[dysfunction]

In response to PageRob:
yea, but if people immensely distrust nuclear waste being transported by train, which they do, imagine the furor that placing it on top of an explosive propulsion system would arise.

[azbackpackr]

I lived off the grid for about 4 years in Hawaii. Had water catchment system, outhouse, used candles and kerosene lamps, cooked over a campfire or on a Coleman stove. Although I did use burnable fuels the consumption of them was pretty low. Of course, no TV, no computer, blender, toaster, microwave, etc. Very, very low-tech.

[jeffmacewen]

The stats sited are out of date and make a number of poor assumptions. At the cost per KwH here in Tucson and the cost I paid for my system since I installed it myself and used higher-quality components, I'm looking at an 8 - 9 year ROI depending on the continuation of solar hours per day and a number of other factors. Since TEP is only likely to *increase* their rates that ROI period may drop, sharply. When I expand in a few years and take all of the tax incentives and buy-back from TEP through Solar Share, it will cost me next to nothing. After that expansion I will be pumping more in than I take out and TEP will pay me for every mV of it.

Your results may vary.

[Vaporman]

I run across stuff like these stories all the time that make me highly doubt global warming:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 92,00.html
What?!?! Another global cooling...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ked-emails
This doesn't surprise me one bit, those idiot kool-aid drinkers just make half the crap up...

[Vaporman]

What?!?!? It comes out that a good chuck of this AGW junk science was all made up and no wants to respond. Hopefully this is the final nails in the coffin for AGW and now we can move on to defeating Universal Healthcare...

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... l-warming/

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/ ... fraud.html

Criminal? Oh yes, indeed. As this mock-science serves as justification for trillions of dollars in imposed and proposed new taxes, liens, fees, and rate hikes -- not to mention the absurd wealth-redistribution premise of international climate debt "reparations" -- such manipulation of evidence should be treated as exactly what it is: larceny on the grandest scale in history.

I can't even begin to express how vindicated and pissed off this makes me feel!!! Now only if these felons would give all the money back...

[nonot]

Two idiots on the web write something and you expect people to fall over stunned?

I don't read most crap that is written nowadays but the first article you linked says this:

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend...

So how is this proving your point that global warming is a myth? Did you even read more than the title of the articles?

[Jim Lyding]

It seems obvious that the idea of global climate change vs. the idea that global climate change is a myth has become a team sport. It's just like the Arizona Wildcats vs. the Arizona State Sun Devils: I root for my team, and against the other team. Virtually all other "political" issues are in the same boat.
IMO global climate change is very much a reality, and all we need to do is look at the evidence. Anyone can take a certain suite of data, and construe it as they will. However, our own eyes inform us that the climate is changing with respect to rainfall, temperature, and ecotones moving upwards.

[Vaporman]

Two idiots on the web write something and you expect people to fall over stunned?

So how is this proving your point that global warming is a myth? Did you even read more than the title of the articles?

I read more that just the titles... Assuming the data is genuine, it's probably just showing warming and cooling trends that are either natural cycles of our planet and/or solar flare activity. The AGW camps just rushed to blame it all on us and expected us to throw billions of dollars at the 'problem'...

I think you fail to grasp how HUGE this is. There's going to be quite a fallout from it.

[BobP]

IMO global climate change is very much a reality

I think most people agree with that...but the real argument is 'the cause'. Now if we could only take the g and put it in front of the r and replace the u with a double e...the argument becomes agreement...but thats not gonna happen.

I think you fail to grasp how HUGE this is. There's going to be quite a fallout from it.

I agree...The big issue here is the timing of it...

[Vaporman]

The big issue here is the timing of it...

Yea, it's been hinted at that maybe someone from the inside may have leaked this or maybe there were holding on to this to release just before the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen...

[chumley]

Yea, it's been hinted at that maybe someone from the inside may have leaked this or maybe there were holding on to this to release just before the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen...

What!!!? Politics interfering with science? I'm shocked!

[chumley]

What!!!? Politics interfering with science? I'm shocked!

Can I quote my own response....? I read this interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps "interesting" is the wrong word. Scary might be more accurate.

Climategate: Science Is Dying
Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142 ... 37848.html

[cathymocha]

The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

Politics and money...so scary.

