Environmental funders reassess climate change tactics: First base starting to look pretty good now

Oops, wrong first base photo!

Shortly after joining the Michigan Environmental Council in 2006, I became aware of an obscure public notice in the Federal Register soliciting comments on a plan for the U.S. Coast Guard to begin live ammunition training exercises with .50 caliber machine guns in 34 areas of the Great Lakes.

I tipped some journalists to the story, lighting the fuse for a maelstrom of protest that forced the Coast Guard to re-evaluate its plans. For a couple months, I invested a fair amount of time into helping spread public awareness of a plan that heretofore had been very, VERY quietly pursued.

At one point, a longtime veteran of the environmental movement asked, “so, who’s funding you for this?” When I replied no one was, she appeared befuddled, and perhaps a little put off.  It had not occurred to me that my work priorities should be dictated by funders. The most important work should get the most attention, right? Not necessarily.

As  this interesting article from Politico points out, the donors who fund environmental work call the shots … to a certain extent. And they are not happy about the results they’ve gotten from the money they’ve poured into addressing climate change during the past several years.

Federal Cap and Trade legislation that would have begun to address the issue crashed and burned. Amid the wreckage, environmental groups are regrouping to try and accomplish change on a piece by piece basis – fighting for better building efficiency standards, and stopping new coal plants, and investing in public transportation.

If this seems like a half-assed way to deal with the planet’s most important issue, it is. But it’s what we have. As the aforementioned Politico article notes, the environmental community has neither sufficent power to punish do-nothing politicians, nor the clout to reward the good ones.

Without that power – or a groundswell of public demand for action – there is little hope of the sweeping change that many of us would like to see.

Does that mean we don’t need visionaries laying out idealistic plans? No. But it means most of us need to hunker down and work for incremental change if we’re going to have something to show for it at the end of the day.

As President Obama’s Advisor Rahm Emanuel told an environmental funder, “Your DNA and my DNA are so different. I’m about trying to get to first base. You’re about trying to hit it over the fence.”

First base might sound like a crappy place to be when you’re so far behind.

But it beats striking out. And it might get funded.

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Detroit News duo vie to pen most outlandish, spiteful tirade against all things environmental

Editorial columnists gone wild!

Pointing out errors, inconsistencies and tortured logic in Detroit News editorial writers’ ugly screeds against environmentalists and all they stand for could be a full-time job. Since Mitten State is only part-time – and because the News tells us that environmentalists hate jobs – we valiantly resist the urge to spend too much time playing Whack-a-Mole with them. Alas, pair of jaw-droppingly stupid columns this week are too irresistible to let pass by.

First, News editorial board member and cartoonist Henry Payne invoked the visage of Nazis in his column titled Sieg Heil, warmingmongers!. He warns darkly of coming “civil unrest” and “grim war” in the United States because of President Obama’s “radical green vision.”

Yes. Civil unrest and grim war. From the radical green vision of a president who’s backing so-called ”clean” coal; expanding oil drilling in previously off-limits areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska coastlines;  and authorizing massive taxpayer subsidies for new nuclear plants.

(Aside: The News’ editorialists rail constantly against taxpayer subsidies for clean energy like wind and solar. On the topic of taxpayer subsidies for coal, gas, oil and nuclear power they are as quiet as church mice.)

Feeling challenged to up the ante in their game of  batshit-crazy, Payne’s colleague Manny Lopez ginned up an incomprehensibly inane blog post incorporating climate change with lunatic murderer Charlie Manson, Koran-burning Pastor Terry Jones and Al Gore. 

On a junior high schooler’s Facebook page the post would be judged a failed attempt at clever. From the Opinion Page Editor of the state’s second-largest newspaper, it’s just embarrassing.
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New study finds that....um...the uh....what was....oh yeah dude...so what were we talking about?

Sometimes you learn stuff that just makes you go:

“Dude…..I’m like, so….um…you know when the uh….oh, man, .I forgot what I was going to say…..hey, are those Cheetos all gone?”

