Amazingly enough, there are still people who claim to understand the science behind global warming, yet make the mistake of thinking localized cold temperatures, such as the recent snowstorms in the Eastern United States, are somehow a refutation of global warming. It’s almost as if they don’t understand the meaning of the key word “global.” Jon [...]

From Calamities of Nature comes this comic (the image here is just the first panel). I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I’ve heard a similar argument made by Sam Harris concerning the word “elite” in a Newsweek essay about Sarah Palin and politics last year. Not exactly the same argument, but [...]

Via The Intersection blog, Chris Mooney made me aware of a great brochure (pdf) from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that gives some basic climate science literacy information. It’s a great introduction to the multifaceted complexities of climate science, how climate works, how it’s measured, and how humans effect it. It starts out with [...]

Instead of re-posting the entire entry here, I’m going to link to my Rationality Now post with my commentary about the CRU email hack and what, if any, implications the emails have on climate change research.

I’ve mentioned before that I wish the Republican party would “go back to being the fiscally conservative, small government party they used to be instead of the religious, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-environment party they are now.” Andrew Sullivan, over at The Daily Dish,  seems to have the same idea, but in more detail. Andrew and I are [...]

I love this video for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. It was made for their 2009 fundraising effort and it’s extremely well done. Promoting real science is increasingly important in our world and the RDFRS does a great job of it.

This evening, I was waiting for my new laptop to get through all its updates and my wife and I were watching NCIS while waiting, which allowed my eight-year-old daughter to stay up a little later than usual because… you know… we didn’t want to miss any of the NCIS episode to go tuck her [...]

Today is the 32nd anniversary of the elimination of smallpox, according to Wikipedia. How was it eliminated? Vaccines. That’s medical science at its best… not “alternative” medicine, not homeopathy, not prayer, not the “Will of God.” Science. Real people doing real research to develop real solutions to real problems. Nothing works like science. Phil Plait says it...

NASA’s equipment is some pretty powerful stuff. But astronomy also depends on the curiosity and contribution of amateur astronomers. [...] If they can discover something great, so can any of you other students who are here tonight. All you need is a passion for science. - President Barack Obama during the White House Star Party (via)

Some people wonder why evolution isn’t more accepted than it is. Despite the monumental amount of evidence in multiple fields of scientific inquiry, those pesky creationists, bringing up the same tired arguments, sometimes seem like B-movie zombies. No matter how many times they get smacked down, they keep coming back to torment scientifically-minded, rational [...]

A friend and I just returned from a trip to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The museum is an attempt to show that the bible is scientifically accurate when you read the book of Genesis in a completely literal way. Though the museum is physically amazing (clean, well built, very high quality, etc), it [...]

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog just recently posted this article about Simon Singh and his current tussle with the British Chiropractic Association. I’ve been following the situation, but what really caught me about this update was Plait’s words in the first two paragraphs about science. Science thrives on criticism. Reality, being what it is [...]