Commander Eileen Collins said astronauts on shuttle Discovery had seen widespread environmental destruction on Earth and warned on Thursday that greater care was needed to protect natural resources. […] “Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It’s very widespread in some parts of the world,” Collins said in a conversation from space with Japanese officials in Tokyo, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. […] “The atmosphere almost looks like an eggshell on an egg, it’s so very thin,” she said. “We know that we don’t have much air, we need to protect what we have.”
“A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents….The official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors…had already approved.”
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.
