Call it the Obama effect or a last minute face saving tactic but the Obama Administration made it clear that it is willing to include national mitigation measures announced by the advanced developing countries in the international climate treaty to be discussed at Copenhagen next month.

In a joint statement the US and Chinese officials announced that the new climate treaty should be based on ‘common but differentiated responsibility’. This is the first time that the United States has agreed for different climate goals for developed and developing countries.

[B]oth sides believe that, while striving for final legal agreement, an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.

During the Bangkok round of negotiations the US and EU negotiators raised objections to the principles agreed upon in the Kyoto Protocol and Bali Climate Convention which said that there will be clear distinction between the mitigation measures of developing and developed countries. It was surprising to see US, EU raise objections to the Bali agreement as it was unanimous. But the move could be explained as a diversion tactic by the US as it was under pressure to give solid numbers regarding emission reductions.

The Obama Administration officials have made it clear that a final climate treaty can only be reached in 2010. The possibility of an official agreement was already bleak given the US Congress’ failure to approve the climate change bill which includes emission reduction targets along with carbon trading mechanisms. Commitments from the US are crucial for the climate treaty as it failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

President Obama said that the new climate treaty must be an effective one which could produce quick and positive results. Although the chances of a final deal at Copenhagen are bleak it’s good to see that the developed and developing countries working to reach on an agreement on the principles of the climate treaty.

Former chief economist of the World Bank Nicolas Stern proposed a logical approach to distribute the responsibilities among developed and developing countries. According to the proposal, developed countries would take up mandatory emission targets probably in line with the IPCC recommendations (25-40 percent reduction by 2020) while the developing countries would reduce their carbon emissions through various mitigation measures which will be set up according to their own discretion.

China has announced 15% renewable energy target for 2020 and improving energy efficiency and energy intensity. China can announce sectoral emission targets during the Copenhagen meet. India’s Parliament will be debating an energy efficiency bill the month which will set stringent usage limits on various industries. Brazil has announced 40 percent emission reduction target by 2020, half of which will be achieved through forest conservation. South Korea has announced 30 percent emission reduction plan by 2020. South Africa and Indonesia are also planning to take up national emission reduction targets.

The issue now is accountability and monitoring. An efficient mechanism for reporting the progress and results of the mitigation measures must be a part of the climate treaty. The developed and developing countries must also agree on the issue of technology transfer and financing. The financing issue is closely integrated with the mitigation measures of developing countries as a major portion of these emission reduction will be financed by either direct aid or through carbon offset mechanisms.

These initiatives are more than welcome as they would not only push the developed countries to take up even more ambitious targets but would mean that the after the commitment period of the proposed climate treaty the developing countries will be be in an even better position to reduce their carbon emissions.

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found.

They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years.

The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted.

“It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time,” said William Patterson, a geological sciences professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who carried out the research. “It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.”

His findings, published at a recent conference, reinforce a series of studies suggesting that the earth’s climate is highly unstable and can flip between warm and cold very rapidly with the right trigger.

Most such research is based on analysing cores drilled from ice or from the sediment found at the bottom of oceans or lakes. In such cores the ice or sediment is found in layers whose composition shows what the climate was like at the time they were laid down.

Ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice cap have already shown that the big freeze of 12,800 years ago — known as the Younger Dryas mini-ice age — happened fast but lacked the detail to pin it down precisely.

Patterson, however, obtained mud deposits from Lough Monreagh, a lake in western Ireland, a region he says has “the best mud in the world in scientific terms”.

Patterson used a precision robotic scalpel to scrape off layers of mud just 0.5mm thick.Each layer represented three months of sediment deposition, so variations between them could be used to measure changes in temperature over very short periods.

Patterson found that temperatures had plummeted, with the lake’s plants and animals rapidly dying over just a few months. The subsequent mini-ice age lasted for 1,300 years.

What caused such a dramatic event? The most likely trigger is the sudden emptying of Lake Agassiz, an inland sea that once covered a swathe of northern Canada.