So it is with the news that our nation’s stoners are responsible for massive amounts of climate-altering greenhouse gasses. Yes, a new study concludes that marijuana cultivation consumes 1 percent of our nation’s electricity. That’s enough to enough to power 2 million homes. Each joint smoked represents about two pounds of climate-trapping carbon dioxide emissions.

The study may have even underestimated stoners’ impact on the environment. It did not, for example, factor in late night pizza delivery, gasoline burned while idling at green lights, or the number of baked people still awake at 3 a.m. watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

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D'OH!! Climate skeptic scientists' data inconvenient for billionaire oil magnates who helped fund it

So two oil magnate billionaire brothers walk into a bar scientific discussion. They spend a bunch of money to help fund a fresh analysis of climate change data conducted by a scientist who’s outspokenly critical of the consensus on global warming.

The brothers are enthused, since they have a lot to gain if the nation believes that burning up fossil fuel as quickly as we can pry it out of the earth is a good thing.

The skeptic community is enthused, since they believe this man is one of the only scientists not on the planet that is part of an evil conspiracy to perpetrate a massive hoax on the world’s people in order to, um .... get more grants or something.The scientist is the toast of anti-government hacks like Michigan's own Oakland University teacher who goes by the name The Blog Prof.

The ending of this story has not been written. But there was a pretty damn good foreshadowing of it the other day  when the scientist testified before Congress. The results so far, the scientist said to the chagrin of the billionaire brothers, are nearly identical to the results obtained by all the other leading scientific organizations on the planet and reported by the International Panel on Climate Change.

This has infuriated the skeptics who once vowed to accept the conclusions of this lone, honest scientist. Even if the conclusions challenged their theory. Now they say this man, clearly, is part of the evil conspiracy.

As Linda Ellerbee used to say, “…and so it goes.”

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Michigan scientists have message for Washington, Upton: Don't make Congress a science-free zone

Upton: For climate action before he was against it

More than 160 Michigan scientists have signed a letter urging Congress to “reject any measure that would block or delay the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from protecting the people of Michigan from air pollution and human caused climate change, both of which put public health, agriculture, the environment and our economy at risk.”

The scientists’ appeal comes as Congress, led by Michigan Congressman Fred Upton, considers whether to pass legislation prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas pollution. Upton, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was for addressing climate change before he was against it.

Our friends as Climate Crock point out here that Congress is poised to become a science-free zone. And, that it could be worse. A bill in the Montana legislature would declare that climate change isn’t manmade, and if it is that it is “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”

 

Good God. Don’t give the dimmest bulbs in Michigan’s legislature any ideas.

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Michigan's Rep. Fred Upton fiddles with climate change show as gas prices, oil dependency continue to burn away at our security and economy

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing on climate change was today. Nice that the Republicans brought real scientists this time rather than charlatans like Lord Monckton.

The hearing was in advance of a vote on legislation sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. (Upton also chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee)

Unfortunately, the committee addressed the wrong issue. As the New York Times’ Andy Revkin points out, the more immediate, more pressing, and more manageable goal should be our “sustained quest to break the economic shackles imposed by enduring dependence on oil.”

But we've  f**cked around for several generations without meaningful action on that, so why start now?

Instead, we got the predictably unfocused questioning and  closed mindedness that served more as a forum for Congressmen to grandstand rather than for scientists to explain. Clearly, the ”Doubt is Our Product" strategy of the fossil fuel lobby and their toadies in Congress will continue to be effective for the foreseeable future.

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A letter to WDIV Channel 4 Meteorologist Chuck Gadica

Chuck Gadica

Hello Chuck (Gadica)

Thank you very much for the piece you did tonight (Thursday, Feb. 24 on the 11 o’clock) about why a warming planet may result in more precipitation. Using the sponges with the demonstration made it easily understandable for a lay audience (I might steal the idea myself!)

It surely helped inform the shrill dialogue over whether more snowstorms and rainfall amounts disprove climate change theory. They don’t.

