Well, the more appropriate question is “Do Killer Whales enjoy the same legal rights in the US judicial system as humans?” I suppose it could be granulated even further. However one phrases it, we may get the answer before too long. A federal court in California is going to decide the question in the context of a lawsuit brought by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.) It has to be said that taking the legal route is one of PETA’s milder strategies. The lawsuit is attempting to prove that Sea World’s holding of five killer whales in captivity (at two different parks) constitutes slavery. My, what of rats’ nest of interesting questions immediately pops up.

To take the most curmudgeonly one first, if Killer Whales have legal rights comparable to those of humans (or at least natural born US citizens), do they have legal responsibilities as well—and can Tilikum thus be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter for the death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau? Or will his plea be self-defense? Full story »

One of the many factual errors, misunderstandings, and misleading claims (I counted at least six) in a Wall Street Journal commentary denying human-caused climate disruption was that only four of the 16 co-signers had published on climate science, and only one has published anything significant on the topic recently. Many of the others were not even scientists (including celebrity aerospace engineer Burt Rutan), but rather engineers or physicians who were misidentified as scientists by the Journal‘s editorial page editor.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. Full story »

On January 27, I wrote an “open letter” to Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer and former CEO of Scaled Composites, expressing my disappointment that he would co-sign a commentary in the Wall Street Journal that contains incorrect and misleading information on climate science and economics. On January 28th, Rutan responded in the comments. He also CCed his response to Anthony Watts, who published Rutan’s response on Wattsupwiththat.com. What transpired is a huge number of comments that essentially drowned Rutan’s and my exchanges.

This post extracts from the original comment thread just Rutan’s and my responses, ignoring all the other comments, good, bad, or ugly.

Comments on this post are closed, and any further exchanges between Rutan and I from the original post will be posted here for clarity. If you have something to say about what we’re talking about, please comment in the original post’s comment thread instead – everything here is also there. Full story »

Climate scientists who study the history of the Earth’s climate (also known as paleoclimatologists) know that modern carbon dioxide levels are at their highest level in the last 800,000 years. They tell us this because they’ve been able to measure the carbon dioxide in air that is actually 800,000 years old. So how do they do that?

Scientists know how much carbon dioxide was in the air hundreds of thousands of years ago because they actually have small samples of ancient air stored in glacial ice. To get a feel for how this works, consider the following examples. Full story »

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid. Full story »

[Update: My original post, Burt Rutan's comments, and my responses to his comments have been copied here. That post has closed comments and will be updated with any further discussion Burt and I have, either in the massive comment thread below or independently. If you're interested in just Burt's and my discussion to date, minus the mass of additional commentary, please feel free to read the new post.]

Dear Mr. Rutan,

Ever since you won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 you’ve been a minor hero of mine. I’ve felt that the development of private human spaceflight was the critical next step toward moving humanity off our small blue marble since I was in high school, and SpaceShipOne was the first major step in that direction. The commercialization of space travel is a large part of why I work in aerospace myself designing satellite and space vehicle electronics.

This is why I was disappointed to find that you had co-signed a Wall Street Journal commentary regarding human-caused climate disruption along with 15 other scientists and engineers. The commentary was replete with incorrect and misleading information. So much so, in fact, that I was surprised that you, as an engineer, would attach your name to it. Full story »

I do not like bats. Once, as a college student living in a third-floor apartment with no air-conditioning, a bat landed on me during a hot summer night. I fled my room, shrieking. Even today, on summer nights at my rural home, when bats fly low over my deck, I instinctively duck.

Bats have a bad rep. Think bat and you likely think bat with rabies. Think bat and you likely think dirty bat or bat as vampiric bloodsucker. Think bat and you likely think evil harbinger of doom and destruction. (Okay, that last one’s a tad over the top … but you get the idea.) Bats have fewer defenders than fear-laden critics.

But bats, the only mammal structurally capable of sustained flight, are just creatures with significant ecological — and economic — roles. Hate mosquitoes and other insects? They’re on the nighttime menu for bats. Like bees, many bats pollinate plants and spread seeds. Bat shit (sorry; bat guano) is rich in nitrogen and is a profitable fertilizer. Bats’ ability to navigate in the dark (echolocation) is a subject of significant scientific study.