It is thought to have burst its banks, pouring freezing freshwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, disrupting the Gulf Stream, whose flows depend on variations in temperature and salinity.

A single year’s disruption in the Gulf Stream could have been enough, said Patterson, to let ice grow far to the south of where it usually formed. Once it had taken over, the Gulf Stream was unable to regain its normal route and the cold took hold for about 1,300 years.

Some scientists have suggested that if the Greenland ice cap melts it could have a similarly dramatic effect by disrupting the world’s ocean currents.

Other research has shown that rapid climate flips are normal. In its 4.5-billion-year history, the earth has experienced at least four main ice ages, of which the last, the Quaternary, is still continuing.

Within each ice age, however, there are periods when ice advances or retreats, and in the past 60,000 years alone the earth is thought to have warmed or cooled by up to 7C at least 20 times. The current interglacial period has lasted about 10,000 years.

“Human civilisation has grown up in a period of remarkable climatic stability,” said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system sciences at the University of East Anglia.

“In the period from 65,000 to 10,000 years ago there were periods of abrupt warming and cooling roughly every 1,500 years, when the temperature in Greenland might fall or rise by 10C in a decade.”

Patterson’s findings are supported by the research of Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

He believes the extinction of Neanderthals roughly 30,000 years ago was linked to a series of rapid climate fluctuations that began more than 40,000 years ago. He said: “Climate is basically unstable, so one of the mysteries is why it has stayed warm for the last 10,000 years.

“Some researchers have suggested this may be linked to the activities of early humans, who started growing crops and clearing forests 8,000 years ago.

“That may have put enough greenhouse gases into the air to stave off another ice age, but the problem now is that we have gone too far the other way.

“The amount of greenhouse gases in the air is greater than at any time in the last million years, so ironically, the threat now is from global warming.”

Patterson is still focusing his efforts on the past. He has built a new robot capable of shaving tiny slivers from the shells of fossilised clams, showing temperature almost day by day from millions of years ago.

]*?)href\s*=\s*['"](.*?)['"]([^>]*)>(.*?) Ending uga_filter:

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found.

They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years.

The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted.

“It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time,” said William Patterson, a geological sciences professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who carried out the research. “It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.”

His findings, published at a recent conference, reinforce a series of studies suggesting that the earth’s climate is highly unstable and can flip between warm and cold very rapidly with the right trigger.

Most such research is based on analysing cores drilled from ice or from the sediment found at the bottom of oceans or lakes. In such cores the ice or sediment is found in layers whose composition shows what the climate was like at the time they were laid down.

Ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice cap have already shown that the big freeze of 12,800 years ago — known as the Younger Dryas mini-ice age — happened fast but lacked the detail to pin it down precisely.

Patterson, however, obtained mud deposits from Lough Monreagh, a lake in western Ireland, a region he says has “the best mud in the world in scientific terms”.

Patterson used a precision robotic scalpel to scrape off layers of mud just 0.5mm thick.Each layer represented three months of sediment deposition, so variations between them could be used to measure changes in temperature over very short periods.

Patterson found that temperatures had plummeted, with the lake’s plants and animals rapidly dying over just a few months. The subsequent mini-ice age lasted for 1,300 years.

What caused such a dramatic event? The most likely trigger is the sudden emptying of Lake Agassiz, an inland sea that once covered a swathe of northern Canada.

It is thought to have burst its banks, pouring freezing freshwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, disrupting the Gulf Stream, whose flows depend on variations in temperature and salinity.

A single year’s disruption in the Gulf Stream could have been enough, said Patterson, to let ice grow far to the south of where it usually formed. Once it had taken over, the Gulf Stream was unable to regain its normal route and the cold took hold for about 1,300 years.

Some scientists have suggested that if the Greenland ice cap melts it could have a similarly dramatic effect by disrupting the world’s ocean currents.

Other research has shown that rapid climate flips are normal. In its 4.5-billion-year history, the earth has experienced at least four main ice ages, of which the last, the Quaternary, is still continuing.

