So you want to know the real truth about termite damage? Can you handle the truth? The only reason we ask is because it really is disturbing when you think about these unwelcome guests coming into your home and eating to their heart’s content without even bringing a dinner gift.

Some estimates place the annual damage to homes at over $500,000. Others say it is well over a million dollars. Most of the worst termite damage is located in the Southeast portion of the United States as well as arid savannah regions in places like Africa and Australia.

It doesn’t matter where you’re located, termite damage can be utterly devastating for the homeowner. It is true that the worst damage can take years to cause problems, but still, that damage can cause a home to become unsafe to live in.

One woman tells us that she had no idea about the amount of damage a termite can do. She never even thought about it until she felt a floorboard that was loose. She went outside and saw a swarm of bugs around the foundation of her house, and she began to do some research.

A pest control company was called in and she found out that she did, indeed, have a termite infestation. What surprised the most was when the termite inspector showed her the amount of damage that a termite could do as she looked into the hole the inspector had cut into her wall. She was amazed and shocked.

Not only will termite damage cause a structure to be unstable, it can – and, if left untreated – even cause the structure to collapse around you. It’s frightening when you think about it.

Those worker termites get inside your home and start burrowing through the studs, the door frames, and the drywall of your home.

They gnaw through the material your home is made of and make trails through the wood that can weaken the wood itself causing problems with the integrity of the wood.

The amount of damage a termite can do is multiplied by the fact that there is more than one termite working on the wood. They work together to get food for the colony and thus cause a huge amount of damage to your structure.

That is why it is so important to pay attention to what is going on around your home and always check for signs of termite damage. Many people don’t do this. They just sit around hoping that their home is safe.

Repairing a home that has termite damage is no easy proposition. There are times when just a few beams in the ceiling need to be replaced. Then there are other times when whole walls need to be reconstructed. In extreme situations, the structure must be condemned and torn down.

The first step towards saving your home is to educate yourself. Do a lot of research and know what to look for when you are looking for evidence of termites in your home. Search the internet, read this article over and over again. Do whatever you have to do, but make sure you know that termites can do a huge amount of damage and cause you to lose your home.

Global warming is going to wreak havoc with the world economy. That is the latest prediction based on the idea that our use of fossil fuels and our production and release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is responsible for an increase-to-come in temperatures.

We’ve got to act now, we are being told. There is a strong consensus that we’re in for some heavy heat and that industry is to blame for it. So energy use must be curtailed and polluters must be made to pay. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan says that there is “a frightening lack of leadership” regarding the steps to take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He blasts the nay-sayers saying the science on climate change “is not science fiction.” Those who try to sow doubt about it are “out of step, out of arguments and out of time,” he is quoted as saying in this recent article.

All very good, and fine, but there is a small problem: when looking at the science, the facts don’t seem to add up. That is what Christopher Monckton says in a two-part article that appeared in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph. His conclusion: The science of global warming is being manipulated, we are addressing the wrong problem, and our solutions won’t do what their proponents say they will.

Monckton adds that we are asking the developing nations that they should not follow the West’s path to industrialization and relative prosperity because it’s bad for the planet. Instead of pouring funds into development of valid energy alternatives, we are starting to trade carbon credits, but with regard to energy production, we keep things very much the same as they are.

Over the past couple of weeks, an entertaining debate has been popping up across the Web. First, Christopher Monckton attacked the Stern Report in the Sunday Telegraph, including a downloadable, 40 page paper on global warming as a hoax. Monckton’s paper was put under the microscope by many reputable sources and trashed by another UK paper, the Guardian.

So how has Monckton responded? Mostly by admitting that his science was bad and so what his history. So now the point isn’t that global warming isn’t occurring, it’s that what is being done about it is laughable. Well, at least someone is laughing.

There is much debate here which is either being ignored or dismissed. Since the critique of the Mann Hughes Bradely 1998 1000 year temp reconstruction(MBH98) by McKintyre and McKitrick (2003), the global warming critics have been very defensive. The questions raised my M&M are minor questions of an unimportant aspect of the methodolgy, and one of cherry picking the data. The reliance on the North American Britslecone tree rings, which weighted their reconstruction on the warm side (the blade of the famous Hockey Stick) has been affirmed.

The June 2006 NAS report was very polite in their critique, with questions dealing with “social networks” (ie peer review) that never did the correct type of due diligence, as well as the robustness of MBH98 being called into question. The Little Ice Age and Medevil Warm Period are now back in the lexicon. Mann to this day refuses to recognize either – he shrugs them off as nothing more than weak teleconnections.

