April Fool's? -- That's The Only Thing I Can Think .... I Guess This Is Why It's Called The Independent -- Independent, As In "Not Group-Think"

The Independent is reporting:

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has angered environmentalist groups after saying climate change is "not caused by humans" and there is "no scientific proof" to back global warming alarmism.

The Canadian ecologist told US lawmakers there is "little correlation" to support a "direct causal relationship" between CO2 emissions and rising global temperatures.

"There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years," he told a US Senate Committee "If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists."

He also criticised the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for claiming "it is extremely likely" that human activity is the "dominant cause" for global warning, noting that "extremely likely" is not a scientific term.

Right, wrong, indifferent, it's nice to see fair and balanced reporting.

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The History of Egypt From 1860 - 1907 In Three Pages

From Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit, pp 180 - 183

This puts the US crash of 2008 in perspective 

Hard as it is to imagine today, Egypt was the China at the turn of the 20th century. 

The conquest of Egypt began with Napoleon in 1798, but Egypt's transformation from an Ottoman fiefdom into a British dependency was mostly the work of entrepreneurs, bankers, and lawyers in the second half of the 19th century.

The American Civil War and the resulting cotton famine turned Cairo into a Klondik on the Nile. Colossal amounts of foreign capital, mostly in the form of loans, flowed into Egypt. For Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish revolutionary, Egypt was a microcosm of the "madness" of modern imperialism.

Inevitably, the debts piled up to complete the Suez Canal ... had the khedive Ismail Pasha invested more cautiously and avoided debt, some historians speculate, Egypt might have entered the twentieth century as another, albeit smaller, Japan.

A period of de facto British rule commenced in 1883. Evelyn Baring, the 1st Early of Cromer, scion of the banking family and one of the great imperialists of the age, was installed as the power behind the khedive's throne. Baring's top priority was restoring Egypt's solvency....an Anglo-French agreement reached in 1904 extended British rule indefinitely, sparking another, even more spectacular investment boom.

Not much bigger than Holland, Egypt attracted as much British capital as India.

The flood of foreign capital was transforming Egypt's feudal economy. Historian Niall Ferguson argues that while old empires extracted tribute, modern ones injected capital and promoted economic growth. In 1900 Egyptian manufacturing had consisted of two salt factories, two textile mills, two breweries, and a cigarette factory. Sugar refining had been by far the most important industry, employing 20,000 workers.

By 1907, brand-new industries such as ginning and pressing cotton, cottonseed oil, and soap manufacturing employed 380,000 workers. Wages rose along with cotton prices....Egyptians were acquiring European culture.

Egypt's foreign colony -- expats as well as Jews, Copts, and Greeks who had settled there hundreds of years earlier -- helped make Egypt "almost the most cosmopolitan country in the world." Cairo swarmed with fortune hunters, bankers, brokers, and entrepreneurs who invested in tourism, railways, banking, sugar, and, of course, cotton.

Egypt became the poster child for the new imperialism.

William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, stopped in Cairo on his way back from India in 1906 ...

... and the then the world-wide panic of 1907. The run on banks that began in New York City in 1907 followed with runs on banks around the world. Cairo was not spared. The Egyptian stock market plunged. Most thought it was temporary but in April the market crashed a second time and, this time, kept going down. This tie full-scale panic erupted.

The Egyptian crash was part of a worldwide phenomenon, just as Cairo was a link in a chin that stretched from San Francisco to Santiago, London to Bombay, New York to Hamburg and Tokyo.

A London banker observed after the fact, "beginning about the middle of 1905, a strain on the whole world's capital supply and credit facilities set in, which increased at so portentous a rate during the next two years that long before October, 1907, thoughtful men i many widely separated markets were discussing, with serious apprehension, what was to be the result."

The even that triggered the chain reaction had taken place on the far side of the world. Besides practically leveling the city, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 resulted in enormous claims to insurance companies in London. As insurers were forced to sell pounds in order to buy dollars to settle them, the pound started to fall in terms of its gold price. To stem the outflow of gold, the Bank of England raised its discount rate to 6 percent in October, 1906. The result was a credit squeeze for borrowers.

Under the gold standard, when England sneezed, the US caught cold. The New York stock market plummeted in March 1907, and in May economic activity began to decline. The recession set the stage for the last and worst banking panic -- the panic of 1907 -- that focused on the New York trusts. The resulting credit freeze forced thousands of banks and businesses around the US into bankruptcy.

A severe economic downturn continued for more than a year, and business conditions did not fully recover until 1910. In England, and on the Continent, the slump was even deeper and longer. In Cairo, on the other hand, the Panic of 1907 was only a pause.