Within each ice age, however, there are periods when ice advances or retreats, and in the past 60,000 years alone the earth is thought to have warmed or cooled by up to 7C at least 20 times. The current interglacial period has lasted about 10,000 years.

“Human civilisation has grown up in a period of remarkable climatic stability,” said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system sciences at the University of East Anglia.

“In the period from 65,000 to 10,000 years ago there were periods of abrupt warming and cooling roughly every 1,500 years, when the temperature in Greenland might fall or rise by 10C in a decade.”

Patterson’s findings are supported by the research of Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

He believes the extinction of Neanderthals roughly 30,000 years ago was linked to a series of rapid climate fluctuations that began more than 40,000 years ago. He said: “Climate is basically unstable, so one of the mysteries is why it has stayed warm for the last 10,000 years.

“Some researchers have suggested this may be linked to the activities of early humans, who started growing crops and clearing forests 8,000 years ago.

“That may have put enough greenhouse gases into the air to stave off another ice age, but the problem now is that we have gone too far the other way.

“The amount of greenhouse gases in the air is greater than at any time in the last million years, so ironically, the threat now is from global warming.”

Patterson is still focusing his efforts on the past. He has built a new robot capable of shaving tiny slivers from the shells of fossilised clams, showing temperature almost day by day from millions of years ago.

Start uga_filter:

Every year, scientists learn something new about the inner workings of lightning.

Central Africa receives the most flashes of lightning per square kilometer, while the polar regions receive the least. This global map of lightning flash density was created with data from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) aboard the Tropical Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) aboard the Microlab-1 spacecraft. (Credit: Jeff De La Beaujardiere, Scientific Visualization Studio)

With satellites, they have discovered that more than 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur around the world every year. (Rwanda has the most flashes per square kilometer, while flashes are rare in polar regions.) Laboratory and field experiments have revealed that the core of some lightning bolts reaches 30,000 Kelvin (53,540 ºF), a temperature hot enough to instantly melt sand and break oxygen and nitrogen molecules into individual atoms.

And then there is this: each of those billion lightning flashes produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas (NOx) that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Near Earth’s surface, ozone can harm human and plant health; higher in the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas; and in the stratosphere, its blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

In 1827, the German chemist Justin von Liebig first observed that lightning produced NOx — scientific shorthand for a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen that includes nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). Nearly two centuries later, the topic continues to attract the attention of scientists.

Fossil fuel combustion, microbes in the soil, lightning, and forest fires all produce NOx. Scientists think lightning’s contribution to Earth’s NOx budget — probably about 10 percent — is relatively small compared to fossil fuel emissions. Yet they haven’t been sure whether global estimates of NOx produced by lightning are accurate.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how much NOx lightning produces,” said Kenneth Pickering, an atmospheric scientist who studies lightning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Indeed, even recent published estimates of lightning’s global NOx production still vary by as much as a factor of four. We’re trying to narrow that uncertainty in order to improve the accuracy of both global climate models and regional air quality models.”

Using data gleaned from aircraft observations and satellites, Pickering and Goddard colleague Lesley Ott recently took steps toward a better global estimate of lightning-produced NOx and found that lightning may have a considerably stronger impact on the climate in the mid-latitudes and subtropics — and less on surface air quality — than previously thought.

According to a new paper by Ott and Pickering in the Journal of Geophysical Research, each flash of lightning on average in the several mid-latitude and subtropical thunderstorms studied turned 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) of nitrogen into chemically reactive NOx. “In other words, you could drive a new car across the United States more than 50 times and still produce less than half as much NOx as an average lightning flash,” Ott estimated. The results were published July.

When the researchers multiplied the number of lightning strokes worldwide by 7 kilograms, they found that the total amount of NOx produced by lightning per year is 8.6 terragrams, or 8.6 million metric tons. “That’s somewhat high compared to previous estimates,” said Pickering.

More remarkable than the number, however, is where the NOx is produced. A decade ago, many researchers believed cloud-to-ground lightning produced far more NOx per flash than intracloud lightning, which occurs within a cloud and far higher in the atmosphere.

