Cold weather may cut state's apple crop | Michigan

APPLES: A stretch of cold weather last month means the state's apple crop this year likely will be smaller than usual. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the annual harvest at 19.3 million bushels. The Michigan Apple Committee says a consensus of state growers and shippers finds the 2010 crop is expected to be about three-quarters of that size. The 2009 crop was about 28 million bushels.

2010’s most annoying fad: the ‘vintage’ incandescent bulb | Grist

Apparently, the latest retro-hot-design fad revolves around inefficiency so glaring it's blinding: a return to "vintage" light bulbs, which are energy-sucking exposed-filament copies of Edison's original illuminating invention.

Restaurant designers all over the world seem to be snatching up these antique-style bulbs that cost anywhere from $9 to $20 at Pottery Barn and Anthropologie, probably because they're being associated with automatic-trend-maker, the label "vintage."

Climate scientists meet to improve brainwashing skills | Australian Climate Madness

Note that they're not meeting to hang their heads in shame and discuss the shonky science, fudged data, blocking of FOI requests or intimidation of sceptical climate journals, which is all par for the course. No, this is all about communication - it's just that they're not getting their message across properly, obviously. The science is just fine, the public are just too stupid to understand

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: IPCC: This Time Will be Different (Not), A Guest Post by Richard Tol

[Tol] The number of people who die in 2010 due to conventional air pollution is greater than the number of people who are projected to die in 2100 due to climate change.