The MBH98 reconstruction as well as other multivariate temp reconstructions are important, as they are the only way the Global Warming critics can plead their case (we are living in the warmest period since the beginning of the Holocene Era).

It disturbs me that a serious newspaper like the Telegraph was prepared to take Monckton’s paper seriously. So far as I can find out, Monckton is a former journalist with no scientific background whatsoever.

But presumably the Telegraph couldn’t find a reputable scientist prepared to write something that fits their ideological rejection of global warming theory…

I used to joke that the government issues so much information every day, it can’t help but let the truth slip out every once in a while. The Bush Administration’s recent report on global warming is a classic example. Though far from perfect, it contains some crucial but awkward truths that neither George W. Bush nor his environmentalist critics want to confront. Which may explain why the Administration has sought to bury the report, while critics have misrepresented its most ominous conclusion.

The US Climate Action Report made headlines because it contradicted so much of what the Administration has said about global warming. Not only is global warming real, according to the report, but its consequences – heat waves, water shortages, rising sea levels, loss of beaches and marshes, more frequent and violent weather – will be punishing for Americans.

The report’s biggest surprise was its admission that human activities, especially the burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are the primary cause of climate change. Of course, the rest of the world has known since 1995 that human actions have “a discernible impact” on the global climate, to quote a landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the White House has resisted this conclusion. After all, if burning fossil fuels is to blame for global warming, it makes sense to burn less of them.

To a lifelong oilman like Bush, who continues to rely on his former industry colleagues for campaign contributions as well as senior staff, such a view is nothing less than heresy. No wonder, then, that Bush and his high command have virtually repudiated the report. Although their staffs helped write it, both EPA Administrators claimed they were unaware of the report until the New York Times disclosed its existence on June 3. Bush himself dismissed it as a mere product of “the bureaucracy,” that oft-vilified boogeyman of right-wing ideology.

But he could equally have blamed his own father. The only reason U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 was compiled in the first place is that George Bush the First signed a global warming treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit that obligates the United States to periodically furnish such reports to the UN (one more reason, it seems, to despise treaties). But somebody in the Administration must have seen trouble coming, because the report could not have been released with less fanfare: It was simply posted on the EPA’s website, three unguided links in from the homepage. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never find it.

The Administration has been hammered for issuing a report that on one hand admits that global warming threatens catastrophe but on the other maintains there is no need to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. The report squares this circle by arguing that global warming has now become inevitable, so we should focus less on preventing it than on adapting to it. To deal with water scarcity, for example, the report advocates building more dams and raising the price of water to encourage conservation. Critics see such recommendations as proof that the Administration is doing nothing about global warming. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

The worst thing about the new global warming report is that it is absolutely correct about a fundamental but often unmentioned aspect of the problem: the lag effect. Most greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for approximately 100 years. The upshot of this undeniable chemical fact is that no matter what remedial steps are taken today, humanity is doomed to experience however much global warming the past 100 years of human activities will generate.

That does not mean we should make matters worse by continuing to burn fossil fuels, as Bush foolishly urges; our children and grandchildren deserve better than that. It does mean, however, that we as a civilization must not only shift to green energy sources immediately but also begin planning how we will adapt to a world that is bound to be a hotter, drier, more disaster-punctuated place in the twenty-first century.

Many environmentalists know it is too late to prevent global warming; the best we can do is minimize its scope. They don’t like to admit this truth, because they fear it will discourage people from making, and demanding, the personal and institutional changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is that risk. But a truth does not disappear simply because it is inconvenient. Besides, a green energy future would mean more, not less, economic well-being for most Americans, while also increasing our chances of avoiding the most extreme global warming scenarios. Sometimes the truth hurts. But avoiding it will hurt even more.

As an independent Australian researcher and scientist I have recently turned my attention to investigating and bringing out the truth about Global Warming. What I found shocked me. Climate change is happening now and there is no escaping it.