The new evidence suggests that the two types of lightning produce approximately the same amount of NOx per flash on average. But since most lightning is intracloud, this suggests a great deal more NOx is produced and remains higher in the atmosphere. Compounding this effect, the research also shows that strong updrafts within thunderstorms help transfer lower level NOx to higher altitudes in the atmosphere.

“We’ve really started to question some of our old assumptions as we’ve gotten better at measuring lightning in the field,” said Ott.

The observations spring out of field projects conducted in Germany, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, and Oklahoma between 1985 and 2002. For example, in a NASA field campaign called the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers Florida — Florida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE) aircraft flew headlong through anvil-shaped thunderheads to measure the anatomy of the thunderstorms. Sensors sampled the pressure, humidity, temperature, wind, and the amount of trace gases such as NOx and ozone.

Later, Ott input this data, as well as additional data from the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network and NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), into a complex computer model that simulated the six storms and calculated the amount of NOx that the average flash of lightning produced. With that number, she could then estimate the amount of NOx that lightning produces globally each year.

“One of the things we’re trying to understand is how much ozone changes caused by lightning affect radiative forcing, and how that might translate into climate impacts,” said Pickering.

There’s a possibility that lightning could produce a feedback cycle that accelerates global warming. “If a warming globe creates more thunderstorms,” Pickering noted, “that could lead to more NOx production, which leads to more ozone, more radiative forcing, and more warming,” Pickering emphasizes that this is a theory, and while some global modeling studies suggest this is indeed the case, it has not yet been borne out by field observations.

The new findings also have implications for regional air quality models. Scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, are already plugging the new numbers into a widely-used air quality model called the Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model. “Lightning is one of the smaller factors for surface ozone levels, but in some cases a surge of ozone formed from lightning NOx could be enough to put a community out of compliance with EPA air quality standards during certain times of the year,” said Pickering.

Pickering offered one important caveat to the findings: The value of 7 kilograms per flash was derived without consideration of lightning from storms in the tropics, where most of the Earth’s lightning occurs. Only very recently have data become available for tropical regions, he noted.

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Every year, scientists learn something new about the inner workings of lightning.

Central Africa receives the most flashes of lightning per square kilometer, while the polar regions receive the least. This global map of lightning flash density was created with data from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) aboard the Tropical Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) aboard the Microlab-1 spacecraft. (Credit: Jeff De La Beaujardiere, Scientific Visualization Studio)

With satellites, they have discovered that more than 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur around the world every year. (Rwanda has the most flashes per square kilometer, while flashes are rare in polar regions.) Laboratory and field experiments have revealed that the core of some lightning bolts reaches 30,000 Kelvin (53,540 ºF), a temperature hot enough to instantly melt sand and break oxygen and nitrogen molecules into individual atoms.

And then there is this: each of those billion lightning flashes produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas (NOx) that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Near Earth’s surface, ozone can harm human and plant health; higher in the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas; and in the stratosphere, its blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

In 1827, the German chemist Justin von Liebig first observed that lightning produced NOx — scientific shorthand for a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen that includes nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). Nearly two centuries later, the topic continues to attract the attention of scientists.

Fossil fuel combustion, microbes in the soil, lightning, and forest fires all produce NOx. Scientists think lightning’s contribution to Earth’s NOx budget — probably about 10 percent — is relatively small compared to fossil fuel emissions. Yet they haven’t been sure whether global estimates of NOx produced by lightning are accurate.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how much NOx lightning produces,” said Kenneth Pickering, an atmospheric scientist who studies lightning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Indeed, even recent published estimates of lightning’s global NOx production still vary by as much as a factor of four. We’re trying to narrow that uncertainty in order to improve the accuracy of both global climate models and regional air quality models.”

Using data gleaned from aircraft observations and satellites, Pickering and Goddard colleague Lesley Ott recently took steps toward a better global estimate of lightning-produced NOx and found that lightning may have a considerably stronger impact on the climate in the mid-latitudes and subtropics — and less on surface air quality — than previously thought.

