Washington State’s 1999 "Forests and Fish" plan was a 50-year agreement in which logging restrictions were relaxed in salmon-bearing watersheds in return for demonstrated efforts by logging companies to implement protections for endangered fish runs. Now a new report from the State Dept. of Natural resources says spot checks found that only 60 percent of the logging operations complied with these rules.

Not to be outdone, the WSJ, an otherwise excellent publication plagued by a backward and scientifically illiterate editorial board, has issued their own attack on the IPCC FAR. Once again, more of the same (it’s truly sad that so much from this sector is so depressingly predictable).

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished, so it was inevitable that the IPCC’s far-reaching and scientifically solid Fourth Annual Report would draw enraged responses from all the usual suspects. The Fraser Institute, a Canadian Far-Right think tank that receives most of its funding from polluting industries, has responded to the IPCC Report’s Summary for Policy Makers with their own “Independent” Summary for Policy Makers. Predictably, the “report” contains nothing beyond a rote recycling of the same long-refuted contrarian arguments and carefully cherry-picked references. It even has the audacity to trot out the satellites-and-weather-balloons-show-no-troposphere-warming argument nearly two years after the discovery that this conclusion was the result of a simple math blunder by their primary source (The report is carefully worded to obscure its over-reliance on the erroneous dataset, yet goes on to defend this analysis by citing weather balloon records that were found to contain an equally spurious cooling of their own at the same time). The report’s lead author is Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, Ontario with a long track record of scholarly blunders and publication scandals including; confusion of radians with degrees in an anti-global warming regression model, botching a global surface temperature analysis, a mathematically flawed paper on historical vs. 20th century temperature rise, and arguing that there is no such thing as average temperature—a claim any high school physics student would know better than to make.

The IPCC has released their Fourth Annual report on the state of climate science and global warming. As might be expected, the evidence is now clearer than ever that humans are dramatically altering global climate in ways that will have serious consequences in the coming century. The full report is not yet available at the IPCC web site, but the Summary for Policy Makers is there in PDF format.