Red in Tooth and Claw

Taylor Mitchell, a young singer-songwriter, has died from her injuries after being mauled by coyotes while on a nature hike. Condolences to the family.

Endanger Mouse

Dave Cherney notes that a recent lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity seeks to list five different species of Pika. As Cherney notes, what makes this lawsuit unique is that the Center is claiming that the sole threat to the Pika is climate change. Surmising that no feasible management strategy could be adopted to address this problem, Cherney then speculates that perhaps this is primarily a symbolic battle.

Ooh-eck. Ooh-fiddle.

I’m no lawyer, but I suspect there’s more to it than sheer symbolism. Concrete management strategies may not emerge out of a ruling, true; but if it can be demonstrated in court that climate change is the primary mover, such a ruling will either give Interior greater jurisdiction and justification to regulate emissions, just as EPA does with pesticides (and maybe soon GHG emissions), or it will result in a re-examination of the scope of the act. Indeed, the Center played a similar card a few years ago with EPA.

Curly Wants His Money Back

Steve McIntyre gives the impression in his recent post that I somehow think peer review is a closed system. He doesn’t say as much, but I gather that he assumes I don’t attribute much weight to the role of blogs in the peer review system. Here’s what he has to say, specifically regarding my comments:

Roger Pielke Jr had opined hopefully that this concession would finally settle at least one small point in paleoclimate. Pielke said that “it looks like this dispute will in fact be resolved unequivocally through the peer-reviewed literature, which for all of its faults, is the media of record for scientific claims and counterclaims”. Pielke was obviously aware of the role of blogs (both Climate Audit and in Finland) in this dispute and was here focusing more on the fact that Kaufman was admitting the upside down use in a formal venue, rather than the role of the journals in extracting the admission from Kaufman. This point was misconstrued by Ben Hale here who interpreted Roger’s post as evidence that the Kaufman error had been detected and resolved by journal peer review and due diligence, when that’s not what happened at all. (I posted a comment at Hale’s to this effect.)

I added the colorful language. More after the jump…