According to a new paper by Ott and Pickering in the Journal of Geophysical Research, each flash of lightning on average in the several mid-latitude and subtropical thunderstorms studied turned 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) of nitrogen into chemically reactive NOx. “In other words, you could drive a new car across the United States more than 50 times and still produce less than half as much NOx as an average lightning flash,” Ott estimated. The results were published July.

When the researchers multiplied the number of lightning strokes worldwide by 7 kilograms, they found that the total amount of NOx produced by lightning per year is 8.6 terragrams, or 8.6 million metric tons. “That’s somewhat high compared to previous estimates,” said Pickering.

More remarkable than the number, however, is where the NOx is produced. A decade ago, many researchers believed cloud-to-ground lightning produced far more NOx per flash than intracloud lightning, which occurs within a cloud and far higher in the atmosphere.

The new evidence suggests that the two types of lightning produce approximately the same amount of NOx per flash on average. But since most lightning is intracloud, this suggests a great deal more NOx is produced and remains higher in the atmosphere. Compounding this effect, the research also shows that strong updrafts within thunderstorms help transfer lower level NOx to higher altitudes in the atmosphere.

“We’ve really started to question some of our old assumptions as we’ve gotten better at measuring lightning in the field,” said Ott.

The observations spring out of field projects conducted in Germany, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, and Oklahoma between 1985 and 2002. For example, in a NASA field campaign called the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers Florida — Florida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE) aircraft flew headlong through anvil-shaped thunderheads to measure the anatomy of the thunderstorms. Sensors sampled the pressure, humidity, temperature, wind, and the amount of trace gases such as NOx and ozone.

Later, Ott input this data, as well as additional data from the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network and NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), into a complex computer model that simulated the six storms and calculated the amount of NOx that the average flash of lightning produced. With that number, she could then estimate the amount of NOx that lightning produces globally each year.

“One of the things we’re trying to understand is how much ozone changes caused by lightning affect radiative forcing, and how that might translate into climate impacts,” said Pickering.

There’s a possibility that lightning could produce a feedback cycle that accelerates global warming. “If a warming globe creates more thunderstorms,” Pickering noted, “that could lead to more NOx production, which leads to more ozone, more radiative forcing, and more warming,” Pickering emphasizes that this is a theory, and while some global modeling studies suggest this is indeed the case, it has not yet been borne out by field observations.

The new findings also have implications for regional air quality models. Scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, are already plugging the new numbers into a widely-used air quality model called the Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model. “Lightning is one of the smaller factors for surface ozone levels, but in some cases a surge of ozone formed from lightning NOx could be enough to put a community out of compliance with EPA air quality standards during certain times of the year,” said Pickering.

Pickering offered one important caveat to the findings: The value of 7 kilograms per flash was derived without consideration of lightning from storms in the tropics, where most of the Earth’s lightning occurs. Only very recently have data become available for tropical regions, he noted.

