Well, not quite. Here's the Inhofe-Upton energy tax prevention act. My favourite part: "The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law is wrong." Separation of powers schmeparation of powers. Via Wonk room (where there's a video), here's Ed Markey:

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room. I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process. Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Followed the climate change congressional hearing yesterday. Cost of Energy links to this. My favourite quote:

Witnesses invited by Republicans tried to compare their cause to that of famous dissenters – such as Galileo – who were eventually proved right. But that rationale brought ridicule from Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who noted that Einstein had almost immediately been accepted by his peers.

Includes almost nothing talked about on this blog in the past four or five years. It's gonna be a page turner, oh yes. [Update: oops, forgot to credit Wordle.]

Resilience science links to a nice little video version of Steve Johnson's TED talk about his new book. They also link to Cosma Shalizi's review, which has a heap of great thoughts. Two of my favourite:

This amused me: "Bank of England governor says financial institutions are fixated on exploiting customers for short-term profit."

Obviously at this point in the PhD I should be avoiding climate blogs, and mostly I'm managing. But I just fell off the wagon slightly, and had a gentle saunter around Watts Up With That. In the words of Father Dougal Mcguire, I'm now hugely confused.

So: the office of inspector general just completed Senator Inhofe's request to investigate CRU-related malfeasance. Here's the (nice and short) report. Predictably, both 'sides' interpret the outcome completely differently. But WUWT - following hot on the heels of Inhofe himself - gets in there with the headline:

Inspector General Finds NOAA Climategate Emails Warranted "Further Investigation"

Inhofe promises to follow up on this to 'ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent according to federal law'.

Perhaps you wouldn't know if you hadn't read the report's summary, or the report itself (it's not linked to in the WUWT story) - but those emails are investigated, in the report. That's one of the main things the report does. It was just saying, 'there were a lot of emails, we've picked out eight to concentrate on. We do that now.'

You must stop selfishly pursuing your pleasure in finding things out. To be frank: fuck your research.

Greg Craven.

Clearly, Iraq wasn't attacked because of one man's lie. I can still vividly remember Powell making claims about the mobile weapons units - am I, um, mis-remembering him actually showing satellite images? At any rate, to state the obvious, here's one former CIA analyst:

There were people at the time who doubted what Curveball was saying, but if the administration doesn't want to believe it, it doesn't make much difference.

I know I keep on banging on about this, but these two letters from 1998 are still there: one to Clinton and one to Gingrich, both stating that the "the only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power", and that the US should "be prepared to use.. force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

The writers' unshakeable conviction in the presence of WMD is backed up by an equally fervent belief that backing down would mean "an incalculable blow to American leadership and credibility."

A fun game: match the letter signatories to Bush administration positions. One of them is even in the Grauniad article above, saying:

It's the job of intelligence agencies to distinguish between defectors who claim to have something to say and defectors who are lying and they obviously didn't do their job. The Germans didn't, and we didn't.

Well, actually, intelligence agencies have a dual purpose: to sort fact from fiction, and to help create a version of the facts that fits their state's foreign policy. I've never really been sure how the two are meant to co-exist.

Via climateprogress, the Onion has the latest:

"While I recognize that intelligent minds may disagree on this issue, I believe we have an obligation to prevent our citizens from having their flesh seared off in a global firestorm that transforms our planet into a broiling molten wasteland," Obama added. "I think Americans deserve better."

What the article fails to mention is that the science isn't settled. In what must be the final, FINAL nail in the coffin for the stroidists, a leaked peer reviewed paper revealed last week that it's not 100% certain the asteroid is even going to hit. If the scientists aren't even sure, why the hell are we still talking about this?

R.I.P. Mozaz.

Comment from Marcus:

Oh mozaz you awkward bugger why the hell you go before that mass fuckin murderer Thatcher?

I'm sure he can arrange a welcome party for her when she gets there.