I was stunned, however that you referred to rising global temperatures twice as an uncertain proposition. (“…if we are warming…”) Even the most skeptical scientists now acknowledge that the climate has been warming for some time. Dr. Patrick Michaels – a leading skeptic and one of few climatologists who openly challenges the IPCC report  – told a panel discussion audience in Detroit two years ago that the planet was most assuredly warming, (although he believes mankind may not be a significant driver in that trend). He told the audience that making the argument that ‘the planet is not warming’ is a discredit to the skeptics’ cause because it is so easily and thoroughly disproved.

The data is unambiguous. NOAA reports that 2010 tied for the warmest year on global record, and that it was the 34^th consecutive year that global temperatures exceeded the 20^th Century average. (emphasis mine). 

The question of how significant a contribution mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions make to this warming climate; and the ranges of temperatures and changes we might see in the future are addressed most rigorously in the IPCC report, which concludes both the contribution and effects are/will be significant. Of course, there are no precise answers to these important questions.  

However, the simpler question of whether the planet is warming -- or not -- is abundantly clear through NOAA’s recorded data and that of other agencies throughout the world.

Your help in explaining science to your viewers is invaluable, and you do it very well….but I hope in the future you will make it clear to viewers that the data show unambiguously that the earth is getting warmer, and has been for many decades.

 Thank you very much for your time,

Hugh McDiarmid Jr.

Farmington Resident\15 year WDIV viewer

(Phone number)

Climate conspiracy theories fall like snowflakes from Detroit News columnists' keyboards

On Feb. 2, Detroit News Opinion Page Editor Manny Lopez took his favorite whipping boy, Al Gore, to task for Gore’s suggestion that the recent Midwest snowstorm may have been intensified by climate change. He lectured “Goreacle and his lemmings” that the storm had nothing to do with climate, but was “part of that pesky little thing called weather.”

Only two days later, Detroit News cartoonist Henry Payne, who sits on the News’ editorial board with Lopez, wrote that, because of snowfall in Dallas, “global warming” had been “debunked on the grandest stage of all: The Super Bowl.” It was, he wrote, “an embarrassment of Janet Jackson-like proportions” for Gore.

Discerning readers may be puzzled how the News’ braintrust can simultaneously declare both that the snowstorm had no bearing on climate change theory and that it debunks climate change in a most humiliating way. But regular readers of the News’ editorial columnists and bloggers are not surprised.

 

In a  Feb. 3 column, Payne tells us that the only people left supporting climate change theory are "the elites and their crony capitalist backers" who are sucking up taxpayer subsidies for windmills (presumably they, not the poor little coal and oil industries are calling the shots in Washington now), asserts that a cold spell in parts of America has climate change adherents “in a panic” and spins the usual climate conspiracy theory involving thousands of crooked scientists worldwide. Plus, there’s a bonus conspiracy theory! A worldwide coordinated cover up of "the scientific scandal of the century"  by the world’s media.

Possibly the frenzy has something to do with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s recent data showing that 2010 tied the  warmest year on global record. Or, perhaps someone is angling for an invitation to a guest spot on a Fox News pundit shoutfest. Either way, News readers deserve less hysteria and more level headedness from their opinion leaders. 

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More irrelevant and boring information: 2010 on pace to be planet's warmest ever

Snowstorm!

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about why the public discussion on climate change really does not hinge on the science at all. The discussion has been hijacked by forces that have little regard for the fuzzy, complicated, scienc-ey stuff.

And true to form, the loudest of the loudmouths  have seized on the American Midwest’s snowstorms and cold snaps as proof of the climate change hoax. (Nevermind, um, the record high temperatures in Phoenix and Southern California.)

So even though the science doesn’t seem to push the public opinion needle, it’s still interesting to go all Old School every once in a while and see what the data says. Lately, it says that 2010 is on pace to be the warmest year ever recorded on our humble planet.

Biblical stewardship of the earth and its creatures? Not in Rep. John Shimkus' truncated Bible

Rep. Shimkus: Don't worry

Not sure how I missed this, but Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois wants to be the next chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. And Rep. Shimkus has a rather unique perspective

on climate change.

He believes that mankind is incapable of harming the planet because the Bible declares God, not man, will destroy the earth. “The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth,” he said.

