A Cool Ten Grand
Tom Lehrer once sang, "It's so nice to have integrity, I'll tell you why: If you really have integrity, it means your price is very high." Now, the American Enterprise Institute is hoping some scientists price themselves at no higher than $10,000. According to The Guardian, the conservative think tank is offering scientists ten grand to write articles that throw doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent report stating that humans are almost certainly the cause of climate change. The Institute, which has received over $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil, sent letters to scientists around the world asking for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs." Perhaps unsurprisingly, some scientists have sharply criticized the AEI's move. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In addition to concluding that there is a 90% chance humans have warmed the planet, the IPCC report predicts that temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8 degrees Celsius in the next century, depending on emissions levels.
Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt
While the IPCC's report is lovely and all, why trust a faceless group with astoundingly good credentials when you can trust an adorable animal? Indeed, that prognosticator of prognosticators Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow this year, forecasting an early spring. In the first 75 years of the 20th century, Phil failed to see his shadow a mere four times, but in the last 25 years, he cast no shadow eight times. While scientists emphasize that Phil's method of weather prediction hardly holds to standards of scientific rigor, some are taking this opportunity to note the effects of climate change on wildlife. Doug Inkley, biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, said, "Phil would probably be the first to agree that our country needs to develop solutions to global warming fast. Otherwise he'll be forced to pull up stakes, move north and change his name to Buffalo Bill." So if it doesn't help to think of all the coast-dwellers who will be forced out of their homes by rising sea levels, please, think of the groundhogs.
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Chessmen
When two of the world's top ten chess players sit down for a game, there will always be exactly two women at the table. Both of them can move any number of spaces in any direction. There is only one woman among the top 100 chess players, and of about 900 grandmasters, only eight are women. In a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers concluded that the underrepresentation of women in the highest levels of chess can be explained by the low proportion of girls who enter chess at the lowest levels. The researchers looked at the ratings of over 250,000 players over 13 years and found that while men have higher ratings than women on average, in areas where women account for at least 50% of new young players, the initial ratings of boys and girls are not significantly different. They also found that men's and women's ratings were equally variable, so the suggestion that men have a higher standard deviation and therefore have more people with extremely high ratings doesn't hold water. Check and mate.