Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: The teflon doomsayers

In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley offers example after spectacular example of a phenomenon that has baffled me ever since I began covering environmental issues in my first job in journalism thirty years ago: to wit, that while the entire presumable goal, purpose, and raison d'être of applied environmental science is to solve environmental problems, any environmental scientist who dares to suggest that problems are being solved is asking for trouble. As Ridley observes, we have arrived at a state where even the most wildly irrational pessimism is treated with reverence, while the most cautiously sober optimism is ridiculed.

Aztec Human Sacrifice | Real Science

The Aztecs believed that droughts, famines and floods were the result of the gods being unhappy with them – and that by making between 20,000 and 80,000 human sacrifices per year, they could minimize the frequency of “extreme” weather events.

It was one of the first large scale attempts to geoengineer a solution to global climate disruption.

Threats to the world's plants assessed : Nature News

More than 20% of the world's 380,000 plant species are at risk of extinction, making plants more threatened than birds, according to the first global analysis of the status of plant biodiversity.
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Habitat loss, resulting from the conversion of natural habitats for agriculture and livestock grazing, is the biggest threat to plants' survival, the study concludes.  [Why isn't the global warming hoax mentioned here?]

Popular Technology.net: Prominent Climatologists Skeptical of AGW Alarm

Six Prominent Climatologists; John Christy, Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Fred Singer and Sherwood Idso, all skeptical of "man-made" global warming (AGW) alarm.