OnlineDayTradingORG
18 years ago
While Washington Slept Queen of England is afraid.
International C.E.O.'s are nervous. And the scientific establishment is loud and clear. If global warming isn't halted, rising sea levels could submerge coastal cities by 2100.
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 by Vanity Fair
Ten months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans underwater, Queen Elizabeth II had a private conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair about George W. Bush. The Queen's tradition of meeting once a week with Britain's elected head of government to discuss matters of state—usually on Tuesday evenings in Buckingham Palace and always alone, to ensure maximum confidentiality—goes back to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the contents of those chats rarely if ever leaked.
So it was extraordinary when London's Observer reported, on October 31, 2004, that the Queen had "made a rare intervention in world politics" by telling Blair of "her grave concerns over the White House's stance on global warming." The Observer did not name its sources, but one of them subsequently spoke to Vanity Fair.
With spring arriving in England three weeks earlier than it did 50 years ago, the Queen could now see signs of climate change with her own eyes. Sandringham, her country estate north of London, overlooks Britain's premier bird-watching spot: the vast North Sea wetlands known as the Wash. A lifelong outdoorswoman, the Queen had doubtless observed the V-shaped flocks of pink-footed geese that descend on the Wash every winter. But in recent years, says Mark Avery, conservation director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, she also would have seen a species new to the area: little egrets. These shiny white birds are native to Southern Europe, Avery says, "but in the last 5 to 10 years they have spread very rapidly to Northern Europe. We can't prove this is because of rising temperatures, but it sure looks like it."
Temperatures are rising, the Queen learned from King and other scientists, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of such gases, is released whenever fossil fuels are burned or forests catch fire. Global warming, the scientists explained, threatens to raise sea levels as much as three feet by the end of the 21st century, thanks to melting glaciers and swollen oceans. (Water expands when heated.)
This would leave much of eastern England, including areas near Sandringham, underwater. Global warming would also bring more heat waves like the one in the summer of 2003 that killed 31,000 people across Europe. It might even shut down the Gulf Stream, the flow of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico that gives Europe its mild climate. If the Gulf Stream were to halt—and it has already slowed 30 percent since 1992—Europe's temperatures would plunge, agriculture would collapse, London would no longer feel like New York but like Anchorage.
...
No one can say for sure whether global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. But it certainly fit the pattern. The scientific rule of thumb is that one can never blame any one weather event on any single cause. The earth's weather system is too complex for that. Most scientists agree, however, that global warming makes extra-strong hurricanes such as Katrina more likely because it encourages hot oceans, a precondition of hurricane formation.
"It's a bit like saying, 'My grandmother died of lung cancer, and she smoked for the last 20 years of her life—smoking killed her,'" explains Kerry Emanuel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied hurricanes for 20 years. "Well, the problem is, there are an awful lot of people who die of lung cancer who never smoked. There are a lot of people who smoked all their lives and die of something else. So all you can say, even [though] the evidence statistically is clear connecting lung cancer to smoking, is that [the grandmother] upped her probability."
Just weeks before Katrina struck, Emanuel published a paper in the scientific journal Nature demonstrating that hurricanes had grown more powerful as global temperatures rose in the 20th century. Now, he says, by adding more greenhouse gases to the earth's atmosphere, humans are "loading the climatic dice in favor of more powerful hurricanes in the future."
But most Americans heard nothing about Hurricane Katrina's association with global warming. Media coverage instead reflected the views of the Bush administration—specifically, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which declared that the hurricane was the result of natural factors. An outcry from N.O.A.A.'s scientists led the agency to backtrack from that statement in February 2006, but by then conventional wisdom was set in place. Post-Katrina New Orleans may eventually be remembered as the first major U.S. casualty of global warming, yet most Americans still don't know what hit us.
Sad to say, Katrina was the perfect preview of what global warming might look like in the 21st century. First, Katrina struck a city that was already below sea level—which is where rising waters could put many coastal dwellers in the years ahead. In 2001, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), a peer-reviewed, international collaboration among thousands of scientists that is the world's leading authority on climate change, predicted that sea levels could rise as much as three feet by 2100. By coincidence, three feet is about how much New Orleans sank during the 20th century. That was because levees built to keep the Mississippi River from flooding also kept the river from depositing silt that would have replenished the underlying land mass, explains Mike Tidwell, the author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast. "You could say that in New Orleans we brought the ocean to the people," Tidwell adds, "which is pretty much what global warming will do to other cities in the future."
