The Associated Press: SETH BORENSTEIN: Is Obama another Mr. Spock?

WASHINGTON — He shows a fascination with science, an all-too deliberate decision-making demeanor, an adherence to logic and some pretty, ahem, prominent ears.

They all add up to a quite logical conclusion, at least for "Star Trek" fans: Barack Obama is Washington's Mr. Spock, the chief science officer for the ship of state.

Let's say a planet was cooling, and some intergalactic fraudsters tried to make money by claiming that Diet Pepsi bubbles were actually overheating that planet.  Would Spock buy into this fraud?

Climate e-mails topple Australian opposition leader – Telegraph Blogs

So the great climate e-mail fiasco has drawn blood – that of an opposition leader, no less, on the other side of the world. Australian Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has been replaced by a climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, after ten of its most senior politicians resigned over its support for the Government’s plans for fighting global warming. They were, it seems, fired up by the hacked communications from the University of East Anglia

[Iowa: Law professor seems frustrated by farmers who fail to buy into the greatest scientific fraud in human history] | The Des Moines Register

The reality is the impacts of climate change are being felt around the globe - whether or not U.S. farm groups and politicians believe it.
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NEIL D. HAMILTON is a professor of law and director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University.

Roundup: Antarctica’s Climate, Atlantic Hurricanes - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

In the first comprehensive international report on Antarctica’s climate, there was strong agreement that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will contribute substantially to the ongoing rise in sea levels in a warming world, while increased snowfall in the interior could offset the contribution somewhat. The study also noted a 10 percent rise in the area of sea ice around the continent since 1980, which the authors said appears related to changes in winds ascribed to the depletion of the ozone layer there.

The sleepy Atlantic Ocean hurricane season ended yesterday, with the development of a Pacific Ocean El Niño condition predictably shifting winds into a pattern that stifles Atlantic storms. I asked Tom Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., about the conditions in relation to the discussion about how warming could affect tropical storms. Here’s his response: “A convincing greenhouse gas-driven change has not emerged in the data so far, in my view, and may well be ‘in the noise’ due to both large natural variability (compared to the expected size of the greenhouse gas-driven signal) and data quality issues.”