Now careful readers will note that the previous link was to the left-wing, Soros funded, Huffington Post which is part of the failed Pelosi-Huffington agenda and a tool of Statists, ecoterrorists and Communists. But Shimkus’ views were also chronicled in the New York Times, which is simply part of the liberal drive-by media and therefore more trustworthy. I guess.

Anyway, Rep. Shimkus declared that the conservative and Tea Party victories in the 2010 means that “The climate debate has, at least for two years, has ended with this election.”

In open defiance of Rep. Shimkus’ decree, climatologists across the nation apparently plan to continue to do research for the next two years. Some of these climatologists have never even slept with Al Gore. So, you see, technically the debate really isn’t over.

It also may be news to Rep. Shimkus that religious leaders across the nation and the world have called for action on climate change, through organizations like the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Even within the modest environmental coalitions in Michigan, there are faith-based groups working toward sensible responses to climate change. Groups like the IHM Sisters in Monroe; the Michigan chapter of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life out of Oakland County and  Michigan Interfaith Power and Light in Royal Oak.

These groups have bizarre ideas about the Bible teaching us that we must be stewards of the earth and the creatures that inhabit it. Stuff like: Lev. 25:23-24. The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

 I don’t know where Rep. Shimkus’ gets his laissez faire Biblical interpretation. But I sure as hell hope he does not inflict such dangerous nonsense on our nation from the pulpit of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

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World's climate change panel due for an overhaul in wake of scandals that unraveled the whole rotten, global conspiracy

Had another interesting email exchange with WJR radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh Lite, Frank Beckmann in which he maintained that my belief that manmade climate change is occurring is because I’ve been “…duped by people who have conned us out of billions of our hard earned dollars through grants and regulations.”

Anyway, Frank and other climate skeptics have seized on each anomaly, inconsistency and error in the IPCC’s climate change theory as proof positive of a global conspiracy. Of which, presumably, I am a part.

Anyway, it’s important to remember that the granddaddy of these issues was the East Anglia email revelations, and that the authors of the emails were exonerated of wrongdoing in four separate investigations.

Skeptics who joyously told us the East Anglia emails were the smoking guns that were going to unravel the whole climate plot are apoplectic that it didn’t turn out that way. No worries….just more proof of the conspiracy, right?

Nonetheless, an overhaul of the way the IPCC operates, as outlined by the journal Nature is probably a smart move. Done right, it will increase transparency and bolster public confidence that has been eroded by opinion leaders, like Beckmann, who have convinced us that thug climatologists are in cahoots with Pruis owners and weak-kneed liberals to take away our guns and sell our children. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, 2010 tied so far for the warmest on record. 

You won’t hear that on Beckmann. Or Limbaugh. Or Hannity. Or Beck. Or FOX. Unless you hear only this excerpt: “Cooler-than-average regions included much of Australia, western Canada, parts of the northern United States, parts of western and central Europe, and central Russia.” Smells like a smoking gun to me.

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Detroit News lets Frank Beckmann spew more unhinged nonsense; so is Stephen Hawking part of the climate change conspiracy?

Stephen Hawking enjoying the spoils of the climate conspiracy

Conservative radio talk show host and football announcer Frank Beckmann has penned another  wild, flailing assault on climate change science in today’s Detroit News. He’s strung together unrelated threads of  factually tortured conspiracy theory sandwiched around words like “bogus” “hoax” and “grant seeking environmental alarmists.”

Frank’s columns must be increasingly embarrassing for those at the News who still believe that even the most opinionated opinion columnists should be held to certain standards of intellectual honesty. But it may be par for the course for an editorial page that continues to promote as fact climate contentions that even the most celebrated climate change skeptic-climatologists have denounced.

It would take a huge word count to address each of Frank’s scattershot accusations and pseudo-facts that sail around untethered by accuracy or context. So I leave you with two links:

First, this link from NOAA where you can see lower on the page the “climate dashboard” that shows actual recorded observations for global temperatures, carbon dioxide, sun energy, Arctic sea ice and sea level.

Secondly, this video with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan talking about the greenhouse effect.

Hawking says “…one of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming brought about by rising levels of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. The danger is that the temperature increase may become self-sustaining, if it hasn’t done so already.”

