major news channel, covering factual topics in an unbiased and intelligent – oh wait – to quote the man himself – ‘You don’t have to live by the standards that society has set’. I couldn’t agree more.” The band has had previous run-ins with the rightwing media. In 2006, they were forced to respond to an article in the Daily Mail by Sarah Sands that portrayed them as part of a “cult of suicide” . My Chemical Romance headline the Reading and Leeds festivals in August. My Chemical Romance Pop and rock Glenn Beck US politics United States Glee US television Dan Martin guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Frontman Gerard Way responds to conservative broadcaster’s claim that song used in Glee episode is propaganda My Chemical Romance have waded into a spat with conservative US pundit Glenn Beck. The Fox News talkshow host chose the New Jersey band as his latest target on his programme last week. Claiming that “our whole culture right now is set up for you and the values that we grew up on to lose”, he discussed the hit TV series Glee – and, in particular, the use of My Chemical Romance’s Sing on an episode that aired in the US in February. Beck accused the band of propaganda, urging parents to remain vigilant against the song, which has just been re-released as a charity single for Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief: “Pay attention to the lyrics,” Beck said. “It’s an anthem saying ‘Join us’. How can you and I possibly win against that?” The track features the lyrics: “Cleaned-up corporation progress/ Dying in the process/ Children that can talk about it/ Living on the railways/ People moving sideways/ Sell it till your last days.” Beck appeared to take lyrics from the song, which is set in a post-apocalyptic California, literally. My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has responded to Beck’s comments via a blog on the band’s website . “I think the word Glenn Beck was looking for was ‘subversion’ not ‘propaganda’, because I don’t know what it would be considered propaganda for – Truth? Sentiment? And I can’t tell what he’s angrier about – the fact that it’s how I feel about the persistent sterilisation of our culture or the fact that it’s on network television for everyone to hear. And railways? Is it 1863? Seen any children living on these lately instead of the internet? “I’m actually shocked that no fact-checking was done on the lyrics,” Way wrote. “I mean Fox is a major news channel, covering factual topics in an unbiased and intelligent – oh wait – to quote the man himself – ‘You don’t have to live by the standards that society has set’. I couldn’t agree more.” The band has had previous run-ins with the rightwing media. In 2006, they were forced to respond to an article in the Daily Mail by Sarah Sands that portrayed them as part of a “cult of suicide” . My Chemical Romance headline the Reading and Leeds festivals in August. My Chemical Romance Pop and rock Glenn Beck US politics United States Glee US television Dan Martin guardian.co.uk
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