Michael Crichton, Glen Beck, the Washington Times, and the Randroids, have all equated environmentalism with eugenics, population control, and fascism. We environmentalists hate human beings, we want to exterminate the human race and have everything go back to a “garden of Eden,” to quote Crichton.

So what about the anti-environmentalists? The ones who don’t believe there is any value to water until it’s bottled, trees until they’re paper, and oil until it’s Carbon Dioxide? what value do the Randroids, Dittoheads, and Corporatists put on human life?

The Bush Administration’s EPA, which represents these ideologies, may provide an answer: $6.9 million, down from $7.8 million in 2003. The difference is $900,000, which looks suspiciously like those price tags you see at a used car dealership. Luckily, most of the media isn’t fooled, and is reporting it as an 11 percent devaluation or nearly one million dollars.

The Guardian’s Elana Schor provides a clear example of how this devaluation of human life impacts public policy:

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18bn to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8m per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9m per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

So the dittoheads value human life one $900,000th less than environmentalists. That’s a $$271 X 10¹² devaluation on the entire population of the United States.

What Beck, Crichton, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, and their zombie legions fail to understand is that humans are inseparable from the environment; no matter how much they would like to fool their audience into believing we are.

Note: I’ve got no objection to the EPA establishing a monetary value for human life. Despite being cold logic, such evaluations are important to decision-making.

You can read the reasoning behind the EPA’s reevaluation in their own report.

$2.07 X 10¹⁴ – Current value of American population according to the EPA.

“Break it up! Break it up! You’re in a feedback loop!” Ms. Moriah had grabbed the two boys by their shirt-collars and was wrenching them apart. Within moments, her thoughts were interceding between their minds, just as her arms were pushing apart their bodies. Alvin and Cory were both breathing hard, staring at one another in uncomprehending silence. Neither knew what had happened to them.

Ms. Moriah took a few deep breaths, her mind composing a proper way to reprimand the students and educate them simultaneously. The boys’ attention turned to her expectantly, observing her mind’s thought-processes.

“Cory, you misunderstood. Alvin’s anger was not directed at you personally, but at you as an opponent in the game. Alvin, you must realize that you must temper your competitiveness with reason. Cory is not just an inanimate player, but another person. You can’t be angry at the concept of an opponent, without being angry at the person fulfilling that role.”

Ms. Moriah took a deep breath. “I know that’s a bit metaphysical for your young minds, but I don’t know how else to explain it. Each one of you got angry because of the other’s anger, and it spiraled out of control into a fight. You must always keep your emotions your own. Understand?”

“We understand,” Cory spoke for both he and Alvin, and Ms. Moriah could sense they did grasp the concept, thanks to observing her construct the explanation in her mind.

“I’m sorry Alvin,” Cory said.

“I’m sorry I got angry from your anger,” Alvin replied, and good feelings propagated among the three of them. Dopamine rewards were so much nicer than adrenaline.

“Very good,” Ms. Moriah said, standing upright and brushing the grass from her dress. “Now you boys go to the rest room and wash up. You’re both covered in dirt.”

“Yes Ma’am,” they said in unison and marched off the playground together, taking their feelings of reconciliation with them.

Their absence made her aware of another consciousness present, “Ms. Moriah?”

She turned around to find Astra’s father standing nearby, where he was admiring her rear just moments ago, and was now respectfully suppressing his desire to admire her figure from the front.

All men thought like this, so neither of them felt awkward about it. She found him attractive also, but with him being married and she in a long term relationship, they quickly put this unproductive, instinctual line of thought aside, which spoke volumes about their emotional maturity. Some people were so overwhelmed with their baser desires, they had to be prohibited from the Web altogether.

Astra’s father was a curious man, with a mind open to learning, and was most interested in her as a teacher, and how her mind worked to communicate ideas to his daughter. He was hoping to gain some pointers for how he could communicate with her as well. Ms. Moriah admired this, and Astra’s father was energized by the admiration.

“Pleased to meet you,” Ms. Moriah said, stepping forward to shake his hand.

“The pleasure is mine as well,” he replied, and with that, they were good friends.