What's more, Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest there is. Such extreme weather events will likely become more frequent as global warming intensifies, says the I.P.C.C. Yes, Katrina's winds had slowed to high–Category 3 levels by the time it made landfall, but it was the hurricane's storm surge that killed people—a surge that formed in the Gulf of Mexico when the storm was still Category 5. Thus, Katrina unleashed 10 to 15 feet of water on a city that was already significantly below sea level.
To envision global warming's future impacts, the illustrations accompanying this article reflect this and other scenarios. [For illustrations, see the May 2006 issue of Vanity Fair. The three large-scale illustrations are an artist's interpretations of projections generated for Vanity Fair by Applied Science Associates Inc. (appsci.com), a marine-science consulting firm based in Rhode Island. The projections do not account for small-scale features such as coastal-protection structures.
The effects of a three-foot sea-level rise compounded by a storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane are shown in the image of the Hamptons, which would suffer severe flooding. The image of Washington, D.C., shows the effects of a 20-foot sea-level rise, which is what scientists expect if the entire Greenland ice sheet melts. The ice sheet has shrunk 50 cubic miles in the past year alone, and is now melting twice as fast as previously believed.
Finally, the image of New York City shows the effects of an 80-foot rise in sea levels. That's what would happen if not only the Greenland ice sheet but its counterpart in the Antarctic were to melt, says James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen, who put climate change on the media map in 1988 by saying that man-made global warming had already begun, made headlines again earlier this year when he complained that White House political appointees were trying to block him from speaking freely about the need for rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Hansen warns that, if global emissions continue on their current trajectory, the ice sheets will not survive, because global temperatures will increase by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. "The last time the earth was that warm, sea levels were 80 feet higher than today," he says. It will likely take hundreds of years for sea levels to rise the full 80 feet, but the process would be irreversible, and the rises would not be gradual. "You're going to be continually faced with a changing coastline, which will force coastal dwellers to constantly relocate," he says.
...
The public discussion about climate change in the U.S. is years behind that in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why. "In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply skeptical of climate-change science and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions," says Fiona Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial Times. "In Britain, the equivalent body, the Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely behind the science and agrees on the need to cut emissions. The only differences are over how to do that."
America's media coverage is also well behind the curve, says Harvey. "In the United States you have lots of news stories that, in the name of balance, give equal credence to the skeptics. We don't do that here—not because we're not balanced but because we think it's unbalanced to give equal validity to a fringe few with no science behind them."
"Americans are hearing more about reducing greenhouse emissions from BP ads than from news stories in Time, The New York Times, or any other U.S. media outlet," Alexander says. "This will go down as the greatest act of mass denial in history."
In 2002, Alexander went to see Andrew Heyward, then the president of CBS News, after running into him at a Harvard reunion. "I talked to him about climate change and other global environmental threats, and made the case that they were more dangerous than terrorism and CBS should be doing much more coverage of them," Alexander recalls. "He didn't dispute any of my factual points, but he did say the reason CBS didn't do more of that coverage was that 'people don't want to hear all that gloom and doom'—in other words, the environment wasn't a ratings winner. He seemed to think CBS News's job was to tell people what they wanted to hear, not what they need to know, and I think that attitude is increasingly true for the news business in general."
American television did, however, give prime-time coverage to the latest, and most famous, global-warming denier: novelist Michael Crichton. ABC's 20/20 broadcast a very friendly interview with Crichton when he published State of Fear, a novel arguing that anyone who bought into the phony scientific consensus on global warming was a modern equivalent of the early-20th-century eugenicists who cited scientific "proof" for the superiority of the white race.
"The United States is the only entity on this planet turning its back on this problem," says Massachusetts senator John Kerry. "Even as he talks about protecting the security of the nation, the president is willfully choosing not to tackle this problem. History will record it as one of the greatest derelictions of duty ever."
The administration opposes the Kyoto Protocol, Connaughton claims, because its mandatory emissions cuts would punish the American economy, costing as many as five million jobs. It would also dry up the capital needed to fund the technological research that will ultimately solve global warming.
"It's important not to get distracted by chasing short-term reductions in greenhouse emissions. The real payoff is in long-term technological breakthroughs," says John H. Marburger III, the president's science adviser. Besides, "there is no question that mitigating the impact of climate change as it takes place will be much less [expensive] than the costs of reducing oil and coal use in the short term."
...
hitex
18 years ago
ZENX posts record earnings! WOWSA!!
Press Release Source: Zenex International, Inc.
Zenex International Reports 2005 Year End Results
Wednesday March 15, 8:30 am ET
Announces Record Revenues and Earnings
OKLAHOMA CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2006--Zenex International, (OTCBB: ZENX.OB - News) a leading provider of commercial roofing, repair and maintenance work, as well as disaster recovery services today reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2005.
