There’s still time for one more doozy of a snowstorm before winter gives up its ghost, I tell myself—although the next storm we get will be the first. We’ve had hardly any snow at all here this winter, which is saying something considering that I live in western New York, famous for the thick bands of lake-effect snow that pummel us every year. This year, not so much.

Everyone’s talking about it—what a mild winter we’ve had. How little snow has fallen. How warm it’s been. Everyone. And it’s not just here; it seems to be all across the country.

I can’t help but wonder about the missed opportunity:  Why hasn’t someone been using the mild weather to bang the drum about climate change? Full story »

Just the other morning, I ran across this article from ThinkProgress:

Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is a Hoax

That article links to a short clip from an interview Inhofe gave to one Vic Eliason at Voice of Christian Youth America to promote his book The Greatest Hoax:

“Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Full story »

Okay, maybe not yet. But we’re definitely getting there. Check out today’s two-part gotcha.

Part 1: Back in 2008 I wrote a piece called “The Smartest Shopping Cart That Ever Lived,” a glimpse into the near-future of GPS meets RFID meets customer relationship management meets intelligent supply chain meets nosy retailer shopping experience. I invoked Minority Report in doing so – remember Tom Cruise trying to get through that mall without being skinned alive?

Of course, as is so often the case when it comes to predicting the future these days, I was way too conservative. Check this item, from the Not-Science-Fiction-At-All Files.

An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager: Full story »

Recently I wrote a post that said Mitt had a spine made of surgical tubing, which provoked this response from a conservative friend: “May I remind you that there is a fine line between sharp humor and bile, and this time you have crossed the line.”

Bile? That’s bile?

This same friend regularly listens to Rush Limbaugh, and laughs when I criticize Mullah Rush. (Although I suspect he might feel differently this week.) Now this fellow is no fool. He has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and is a very successful CEO. But over the last fifty years, the right has methodically and relentlessly moved not only policy but the language of debate to the right. Right-speak has become “fair and balanced,” center-speak has become socialist, and left-speak has become bile. And we on the left have been either too lazy or too smug or too polite to stop it.

Full story »

Figure 1 – The carbon cycle

Update: To read other articles in this series, click here.

Over the last few decades, scientists have learned a lot about how life interacts with the air, land, and sea. And in the process, they’ve made observations that have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the increasing carbon dioxide in the air is from people burning coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

So how did the scientists put together all the pieces to make a complete conclusion? They started with an understanding of how plants use carbon during photosynthesis. That knowledge showed that the increased carbon dioxide in the air was from plants. Then they formulated some guesses as to where that much plant-based carbon dioxide could come from and, by process of elimination and careful accounting, determined that the source was human consumption of fossil fuels. Full story »

It’s now been 17 days since confidential Heartland Institute documents describing the Institute’s budget and fund raising plan for 2012 were published on the web. In that time, Heartland has steadfastly refused to authenticate the content of the published documents even as they have implied the documents’ authenticity with email screen captures and multiple claims that the documents were stolen. It’s difficult to steal a document from someone if they’re not in possession of the document in the first place, after all.

Over the last 17 days, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been very busy, what with all the emails, interviews, blog posts, and detailed analyses of allegedly fabricated documents. So why hasn’t he officially acknowledged the authenticity of the Heartland documents? Has he simply been too distracted by begging for donations and threatening journalists to execute on his responsibilities as the head of The Heartland Institute? Full story »

On February 24, 10 days after multiple internal documents from a Heartland Institute Board meeting were published on the web, The Heartland Institute posted redacted screen captures of some of the emails that had been sent to Peter Gleick’s spoofed email address. These emails show that there are some discrepancies between the files Heartland transmitted and those that were later published. The emails also show how easy it was for Gleick to impersonate a member of Heartland’s Board. Full story »

“From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombies. From a factual anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.”

So writes author Matt Mogk in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies. As a professional zombie expert—he’s president of the Zombie Research Society—Mogk has written the bible on zombies. If my task was to trace the connection between voodoo zombies and flesh-eating movie monsters, I figured this was the book to check out. And indeed, it answered my question: There is no connection.

But as Mogk’s book warns, “The scientific study of zombies is largely an exploration of all that is strange and disturbing in our natural world and often leads to more questions than answers.” The same could be said of his zombie bible: it answered one question and posed a hundred others. Full story »

On February 24, The Heartland Institute published a press release from Heartland’s president Joseph Bast announcing that they’d published screen captures of several emails. While I’ll have more to say about the emails themselves in the next day or so, I wanted to briefly focus on a different point.

Toward the end of the release, Bast writes

We repeat our request that the fake climate change strategy memo be removed from Web sites and blogs such as DeSmog Blog, Think Progress, and the Huffington Post, along with documents that were stolen from Heartland. It is the ethical thing to do. [emphasis added]

Given The Heartland Institute’s history of unethical behavior, calling on others to behave ethically is the height of chutzpah. Full story »

Recently, a left-wing colleague described his vision of where America is headed over the next forty years–breakdown of government, mass starvation, roving bands of marauders, etc. It’s interesting that this is exactly the same vision shared by those on the far right who star in the new TV show Doomsday Preppers, about people who are stockpiling cases of beans in their suburban basements, while asking themselves, “What load would Jesus shoot?” Maybe the visions of both left and right are so similar because that future has been portrayed so many times in movies.

