Science

"BEIJING — Armed with a device that looks like an old transistor radio, some Beijing residents are recording pollution levels and posting them online. It’s an act that borders on subversion. The government keeps secret all data on the fine particles that shroud China’s capital in a health-threatening smog most days. But as they grow more prosperous, Chinese are demanding the right to know what the government does not tell them: just how polluted their city is."

GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman told conservatives Tuesday that he had doubts about the consensus science on manmade climate change -- science he once believed in. He is only the latest GOPer to flip-flop on science. There was a time when Republicans "believed" in science and cap-and-trade was a Republican invention.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who once thought climate change was man-made and required action, has changed his position. He now denies the scientific consensus.

Universities like Penn State take money from gas and oil companies to do research on the Marcellus Shale, raising issues about conflict of interest. The universities' secrecy makes it worse.

"A county Circuit judge in Virginia has sided with the University of Virginia's effort to restrict the release of personal emails from one of its former faculty members."

"Freakish weather disasters – from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand – are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press."

Having previously declared his acceptance of the scientific consensus that human emissions are causing climate change, Mitt Romney finally joined the Republican consensus that science is wrong.

"LOS ANGELES — After a five-year delay, an Earth-observing satellite will be launched to test new technologies aimed at improving weather forecasts and monitoring climate change."

"A team at the University of California Berkeley that set out to test the temperature data underlying the consensus on global warming has concluded that the mainstream estimate of the rise in the earth’s surface temperature since 1950 is indeed accurate. It has warmed about 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the researchers say."

The New York Times' Green blog had the story October 20, 2011.