Hawking, of course, is a literal genius the world’s most celebrated cosmologist and physicist. But Beckmann might well categorize him as just another “environmental alarmist” who has “fouled the air with their fraud.”

That igloo was funny! Hey Sen. Inhofe, where the #@!% are you now? (and some yucky science stuff for the rest of you)

That was so damn funny when the family of climate skeptic Sen. James Inhofe built an igloo near the Capitol during record snowfall in February!

Well, where the #@!* are you now Sen. Inhofe? Haven’t heard much from him, nor from the usual suspects whose decibels rise whenever it’s cold out – Detroit News cartoonist Henry Payne; WJR talk show host Rush Limbaugh Frank Beckmann, or our friends over at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Maybe it’s because they realize that a week-long stretch blistering heat in the American Midwest has no statistical significance when analyzing long-term global temperature trends. And now they feel foolish having used similar stretches of abnormally low temperatures to crow about the climate conspiracy (since they have precious little science on their side).

NAW! Didn’t think so.

To speak a little science (some of you can log out now: Science stuff, yuk!) you’ll recall that NOAA recorded the hottest global temperatures on record for January through April of this year. Now they’ve release May, 2010 data. Yep, hottest May on global record.

Planet to Sen. Inhofe: “How do you like me now?”

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Al Gore: Crazed sex poodle?

A woman accusing Al Gore of sexually assaulting her described him as “crazed sex poodle,” http://bit.ly/9TydL1 and told him to “get off me you big lummox" http://bit.ly/b6bUMF which has the right wing Gore haters in a fine lather.

Al is definitely a big lummox. And could be a crazed sex poodle. But none of that has any bearing on climate change science. The latest from NOAA: “The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2010 was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the warmest such value on record since 1880.” http://bit.ly/ZYxCn

January through April: Warmest global temperatures on record

I’ll let this report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration speak for itself: “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April, according to NOAA. Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.” http://bit.ly/c3TflY

Again, this is a tiny data point in an expansive record of climactic temperatures worldwide, and by itself is of little significance. But it fits precisely with what scientists have been telling us about climate change for decades.

In the interest of fair and balanced news coverage, I expect that Fox News and its dittoheads will be airing this story prominently. Or, maybe, not so much.
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"An awesome Earth Day warning" from 40 years ago!

I don't think the word "awesome" had quite the same connotation in 1970. Nonetheless:

At the end of his Earth Day broadcast on NBC News, April 22, 1970, anchorman Frank Blair reported an “awesome Earth Day warning” from climatologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell who reported that manmade pollution “….could so warm the earth in 200 years as to create a greenhouse effect, melting the Arctic ice cap and flooding vast areas of the world.” See the warning at the end of the clip, here: http://bit.ly/bjWyA7
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Climate Change: Smoking gun fizzles, Princeton physicist accuses me of issuing propoganda!

The British House of Commons’ investigation into the hacked e-mails of climate researchers is complete. To jog your memory, this is the so-called “Climategate conspiracy” smoking gun that was going to blow the lid off the climate change hoax and reduce 40 years of climate research to a smoking pile of rubble.

The Washington Post said the investigators criticized “a culture of withholding information” but concluded that “the integrity of its climate change research was not in doubt….The 14-member parliamentary committee said in its report that it had found nothing to challenge the "scientific consensus" that global warming is occurring and influenced by human activity.” 

Here’s the Post’s writeup: http://bit.ly/8XvCRB

And here’s the Brits’ investigation: http://bit.ly/9sMU4P

None of this is likely to slow down die-hard skeptics. For them it merely means the British House of Commons is in on the conspiracy along with the rest of us. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. If your scientific research or your laymen’s understanding of it affirms that climate change is a problem, BANG! you’re part of the hoax and nothing you say henceforth can be credible. End of story.

Speaking of skeptics, a Princeton physicist – in a publication of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy - has accused me of issuing a “propaganda statement” via a press release I issued on behalf of the Michigan Environmental Council. The release blasted the credentials and motivations of a torturously skewed panel of climate “experts” convened recently by the Mackinac Center.

