"Stark warning over climate change"

The BBC News got itself into a tizzy recently over a "major report" which apparently said

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed.

and other stuff along those lines. But it turns out that this is merely the proceedings of a conference that took place a whole year ago, which itself was fairly dull in scientific terms but which had an exciting title ("Avoiding dangerous climate change") and garnered plenty of press attention due to the involvement of politicians. I didn't see anything particularly earth-shatttering (or even mildly surprising, in fact) in what was presented either then or now. And in particular, the "worse than previously believed" angle is strongly misleading - the evidence seems to be that it is pretty much exactly as had been predicted some time ago. So really, there is not much of a story there.

Stoat draws exactly the same conclusions, and discusses a few more of the details wrt sea level. So that must prove we are right :-)

I was more amused by the tale of the "3 priceless Ming Vases" which were apparently broken in one fell swoop by a visitor to a museum who tripped over his shoelaces. Heard on Radio5:

Presenter: So these priceless Ming vases, are they really rare then?
Expert: Not really, in fact they are getting more common every year.

(not an exact quote, but you get the idea)