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(CNN) -- At the start of the 1980s there were more than a million elephants in Africa. During that decade, 600,000 were destroyed for ivory products. Today perhaps no more than 400,000 remain across the continent, according to Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington, who is widely recognized as an authority on the subject. If this level of killing continues, if elephants continue to be slaughtered for trinkets and statuettes, in 10 years' time most of Africa's elephants will be gone and an ineffable symbol of majesty and wonder -- and the linchpin in the ecology of an entire...

Scientist claims to invent 'time machine' to see into the future with 98 per cent accuracy • He says his device can detail any individual’s life between five and eight years in advance after taking readings from the user's touch An Iranian scientist claims he has invented a time machine that allows you to predict the future with 98 per cent accuracy. Ali Razeghi says his device can produce a print-out detailing any individual’s life between five and eight years in advance after taking readings from the user's touch. He claims the Iranian government, whose nuclear programme has caused concern...

Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College claims in a press release this month: “Every college or university that claims to be holding a ‘green’ commencement needs to have divested from investments in fossil fuels, or admit that they cannot truly make that claim.” “As the first college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as its central focus, Unity College ascended to the leading-edge of higher education, training the next generation of environmental leaders to pursue trans-disciplinary solutions to the earth’s most pressing problems including global climate change.” “With a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees in...

A California billionaire is pledging to spend as much of his fortune as necessary to make climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” Tom Steyer, who made his riches as a hedge fund manager, told The Hill on Tuesday that he wants to make climate change a campaign issue for years to come and Democratic support for environmental protections as widespread as support for gay marriage and immigration reform. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the...

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream. ... But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.

In Washington, everyone has their issue. But it's probably safe to say that Stephen Bassett's is a little more colorful. Bassett, the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, wants the U.S. government to lift what he calls the "truth embargo" and acknowledge that extraterrestrials are real and are engaging the human race. "Think of me as a very committed political activist like any other, whether it's the civil rights movement, or the gay rights movement, or the women's rights movement, or any other," he told Yeas & Nays. Though his movement is a wee bit more alien. Bassett and...

The list of amici contains several names that will be familiar to anyone whose has had the bad habit of following American politics. Beyond their political coloration, which in many instances seems quite changeable, they do present a typical Washington motley: underemployed lobbyists, society hostesses, TV gasbags, defenestrated politicians, and political hangers-on, most of them draping themselves in the phony-baloney job titles that only our preposterous political culture can pretend to endow with authority (“adviser,” “consultant,” “commentator,” “advocate”). In other cases there are references to real jobs—former special assistants, speechwriters, undersecretaries—that the amici once held and abandoned several administrations ago,...

NYT's Krugman: Skeptics 'punished in the afterlife' --- McKibben: 'White America' has failed

Believe it or not—and I suspect most readers will not—there’s a liberal war on science. Say what? We are well aware of the Republican war on science from the eponymous 2006 book (Basic Books) by Chris Mooney, and I have castigated conservatives myself in my 2006 book Why Darwin Matters (Henry Holt) for their erroneous belief that the theory of evolution leads to a breakdown of morality. … The left’s war on science begins with the stats cited above: 41 percent of Democrats are young Earth creationists, and 19 percent doubt that Earth is getting warmer. These numbers do not...

A few salient facts are known about the Americans whose lives might be changed by a Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage expected this summer. About one in five gay and lesbian couples are raising children that are under age 18. Same-sex couples are less likely than traditional married couples to have health insurance covering them both. One in 10 men with a male partner or spouse is a military veteran. As many as 6 million Americans, roughly 2 percent of the population, have a parent who is lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. These nuggets of demographic insight into same-sex...

President Obama has put salvation from dreaded climate catastrophes on his action agenda hot list. During his inaugural address he said: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” He went on to shame anyone who disagrees with this assessment, saying, “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.”

The Earth has been getting warmer -- but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes? A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought. “[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental...

Having heard it straight from President Obama last Monday, the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” looming in our immediate future are all imminent catastrophes fueled by rapid climate change about which we simply must do something right away — but this is exactly the type of alarmist rhetoric that ensures we pursue the types of ineffective, top-down, big-government, expensive, and internationalist solutions that will actually have very little net effectiveness in sincerely addressing the issue.One of environmentalists’ favorite past-times includes whipping up a certain amount of global-warming frenzy as an excuse to implement...

Let's look at experts. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a mathematician and scientist. Newton has to be the greatest and most influential scientist who has ever lived. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his genius transformed our understanding of science, particularly in the areas of physics, mathematics and astronomy. What's not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours on alchemy; his experiments included trying to turn lead into gold. Though he wrote volumes on alchemy, after his death Britain's Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to be printed." Lord William Thomson Kelvin...

Guest post by Dr. Tim BallIn a comment on the WUWT article about the abject failure of UKMO weather forecasts, “Slingo Pretends She Knows Why It’s Been So Wet!”, Doug Huffman wrote, “Each forecast must be accompanied by the appropriate retro-cast record of previous casts” (January 6, 2013 at 7:06 am). I pointed out years ago that Environment Canada (EC) publishes such information. They expose a similar horrendous story of absolute failure. This likely indicates why it is not done by others, but provides adequate justification for significantly reducing the role of the agency.Both EC and UKMO predictions fail. The...

Have you ever experienced the feeling at work that everyone around you is unstable? That you're the only level-headed worker in a workplace populated by colleagues whose fits and outbursts are unpredictable, or even psychopathic? The experience might be common to many workers, but according to a recent book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, certain fields are more likely to attract actual psychopaths than others. The book by Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton argues that "a number of psychopathic attributes [are] actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed...

There is a correlation between watching porn and support for gay marriage among men, Dr. Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at University of Texas at Austin, found. Exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts, he believes, may undermine a traditional view of marriage. Using data from The New Family Structures Study, a project for which he was the principal investigator, Regnerus found statistically significant positive correlation between porn use and support for same-sex marriage among men, even after controlling for other predictors, such as political party, religiosity, marital status, age, education and sexual orientation. In the full sample, 42...

[Full title: "Psychiatry goes insane: Every human emotion now classified as a mental disorder in new psychiatric manual DSM-5 "] (NaturalNews) The industry of modern psychiatry has officially gone insane. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being -- sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement -- is now being classified as a "mental disorder" demanding chemical treatment (with prescription medications, of course). The new, upcoming DSM-5 "psychiatry bible," expected to be released in a few months, has transformed itself from a medical reference manual to a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. "Mental disorders" named in the DSM-5...

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water. The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of...

Scientists may have finally solved the puzzle of what makes a person gay, and how it is passed from parents to their children. A group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuals get that trait from their opposite-sex parents: A lesbian will almost always get the trait from her father, while a gay man will get the trait from his mother.