Hermit Tarot Card

I test out INTJ (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging) on the Myers and Briggs personality test, meaning I’m like Isaac Newton, Niels Bohr, and Ada Lovelace. My Riso-Hudson Type Indicator ranks me as Thinker(8), Peacemaker(6), Reformer(4), Skeptic(4), Artist(4), Motivator(4), Helper(3), Generalist(3), Leader(0). I am the Hermit Tarot Card.

According to the Are You a Scientist? quiz, where I got 19/20, I should be involved in the sciences, and am “the original mad scientist!” According to the Nerd Test, I am “Dorky Nerd King,” but I’m practicing to beat that score.

Dorky Nerd King

If I were a superhero would be Spider-Man, mostly for being geeky (Superman was a close second). I am science fiction author Gregory Benford “A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.”

I have the emotional maturity of a 25-year-old. I am zero percent evil.

I am Angelic

According to The Cadaver Calculator, my dead body is worth $5,225!!! My body could feed 14 Cannibals. I have a 100% chance of surviving a house cat attack, here’s a breakdown of my Surviving other Animal attacks:

How did people know anything about themselves before the Internet?

(Reposted in honor of Martian Chess (HT BMF))

Continuing the Chess train of thought from earlier this week. I was reminded of one of my favorite legends surrounding Chess. Before the game had a King and Queen, in Persia, where the Chess was invented, it had a Shah and Vizier. The Shah is a Persian King (“Shah Mat” in Persian means “The King is Ambushed / Dumbfounded/ Dead“, and is where we get the term “Checkmate.”)

As the story goes, the Vizier, Shah’s closest advisor, had invented the game of Chess, and the Shah was so delighted with it that he offered the Vizier anything he wanted as payment for creating such a wonderful past time.

The Vizier answered that he would like to have one grain of wheat for the first square on the Chess board, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on, doubling the amount until all 64 squares were accounted for.

“That’s all?” the Shah was surprised at the seemingly meager request, but quickly had his treasurer tasked with fulfilling it.

The Treasurer did the math, as we can see here:

1: 1
2: 3
3: 7
4: 15
5: 31
6: 63
7: 127
8: 255
9: 511
10:1,023
11:2,047
12:4,095
13:8,191
14:16,383
15:32,767
16:65,535
17:131,071
18:262,143
19:524,287
20:1,048,575
21:2,097,151
22:4,194,303
23:8,388,607
24:16,777,215
25:33,554,431
26:67,108,863
27:134,217,727
28:268,435,455
29:536,870,911
30:1,073,741,823
31:2,147,483,647
32:4,294,967,295
33:8,589,934,591
34:17,179,869,183
35:34,359,738,367
36:68,719,476,735
37:137,438,953,471
38:274,877,906,943
39:549,755,813,887
40:1,099,511,627,775
41:2,199,023,255,551
42:4,398,046,511,103
43:8,796,093,022,207
44:17,592,186,044,415
45:35,184,372,088,831
46:70,368,744,177,663
47:140,737,488,355,327
48:281,474,976,710,655
49:562,949,953,421,311
50:1,125,899,906,842,623
51:2,251,799,813,685,247
52:4,503,599,627,370,495
53:9,007,199,254,740,991
54:18,014,398,509,481,983
55:36,028,797,018,963,967
56:72,057,594,037,927,935
57:144,115,188,075,855,871
58:288,230,376,151,711,743
59:576,460,752,303,423,487
60:1,152,921,504,606,846,975
61:2,305,843,009,213,693,951
62:4,611,686,018,427,387,903
63:9,223,372,036,854,775,807
64:18,446,744,073,709,551,615

There wasn’t enough grain on the entire planet to fulfill the Vizier’s request! No one knows what happened to the Vizier when the Shah discovered the trick, but the fable does illustrate the power of exponential growth.

In Olaf Stapledon’s 1935 science fiction novel “Odd John,” an evolutionary leap of a human child wonders why we built our number system on units of ten. After all, the number twelve has six factors, meaning it is divisible by six numbers, {1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12}, while ten only has four factors, {1, 2, 5, 10}. Wouldn’t a base-12 number system be more practical?

