Unconventional Sources

The International Polar Year is over. It stretched between two years, actually, 2007 and 2008, with loads of research based upon cooperation between scientists from all over the world, researching the state of the north and south poles, climatologically and biologically.

The thing is, though that the work continues. Scientists continue to cooperate, to do work on these areas of research. The event goes away, and the science goes on.

Actually, the event continues too. The research done in 2007 and 2008 as part of the International Polar Year continues to bring new understanding about the state of climate change.

Today, the IPY team revealed that the minimum extent of year-round ice in Antarctica reached the smallest area ever measured during 2007 and 2008. Areas of Antarctica thought to be relatively untouched by climate change were found to have subject to unexpectedly strong effects of global warming as well.

The year has passed, but keep an eye on the International Polar Year, definitely still part of current events.

With the election of Barack Obama, Americans have assumed a new habit of passivity: Hope has become hoping that people in Washington D.C. will make things better. The thing is that while ordinary folks sit around and hope things get better, there are corporations and powerful organizations with paid lobbyists going to work in Washington D.C. every day to make sure that things don’t change.

If there is to be hope, we have to stop just hoping, and begin acting. We can’t count on elected officials to do what’s right. We have to force them to do what’s right, by taking action ourselves to help create the kind of public pressure that elected officials cannot resist.

That’s what the people at Force Change had in mind when they created their site, a place that informs citizens about environmental policy so that they’ll understand enough about environmental issues to apply intelligent pressure on the government and private organizations to make a real difference. Thanks to the people at Force Change. We’re reading.

As Roy Spencer makes the rounds of corporate media outlets spreading propaganda against the science of global warming, a few sites are taking note of Spencer’s record of rather sloppy science.

The DeSmog Blog has gathered many sources on Roy Spencer’s rather unscientific methods, as has a Squidoo lens on Roy Spencer. Among these are mixing his Christianity with his science, and working for more than one organization that takes corporate funding from Exxon-Mobil.

The Way Things Break notes that Spencer has given public support to the pseudoscientific Creationist Intelligent Design ideology.

Irregular Times notes Spencer’s seeming disdain for statistics, as well as Spencer’s infamous blunder in drawing wildly inaccurate conclusions from measurements in the troposphere.