[Al_HikesAZ]

The journal Nature published the highly technical article by Professor Sinninghe Damste’s team.

Dutch: Gore Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Netherlands is afire today over a Dutch study concluding Mount Kilimanjaro's snow melt — used as a symbol of AGW by Al Gore — is entirely natural. December 3, 2009 - by Leon de Winter

Newspapers and news sites in the Netherlands today extensively broke the news of the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University and winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize — about the melting icecap of the Kilimanjaro, the African mountain that became a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Professor Damste studied organic biomarker molecules in the sediment record of Lake Challa, near Mount Kilimanjaro, and reconstructed the changes and intensity of precipitation in this part of Africa over the last 25,000 years. They observed an 11,500 year cycle of intense monsoon precipitation.

In the dry period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, Kilimanjaro was ice-free.

At the end of this period, a dramatic climate change from very dry to very wet took place — driven by changes in solar radiation — resulting in the creation of an icecap. At the moment, this part of Africa seems to be at the end of a similar dry period, resulting in the disappearance of the famous icecap.

DOSR calls Al Gore’s iconic use of the melting cap of Kilimanjaro “unfortunate” — since it now seems to be mainly the result of “natural climate variations.”

The journal Nature published the highly technical article by Professor Sinninghe Damste’s team.

The website of Elsevier magazine — the Netherlands’ most circulated political weekly — broke the news as follows: “Dutchman discredits Al Gore’s climate evidence.”

Leon de Winter is columnist for Elsevier Magazine in Holland. He is also a bestselling novelist and adjunct-fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is presently living in Los Angeles.

The environment is complex and my mind is not yet made up. Some of the science indicates some harm from AGW but some of the science shows that we don't really understand what is happening. Expensive ill-considered cures of the wrong diagnosis are not the answer.

[sarc] It appears the only real solution is eliminating all mammals from Earth [/sarc]

[joe bartels]

UN climate chief: Hacked e-mails are damaging
Dec 6, 10:35 AM (ET)

By ARTHUR MAX and KARL RITTER

COPENHAGEN (AP) - The world is entering talks on a new climate pact with unprecendented unity and leaders must seize the moment to create a turning point in the battle against global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said Sunday. At a news conference, Yvo de Boer called on the 192 nations represented at the U.N. climate summit starting Monday "to deliver a strong and long-term response to the challenge of climate change."

Even so, he worried that e-mails pilfered from a British university would fuel skepticism among those who believe that scientists exaggerate global warming.

"I think a lot of people are skeptical about this issue in any case," de Boer told The Associated Press earlier Sunday. "And then when they have the feeling ... that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say 'you see I told you so, this is not a real issue.'"

E-mails stolen from the climate unit at the University of East Anglia appeared to show some of world's leading scientists discussing ways to shield data from public scrutiny and suppress others' work.

Those who deny the influence of man-made climate change have seized on the correspondence to argue that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about global warming.

"This correspondence looks very bad," de Boer said, but noted that the matter was being investigeted by the university, police and the head of the U.N.'s expert panel on climate change. He also defended the research - reviewed by some 2,500 scientists - that shows man has fueled global warming by burning fossil fuels.

"I think this is about the most credible piece of science that there is out there," he said.

U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing called the science on global warming "very robust, very substantial." He told AP that the controversy surrounding the leaked e-mails came at an "unfortunate" time, just before the long-awaited U.N. talks, "but has no fundamental bearing on the outcome."

Climate skeptics meeting in downtown Copenhagen for a panel discussion organized by a Danish nationalist party said the leaked e-mails highlighted the limitations of global warming research.

"There has been a lot of this kind of activity going on, there has been suppression of view points," said Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.

Negotiators in Copenhagen are trying to set targets for controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases, including by the leading contributors, China and the United States. They will also seek agreement on how much rich countries should pay to help poor nations to deal with climate change.

De Boer told a news conference that Copenhagen must be a "turning point" in the international response to climate change. He said climate targets announced in the runup to the summit were boosting the chances of success - even though they fall short of what scientists say is needed to avoid dangerous levels of warming.

"Never in the 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different nations made so many firm pledges toghether," De Boer said. "It's simply unprecdented."