In our decimal (base-10) number system, the number dial flips every ten units. After the number nine, we go back to zero and put a one in front of it in the tenths place (10). When the tenths place reaches nine and the one’s place reaches nine for 99 units, we flip them both to zero and add a one in front of them at the hundredth’s place (100).

Having a duodecimal (base-12) number system would mean flipping back to zero every 12 units. So after “9,” we would have “A” (or some other symbol representing 10), and “B” (or some other symbol for 11). So 8.. 9… A… B… 10, where the “1” is the twelve’s place (known as the “dozen” place), so a duodecimal “10” is our decimal 12. Similarly, 12X12, or 124 is represented by “100.” So counting up: B8… B9… BA… BB… 100.

Duodecimal Multiplication Table Credit: RodrigoSampaioPrimo

Does this seem otherworldly? Then consider this, days and nights are measured in 12-hour blocks, with hours subdivided into 60 minutes and minutes in to 60 seconds, all divisible by 12. We use a duodecimal number system to measure time; although we annotate it in decimal.

In the digital universe that exists inside of our computers, everything must begin with the bit, enough room to store a single unit of data. This means computers must use a base-2 number system, also known as binary. Counting up, after the number one, we flip to zero with a “1” in the second place (known as the “pair”), so the number 2 is represented by “10,” three by “11,” four by “100,” five by “101,” six by “110”, seven by “111,” and eight by “1000.” Every one or zero in the digital ecosystem taking up one bit of space.

It’s difficult for humans to work with the long strings of ones and zeros in binary number systems, and binary’s powers, {1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64…} do not divide, and therefore translate, well into our decimal system {1, 2, 5, 10}. For this reason, many computer programmers rely on a hexadecimal (base-16) number system, which counts up as 8… 9… A… B… C… D… E… F… 10. With “10” representing decimal’s 16.

Hexadecimal Multiplication Table Credit: Bernard Ladenthin

This way, a single hexadecimal symbol can represent up to four binary symbols. Hexadecimal’s “F” represents decimal’s 15 and binary’s “1111.” The World Wide Web uses hexadecimal triplets to define Red, Green, and Blue (R,G,B) values for colors on web pages. For example (0,0,0) or “#000000” translates to zero Red, zero Green, zero Blue, which is black, and (FF,FF,FF) or “#FFFFFF” translates to 256 Red, 256 Green, and 256 Blue, which is white. “#00FF00” is Green, and “#008800” is light green. Setting any of these values between zero and FF will give you 24-bit color, nearly all of the colors in the visible spectrum.

So we’ve played with powers of one, powers of 10, powers of 12, and powers of 16, but there are many more. There is quinary (base-5) and vigesimal (base-20). The ancient Sumerians used a sexagesimal (base-60) number system, which was adopted by the Babylonians. If this sounds extremely out there, consider that we still have the remnant’s of this system in our modern measurements of time (60 minutes, 60 seconds), angles and geographic coordinates (360 degrees).

With so many options available to us, why do we use a decimal number system?

Because it’s the number of fingers we have on our hands!

Additional Notes:

If I could change one thing—this is going to sound stupid—but if I could go back in time and change one thing, I might try to interest some early preliterate people in not ! using their thumbs when they count It could have been the Standard, and it would have made a whole lot of things easier in the modem era. On the other hand, we have learned a lot from the struggle with the incompatibility of base-ten with powers of two.

Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America; I see men flying–but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Whenever I mention the fact that the world’s most prominent programmers in Computer Science’s early days were all women, the listener invariably asks me, “Why is that?”

To which I always think, Why not?

Sadie Plant’s book zeroes + ones explores changing social status of women in an Information Age that empowers them while they empower it. She relates computer programming to knitting, and pulling together Web 2.0 resources to working a loom. She dances with the online world’s anonymity, and how that tears down all the social contexts people previously used to pre-judge one another’s words. Plant does these things with prose that is complete chaos.

