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Climate change campaigner Al Gore denied Australian firestorm footage AN Australian filmmaker refused to sell footage of a firestorm to former US vice-president Al Gore - to use in Mr Gore's climate presentations - because the event was unrelated to climate change. Chris Tangey from Alice Springs Film and Television recorded the phenomenon on Curtin Springs Station, 360km southwest of Alice Springs, while scouting locations for a film. The footage has been an international sensation, reported widely in global media. In an email exchange with Mr Gore's office, Mr Tangey said using the footage in a climate-change framework would be...

Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious—the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe—can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. Although cosmic mysteries remain, Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, says there's good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever. … Another role for God is as a...

I may just poll my comment section and pass that off as a Battleground State poll. The Washington Post explained that rather curious “Swing State” subsection in today’s national poll where Obama had an incredible 11-point lead relative to his national lead of only 2-points: The WaPo-ABC ‘swing state’ poll numbers, explained Monday’s Washington Post-ABC News poll adds to the evidence of an emerging, important dynamic in the presidential contest showing closer parity nationally than in key battleground states, where President Obama has had clear leads.

.... I am a proponent of carbon taxes. One criticism of this policy that you hear, for instance here from Noah Smith, is that they are pointless because you need international cooperation to make a real dent. But among non-tradeable goods this is not really the case. We don’t have to worry about transportation shifting abroad, since you can’t really outsource driving your car or shipping a package. And this matters, as transportation accounts for 70% of U.S. fuel consumption, and 30% of U.S. greenhouse gases. But even if carbon taxes are problematic, surely higher gas taxes are a good...

Sociologist Mark Regnerus, whose study on gay parenting outraged gay-rights advocates and their cheerleaders in the academy, started classes at the University of Texas in Austin with, he says, a bit of a load off his shoulders. A university inquiry cleared him of charges of flawed scholarship. Or as gay activists and their many supporters in academia saw it -- that he'd engaged in some very calculated and vile gay-bashing. Specifically, Regnerus was charged with "scientific misconduct" for his study in the July issue of Social Science Research, titled: "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex...

Erica Loberg doesn’t come right out and say it, but the author of “Inside the Insane” believes that those of us who are very religious – or “hyper religious,” as she describes us – are mentally ill. “Are there are lot of hyper religio(us) people walking around with schizophrenia or hypo mania and not even know it?,” she asks. “Can religion be a springboard to help discover a mental illness?” Loberg doesn’t answer her own questions, but it’s pretty obvious what she thinks: Religiosity is a marker for mental illness, if not insanity. When I checked Loberg’s biography, I discovred...

FRIDAY, Sept. 14 (HealthDay News) — Regular exposure to secondhand smoke has a negative effect on brain function, according to a new British study that found people who live with or spend a significant amount of time with a smoker are damaging their memories. “According to recent reports by the World Health Organization, exposure to secondhand smoke can have serious consequences on the health of people who have never smoked themselves, but who are exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke,” Dr. Tom Heffernan, a researcher at the Collaboration for Drug and Alcohol Research Group at Northumbria University, said in a...

Following up on his 2008 promise that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,” President Obama has promised to do something about droughts, which are caused — in his opinion — by the dreaded global warming.Obama gets a lot of his climate information from NASA’s Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A federal employee, Hansen endorsed John Kerry for president in hotly contested Iowa ten days before the 2004 election. This year, he has been all over the media blaming the...

Woe to any scientist with an interest in objectively researching and reporting on “LGBT”-related issues. If your findings fail the left’s socio-political “butterflies-and-rainbows” litmus test, the “progressive” establishment will try to destroy you – guaranteed. Thus, on these matters, honest scientific inquiry will require courage. Kansas State University, July 2010: Family Studies professor Dr. Walter Schumm releases the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of homosexual “parenting.” Published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, the study determined, among other things: Children raised in “gay” households are up to 12 times more likely to self-identify as “gay”; Of those...

