Connie Hedegaard met with California’s governor, Jerry Brown, and Mary Nicholls, who chairs the Californian Air Resources Board, in Sacramento to discuss how future co-operation might work to join the world’s largest and second largest carbon markets.

So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

“But places like New York are going to have a larger contribution than the average – 20% more in this case – and Reykjavik will be better off.”

Of the 13 regions where the team makes specific projections, New York sees the biggest increase from the global average, although Vancouver, Tasmania and The Maldives are also forecast to see above-average impacts.

The Congressional Research Service found that during the Clinton-era shutdowns – which lasted 26 days – veterans’ services all but ceased, the National Park Service shuttered 368 sites, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped disease monitoring and toxic waste clean-up was suspended.

Over 30,000 applications for US visas were stalled each day and 200,000 passport applications sat unattended on desks.

Like all other departments, the State Department will have to determine which of the services it provides in foreign embassies are “essential”, but they would probably shut down or operate on skeleton staffing.

Customs and immigration at US airports and borders however would continue to function.

No new patients were enrolled in clinical research trials at the National Institute of Health, and its disease hotline went unanswered.

Alcohol, tobacco and firearms applications were affected, as were border patrol and law enforcement recruitment, delinquent child support case management and all of the national monuments in Washington DC.

Social security cheques were mailed, but administrators were unable to handle queries about address changes, lost cheques, new enrolees and the like.

This time around, government workers will likely have to shut off their Blackberries. Answering work emails is in contravention of the 1870 act which prohibits the government from receiving free labour.

Employees who try to sneak in some free work could land themselves a $5,000 (£3,118) fine or two years in prison.

Mostly a government shutdown works by furloughing nonessential government workers.

They are usually suspended without pay and later given back pay, even though they had not worked during that period.

That helps contribute to the irony: shutting down the government is expensive.

Fines and fees aren’t collected, the tourism industry suffers from the closure of national parks and employees are ultimately paid for not doing any work.

Writing is a form of Thought Engineering. The works created are Machines that operate on the minds of those that choose to activate them, producing for each a unique result.

This is why the State, in its Monopoly of Force, controls Language. Prohibiting the assembly & distribution of Dangerous Machines that threaten to impair or destroy the operation of its own.

The company’s Recycler robot uses data from a combination of visual sensors, metal detectors, weight measurements and tactile feedback from a robotic arm to pick out likely pieces of refuse and categorise them.

Through trial and error its machine learning software has been taught to recognise around a dozen types of material, including different plastics. And it can pluck out concrete, metal and wood from a stream of waste as it moves along a conveyor belt.

For more ambiguous types of waste, such as a piece of plywood with nails driven through it, the robot uses a spectrometer to recognise objects based on the unique patterns of light they reflect. This means the robot can distinguish the type of waste based on its colour and drop it into the appropriate bin.