May I ask you a question? If I lay a pile of dry sticks in preparation for a bonfire in my garden, and a bolt of lightning strikes those dry sticks, are the dry sticks responsible for the fire, or the bolt of lightning?  Clearly the agent is the lightning. Do we all agree?

Credit: Smith609 / Wikimedia Commons

A fossilized trilobite, an ancient type of arthropod: This specimen, from the Burgess Shale, preserves “soft parts” – the antennae and legs is from the Cambrian period when life exploded.

The quest to discover what drove one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth has taken a new, fascinating twist.

In a recent turn towards the disturbing, a number of jurisdictions including Rhode Island have enacted laws that exclude working papers correspondence and other work product from freedom of information act requests.

In the last quarter of the 20^th century, James Hansen, former head of the NASA Goodard Institute of Space Studies, utilized false data to promote the nascent global warming movement. The objective being to reduce the use of ‘fossil fuels.’

In the olden days, science and politics were independent disciplines. That, however, has changed.

Today’s politicians micromanage science, particularly in heavily politicized countries such as Norway, ostensibly to ensure that science agrees with current policies.

The latest fake heatwave news from the BBC:

Extremely hot weather has started to hit most of the United States, with temperatures set to peak over the weekend, meteorologists say.

The heatwave could affect about 200 million people in major cities like New York, Washington, and Boston in the East Coast, and the Midwest region too.

A research team led by U.S. and Korean scientists deployed three moorings with hydrophones attached seaward of the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Ross Sea in December of 2015 and were able to record hundreds of short-duration, broadband signals indicating the fracturing of the ice shelf.

If you follow the subject of global warming alarm, you will have read many times that there is a “consensus” of “97% of climate scientists” on — well, on something.

I’ve actually never been able to find a precise statement of the proposition on which the 97% supposedly agree. But suppose you can find the statement.

International Journal of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resources publishes a new paper showing a significant and growing relationship between mid-ocean seismic activity and global temperatures (extended through 2018).

On July 25, the Heartland Institute will hold its 13th International Conference on Climate Change, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Heartland has already published at least three, 1,000-page, peer-reviewed volumes on so-called “Climate Change,” under the moniker Climate Change Reconsidered II.

Camille Veyres presents a one-hour video on the carbon cycle and physics of the atmosphere which debunks the lies told by government academics about CO2 and man-made global warming.

Among the junk science, Veyres also exposes the lie that “The CO2 from “fossil fuels” accumulates in the atmosphere.”

Depending on who you ask at Gothamist, summer either sucks or is the most delightful time of the year. What’s not up for debate, though, is that right now this city feels hotter than, say, a wide-open field upstate.

It’s that time of year again — summer — when the weather/climate charlatans try to scare us into believing that because we are having the annual heat wave, global warming is real and the world will surely end by next summer (by which time you’ll have forgotten last summer).

We’ve made it to mid-July and we are just now having our first major heatwave of the season here in the United States.

A massive ridge of high pressure has built-in over the southeast, which is dominating weather conditions almost everywhere east of the Rockies (Figure 1).¹