Climate In the News, and The Story of Four Dead Polar Bears

The NYT reports that new EPA regulations may strain the capacity of power plants, which would result in rolling blackouts and brownouts.

This story about microbes breaking down the gulf oil spill five times faster than expected is not really a global warming/ climate change story (although there is one speculative mention0, it's just cool.

David Archibald in Australia::

The oceans started cooling in 2003, and the atmosphere is following.  There has been no warming since 1998.

In fact, the temperature of planet today is almost the same as it was when satellites first started measuring it in 1979.  No one under the age of 32 has experienced global warming.  Some of us predate that and remember the heavy frosts of the nineteen seventies.  Those frosts are returning, and worse.  Solar activity is weakening, and will remain weak for another 22 years.

Who is David Archibald?

Al Gore, as scientifically aware and literate as ever, has some logical and well cogent response to the idea that the earth is not warming. If swearing and being vulgar is logical and cogent in your world.

Not limited to the field of climate 'science', but the quality of scientists and their work has apparently been diminishing:

It’s natural to wonder how much the swelling of the ranks and the dilution of talent accounts for the Wall Street Journal’s findings in “Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge.”

Seems retractions by journals have gone from near none ten years ago to well over 300 the past two years. Some of these retractions are from the authors of the papers themselves, after they conscientiously notice their mistakes, but many others are from the editorial boards of the journals after they identify various shenanigans of the authors.

The growth in shoddy work has been so explosive that the blog Retraction Watch has popped up to document the flood. First two headlines: “A quick Physical Review Letters retraction after author realizes analysis was ‘performed incorrectly’” and “Cal Poly Pomona education researcher leaves post after rampant plagiarism is revealed.” What a depressing site!

What’s going on?

Here's a pretty graph to organize it- there actually is a hockey stick.

When models and predictions collide with reality.

If you don't read anything else, you have got to read this post on how polar bears got on the endangered species list (it's abasolutely farcical, like something out of Monty Python), and about the married couple who peer reviewed the same paper by Charles Monnett, and monetary connections (taxpayer money, natch) between the author of that paper and one member of the husband/wife tag team of reviewers.  Peer Review just ain't what it used to be.
Husband wife team of reviewers?  Did that surprise you?  Make you raise your eyebrows just a little?  Well, I fudged a little.
Lisa Rotterman, the female reviewer of the two person peer review team is actually married to the author of the paper she reviewed.

Really- you've got to read these links. 
I can't wait, I have to share- you know how you've heard the polar ice is melting so the polar bears are dying, drowning, from exhaustion because of the long swims they now have to make. It was based on a single siting of four polar bears from a height of 1500 feet as Charles Monnett flew over on his way to study humpback whales.  He did not return and have an autopsy done, so nobody knows how they died. The theory that they drowned isn't even worthy of the term theory. MY theory is that they were shot by some trigger happy hunter, or poisoned, or that they weren't even polar bears, but an oddly shaped iceberg.  My theories are worth at least as much as his, since we have no confirmation- he did not so much as take a picture.
And this is the reason polar bears are on the endangered species list.
You should still go read the links