Science

"NASA is getting ready to turn its scientific instruments toward our home planet with a trio of Earth-observing missions set to launch in 2014."

"The University of California at Berkeley cut laboratory financing this week for a professor who has complained for years about corporate-led retaliation for his association of health risks with a widely used herbicide."  The herbicide is atrazine.

"Here comes more bad PR for climate change–denying politicians.

"A year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service was poised to use a scientifically flawed range map for the American burying beetle during a preliminary assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline's effect on the endangered insect."

"The weather is one of those topics that is fairly easy for people to agree on. Climate, however, is something else. Most of the scientists who study the Earth say our climate is changing and humans are part of what's making that happen. But to a lot of nonscientists it's still murky. This week, two of the nation's most venerable scientific institutions tried to explain it better."

"In the past several years, a number of polls have documented the huge gap between liberals and conservatives when it comes to their acceptance of the science of climate change. Naturally, then, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to trying to explain this dramatic divide over what is factually true. And it wasn't long before they homed in on the role of conservative media in particular -- thus, a number of studies show that watching Fox News increases your risk of holding incorrect beliefs about the science of climate change."

"WASHINGTON -- A new massive federal study says the world in 2012 sweltered with continued signs of climate change. Rising sea levels, snow melt, heat buildup in the oceans, and melting Arctic sea ice and Greenland ice sheets, all broke or nearly broke records, but temperatures only sneaked into the top 10."

"Google’s climate scientists are not happy with the company’s political support for climate science denying Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)."

"WASHINGTON -- Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe failed for more than a year to discipline two supervisors who retaliated against whistle-blowers at an Oklahoma field office, the Interior Department's inspector general says in a harshly worded letter that accuses Ashe of damaging the agency's credibility and integrity."