The Orange County Register managed to take their complaints about the California Air Resources Board (ARB) doing their job and twist it into a piece denying the realities of climate change and spouting one of the most absurd denier claims; that global warming is benign, even good for us.

The piece starts with an accusation against the ARB of “dictating to private enterprise” by adopting regulations that will force fuel producers to reduce their carbon footprint. The role of the ARB is "to promote and protect public health, welfare and ecological resources through the effective and efficient reduction of air pollutants while recognizing and considering the effects on the economy of the state". Hey OC Register editorial board, protecting the public health and environment from harmful air pollutants is the board’s job description.

It’s sometimes called a mandate.

This is government by administrative decree from unelected ARB board members, administrators and staff, who concocted a fanciful "solution" to so-called global warming, an increasingly disputed phenomenon that hasn't occurred for at least a decade.

You have to love the global warming denial just two paragraphs into this piece. I’m not sure where they are getting their data, but 2008 was tied with 2001 as the eighth warmest year on record using National Climatic Data Center records dating back to 1880.

Peer Review - a process by which something proposed (as for research or publication) is evaluated by a group of experts in the appropriate field. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Over the weekend, Brian Angliss posted a piece over at Scholars and Rogues on why scientific peer review matters. He wrote it in response to climate change deniers who like to argue that peer review is useless and therefore, just because climate science is peer reviewed, it isn’t necessarily true.

Unfortunately for the denier community, it’s a little more complicated than that. As Angliss writes:

One major misconception about all varieties of peer review is that the reviews guarantee no errors in the final product.

What peer review does is start a process of finding and correcting errors, which generally continues upon and after publication, Angliss explains. It is another step in the scientific method of gathering data and testing hypotheses to solve a problem or understand an issue. Because of this method, scientific understanding often builds and deepens over time. That does not make the original assumptions or theories incorrect.

When economy and environment are pitted against each other (a la Stephen Harper) we are manipulated into thinking that we must sacrifice one in order to achieve success with the other.

Would she or wouldn’t she? To tell from the lavish – some would say obsessive – coverage that preceded the vice-presidential debate in St. Louis, Missouri, last week, the question that was on every self-respecting pundit’s mind was: “How, or, to be more precise, how poorly, will Palin fare?”

Following a series of highly publicized interviews in which she had “distinguished” herself for her absolute lack of grasp of foreign and domestic policy issues – citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia and her whirlwind tour of Iraq as examples of her “substantial” experience.

Reducing greenhouse emissions won’t be enough to stop global warming.

Three respected climate experts made the troubling argument in Nature that changing light bulbs, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems will have little impact because warming is already greater than anticipated and set to go much higher.

So much so, in fact, that we’re going to have to find new technology to bail us out.