“Much more likely than not, global warming is upon us. It is prudent to expect that weather patterns will change and the seas will rise, in an ever worsening pattern, through our lifetimes and on into our grandchildren’s…Nearly everyone in the world will need to adjust. Citizens will need reliable information. So it is an important job, in some ways our top priority, to improve the communication of knowledge”. – Prof. Spencer Weart

The fact is we aren’t being told the whole truth about global warming. For a start, our best climate scientists are being muzzled, harassed and forbidden from talking to the press about the things they know but dare not say. On top of that, fossil fuel companies have been avidly campaigning to spread misinformation and confusion about climate change and global warming…. After all, the last thing they want is control or limitation over their industry…

Yet, nearly every week now a shocking climate catastrophe hits the news… Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, mega-droughts in Australia, the Asian tsunami, laval mud oozing uncontrollably out of the ground in Indonesia, stunning melting of sea ice in the Arctic, the collapse of massive ice shelves in Antarctica, floating icebergs off New Zealand’s coast, accelerating glaciers in Greenland, and only this month, the earthquake off Japan measuring a massive 8.1 on the Richter Scale they are all (yes, even the seismic activity) signs of spiraling climate change… and, we ain’t seen nothing yet!

Truth is, climate change is not some far-way problem that our kids will have to deal with, as scientists at first thought it would be. Information that has only come to light in the last few years strongly suggests that it could get a lot worse very, very quickly. It could even be bad enough to threaten our food and water supplies, and is a looming threat to low-lying, heavily populated coastlines around the world….

Already we are seeing South Pacific islands submerging under the onslaught of rising seas levels.

Every day climate extremes are being recorded around the world that dramatically exceed official predictions. Groundbreaking research continues to uncover fundamental truths about climate that have yet to be incorporated into climate models and predictions. While many official scenarios still assume that changes will unfold in a gradual, linear fashion, newly understood climate forces have the potential to create rapidly accelerating, exponential shifts.

And fresh evidence about Earth’s climate past has only recently revealed that centuries of slow, creeping variations in our planet’s climate history have been punctuated by stunningly rapid change. No longer is climate seen as an inherently stable system that gradually shifts from one state to another. Our climate system has shown that it is capable of responding to relatively small upsets with radical instability and upheaval. Could it be possible that it is happening again? My research suggests that it is.

“Large, abrupt and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past, when the earth system was forced across thresholds. Although abrupt climate change can occur for many reasons, it is conceivable that human forcing of climate change is increasing the probability of large, abrupt events.” – Prof. R. B. Alley

But scientists have been a bit late to wake up. It was not until 2005 that the phrase ‘tipping point’ appeared in publications on climate, implying that it could change not only rapidly, but irreversibly. Such tipping points indicate a threshold of change beyond which the system loses its stability and transforms spontaneously into a radically new state….cold to hot, warm to freezing, wet to dry, calm to chaotic. It is now understood that even small creeping changes…like current global warming… can induce sudden, irreversible flips from one climate state to another.

We are now seeing possible tipping points in the melting of polar ice caps, and the thawing of tundra, both of which contribute to the warming that triggered them, and dramatically accelerating global warming further. In this way, rather than steady, gradual changes, what we could be facing is an abrupt rearrangement of our climate.

A report by the U.S. National Research Council first suggested in 2002 that abrupt and potentially catastrophic climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future.

“The world is teetering on the brink of abrupt climate change: a change that will be so rapid and

unexpected that human and natural systems will have difficulty adapting to it “

- National Research Council.

The real question is what does it mean for our future?

It is no longer easy to deny that the climate is changing. The risk is that it may change quicker than we can fully understand or accept it. Trouble is we can’t really afford not to act now… We could easily be caught unprepared for this.

Right now in Australia, for example, we are heading into yet another El Nino event, of continuing drought conditions and extreme heat. El Nino events are becoming progressively more frequent and more intense with climate change, and are tipped to become the new “normal” climate for countries bordering the south Pacific. So we can anticipate tightening water resources and widespread failure of food crops in Australia. We will be forced to rethink the way we use…and waste… many essential resources that we have, until now, taken for granted.

My research into the latest facts on climate change reveal that this just one small aspect of the monumental climate shocks that are on the cards. Others who know, like me, are alarmed at what lies ahead. Unfortunately we missed the opportunity to avert this crisis with minor tweeks to our lifestyle and behavior, like changing light bulbs or catching the bus now and then. This late in the day we should be seriously preparing for the shocks ahead, because time is running out.

We need to rethink the way we live our lives if we want to have any future at all.

This is a volatile world. If climate shifted abruptly in the past, not just once, but repeatedly, it’s inevitable it will happen again. The question is, when?

I expect that this article has raised a lot more questions than it has answered. If you’d like to know more, you can get in-depth information and regular updates at www.WakeUp2GlobalWarming.org