Climate change is more complex than global warming--Willful ignorance aside.

There's a good reason why all the climate change deniers refuse to see human-made climatic change as real..instead they prefer to focus on "global warming" as their whipping boy.

By focusing on one extreme (global warming), it's easier to discount the impact human activity has on the climate as a whole.  Rather than seeing the entire weather system as a whole and see the impact on climatic variability as the real issue, their cherry-picking of anthropogenic global warming becomes the easier straw man to tear down.

I've recently been in an argument with a bunch of deniers who, instead of examining the premise of increasing climatic variability (which is the real issue...) they prefer to couch their arguments in terms of global warming ONLY.  Why would they do that instead of examining all the evidence?

As anyone who studies vast complex systems will attest:  You cannot ignore the resiliency of the system, nor can you over-simplify the system and still have the capacity to understand it to the degree necessary to talk about it intelligently.

Climate is one of the most complicated systems we know of.  Reducing it to one aspect (global warming) while specifically ignoring the other aspects (variability and climatic swing intensification) is to deliberately and willfully violate Occam's Razor--which means these idiots are distorting the facts for some agenda. 

Why else would they choose to ignore ALL the evidence and ALL the facts and focus on only one area of climate research--to the exclusion of the entire body of work--UNLESS they cannot face the facts or cannot offer anything substantive against ALL the evidence?

I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin's quote: "We are all born ignorant, but we must work really hard to remain stupid."

These characters remind me of Ron White's quote: "You can't argue with stupid."

Intelligence reduces risk of death--Duh.

Sometimes scientists find results that most of us already know intuitively.

This study links High IQ with reduced risk of death.

In my opinion, stupidity is nothing more than "Darwin in Action." You know, the human version of natural selection or survival of the fittest.

We all shake our heads when some idiot decides to play chicken with a train.

In my mind, stupidity serves a very useful purpose. It weeds out the weak and unfit from our gene pool. The immediate result may suck, but over time, the accumulation of stupid actions by many individuals improves the quality of our species leaving only the best and brightest around to reproduce.

Darwin was right.

These results may be a no-brainer, but sometimes it helps to verify with reproducible results.

Science regains its rightful place--being unmolested by politicians.

Obama is undoing the anti-intellectual crap spewed all over science by the Bush administration.

All I can say is: "Thank God!"

Irony is intended.

My problem with the whole selling out to the Religious Right boils down to this:

Insecure faith is the cause of the anti-intellectualism and fear of knowledge that governed such policies.

There, I said it.

Those intolerant of conflict with their world view are the last people to consult when making science policy. Bush screwed the pooch big time with that policy and it's time for the Galileo's of the world to be set free from the yoke of faith.

Despite what the faithful might think, the world isn't constrained to one particular worldview.

The rest of us adults realize this and accept that forcing others into our own circumscribed reality might just be the worst "tyranny over the minds of men" that Thomas Jefferson was referring to when he said it two centuries ago.

Reason has returned and the idiots are being shown the door. Our forefathers saw the dangers of mixing religion and politics, but for the past eight years we've had to endure the result they warned against.

High time for secular society to return to American politics and government.

Dare we say "Turning the Corner" on science education in schools?

In Texas, that bastion of fuzzy-headed liberalism, a school board finally came down on the side of good science and shot creationism in the face.

It's a sad day when creationist, who claim to be Christians, resort to misprepresentation and outright lying to push their agenda.

Maybe now the ridiculous political religious agendas that have undermined our education system will be consigned to history.

We'll see.

Study makes short work of a touchstone of Right-wing ideology

This story shoots holes in the notion prevalent among ideologues on the Right that college is a place where "fuzzy-headed, liberal, professors" indoctrinate the nation's youth.

As with all chimeras, the facts say more about the believers in such false notions than it does about those it inaccurately purports to describe.

The Right has a long and troubles association with education and anti-intellectualism.

If you look back to the Third Reich (A Right-Winger's wet dream of a time...), one of Hitler's first actions was to either kill or exile all the college professors. He did this because education and mental discipline were anathema to the Nazi ideology.

The good thing about college is that it teaches people to argue, debate, and exercise critical thinking (At least that's what it's supposed to do..).

Hitler knew critical thinking would undermine his plans, so he took steps to short circuit the potential for critical thought.

The Right similarly hates critical thought and this underscores why the image of the liberal college professor indoctrinating the nation's youth into the liberal church is used to scare like-minded ideologue.

This study is great.

Morality better represented by the knee-jerk reaction

Here's a fun study about morality and hypocrisy.

Of importance here: When we have time to reflect, we tend to excuse our bad behavior, but when we react without thinking, our moral behavior is of a higher caliber.

Love this kind of science.

People are basically moral, unless they have time to think about it.

Woman develops accent after a stroke.

Live Science reports on a strange condition where a stroke survivor develops and entirely new accent.

The brain is a fascinating organ.