I saw the play "The Heretic" on its opening night this evening at the Royal Court Theatre. The audience liked it and there was almost a full house. It was very much a sceptic's play, with sceptical material interwoven with romantic comedy. The playwright Richard Bean is quite well known. It was a fairly long play, 2 1/2 hours including interval; personally I found the sceptical material a wee bit preachy at times, and I would have liked a faster pace to compensate for that. If it were my play I would have edited it down and kept the best 90 minutes guided by audience response, but then I often think that about comedy. It would make a good film or TV play, again in a shorter faster-paced form I think. It's on till 19 March, not a bad evening out if you're in London.

Working again now

I am trying to add a comment to the Bob Ward thread but its not working.

Sylvestre Huet (a true believer) picks up the Amazon drought paper in his Liberation blog, after weeks without any Global Warming posts. His last paragraph is interesting:

"The article published this morning in Science probably owes its rapid publication, apart from its intrinsic interest, to the spectacular episode of Amazongate, told in detail by Lewis, illustrating the sometimes doubtful relations between science and the media."

http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/2011/02/2%C3%A8me-s%C3%A9cheresse-du-si%C3%A8cle-en-amazonie-en-cinq-ans.html

Yet another example of Bloggers doing a job that Lame Stream Media journalists pointedly refuse to do.

Two US based bloggers, Mike Vanderbeogh and David Codrea, have been gathering the evidence that a US agency was facilitating the smuggling of guns to Mexican criminals (without telling the Mexican authorities), allegedly to pad figures of guns traced back to the US and so justify their own funding.

One of those smuggled guns appears to have been used to murder a US Border Patrol agent.

Despite the bloggers posting for about a month, the MSM are only now starting to take a reluctant interest.

There is a concise summary of the story here, along with links to the blogs:
http://tsradionotes.blogspot.com/2011/02/of-whistleblowers-watchdogs-and-atf.html

FOX news looking for global warming skeptics:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/03/fox-news-posts-request-fo_n_818382.html

From the University of Leeds press release ...

"Considerable uncertainty remains surrounding the impacts of climate change on the Amazon. This new research adds to a body of evidence suggesting that severe droughts will become more frequent leading to important consequences for Amazonian forests.

"Two severe Amazon droughts in five years alarms scientists"
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/1466/two_severe_amazon_droughts_in_five_years_alarms_scientists

Cumbrian Lad,
That's a fascinating result. Once again, it shows the inanity of attempting to make quantitative long-term climate model predictions by programming in assumptions which "look right" but have no observational basis. I'd also claim it's dubious to extrapolate (as many do) a model beyond the circumstances on which its quantitative basis rest, but that's a different story.

To our host: this seems post-worthy.

Gosh, Cumbrian Lad beat me to it, apologies, do delete me... again

AnyColourYouLike.

Amazon drought in the news last night and this looked interesting

http://www.science20.com/news_account/global_warming_puzzle_amazon_rainforest_showed_better_growth_during_drought