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Results of Survey of Scientists on Climate Change

From CNN (!)'s online report on the poll:

Two questions were key: Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures? About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.

The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.

Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 percent and 64 percent, respectively, believing in human involvement.

While
the precise impact of the fall resurgence of 2009-H1N1 influenza is
impossible to predict, a plausible scenario is that the epidemic could: produce infection of 30-50% of the U.S. population this fall and winter, ... lead to as many as 1.8 million U.S. hospital admissions during the epidemic, ... [and] cause between 30,000 and 90,000 deaths in the United States."

—Report to the President on U.S. Preparations for the 2009-H1N1 Influenza, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Aug. 7, 2009

"The economy went into freefall and is still falling and we don't know where the bottom will be until we get there and there's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."

—George Soros at Columbia University, Feb 20, 2009

Chris Wallace: "Best guess: Will the president end up giving McChrystal the troops he wants, or will he change the war strategy?"

Charles Krauthammer: "I think he doesn't and McChrystal resigns.

—Fox News Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009

"Brown
will be tempted to fight on, but if he is well advised and sensible, he
will see that this cannot go on. He will concede what Tony Blair also
eventually also conceded when the pressure grew too great -- that he has no wish to be an impediment to Labour's electoral success. He will step down soon, maybe today, certainly this weekend."

—Martin Kettle, The Guardian, June 5, 2009

"I'm very pleased to announce that we've
had a breakthrough in negotiations in Honduras. I want to congratulate
the people of Honduras as well as President Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti
for reaching an historic agreement.... I
cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that
having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order
overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue."

—U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Oct. 30, 2009

"I
think if they [Israel] are to do anything, the most likely period is
after our elections and before the inauguration of the next president. I don't think they will do anything before our election because they don't want to affect it. And they'd have to make a judgment whether to go during the remainder of President Bush's term in office or wait for his successor."

—John Bolton, Fox News, June 22, 2008

 "It will have to make a decision soon, and it will be no surprise if Israel strikes by year's end. Israel's choice could determine whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future."

—John Bolton, The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2009

"This is going to unleash rampant inflation around the world, rampant confusion in the currency markets. You're going to have currencies gyrating all over the world. Bond markets are going to start to collapse, and then we're going to have a real problem. The stock market understands this. They're unleashing an inflationary Holocaust because they don't know what else to do."

—Jim Rogers, CNBC, Oct. 10, 2008

"If
we do nothing, I can guarantee you that within a decade, a communist
Chinese regime that hates democracy and sees America as its primary
enemy will dominate the tiny country of Panama, and thus dominate the
Panama Canal, one of the world's most important strategic points."

—Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), Dec. 7, 1999

This blog has attempted to give Palin the benefit of the doubt on this from the get-go. The Dish was one of the first blogs to post a photograph - of only four - showing Palin somewhat pregnant. At the time, on August 31, 2008, I asked:

Please give us these answers - and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy - and put this to rest.

A short time later, I asked simply:

What harm
would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin
delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be
an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this
rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue
medical records. So let's have them. And then we can move on.

 On September 3, Palin was cut off from the press for the following reasons:

In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his
campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that
have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old
baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would
submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage.

On September 5, Ben Smith reported that the medical records would be released "very soon". We kept being told that in the campaign and they never were - until the brief doctor's note was issued a few hours before midnight before Election day.

So here are the simple questions the Dish has been trying to get an answer for much more than a year. They are easily answered and could have been at any moment since August 31 2008 when I first asked them. Here they are:

Can you please provide independent medical documents/sides/reports that prove that Trig is Palin's biological child? If this is deemed too private, then please provide them off the record to a reporter who can vouch for them to the rest of us?

Can you please provide Trig Palin's birth certificate listing his biological mother and father?

Can you please ask Catherine Baldwin-Johnson to discuss these questions with medical reporters so this whole thing can be put to rest for good and all?

If you refuse to do these things, why?

Please, governor Palin, let's put this behind us. Only you can. I pledge to post any and all material you can provide debunking these stories soon as I receive any. I'd like this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible - for the sake of all of us, but especially the innocent child caught up in something he doesn't deserve.

"Obama's
attitude was, this is an elderly gentleman in a country where this kind
of greeting is customary. It does not seem extraordinary to show this
kind of gesture to him. The Fox news poll said that 67% of
Americans thought it was a good thing for him to have done. When the
president heard that some people had complained, I'd characterize his
reaction as: The notion that the United States is somehow humbling or
humiliating itself by showing respect for a local custom, when it is
transparently the most powerful country in the world, leaves me
speechless."

"We
closed some of the gap but not all of the gap. The Chinese do not wish,
three weeks out of Copenhagen, to be seen working hand in glove with
the US to impose a "G2" solution to the G77. They have their own
reservations about how far things should go. But they also don't want
to be seen as the stumbling block or odd man out.

"We kept making the argument, We're the #1 and 2 emitters, so we
have a special responsibility, a special role. We got some movement.
They are taking substantial mitigating steps, which they didn't
enumerate but we know what they are. As best we can tell, they are
prepared to submit those as their "target" in Copenhagen, and of course
we want them to be "commitments" rather than targets. There is still a
stumbling block on the issue of accountability, which is always a hard
one with the Chinese. We'd like to have an independent peer review of
whether doing what you said you would do.  There are lots of different
ways to do that... But we haven't closed that part of the gap yet.

"Prime
Minister Rasmussen [Lars Loekke Rasmussen of Denmark, with obvious
involvement in the Copenhagen talks] has been saying that while a
binding legal treaty by this December is not possible, he has been
calling for a politically-binding accord at Copenhagen. Then there
would be the task of turning it into a treaty over the next year. The
Chinese have bought into that general framework. And we made a lot of
agreements with them on clean energy [details here]. So on climate change, there were no miracles, but we moved them out out of the position of being
blockers to being part of the game.

"I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They're at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can't be an expert on every question, and so you're part of the Washington press corps and if you're really good and really diligent, you're going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China."