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For the fourth quarter, revenues were $17.3 million, an 8% increase over the $16 million reported in the prior year period. Net income for the fourth quarter was $2.5 million, a 30% increase over the $1.9 million for the fourth quarter of 2004. Earnings per share for the fourth quarter were $0.03 per fully diluted share versus $0.02 per fully diluted per share reported in the prior year.
For the full year, revenues totaled $59.2 million, a 113% increase over the $27 million reported for 2004. Net income rose to $9.3 million, or $0.12 per fully diluted share versus the $1 million, or $0.02 reported in the prior year. Revenues in 2005 included $42.2 million for storm-related work in Florida and Mississippi versus $10.6 million in 2004.
Ron Carte, Zenex's President and CEO said, "2005 was a year of dramatic developments and great successes. Our core roofing business remained stable during a year which saw a significant change in the management of that business. At the same time, our relationship with Oklahoma Development Group gave us the unique opportunity to bid for and be awarded contracts for storm related work. Finally, our ability to service such large contracts is a testament to our rapid response capabilities and the geographic scale of our business."
"We look forward to growing our core roofing business by focusing on the commercial roofing market and emphasizing our expanded product offerings and extensive maintenance capabilities. At the same time, while any storm related work is by definition weather dependent, we are confident in our abilities to respond quickly and effectively should the need arise," concluded Carte.
Commenting further, Reggie Cook, CFO noted, "Not only are we pleased with our 2005 results, we are particularly happy with the fact that while we saw a dramatic increase in revenues, we were able to control the growth in expenses. Operating expenses were 75% of revenues in 2005 versus 91% of revenues in 2004. We also reduced our long term debt from $915,452 to $295,390 as we took the opportunity to repay a portion of the debt with cash generated from operations."
Webcast and Conference Call
Shareholders and other interested parties are invited to listen to Zenex International's conference call hosted by Carte and Cook, scheduled for 11:00 am EST, today, March 15, 2006. Those interested in participating on the conference call may dial +1 617-213-8853 and enter access code 45121061 or via the Internet at:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/playerlink.zhtml?c=108715&s=wm&e=1230055.
About Zenex International
Zenex International, Inc. is the holding company of Aduddell Roofing, www.aduddell.com, one of the leaders in the commercial roofing industry nationwide. Through Aduddell Roofing and other subsidiaries, Zenex International offers Fortune 500 companies and large governmental agencies a broad range of roofing services, including re-roofing, restoration and repair, new roof construction, sheet metal fabrication, and waterproofing. In addition to work on large projects and high security roofing matters, the company has a nationally recognized track record for handling disaster recovery and emergency projects efficiently and cost effectively. More information about Zenex International can be found at www.zenex.net
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:-- This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors.
Zenex International
Consolidated Income Statement
(In Thousands, Except Per Share Data)
2005 2004
----------- -----------
Revenues $59,227,145 $27,828,362
Operating Expenses
Cost of sales 41,668,047 23,262,586
Selling, general and administrative 2,772,785 2,011,624
Warranty expense 138,847 110,820
----------- -----------
44,579,679 25,385,030
----------- -----------
Operating Income 14,647,466 2,443,332
Other Income (Expense)
Interest and dividend income 86,039 75,139
Gain(loss) on sale of equipment 12,369 3,228
Other income 197,862 34,924
----------- -----------
296,270 113,291
----------- -----------
Net Income from Operations
Before Income Taxes 14,943,736 2,556,623
Income tax expense 5,618,797 1,022,488
----------- -----------
Net Income 9,324,939 1,534,135
Other Comprehensive Income
Unrealized holding gains 14,146 1,230
Reclassification adjustment - -
----------- -----------
Comprehensive Income $ 9,339,085 $ 1,535,365
=========== ===========
Primary Earnings per Share $ 0.191 $ 0.032
=========== ===========
Fully Diluted Earnings per Share $ 0.115 $ 0.019
=========== ===========
Zenex International
Consolidated Balance Sheet
(In Thousands, Except Per Share Data)
2005 2004
------------ -----------
Assets
Current Assets
Cash $ 22,330,751 $ 2,500,561
Accounts receivable, net of allowance 4,614,895 4,756,142
Estimated earnings on uncompleted contracts 2,158,971 1,363,505
Prepaid expenses & other 185,038 205,021
------------ -----------
29,289,655 8,825,229
------------ -----------
Non-Current Related Party Receivable 1,801,133 1,730,340
------------ -----------
Property and Equipment 2,069,686 1,839,807
