Roger Pielke: Dear Expert, Please Cook the Books - WSJ.com

Closer to home, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie issued an executive order classifying the storm as a "post-tropical cyclone" rather than a hurricane, pre-empting the scientific evaluation of the National Weather Service, which has yet to make its final determination. Whether Sandy was a hurricane or not makes a big difference in insurance payouts to individual homeowners. If a hurricane, the payouts would be much smaller. In a letter to the Weather Service, New York Sen. Charles Schumer reminded the agency that its scientific judgments could cost his constituents a lot of money.

Each of these very different cases shares a common characteristic. An institution—Elstat in Greece, the Major Risks Commission in Italy and the U.S. National Weather Service—was tasked with rendering expert judgments as an input to policy making. In each case, that input was thwarted in some way.

Twitter / billmckibben: ingenious paper demonstrates ...

ingenious paper demonstrates that it costs $9 billion a day to NOT use renewable energy http://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Climate_and_Energy/Cost_of_non_use_of_RE.pdf …

Twitter / PaulRogersSJMN: Sierra Nevada snowpack in ...

Sierra Nevada snowpack in California now at 93% of normal for this date, down from 140% a month ago due to lack of January storms.

EPA chief cuts video spotlighting LGBT employees | JunkScience.com

Nothing against LGBT-ers but: Our government is broke. LBGT issues have nothing to do with EPA’s mission. Everyone had their problems growing up. What gives?