I discovered that Plant’s haphazard, non-linear romp through history, metaphor, and wild prose is a literary style known as Cyberfeminism, which is oddly inspiring. Her prose is delightful; her organization is terrible. For instance, she references Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and then, a few chapters later, tells us what those laws are.

I would love to cut this book up into note cards of paragraphs and put it back together into coherency, but then it might lose it’s charm. A whirlwind of ideas lacking defined purpose appears to be what Cyberfeminism is all about.

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.
– Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Her style is the essence of punk, intellectual, confrontational, and subversive. At first I was put off by some of those metaphors that usually turn me off to some feminist writers. Zeroes are made to represent vaginas at a point, ones are penises, which are then extrapolated into social views of women being empty, needing men to fulfill them. Although I find passages like this pretty silly, in the context of Plant’s book, I was okay with it.

She references science fiction novels and movies with cyberpunk and steampunk themes, such as Blade Runner, Eve of Destruction, and all of William Gibson’s novels, in support of Plant’s metaphor for women of the past being appliances, like computers, tasked with mundane work. Women are like the replicants or androids of science fiction, which break from their molds to empower themselves, rebelling against the authorities. As computers produce phenomenon beyond our expectations, so do empowered women.

And instead they watch the machines multiply that push them little by little beyond the limits of their nature. And they are sent back to their mountain tops, while the machines progressively populate the earth. Soon engendering man as their epiphenomenon.
– Luce Irigara, Marine Lover

There are many ways to bring women into the Computer Science fold. While I prefer strong, dispassionate reasoning, I believe Sadie Plant’s method, with its themes of rebellion, intellectual strength, and empowerment, is by far the much more effective means. Any tactic that inspires people to learn is a worthy tactic.

Because when we learn, we are programming ourselves.

Note: Quotes cited here, are cited in Zeroes + Ones, which is filled with such references.

Following TGAW’s Thread responding to the No Child Left Inside Coalition’s claim that “young people could identify 1000 corporate logos but fewer than 10 plants or animals native to their backyards,” I decided to take a shot at naming ten things in my yard.

FAIL.

If I counted the fruit trees, the mimosa tree, and wisteria vine I’d planted since taking over the property, then yeah, no problem, but finding 10 species that I could name that were just there to begin with was just barely out of my reach. Here’s what I came up with.

Bagworm Psyche carpini

Easy. One of my chores was pulling these little buggers off all the bushes in our yard as a kid, piling them up in one spot, and torching them. Fun!

Bald cypress Taxodium distichum

Moderate. The tree to the right of this photo is what those wood-humps (called “knees”) sticking up out of the swamp are connected to. Said knees are sticking up around and under my house. Oh the joys of living in a swamp.

American Crows Corvus brachyrhynchos

FAIL. I thought these were blackbirds. I’m not even certain they’re crows, but they sure aren’t ravens, too small.

White Clover and Bumblebee Trifolium repens and Bombus lucorum

Easy and Easy. Everybody knows clovers, and most of us have stepped on a bumblebee walking barefoot through a clover patch (if you haven’t, I highly recommend it). Negative reinforcement makes for good learning.

Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica

Moderate. I thought this was just honeysuckle, but apparently it’s an invasive species, but one that’s very popular and smells nice, so nobody minds.

Eastern Mistletoe Phoradendron serotinum

Moderate. Mistletoe is the green bushy stuff in trees that remains when winter cold has stripped all else away. I learned this a few years back when a friend about near killed himself trying to acquire some for his wife.

Annual Blue-eyed Grass Sisyrinchium rosulatum

FAIL. I had no idea what this stuff was, and it took an hour of searching the Webbernets to find out. It’s very pretty and it smells nice too. Elizabeth City is the first place I’ve seen it, and it’s all over everybody’s yards in Spring.

American Robin Turdus migratorius

Easy. If the Robins hadn’t scared off the Blue Jay, I might’ve succeeded in my quest. Robins are very nice, but Blue Jays are so wonderfully confrontational, conversational, and they’ve got a cool head crest to boot!

Rose Bush Rosa ??????

Easy. My neighbor told me what it was when he saw I was about to chainsaw it down.