Of course, we could end up like that. But we probably won’t.

Full story »

According to Peter Gleick, he was moved to impersonate a Heartland Institute board member by a memo he received in the mail, the details of which he wanted to verify. Since the publication of both the memo and the internal Heartland documents, however, there have been many questions and claims about the source of that “climate strategy” memo, with The Heartland Institute claiming it was fabricated and Heartland’s allies claiming that Gleick must have written it himself. However, one oddly specific paragraph in a recent Heartland statement, written by Heartland communications director Jim Lakely, raises a number of questions about Heartland’s prior claims of innocence with respect to the authorship of the memo. Full story »

The more I watch modern politics (and economics and the culture wars and science “debates”) the more it all reminds me of pro wrestling. You know how it goes. Tough match, back and forth, both the good guy (the “face”) and the bad guy (the “heel”) getting their licks in, and then at the decisive moment either the heel “accidentally” knocks the ref down or his manager distracts the ref or something. While the zebra is looking the other way, the black hat clocks the crowd favorite with a steel chair. Ref turns around. 1…2…3…and we have a new champion! Lather, rinse, repeat.

Which brings us to the breaking story surrounding The Heartland Institute and the revelation of all kinds of incriminating internal documents that, in a nutshell, prove that everything climate scientists have been saying about them is true. Full story »

As of three days ago, The Heartland Institute began delivering letters/emails to bloggers and journalists who reported on the confidential Heartland documents that were published on Valentine’s Day. The letters demanded that any copies of Heartland’s internal documents be deleted, all comments on the contents of those emails be purged, and full retractions be issued, under threat of legal action.

Last night, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, admitted on the Huffington Post that he was the anonymous source for those documents and that he’d claimed to be someone else to get them, in an attempt to verify information that was leaked to him from someone unknown via postal service mail. Gleick wrote that his behavior constituted a “serious lapse of [his] own professional judgment and ethics.”

The admission of responsibility by Gleick – taking responsibility for his actions and owning up to an ethical failure – draws a sharp contrast to Heartland’s own lack of ethics and history of misrepresentation, deception, and dishonesty. Full story »

On Valentine’s Day, someone obtained a number of internal documents from the Heartland Institute including IRS records from 2010, the agenda and meeting minutes from the January 17 board meeting, and proposed 2012 fundraising plan, among others. On the 15th, Heartland claimed that these documents had been stolen and that one was a fabrication, and they announced plans to “pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation.” Earlier today, Greg Laden posted the threatening email he received on his blog, and Heartland’s demands are as follows:

[W]e respectfully demand: (1) that you remove both the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents from your web site; (2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (3) that you remove from your web site any and all quotations from the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings; and (5) that you remove all such documents from your server.

Brendan DeMelle of DeSmogBlog.com was sent a similar email which is posted online as well. Full story »

“Who the hell is this guy writing to?” I wondered as I made my way deeper and deeper into Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

In my recent readings about “place” in creative nonfiction, I’d had the pleasure to read a lot of fine, fine work by nature writers. I’ve always enjoyed that kind of writing, and I’ve enjoyed a deeply felt connection to the natural world (one reason I took on that reading project in the first place). I’ve tried of late to make a conscious effort to seek out writers who talk about the relationship between humankind and nature, particularly in the context of looming environmental collapse. That’s how I found McKibben.

That I finished his book—instead of throwing myself off a bridge in despair—still amazes me.

Full story »

Case 1: In 1997 a prominent scientist made a bet with a colleague over a complex black hole issue that physicists were trying to figure out. This bet was very public and given the egos involved in the field of advanced quantum science, the stakes were huge.

Case 2: In a climate-related thread on S&R, a “skeptic” was asked point-blank: “What evidence would you accept that global warming is real? What tests would you have to see, in order to change your view?” This is a straight-up establishment of terms for consideration of any scientific question: what is evidence in favor of the hypothesis and what evidence disproves the hypothesis? Full story »

I hope you made the time to read Wufnik’s post from Friday. Entitled “Surrounded by people ‘educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought,’” his analysis of our culture’s “active willingness to be deceived” represents one of the iconic moments in S&R’s history. If you didn’t see it yet, go read it now.

In addition to the questions the post explicitly addresses, it also raises other critical issues that deserve equally rigorous treatment. One point for further consideration, for instance, lies in his use of the word “educated.” I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to suggest that our society is, by a variety of metrics, more educated than perhaps any society in history. Those metrics would include factors like “number of people who attended college.” At the same time, we are significantly less educated if we pay more attention to factors like the much harder to quantify “capacity for critical thought.” Full story »

In an article titled “Syngenta’s Paid Third Party Pundits Spin the “News” on Atrazine,” the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) PR Watch revealed that Steve Milloy, editor of JunkScience.com, had been hired to PR outreach through both his “National Center for Public Policy Research” and his “Free Enterprise Education Institute.” CMD acquired sealed court documents from a lawsuit against herbicide manufacturer Syngenta that show Milloy asking for a $15,000 grant in 2004 and invoicing Syngenta for $25,000 in 2008.

Another sequence of emails shows two Syngenta employees talking about how Milloy was going to do his “weekly column” on the book “Poisoned Profits” and getting Milloy some talking points: Full story »

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 »