Some thoughts.

At not only how different the state Doppler radar is from the local one, but at how little rain one can get from a “heavy shower’ on the local Doppler. I filled the pool this morning in the hopes that one of the many “thunderstorms” predicted for today would actually hit us. We watched all weekend as they approached southeast Palm Beach County, and would either stall, or fizzle out, just before they reached us. We really need the rain here. And thunderstorms are one of the three things that I like about south Florida, relative to south coastal California.

Still, I’m glad that we have much better weather forecasting and sensing than we did as a kid growing up in southeast Michigan, when the best they could do is tell you that they had “tornado watches” and “warnings” and it was based on a WAG as to where they were going to go.

Tim Carney takes on the ad hominem fallacy of attacking policy papers based on the funding sources of the institute that generated them.

Polar bears are eating each other:

“During 24 years of research on polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region of northern Alaska and 34 years in northwestern Canada, we have not seen other incidents of polar bears stalking, killing, and eating other polar bears,” the scientists said.

Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century.

It’s George Bush’s fault of course. If only we’d signed on to Kyoto.

Actually, while it helps emphasize the surprise of the researchers, the fact that they haven’t seen it in such a short period of time tells us nothing about how common it is historically. And in any event, the American Geophysical Union says that we can’t definitively blame it on SUVs.

Sorry, Al.

It’s bigger than many had hoped:

Scientists from several institutions, including the National Park Service, have joined Mazzotti’s team in hopes of controlling, if not eradicating, the python population. But that’s pretty hard when it’s uncertain how many are out there and where they hang out…

…Most pythons have been seen near roads or other manmade structures, so officials had hoped they had not ventured too deeply into the park. But that turned out not to be the case. They are everywhere.

“Burmese pythons are right in the heart of Everglades National Park,” Mazzotti says. And they are wreaking havoc on the system, eating everything from gray squirrels to bobcats and threatening efforts to restore native species to the park.

Unfortunately, it’s an ideal home for pythons. They are “habitat generalists,” meaning they like to live between wet and dry areas, and they like to climb trees, and they are good swimmers, and there’s lots of animals for them to eat. That’s also just the kind of environment that appeals to alligators.

“So here they are, hanging out in the same places, doing the same things,” Mazzotti says. “And on more than one occasion, several of which were witnessed by the public, they have gotten in fights.”

I haven’t seen any, but I don’t spend that much time there.

I’ve always been in favor of cloning, until I read this:

The former vice president, a Democrat, said on Monday that by the end of the summer he would start a bipartisan education campaign to train 1,000 people to give a version of his slide show on global warming featured in the film “An Inconvenient Truth” and book of the same name.

That well-known climatologist, Bill Clinton, says that his former VP is right–GOP policies are going to give us more hurricanes. Well, he certainly knows about big blows, anyway.

Recent groundbreaking research indicates that (are you sitting down?–I don’t want to feel responsible for anyone who hurts themselves falling to the floor in shock) many teenage girls feel pressure from boys to have sex.

Amidst media hysteria from Al Gore’s latest propaganda, Iain Murray has some suggestions for the most sensible approach to the problem if it is a problem–adaptation.

Not that I’m a conservative, but I think that many of those who are will find it useful. A petition for conservatives against Intelligent Design.