But in the past five years, up to 6.7 million bats are estimated to have died in 16 states and Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. Three species face extinction — the little brown bat, the northern long-eared bat and the tricolored bat. A malady called white-nose syndrome is killing them.
Full story »

Marc Morano, former environmental communications director to Senator Jim Inhofe and the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, recently published on his Climate Depot website the email address of conservative MIT climate scientist and hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. As a result, Emanuel was deluged with hate mail that not only threatened his life but also threatened his wife. (MotherJones has the full story.) Other climate scientists and their family members have been threatened with torture, rape, and murder in the past, so it’s likely that similar threats were involved here. Full story »

What the hell is up with all the Jobsophilia since Steve Jobs died? The Tech Curmudgeon has noticed that there’s a hell of a lot of supposedly smart people reporting and blogging on “technology” claiming that Steve Jobs was the most visionary tech guy in the last 30 or 40 years. Or they’re fellating Jobs’ reputation and going so far as to claim that the man changed the world more than anyone else in the history of technology. The Tech Curmudgeon wants some of what they’re smoking, because it’s clearly better than mescaline and LSD.

So lets look at some of Jobs’ contemporaries who are more important than he was to things that, you know, actually matter to the real world. Full story »

[*B.S. means “Bad Science.” What did you think it meant?]

by Peter H. Gleick
Crossposted at Forbes and Huffington Post. To see S&R’s climate-related posts, click here

[Correction: Katharine Hayhoe was misidentified as a Republican in the original post at Forbes and HuffPo. This has been corrected below.

Peter Gleick updated the original posts at HuffPo and Forbes and removed Ben Webster from the Second Place text. S&R has updated this post to bring it in line with Gleick's update.]

The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.

Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. Full story »

by Robert S. Becker

Stay ‘til the end – and a rich payoff of Carl Sagan’s gemlike insights. A little clean-up work first, to clear the palate.

I don’t regularly read Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer (CK, as in crank), often regret when I do, ending with gnashing teeth. From time to time, perplexity or hilarity moves me to the dark side, hunting out the loopy logic behind the latest fringe skullduggery. I used to read that wily conservative wordsmith, Peggy Noonan – a far better stylist – until I gagged at her unctuous Vatican sycophancy.

So, I brightened suspiciously at Krauthammer’s seemingly apolitical title, “Are we alone in the universe?” Full story »

#8: The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1953)
#9: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1961)

The thermometer says it’s 23 degrees, but the wind blowing east off the Gulf of Maine says differently. I can hardly feel my fingers though my deerskin mittens have been off for less than half a minute. I wanted to grab a couple snapshots with my Blackberry of the waves as they roll in and hit the granite shoreline that the receding tide has been slowly revealing. As the waves hit, the same wind that’s numbing my fingers is sheering off the tops of the whitecaps before they hardly have time to spray. There’s a booming flash of white—and then the wind erases it.

I’m standing at the southern tip of Mt. Desert Island, near the western end of the natural seawall. I’ve come here, to the edge of the sea, to spend some time with Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. Full story »

The Tech Curmudgeon looked up the word “technology” in his dead tree American Heritage Dictionary, and just in case he was dating himself, he looked up the word in an online dictionary too. Both dictionaries generally agree with each other that the word “technology” means the application of science or knowledge to achieve a practical objective. That’s a pretty broad definition that takes in anything from stereo systems to car engines to air- and spacecraft to oil extraction equipment. So the Tech Curmudgeon wants to know when was it that “technology” came to mean just personal gadgets, social media, and smartphone apps? Full story »

by Robert Becker

Is “Higgs boson” a creative particle or energy field? Can we thus infer an “anti-God particle,” as anti-matter opposes matter, or dark energy battles gravity?

Any covenant with Godhead, in my book, comes down to Creation. Genesis, the source of time, space, and being; in short, existence. Especially our piddling existence. Without creation as we know it, we’d be deficient in mass, not even rocks; or with multiverse speculations, we could also be someone else, who knows where, gabbing with utter aliens. Because we esteem existence (over all the sorry alternatives), let us greet the New Year by honoring the force that could well have made something real out of, well, something not. The “God Particle.” Hallelujah!

If this particle is a particle. Full story »

Atmospheric CO₂ concentration data from ice core (blue, 1750-1975)
and direct atmospheric measurements (red, 1960-2010) vs. “compounding
interest” model described in post (purple). Click for a larger version.