House Cat Felis catus

I’m not counting my old three-legged, snotty, patchwork mess of a cat, Mollie, in my 10 things, but she did follow me around the yard wondering what I was up to.

Larger images available at the complete flickr set.

“I don’t understand why we have to leave Earth for a stupid space ship anyway,” Tory, my 10-year-old daughter, griped. She had been a muttering, grumpy bundle of joy all day as we loaded belongings into our assigned shuttle.

“Because it’s time for the human race to grow up and join the galactic community,” I reminded her patiently.

“But why do we have to give up Earth?” she snapped. “It’s our planet dad!”

“It’s not our planet,” I countered. “We were just using it as a home until we got smart enough to leave. It’s all the other species’ turn to use the Earth now, to evolve and see what they come up with.”

“Newsgrrl said the heavy metals in the soil will show our cousin species that we were here,” Tory said, piling her toys haphazardly on a box exactly opposite what I’d instructed her to do.

‘Newsgrrl’ was Tory’s new favorite podcast, a political pundit protesting the off-world human migration, providing a young girl, seeking to assert her intellectual individuality, a million ways to protest her off-worlder dad.

“When we’re gone, the trees and plants will take over everywhere we lived,” I said, “and they will pull the metals out of the soil so nobody will know the difference.”

“Newsgrrl said it’s silly to think we can just leave Earth without people finding evidence that we were here,” Tory lectured. “Newsgrrl says we’re going to look pretty stupid a hundred years from now, when our cousin species find out we were here.”

“A hundred million years from now, the next species to evolve intelligence will look through the geological strata and fossil history to find a mass extinction, dramatic climate change, and a layer of unusual metals and compounds in the rocks our soil will become,” I explained carefully. “They will hypothesize natural causes, like meteor strikes and volcanic activity, for all of those findings.”

“Our civilization was here a whole twenty-thousand years,” Tara quipped. “You can’t hide that.”

“We were leaving technological evidence here for only twenty-thousand years,” I countered. “That’s only point-zero-zero-zero-two percent of a hundred million years. We changed the Earth a whole bunch in that blink of an eye while we were growing up, but now it’s time to let another species grow up, something completely different. That’s why we’re taking all the large land animals with us when we go, so something completely new will evolve.”

“It’s still not fair,” Tory’s bottom lip stuck out, pouting, and I realized my error in trying reason with her on such a high level.

“Don’t you want to meet your new online friend, Qili, in person?” I asked, referring to the female exchange student from our more-advanced cousin species.

Tory nodded reluctantly, “Yes.”

“Then we have to go to a new and better place,” I said gently. “Qili’s great great great grandparents, great times ten to the sixth power, had to leave Earth, just like we’re doing now, 65 million years ago. If they didn’t, the mice from way back then would never have grown up into people, and we wouldn’t be here today. You don’t want to keep our next species-cousins from growing up, do you?”

“No,” she answered sullenly, and I knew I had won the argument. It just had to sink in with her. After a moment, she asked, “Is Qili a real life dinosaur? Like a brontosaurus or a velociraptor?”

“Yep,” I answered, resuming our packing. “Just like you’re a real life mammal, like a girraffe or lion.”

Tory gave me a skeptical look, and I knew another argument was forthcoming.

Step the First

Download Miro Player, the free and open-source RSS aggregator for video podcasts. I’m sure there are others, but Miro is, to my experience, the sleekest and most user friendly.

Miro (Formerly “Democracy Player”)

Step the Second

Subscribe to the following shows:

• Nova’s Science Now presents engaging science from a longtime standard in documentary-making.
• PBS has a HUGE collection of classic clips from their documentaries. Awe inspiring, wonderful stuff!
• National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles are great, short clips to enchant you.
• dh love life is Daryl Hannah’s regular video blog exploring sustainable living. Fun and thoughtful (although a bit too new age at times).
• EcoGeeks’ Wild Classroom has it’s misses, but overall it’s a worthy subscription.
• Wired Science often introduces me to the more “out-there” science news.
• Dr. Kiki’s Food Science is fun, entertaining, and involves the chemistry in your kitchen. Highly highly recommended.
• Science Sensei is my favorite of ScienCentral’s videos. His kung-fu is superior.
• TED Talks takes the world’s most intriguing intellectuals and gives them 18 minutes on the soapbox.
• Every episode of Seed Salon takes two great minds and allows us to be a fly on the wall for their dinner conversation.
• Evolution Entertainment is a recent addition to my playlist, also of remarkable quality.
• Life on Terra is my absolute FAV. It’s hard to believe there are documentaries of this caliber for free online.

