Al Fin: A Living Earth of Incredible Resilience

When political activists moan about the environmental effects of a 0.6 degree C rise in global temperature over a century, knowledgable observors are forced to suppress wry smiles at the ecological ignorance unwittingly revealed.

Earth life has not survived this long through unimaginable disasters and catastrophes, by being unable to deal with variation in climate and physical conditions. Certainly the impact of humans upon the Earth to this point has been extremely benign in comparison to the natural extreme variability that life has suffered under -- and still thrives.

American Thinker Blog: Caught in a lie

The Treasury Department has been sitting on some data that gives the lie to the administration claim that the cap and trade bill will not substantially affect the average American taxpayer.
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John Kerry is leading the charge to bring the cap and trade bill to the floor of the senate before year's end. I would be very surprised if this news didn't kill the House bill for good. That doesn't mean that some kind of energy bill won't make it through the senate, but it will almost certainly not contain the carbon credits and other schemes to tax the American people into paupery.

More unsettled science: Was Mighty T. Rex 'Sue' Felled By A Lowly Parasite?

It is an image commonly promoted by museums and dinosaur aficionados. Sue's remains, in fact, exhibit holes in her jaw that some believed were battle scars, the result of conflict with another dinosaur, possibly another T. rex.

But a new study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, provides evidence that Sue, perhaps the most famous dinosaur in the world, was felled in more mundane fashion by a lowly parasite that still afflicts modern birds.