This is Rob Bell speaking on "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."

Bell starts with a reflection on ache - the ache for a nuclear free world, or for a marriage to work.

He then deals with a traditional understanding of the beattitudes and "exemplary attitudes", and quotes one commentator:

"Those who intentionally devote every aspect of our lives and every molecule of our being to embrace, adopt and become morality upright without guilt of sin." (16 mins)

But Bell, being a good disciple of Dallas Willard, rightly rails against this interpretation as "new law", "Blessed are those who get it right."

Instead he talks about those who have the ache for something more, and who sense they are far from it; who do not have the righteousness, but yearn with physical desperation for something more.

There is a section on this in Habakkuk.  Talks about having a Habakkuk day.

He talks about friends unsure of whether to buy a sofa or donate to Developing world water projects.  One understanding is that once they get the right answer then God will bless, but Bell says that God blesses us in the tension, in the place of not knowing.

Blessed are you when you ache because the world isn't as it is supposed to be

Blessed are you when you come to the end of yourselves

Blessed are you when you get frustrated enough to throw up your hands and say "God, I can't do this."

Blessed are you when you can't make the tension go away no matter how hard you try

Blessed are you when you run out of willpower, ideas, self-control, hope, fortitude and energy

Because it's in that place

In that state

In that pain

In that ache

In that longing

In that desire

In that awareness

In that  hunger

In that thirst

That Jesus announces

"God is with you"

One of the most common arguments against anthropogenic climate change, is that our current warming is nothing other than a post-ice-age reheat.  This is natural, so no need to cut engine capacity or build windmills.  Top Gear can go to air with a clear conscience.

One of the key arguments against the "this is normal, why panic" brigade is the kind of graph on the right, commonly referred to as the "hockey stick graph".  The right hand side of the stick, the part for hitting the puck, is the worry.  It's the sharp rise in temperature that has been happening since the industrial revolution.  It is this kind of graph that the IPCC featured prominently in its 2001 report on global warming, and the BBC most recently featured in its pre-Copenhagen guide to global warming.

Climate sceptics have been quick to jump on the hockey stick.  Michael Mann's original 1998 version had error bars as thick as the tree trunks where the data had come from, and his computer models would have produced hockey sticks, they claimed, even if they had been fed the numbers from a telephone directory (so called "red noise").