US Croplands, Climate Change, Biofuels and, um, Science.

by NNadir

I don't know if you've ever had occassion to sit at the dinner table with religious fundementalists and discuss science.

I have.   (I have, in fact, sat in the laboratory, and discussed science with religious fundementalists, but let's not talk about that.)

One of the more fun conversations like this - dinner table, not laboratory - involved a family member, who I happen to know has never opened a science book seriously in her life - informing all of the members of our family that "everything in the Bible has been verified by science."  

This is not by itself even remotely interesting except to inform us on one level about the prestige of science, since in former times science was only considered valid if it conformed to religion whereas, subtly without all that much notice, religions now seek validity from science and not the other way around.

Science has become a cultural talisman worldwide.   As it happens, the paper from the primary scientific literature comes from the journal Science...

continued at Daily Kos....

Death Wish 2010: Climate Change Deniers Seal the Greenhouse

by ignatzmouse

In the midst of what is becoming the hottest year on record, what remained of an already compromised address to climate change was stripped from the Obama administration's energy bill. The climate legislation could not pass intact because the administration was not willing to fight for it in the smirking face of climate change deniers, deregulators, and politicians in the pocket of polluters. The will to act for tomorrow, even as the warming daylight breaks our collective sleep, is more fragile than the sheen of atmosphere wisping over this small rock in space. Politicians it seems fear the deniers, fear that they may be accused of foresight in the face of the blind march of corporatism as if allegiance to its ideology trumps all else in its wake. So they make a devil's bargain while the planet cooks and pundits rook. If this administration is incapable of fueling change instead of carbon tycoons, can we ever again hope that climate change will be addressed before the inevitable?

continued at Daily Kos...