There are many many more shows out there. You can do a search on “Science” from your Miro Player to find them. There’s more content than I can keep up with. Enjoy!

Is there anything more amusing than watching dittheads work themselves up into a frothing, impotent rage when confronted with Reality’s liberal bias? Most recently they’ve started rolling around, slobbering all over themselves over this video of Harry Reid pointing out that “Coal makes us sick:”

How dare he say that Oil and Coal makes us sick?!?! the dittohead blogs responded in their predictably uneducated fashion (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. (Oh yeah, and , here)), calling him names, arguing that the oil industry provides for us like a benevolent loving guardian, and basically ignoring the real question, Do fossil fuels make us sick?

Let’s Review:

Continuous contact with motor oil causes skin cancer. Diesel Truck drivers are 50% more likely to get lung cancer, while auto mechanics are more likely to die from a wide variety of cancer-related diseases. 12,000 Coal Miners died of black lung disease between 1992 and 2002. According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, Vehicle exhaust emissions:

…irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, and are a risk to health by breathing in. Petrol or gas (LPG) fuelled engine fumes contain up to 10% carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas. Prolonged exposure to diesel fumes, especially blue or black smoke, could lead to coughing, chestiness and breathlessness, and there is evidence that long term exposure may increase the risk of lung cancer.

Run a car in a closed space, like a garage, and you will asphixiate very quickly. One gallon of motor oil can ruin a million gallons of freshwater if dumped into the public water system “- a year’s supply of water for 50 people.” At the Coast Guard base where I work, a small amount of jet fuel, which is kerosene-based, leaked into the ground at one site, it will take years of phytoremediation to make the field usable again.

In Ecuador cancer rates were found to be 150 percent higher in an oil-drilling area than in other parts of Ecuador. Lukemia rates in those same areas where three times the norm.

Coal Fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer. Fish populations across the globe are increasingly becoming contaminated with mercury, dumped into the environment by these plants. With levels rising, the American Geological Institute has issued fish advisories warning the public about the health risks posed by eating certain fish.

Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada Credit: Sierra Club

All of these issues, dittoheads taking a strong stand against any government support of alternative energies, and then there’s this:

The Department of Energy is currently seeking $648 million for “clean coal” projects in its 2009 budget request, “representing the largest budget request for coal RD&D in over 25 years.”

And then there’s that whole Global Warming thing, of which fossil fuels is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, which dittoheads don’t believe despite all of the following organizations and scientific bodies making statements asserting their acceptance of the Theory:

G8
Brazil’s Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias
France’s Académie des Sciences
Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
Russia’s Academy of Sciences
United State’s National Academy of Sciences
Royal Society of Canada
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
Science Council of Japan
Academy of Science of South Africa
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Indian National Science Academy
Academia Mexicana de Ciencias
United Kingdom’s Royal Society
Malaysia’s Academy of Sciences
New Zealand’s Academy Council of the Royal Society
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Australian Academy of Sciences
Woods Hole Research Center
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
American Meteorological Society (AMS)
National Research Council
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
Federal Climate Change Science Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
UN Project on Climate Variability and Predictability
American Geophysical Union
Geological Society of America
American Chemical Society
American Association of State Climatologists
US Geological Survey (USGS)
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
World Meteorological Organization
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Australian Meteorological And Oceanographic Society
Pew Center on Climate Change
928 peer reviewed scientific journal papers

In ditthead land, you can go skinny-dipping in oil-lakes, put high-octane in the cat’s dish, and user Mercury as a seasoning. : P