Hey Brian, I hear there are  still some flat earthers out there. Equal time, please. And I always believe anything written on a napkin.

While journalists debate their debating rules, the rest of us have to try to get our hands on some goats.

It's another dry year out here in California (Gomer: "Surprise, surprise!") and my little 5-acre ranchero is surrounded by stuff that looked pretty a couple weeks ago and looks like fuel today. A crispy critter I could easily become. I'm planning to borrow a couple dozen of my neighbor's goats to eat a nice break around my house and the rest of the important stuff.

I'm hoping the goats will also eat the purple star thistle that's crowding out all the indigenous plants as well as our modest garden and landscaping plantings. According to the literature I had until the end of May to worry about the thistle going to seed, but it turns out I've waited too long: spring was nearly a month ahead of schedule, and the little white tuffs have already started to appear and are at this moment lodging in nooks and crannies, where they can hang out for a couple years before the time's right to piss me off again.

So I have learned to tell the onset of spring not from the books but from the land. Certainly not from the Wall Street Journal.

Hell will freeze before the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal admit to global warming. Of course, If Rupert Murdoch thinks he'll make money by freezing hell he'll make it happen.

Yes, Brad, he has and as I understand it, his current, much younger wife is a major reason why.

This is dumb, but the chain of association from WSJ to to weather to Murdoch made me think of the following entry from a sort of half-serious book called (I think) Talking Strine:  A Guide to Australian English:

scona - n.; a meteorological term, as in "Scona rain!"

www.spaceweather.com

How about you grapple with some astronomical reality?

One more thing, was the IPCC lying or unable to grasp the facts when they made the blatantly false prediction concerning the current cooling?l

Specifically, what prediction are you claiming is blatantly false, Cthulhu?

The IPCC has to back up all of its claims (the detailed claims in the technical documents) with citations from the peer-reviewed literature, and can only use articles that appeared before an agreed-upon cutoff date. So please go further and enlighten us about which peer reviewed articles were based on lies? Peer review is no guarantee of perfection by any means, and sometimes past work is shown to be wrong, or to be correct within some limited range but wrong when extrapolated, but the fraction of legitimate peer-reviewed science that is based on lies or willful misinterpretation of data is small. As a reviewer and editor I have reviewed many, many journal papers, and while some of them have turned out to be incorrect, in my opinion zero percent of the ones that I recommended publishing were based on lies or obvious inability to grasp facts. And no, I am not in climate science or involved with the IPCC, so you are not insulting me personally, just my professional colleagues.

As I've said before, it's time to get a Project Steve going for global climate change theory.

Here's some real Australian English for y'all to rack your brains over.  The following phrase is part of a national or at least statewide ad campaign and appears on billboards entering and exiting Melbourne on the Westgate freeway:

"Dob in a hoon."

I challenge you to figure that one out WITHOUT resorting to a Google search.

aero - *After* I Googled it, it still took me three articles to understand.