We used to be the leader of the world...

 Tamino really sums it up

We used to be the leader of the world, we gave hope to people everywhere. Now we’re the albatross, the burden, the problem. If you ask a Republican presidential candidate what to do about climate change, the best answer you could hope for is to burn more natural gas — switch from one carbon-based fuel to another. With that attitude, in the presidency or in congress, we won’t just remain the problem child of the world, we’ll get worse.

The Republican base is so immersed in science denial that simply acknowledging reality is disqualifying.  They speak of America as the greatest power in the world, and the leader of the free world, yet we are not even close.  It would be a vast improvement if we were just a follower.  Instead, we're the anchor - holding back world progress on one of our greatest global challenges.

I had a conversation several years ago with a science-denying colleague who commented that he was ever thankful that we dropped out of the Kyoto agreement, because it ultimately did nothing, and if we had held up our part of the bargain our economy would have suffered.  Might it have been different if we had led the way - as a leader is supposed to do - instead of hiding in fear and preserving the status quo?

The Pause that Wasn't

Another new study confirms that there has not been a pause or hiatus in global warming, confirming the five other studies that have recently come to the same conclusion.  In short, every evaluation that suggested global warming has slowed down or paused was looking at too short a time frame to draw any conclusions.  Rather like saying global warming pauses every night.

"There has never been a pause in global warming unless you try to create one by looking at an insufficiently large number of data points," said lead author Stephan Lewandowsky, a social scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in the U.K

Here's a summary at InsideClimate

And in the meantime, The chairman of the House Science and Technology committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, is leading a witch-hunt against NOAA for publishing another paper with the same conclusion. He insists that NOAA release the data that they've already made publicly available.  And he insists they release the analytical methods that they've already made publicly available.  What's more disturbing - that the Chairman of the House Science and Technology committee doesn't believe in science, or that he's so ignorant of technology that he doesn't know how to click on links on NOAA's web site?

God Is Telling Us Something ...

How often do we hear that climate change cannot be real because God would ensure that we don't harm the climate?  

For the religious among us, God is warning us now.  With increasing temperatures, melting polar ice, rising sea levels, changing seasons, and more extreme weather.  He gave us the intellectual power to figure this out, and now he's warning us that we're running out of time, but we're not listening.

Global Temperature Anomaly through October

As was expected by anyone who was paying attention, the very strong and still-strengthening El Nino, and the never-paused effects of human-created carbon emissions, have combined to shatter previous global temperature records.  Here is the NASA data as of the end of October.  

Any thoughts James Inhofe?  (Oh, sorry, I guess you can't see it with all the sand in your eyes.)

More details at Tamino's Blog

A Religious Test for Syrian Refugees?

We've heard suggestions that only Syrians who can prove they are Christian should be accepted as refugees.  Perhaps it's time for some brief reflection...

from Informed Comment - Juan Cole's excellent blog focusing on the middle east.

From Human to Fish - Half a Billion Years of Evolution in Reverse

Incredible animation shows 550 million years of human evolution in about a minute.  In some ways it's an ultra-condensed animated version of Richard Dawkin's book The Ancestor's Tale, which traces human evolution back much further and includes the other branches not in our direct lineage.