While Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steel bicker over how Republicans should commit political suicide, Earth had one of its closest near misses in a very long time. And we all almost didn't notice.

The object that nearly hit us was first seen on Saturday. Called "DD45" it seems to orbit the Sun once every 1.5 years. This time around it crossed out path. Now things hit the earth every day, but they are tiny or very small objects. DD45 was about the size of the famous object that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, levelling some 2000 square kilometres of thankfully uninhabited taiga. Now, we are not talking something like Deep Impact, but if it had hit earth, it would have made all our economic problems seem kind of trivial, at least for awhile. The Tunguska impact is estimated to have roughly been equivalent to a 10–15 megaton explosion. It would have been devastating to the area where it hit particularly if inhabited.

In the 1980's I participated in actions to try and stop the forced relocation of Native Americans (Dineh/Navajo tribe) to make way for the corrupt Peabody coal company to pretty much destroy an entire mountain to mine coal. The issue continues today.

The issue has many componants. There is the environmental impact of mining coal, something that became painfully obvious recently in Tennessee, but really is something that poisons people every single day in America. Then there is the impact on global warming of continuing to burn coal for energy, pretty much a 19th century idea whose time has long passed. There is the issue of native rights and the unfairness of the treaties that allow companies like Peabody Coal to pay pennies to Native Americans for the right to mine resources for millions of dollars in profits. Of course there is also the corruption behind companies like Peabody coal that buy off politicians so they can get away with violating environmental laws with abandon. And there is the injustice of forced relocations of people off land that their families have occupied for generations.

All of these problems come together at the place alternately called Black Mesa and Big Mountain (I knew it as Big Mountain when I visited it in the 1980's).

This comes from Blue NC:

North Carolina's state legislature is currently debating the Healthy Youth Act, which would finally bring much needed comprehensive sex education to their classrooms. And a recent poll from Public Policy Polling shows that this is the kind of sex education that a large majority of North Carolinians want.

When asked: "A bill being considered in the Legislature would give parents the choice of having their children receive comprehensive sex education or abstinence only sex education. Would you support this proposal?" , 69 % say yes, to only 31% who say no.

Even among those who typically oppose progressive policies, there is widespread support:

Even among voter groups traditionally most opposed to any increase in sex education there is majority support, including conservatives (58%), Republicans (54%), senior citizens (63%) and rural voters (69%).

Not yet rated.

The latest drivel from anti-Science Global Warming Deniers is this:

Global warming stopped in 1998 and it has been cooling since then.

I am hearing this all over the place. What they then do is carefully pick the temperatures from individual years and compare them with other individual years to try and show a pattern that suggests cooling. There are three problems with this.

First, the possibility of cooling trends, locally or temporary, is quite likely within a general warming trend. Climate does not change linearly, but will vary up and down from year to year. This is why, as I will say again below, individual years are not significant. An individual year can include anomalies like El Nino or La Nina conditions. In addition, things like volcanic eruptions can cause temporary cooling (something deniers like Rush Limbaugh seemed to ignore when they used to claim, in the 1990's, that global warming was caused by Mt. Pinatubo). An initial cooling over Antarctica was predicted by the global warming models. This Antarctic cooling has been used by some deniers, who either don't realize or ignore that temporary cooling of Antarctica was predicted by the models, as "evidence" that global warming wasn't happening. Well, as predicted, that cooling trend has ended even in Antarctica. The only deviation from what was predicted by the models was the temporary cooling didn't last as long as predicted.

Second, there is a major error made by the deniers: you do NOT judge science based on selected data points. Only using a complete data set. The deniers cherry pick individual years to make their point. Scientists use entire data sets. When you do that, THIS is what you see:

And THIS:

Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 8:00 AM
Sunday, March 01, 2009 at 7:00 PM (EST)

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

We'll focus on the following:

1) Technology development for enhancing government transparency

2) Community building for the transparency in government tribe

3) Talks, workshops and coding sessions to better equip technologists with the skills needed to deliver an Open Government

Location:
The Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet
@ George Washington University
805 21st St., NW, Floor 3