Here’s our press release: http://bit.ly/cSXA2O
Here’s the Mackinac Center’s piece with the Princeton skeptic (who, it should be noted, is a smart and distinguished researcher in a field with some relevance to climate science, but is not a climatologist): Http://bit.ly/9xMiWD

So if you’d like to read them and decide for yourself where you find the propaganda, I’m cool with that! No pun intended.
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Canada's 2009-10 winter warmest on record

Canada’s winter was the warmest since they started keeping records 62 years ago. Seven degrees (farenheit) above normal: http://bit.ly/cGAUkH

This data point for merely a few months on a small part of the planet’s surface is of no statistical significance when it comes to using (or misusing) it for the purposes of talking about climate change.

Still, it’s interesting. And so is this graphic showing the temperature departures from normal across the globe.

Here in the continental U.S. we were a little chilly. We know this because of the little blue dots over our nation. We also know because because Glenn Beck and Senator Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh went apoplectic and  frothed at the mouth every time it snowed in Washington or iced up in Atlanta.

But our Canuck neighbors weren't cool. They were exceptionally warm this winter. And, clearly, so was the majority of the planet.

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Best Buy tells the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to stuff it! You don't represent us on climate change

With the year-long health care debate coming to a close, hopes are high that Congress will address the issue of  energy independence. And the Best Buy chain of superstores agrees!

Best Buy told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week that it most assuredly does not have their support when it comes to the Chamber's obstructionist approach to limiting climate changing pollution: http://bit.ly/9ybsaj

Best Buy is "...supportive of comprehensive climate change legislation and working to move toward a low carbon economy. With regard to the Chamber’s climate initiatives, the Chamber has not spoken for Best Buy on these issues."

Bravo. The company also ranked 61st on a Green Ranking list of America's 500 largest corporations done by Newsweek Magazine: http://greenrankings.newsweek.com/

Best Buy's impersonal, warehousy feel creeps me out. But my perception of the place just got a little warmer and fuzzier.
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Anti-regulation activists come to Michigan dressed as science experts! (But did they stay at a Holiday Inn Express?)

Today, a panel of anti-government anti-regulation activists will convene on two Michigan college campuses, Oakland University and Central Michigan University: http://bit.ly/cSXA2O

They will spread this message: Thousands of climate scientists worldwide are either incompetent or have abandoned their ethical, moral and professional obligations as part of an insidious plot to fake the issue of climate change.

They could be right....and Arkansas-Pine Bluff could win the NCAA basketball tournament this year.

Here’s a more plausible explanation:

The panelists each work for organizations dedicated to eliminating government regulation. Two of the three are paid by big foundations and companies to fight government oversight. Climate change solutions almost certainly will require government oversight. Therefore, these organizations are desperately denying the science that threatens their mission: Minimizing regulation and protecting clients.

So maybe thousands of climate scientists are stupid or crooked.

Or maybe the panelists’ hatred of government regulation and/or loyalty to their funders is so great that they will do anything in order to block it.

The latter explanation is business as usual for the folks who continue to defend tobacco companies and oppose government regulations that prevent the Great Lakes from being siphoned into Asia-bound tankers for sale to the highest bidder.

It is telling that the so-called ‘expert panel’ today tackles the most pressing and complex scientific matter of our time, yet there are no scientists on the panel! Instead we get a newspaper cartoonist – Henry Payne of the Detroit News -- and two paid flacks for anti-government foundations: Paul Chesser of the Heartland Institute and Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation.

The anti-science crusade has been successful, as it was against tobacco regulation a generation ago. Recent polls show a decline in the number of Americans who believe the science of climate change: http://bit.ly/cfnt8g


But even with the recent dustup over e-mails stolen from climate scientists, no major US scientific organization has changed its stance on climate. In fact, a list of 250 (and growing) U.S. scientists (mostly climatologists) have signed this open letter: http://bit.ly/b5JnK8

I’ve already filled out my NCAA bracket. People who analyze basketball for a living predict an early exit for Arkansas-Pine Bluff. I’ll root for them because I love to see the underdogs make fools of the experts. But that’s not where I’m putting my money. How about you?

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