The left's war on traditional marriage took a truly disgraceful turn Monday. The folks at Salon actually published a piece entitled "Gay Couples Have Happier Kids." The sub-headline read, "Studies show that the traditional nuclear family is not better. It's a dying model -- and that's a good thing": If you want what’s best for your kids, one surefire way to provide them with a healthy, happy home is to make sure they have lesbian parents. In the longest-running study of lesbian families to date, zero percent of children reported physical or sexual abuse—not a one. In the general population,...

(snip) ....... They measured social tolerance by two variables: Gender-orientation tolerance, measured by whether respondents would agree to having gay persons speak in their community or teach in public schools, and whether they would oppose having homosexually themed books in the library. Racial tolerance, measured by responses regarding various racial and ethnic groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Eighty percent of the study respondents were Caucasian, LeRoux said. The researchers measured altruistic behavior by whether respondents said they had allowed a stranger to go ahead of them in line, carried a stranger's belongings, donated blood, given directions to a...

Take a look around key committees of the House and you'll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missour's Representative Todd Akin's take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who's been raped. On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers. Let's take a quick tour of the crazies in the House. Their...

Efforts to advance climate-change education in schools and communities are getting a boost from a set of six grants awarded this week by the National Science Foundation, totaling nearly $19 million. The grants will support a number of efforts, including a joint project in Maryland and Delaware to help schools deliver effective and regionally relevant instruction in grades 8-12, and pay for work led by the New England Aquarium to enhance climate-change education in zoos, aquariums, and other settings. The four other NSF grants include: -- $5.7 million to Columbia University for a project to help the public understand climate...

Is your pet gay? On this episode of the Conscience of Kansas radio, Dr. Paul A. Ibbetson talks about the homosexual agenda and the search for scientific credability in their social movement. Dr. Ibbetson speaks to the myth of animal homosexuality and why it does not stand up to scrutiny.

The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that...

A significant number of social and personality psychologists have told researchers they would discriminate against conservatives in decisions about publishing, grant applications and hiring, according to a study published in the September issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Authors Dr. Yoel Inbar and Dr. Joel Lammers assert in the study the more liberal the psychologist claimed to be, the more likely they were to admit to anti-conservative discrimination.... "By excluding those who disagree with (most of) us politically," Inbar and Yammers concluded, "we treat them unfairly, do ourselves a disservice, and ultimately damage the scientific credibility of our...

Consider this a warning: the theory I’m about to describe is likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt. It’s the best—the kindest—of you out there likely to get the most upset, too. I’d like to think of myself as being in that category, at least, and these are the types of visceral, illogical reactions I admittedly experienced in my initial reading of this theory. But that’s just the non-scientist in me flaring up, which, on occasion, it embarrassingly does. Otherwise, I must say upfront, the theory makes a considerable deal...

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Smoking anything other than medically-prescribed marijuana at San Francisco street fairs, festivals and other outdoor events held on city property would be banned under new legislation before the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Eric Mar said he introduced the proposal because of the health impacts of secondhand smoke when people light up in public. “It’s widely known that secondhand smoke is responsible for as many as 73,000 deaths among non-smokers each year in the United States, and there is no safe level of exposure,” he said.

A third of the world's adults are physically inactive, and the couch potato lifestyle kills about five million people every year, experts said in the medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday. "Roughly three of every 10 individuals aged 15 years or older -- about 1.5 billion people -- do not reach present physical activity recommendations," they said in a report that described the problem as a "pandemic." The picture for adolescents is even more worrying, with four out of five 13- to 15-year-olds not moving enough, it said. Physical inactivity was described for the study as failing to do 30...

It was for a moment the clash of the Nobel Prize winners on climate changeÂ… just barely, but nothing like this has happened before in the debate-that-isnÂ’t. Normally this is not a show the heavyweights turn up too. But there were three Nobel winners in the room at the same time., Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland won the 1995 Nobel for work on Ozone. Both of the first two are fans of the man-made global warming theory and they both spoke just prior to notable skeptic Ivar Giaever (who won a Nobel for tunneling in superconductors in 1972). [UPDATE: Watch...