In many ways, climate science is difficult. There’s a reason that the best climate models require some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in order to run. But the most important concepts are easily understood by a non-expert with either a little mathematical skill or the ability to use some simple online tools. This is the inaugural post of a new series that seeks to illustrate how anyone and everyone can understand the most important concepts underlying climate science and the reality that is human-caused climate disruption.

Are people adding a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere? It’s such an easy question to ask, but the answer depends on what you mean by “a lot.” And it depends on what you’re referring to. Full story »

Yellowstone’s “supervolcano.” Harry Turtledove.

Score!

It seemed like a no-brainer to me when I saw Supervolcano: Eruption on the bookstore’s “new arrivals” table.

For being about the world’s greatest cataclysm, though, Turtledove’s new book was more “bore” than “score.” Full story »

When you’ve been following, analyzing, and reporting on climate science and politics for as long as I have, a few things become apparent. First, most climate disruption deniers have no real clue about actual climate science and are instead simply regurgitating talking points they heard from their favorite denial-peddling think-tank, politician, commentator, or news source. Second, the arguments against human-caused climate disruption almost never change, so you’ll be rebutting the same thing over and over again. And third, most arguments you hear are incompatible or self-contradictory, although not always obviously so.

Today, John Cook of the denial-debunking uber-site Skeptical Science published a detailed examination of some of the many self-contradictory claims by Ian Plimer, the Australian author of the thoroughly and widely debunked book Heaven and Earth – global warming: the missing science. Full story »

Given the release of a second batch of hacked emails yesterday, S&R decided to pull this analysis from 2010 back to the front. The conclusions reached in this analysis are as applicable to the emails published in 2011 just as much as they are to the original emails from 2009.

It is impossible to draw firm conclusions from the hacked documents and emails. They do not represent the complete record, and they are not a random selection from the complete record.
- Dr. Timothy Osborn, Climatic Research Unit (source)

After several hundred hours of studying the emails and looking at their references, I have no hesitation in stating that, to my satisfaction, the system is rotten to the core and has been from the start.
- Geoff Sherrington, former corporate geologist, (source)

According to Osborn, there is not sufficient context to understand the “true” story behind the published Climatic Research Unit emails and documents. However, according to Sherrington, the emails and references contained therein provide all the context needed in order to conclude that climate change research is complete hogwash. Reality lies somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes – the question is where.

S&R set out to determine whether the published CRU emails provided enough context for the public to condemn or vindicate the scientists involved. After investigating three primary options and reading a key study, S&R has concluded that the emails do not themselves contain sufficient context to understand what really happened in climate science over the last 13 years. Full story »

See update at the end

If you follow climate news, you’re probably already aware that someone has illegally published another 5000 climate emails, probably from the original “Climategate” hack from two years ago. S&R is following the story and will publish a more in-depth analysis as we learn more. However, we feel it’s important to point out the following key facts about the original emails and their subsequent investigations:

• Three separate investigations in the UK, one by Parliament, one by a group associated with the world’s oldest scientific body, the Royal Society, and a third convened by the University of East Anglia, found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.
• Two separate inquiries into alleged misconduct by climate scientist Michael Mann found no evidence of misconduct, and a third investigation by the National Science Foundation also found no evidence of misconduct.
• S&R investigated a number of conspiracy claims against climate scientists in general, and Michael Mann in particular, and found them all lacking any factual basis.
• S&R also looked at whether it was possible to extract reliable enough information from cherrypicked email records to support conspiracy charges and found that both research and common sense argued against some form of climate science conspiracy.

Full story »

The Heartland Institute has a history of distorting peer-reviewed papers, lying in newspaper editorials and Institute blogs, and claiming extensive scientific expertise where little actually exists with respect to climate science and the reality of human-driven climate disruption. Given this history, the distortions in the Heartland Institute’s latest media advisory regarding the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project are only to be expected.

BEST analyzed more surface temperature data than any other study had previously and concluded that the established global temperature records were accurate. In this way, BEST confirmed what every climate realist already knew from three surface datasets and two satellite datasets – that the globe is warming and that the best available science indicates that the urban heat island effect has a minimal impact upon the measurements. However, the Heartland Institute’s media advisory claims that “the paper is seriously flawed,” attributing that statement to James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

It’s at this point, the second sentence of the media advisory, that the distortions start. Full story »