Less: accumulated depreciation (879,737) (1,387,818)
------------ -----------
1,189,949 451,989
------------ -----------
Other
Investments 423,110 5,740
Deferred tax asset - 35,000
------------ -----------
423,110 40,740
------------ -----------
$ 32,703,847 $11,048,298
============ ===========
Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity
Current Liabilities
Current portion of long-term debt $ 213,410 $ 734,257
Accounts and subcontract payables 11,825,466 3,935,652
Accrued liabilities 250,883 253,329
Insurance payable 40,458 245,099
Income tax payable 5,349,105 112,002
Billings in excess of costs and estimated
earnings on uncompleted contracts 97,784 225,088
------------ -----------
17,777,106 5,505,427
------------ -----------
Long-Term Debt (Net of Current Portion) 81,980 181,195
------------ -----------
Deferred Income Taxes 144,000 -
------------ -----------
Zenex International
Consolidated Balance Sheet Continued
(In Thousands, Except Per Share Data)
Stockholders' Equity
Preferred stock ($0.001 par value,
20,000,000 shares authorized, no shares
issued and outstanding) - -
Common stock ($0.001 par value,
100,000,000 shares authorized, 48,737,921
and 48,737,921 shares issued and
outstanding at December 31, 2005 and 2004) 48,738 48,738
Paid-in capital 4,860,632 4,860,632
Unrealized gain (loss) on available-for-
sale securities (3,569) (17,715)
Retained earnings 9,794,960 470,021
------------ -----------
14,700,761 5,361,676
------------ -----------
$ 32,703,847 $11,048,298
============ ===========
Contact:
General Inquiries:
Cameron Associates
John McNamara, 212-554-5485
john@cameronassoc.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Zenex International, Inc.
Topgun21
18 years ago
ZENX To the RESCUE- Wow, what a buying opportunity~ This company is for real, and has come to the RESCUE for tens of thousands of people!
The earnings will blow this puppy up inho to test the $1.48 recent high, and I appreciate the opportunity to pick off another 18,400 shares today, but those MM's would only give them at 500 a time then 2,500 and then raise the ask etc.
I look forward to seeing Carother's winning the bid for Wilma! This company has always come through to help others in a time efficient way, along with employing "local populace" which is priceless!
How can ACOE not look that with all the devastation done with Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, that this company does care and helps out the very people by putting up temp roofing along with employing thousand plus workers that have lost jobs due to these terrible hurricanes.
As Max Mayfield hurricane center said that we have entered into a cycle of these storms for at least the next 20 plus years, what a place to park some good coin and reap the benefits while helping others!
Our management seems solid, and it appears we will win a huge contract for Wilma , as we should be considered via Carother's a as a small, disadvantaged minority business, due to the face that we employ locals who lost everything, and have a excellent work ethic, and get things accomplished in a timely fashion. Yes, I sold my SGR (Shaw Group) shares along with my HOM shares to now have a position of 40,000 shares long and strong. The 18,400 today solidifyied my position at 40,000 shares.
I really enjoy reading the posts here, and appreciate all the due diligence etc. I can't believe that this stock price is so cheap for the $60 mill in "Blue Roof" contracts, coupled with all the commercial contracts 23 plus worth some nice change recently announced.
In my humble opinion, I believe that the OTCBB is a blessing in disguise, because this stock would be up at $4-$5/share if it was traded on a major AMEX/Nasdaq small cap board imho!
I am looking for a minimum $5.00/share by next Hurricane Season, and Inst's will buy this puppy up imho, and bring on the $10/share within 12 months imho!
Can't wait for earnings......EBITA will be excellent imho, along with commercial contracts as the CEO Ron Carte said in earlier post by board member here "Booked well into the next year etc"!
I even got members of our USAR-- Urban Search and Rescue Team to buy into this at roughly .89/share (They picked up average of 2,500 shares a pop, because they were deployed for 17 days to affected area, and first hand witnessed blue roof on front line etc.
When the scathing "unfair" article came out in the LA Times, they couldn't believe that they could get in under a buck, so the majority of them bought some ZENX, due to the fact that HAL, HOM, and SGR were out of the price range and they could get more for there buck here in ZENX land!
Enough of my rambling, call me a pumper if you wish, but it is nice to hear good reports, and get in on ground floor. Well, wish I would of picked this up around .30 earlier all well!
Good weekend to all, and looking forward to the new web site, Wilma contract, and earnings!
We got a MONSTAAA!!!
Trade like a pro: Leverage real-time discussions and market-moving ideas to outperform.
100lbStriper
18 years ago
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