De Boer told AP "it's going to be two weeks of thorough negotiation to try and get the ambition level up and to get the financial specifics on the table."

The emissions cuts offered have disappointed scientists and poorer nations facing damaging climate change. They say greenhouse gases, by 2020, must be reduced by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 output to keep temperatures in the less dangerous range of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels.

The European Union approaches that target, pledging to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels, and more if others agree. Awaiting U.S. congressional action, however, the Obama administration could make only a provisional offer of a 17 percent reduction by 2020 from 2005 levels. Against 1990, that represents only a 3 to 4 percent cut, experts say.

The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions: clean energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.

China says it will, by 2020, reduce gases by 40 to 45 percent below "business as usual," that is, judged against 2005 figures for energy used versus economic output. India offers a 20 to 25 percent slowdown in emissions growth.

[BobP]

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges
Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

Comments 82 | Comment on this article

Visitors watch a visual display about the environment before the opening of the summit in Copenhagen Photo: REUTERS
On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."


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Q&A: the thinking person's guide Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen's clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city's famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week "Climate Bottom Meeting," complete with a "storytelling yurt" and a "funeral of the day" for various corrupt, "heatist" concepts such as "economic growth".

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week's unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change "saboteurs" reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. "If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence," said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. "Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys."

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners' apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. "If Martin Luther King had come along and said 'I have a nightmare,' people would not have followed him," he said.

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama's decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a "victory" for the talks.

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure

[jeffmacewen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg

[chumley]

This exciting thread has been quiet for a while ... Lots of juicy discussion-points in this article!

I'll start with my belief that scientists shouldn't be activists. Leave that to the politicians and cable-tv pundits.

Climate scientists plan campaign against global warming skeptics

The American Geophysical Union plans to announce that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. Other scientists plan a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

By Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington Bureau
November 8, 2010
Reporting from Washington

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday's election.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a "climate rapid response team," which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.

"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.

"We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed."

During the recent campaigns, skepticism about climate change became a rallying cry for many Republican candidates. Of the more than 100 new GOP members of Congress, 50% are climate change skeptics, according to an analysis of campaign statements by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Prominent Republican congressmen such as Darrell Issa of Vista, Joe L. Barton of Texas and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin have pledged to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. They say they also intend to investigate the so-called Climategate scandal, in which thousands of e-mails of leading climate scientists were hacked and released to the public last year.

Climate change skeptics argued that the sniping in some e-mails showed that scientists suppressed research by skeptics and manipulated data. Five independent panels subsequently cleared the researchers involved and validated the science.

"People who ask for and accept taxpayer dollars shouldn't get bent out of shape when asked to account for the money," said James M. Taylor, a senior fellow and a specialist in global warming at the conservative Heartland Institute in Chicago. "The budget is spiraling out of control while government is handing out billions of dollars in grants to climate scientists, many of whom are unabashed activists."

Ongoing public interest in Climategate has prompted the scientists to act.

The American Geophysical Union plan has attracted a large number of scientists in a short time because they are eager to address what they see as climate misinformation, said Jeffrey Taylor, research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and manager of the project.

Still, the scope of the group's work is limited, reflecting the ongoing reluctance among many scientists to venture into politics.

A rapid-response team, however, is willing to delve into politics. In the week that Abraham and others have been marshaling the team, 39 scientists agreed to participate, including Richard Feely, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

"People who've already dug their heels in, we're not going to change their opinions," Mandia said. "We're trying to reach people who may not have an opinion or opinion based on limited information."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 4003.story

[imike]

...it is probably melting off from all the heat friction created by that guy setting the new up/down record of just over 7 hours!

[Jim Lyding]

<<I'll start with my belief that scientists shouldn't be activists>>
I don't necessarily agree. Scientists of all stripes should stand behind what their research honestly tells them. What good would they be if they said "oh well" when someone else questions what they've concluded? There are countless politically-focused conservative organizations out there that espouse the idea that climate change is a myth, but I only read about conservatives criticizing those scientists who have looked at the evidence, and consequently believe that climate change is real.

All I need to know about most of these climate change-denying politicians is that they also don't believe in evolution.