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'8', 'footer_hooked' => true, 'filter_content' => true, 'filter_comments' => true, 'filter_comment_authors' => true, 'track_ext_links' => true, 'prefix_ext_links' => '/outgoing/', 'track_files' => true, 'prefix_file_links' => '/downloads/', 'track_extensions' => 'gif,jpg,jpeg,bmp,png,pdf,mp3,wav,phps,zip,gz,tar,rar,jar,exe,pps,ppt,xls,doc', 'track_mail_links' => true, 'prefix_mail_links' => '/mailto/', 'debug' => true, 'check_updates' => true, 'version_sent' => '1.6.0', 'advanced_config' => true, ) Ending uga_get_option: account_id (UA-10399907-2) Ending uga_get_tracker: Start uga_insert_html_once: footer, Footer hooked: HTML inserted: Location is FOOTER Inserting HTML End uga_insert_html Ending uga_wp_footer_track: Start uga_shutdown Start uga_in_feed Ending uga_in_feed: Start uga_track_user Start uga_get_option: ignore_users uga_options: array ( 'internal_domains' => 'www.humacon.org,humacon.org', 'account_id' => 'UA-10399907-2', 'enable_tracker' => true, 'track_adm_pages' => false, 'ignore_users' => true, 'max_user_level' => '8', 'footer_hooked' => true, 'filter_content' => true, 'filter_comments' => true, 'filter_comment_authors' => true, 'track_ext_links' => true, 'prefix_ext_links' => '/outgoing/', 'track_files' => true, 'prefix_file_links' => '/downloads/', 'track_extensions' => 'gif,jpg,jpeg,bmp,png,pdf,mp3,wav,phps,zip,gz,tar,rar,jar,exe,pps,ppt,xls,doc', 'track_mail_links' => true, 'prefix_mail_links' => '/mailto/', 'debug' => true, 'check_updates' => true, 'version_sent' => '1.6.0', 'advanced_config' => true, ) Ending uga_get_option: ignore_users (1) Start uga_get_option: max_user_level uga_options: array ( 'internal_domains' => 'www.humacon.org,humacon.org', 'account_id' => 'UA-10399907-2', 'enable_tracker' => true, 'track_adm_pages' => false, 'ignore_users' => true, 'max_user_level' => '8', 'footer_hooked' => true, 'filter_content' => true, 'filter_comments' => true, 'filter_comment_authors' => true, 'track_ext_links' => true, 'prefix_ext_links' => '/outgoing/', 'track_files' => true, 'prefix_file_links' => '/downloads/', 'track_extensions' => 'gif,jpg,jpeg,bmp,png,pdf,mp3,wav,phps,zip,gz,tar,rar,jar,exe,pps,ppt,xls,doc', 'track_mail_links' => true, 'prefix_mail_links' => '/mailto/', 'debug' => true, 'check_updates' => true, 'version_sent' => '1.6.0', 'advanced_config' => true, ) Ending uga_get_option: max_user_level (8) Tracking user with level 0 Ending uga_track_user: 1 Footer hook was executed Start uga_get_option: footer_hooked uga_options: array ( 'internal_domains' => 'www.humacon.org,humacon.org', 'account_id' => 'UA-10399907-2', 'enable_tracker' => true, 'track_adm_pages' => false, 'ignore_users' => true, 'max_user_level' => '8', 'footer_hooked' => true, 'filter_content' => true, 'filter_comments' => true, 'filter_comment_authors' => true, 'track_ext_links' => true, 'prefix_ext_links' => '/outgoing/', 'track_files' => true, 'prefix_file_links' => '/downloads/', 'track_extensions' => 'gif,jpg,jpeg,bmp,png,pdf,mp3,wav,phps,zip,gz,tar,rar,jar,exe,pps,ppt,xls,doc', 'track_mail_links' => true, 'prefix_mail_links' => '/mailto/', 'debug' => true, 'check_updates' => true, 'version_sent' => '1.6.0', 'advanced_config' => true, ) Ending uga_get_option: footer_hooked (1) Start uga_get_option: debug uga_options: array ( 'internal_domains' => 'www.humacon.org,humacon.org', 'account_id' => 'UA-10399907-2', 'enable_tracker' => true, 'track_adm_pages' => false, 'ignore_users' => true, 'max_user_level' => '8', 'footer_hooked' => true, 'filter_content' => true, 'filter_comments' => true, 'filter_comment_authors' => true, 'track_ext_links' => true, 'prefix_ext_links' => '/outgoing/', 'track_files' => true, 'prefix_file_links' => '/downloads/', 'track_extensions' => 'gif,jpg,jpeg,bmp,png,pdf,mp3,wav,phps,zip,gz,tar,rar,jar,exe,pps,ppt,xls,doc', 'track_mail_links' => true, 'prefix_mail_links' => '/mailto/', 'debug' => true, 'check_updates' => true, 'version_sent' => '1.6.0', 'advanced_config' => true, ) Ending uga_get_option: debug (1) -->