Oh what a completely gratuitous way of getting you to read this blog! Shameless sensationalism, pure and simple. We try to be more high-minded than that at HuffPost, at least over here on the blog rail, where we would never post links to the red-headed royal frolicking around a Las Vegas hotel room in the buff, with an equally starkers "poker" (poke her? surely that's what the reports meant ...) companion. At most we would publish a serious think piece on the increasingly diminishing returns of the monarchy -- one which would thoughtfully weigh its relevance to our country, one which might indeed spark an important national debate on the topic.

AP — WASHINGTON - A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong...

People accuse me and other environmentalists and scientists of being "alarmist". But the situation is alarming, and it's even more alarming that some people ignore it. This disconnect with reality is because industrial interests spend billions of dollars continually promoting discredited theories.

Science is playing second fiddle to political concerns in Canada and the U.S. Recently, we've seen more "muzzling" of scientists, funding cuts, and an increasing disregard for science in policy-making. This scientific antipathy could not come at a worse time.