... James Delingpole's Hate Speech in the UK Telegraph This is James Delingpole demonstrating his prowess when it comes to understanding and commenting on climate science. Dellingpole is the one on our right: OK, now that we've established Delingpole to be a misinformed misguided intellectual lighweight, let's look at his latest piece from the UK Telegraph: Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science? Should George Monbiot…

Obama promised to eliminate left over random nuclear stuff that could be used to build either "clean" or "dirty" bombs, material that was distributed among several countries, by the end of this year (2013). We have yet to see if that task can be completed, but apparently it is on schedule. Now, we have to get the Republicans to do the right thing and agree to the trimming down of our nuclear arsenal. That is actually more likely than it sounds. Here are all the details: Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Why was the Civil War fought? This is "Confederate Heritage and History Month" so it is a good time to talk about the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery. I don't have anything else to say about that right now, but my friend John McKay has written a lengthy blog post explaining this. Have a look: It's Treason Appreciation Month

Don't hold your breath: source After I made this graph I found out that there is a version of it HERE with more info on the background.

There are something over 10,000 species of birds (thus the name of the famous blog). Of these, just under 600 are in very very serious trouble, some to the extent that we are not sure if they exist, others are so rare that we know they exist but there are no good photographs of them, others are merely very likely to go extinct. There are patterns to this rarity, having to do with what threatens birds on one hand and what makes certain birds vulnerable on the other, but the range of birds that are threatened, in terms of size, shape, kind of bird, habitat, etc. represents birds pretty…

A couple of years back, the The Crossley ID Guide for Eastern Birds came out and it caused a huge splash in the birdwatching world. For some time now it has become apparent that bird watching, especially the identification part of it, was changing in its approach. We describe it this way, though I think the reality is more complex: In the old days we used logical links to known reliable field marks to turn carefully made field observations into species identifications of varying degrees of certainty. Now, a new approach has been developed where we look at the whole bird and get an…

Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo as “fierce people” and this characterization of them was used, misused really, against them by outside forces including the government to justify their “pacification.” The Yanomamo were indeed being abused by these outside forces, and…

... would not have helped at Sandy Hook ... the armed guards would have been the fist to be killed ... or at any of the other places where there have been mass shootings with armed guards present or very near by. Also, many, many schools already have a "school resource officer" on duty. In Minnesota there seems to be one at every school, and that may be good, but we've had our share of school gun play. The call by the NRA to put an armed guard in every school is little more than a marketing scheme to sell a few hundred thousand guns. MacDonalds would also like to put a Big Mac in every…

No. That is not who we are. Shame on those counting on us forgetting.

This is why we can't have nice things, like immigration reform. From MSNBC: Amid a hot-button debate in Washington over how to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, Rep. Don Young, a 21-term lawmaker, referred to immigrant workers as "wetbacks" — a term that could threaten to inflame the debate about immigration reform. "My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes," Young said in an interview with radio station KRBD. He was discussing the number of jobs that have been made irrelevant due to advances in automation. Young is one of the top Republicans in the House.…

The current Wikipedia entry for Climate Change has about 7000 words on that one page (including notes, all the other words that show up on Wikipedia pages). The current Wikipedia entry for the Hockey Stick Controversy has about 25,000 words in all. The controversy over one aspect of climate change, the basic observation of temperature change known as the hockey stick graph, is certainly not more complex than, more important than, or harder to explain than climate change as a whole. Is this a failing of Wikipedia? A success for the Climate Science Deniers who are also hoping to have the…

Skeptically Speaking has this: This week. we’re looking at what science has to say about the origins of selfless – and even self-sacrificing – behavior. We’ll speak to biology professor Lee Alan Dugatkin, about his book The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness. And we’ll discuss altruism from a neurological perspective, with Duke University Neuroscientist Steve Chang, whose research in monkeys looks at how their brains process and record helpful inclinations. Get the podcast here.

Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue is a new book by William Stolzenburg. I've not seen it, but Desiree Schell interviewed the author on Skeptically Speaking: This week, we’re looking at invasive predators, changing ecosystems, and the ethical questions raised by killing one species to save another. We’ll speak to science journalist Will Stolzenburg, about his book Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescue. Also in that edition of Skeptically Speaking, Bug Girl talks about insect conservation. Click here for the podcast…

Don't miss this excellent Skeptically Speaking: This week, we’re looking one orbit outward, at the little red planet that’s inspired so much science and science fiction. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan talks to University of Tennessee geologist Linda Kah, about her work as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, analyzing the images sent back by the Curiosity rover. And she’ll speak to geologist Chris Herd, curator of the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection, about using rare meteorites from Mars to study the planet’s composition and atmosphere. CLICK HERE

Apollo 11 In 100 Seconds from Spacecraft Films on Vimeo.

There are two very important posts out there that I'd like to make you aware of related to climate change denialism. Here's the teasers, please click through and read them. If you like them, tweet them! First, from The Scientist, an opinion piece by Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines: Life as a Target: Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role. As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I…

This comes form Peter Sinclair's blog: The Conservation Hawks is a new group dedicated to harnessing the power of sportsmen to address climate change. Stop. Before you give in to anger, or to the “conservation fatigue” that can fall upon us like a giant wet carpet whenever climate change is mentioned, consider this: If you can convince Conservation Hawks chairman Todd Tanner that he’s wasting his time, that he does not have to worry about climate change, he will present to you his most prized possession: A Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge over/under... Go to Peter's blog and get your gun!…

Rhett Allain at Dot Physics has proposed that we stop using the terms "Hypothesis", "Theory", and "Law" because people so abysmally misunderstand them. He proposes replacing them all with the term "model". Take out all three of these “science” words from introductory texts. They do more harm than good. The problem is that people have firm beliefs that they mean something other than what they are supposed to mean. I don’t think we can save these words. We do have a word to replace them. Are you ready? It’s the model – or you can call it the scientific model if you prefer. I'm not sure if the…

I've been waiting for people to die before I told this story on my blog, but certain people seem to take forever to do that so I'm not waiting any more. Besides, it happened a long time ago. The story I'm telling you happened to me a long time ago (about 1990) and the thing that happened to me really amounted to someone telling me a story, which in turn happened a long time before that (about 1977). There had been some kind of thing, a barbecue, at the home of Scotty MacNeish. If you don't know who Scotty is, you should. He is the archaeologist who discovered and documented the origins of…

It is important to get this right. There is something interesting happening in the Arctic right now, and some people are pointing to it and jumping up and down and yelling about how it is a major climate change event. But it may very well not be. Or it could be. The thing that is happening is something that normally happens, but there are features of the event that are odd. We won't know its significance until the Northern Summer, and even then we won't be sure if this is just an unusual thing for this year or a new trend because, by definition, trends run over periods of time. Every year as…