During the BP oil disaster, the government would generally back up BP’s estimates of flow data, and only changed when they changed. Now we learn from Kate Sheppard that the White House actually leaned on their own scientists to lowball the amount of oil being released from the busted well.

The joy in some quarters over the Obama decision to deny the permit to TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tarsands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. I’m glad for the decision, but it was hardly a ringing endorsement of either concerns about potential damage caused by spills from the pipeline or concerns about what tapping into the tar sands will do to the climate. Rather, it was political posturing for effect by DC politicians on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The GOP forced a rider into must-pass legislation saying “You’ve got 60 days to approve or deny” and State said — back then — that with that kind of a time limit, they’d have no choice but to deny. And this week, they did just that.

As Bill McKibben says, “We’ve won no permanent victory (environmentalists never do) but we have shown that spirited people can bring science back to the fore.”

Come Tuesday, Bill will be taking a group of spirited people to Capital Hill, to take the fight to the science-deniers who live off the money from Big Oil. It should be quite something.

One important part of the suspected covert war with Iran, in addition to the drone surveillance and cyberwarfare, concerns the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Several scientists have been murdered under questionable circumstances over the past several months. And now, another death has been reported.

The Smithsonian magazine highlights — and supports — evolution in the cover story of their January issue. Online, they go even further, with additional information and links.

Cue the TheoCon heads exploding in five, four, three . . .

John Broder looks back today at the Obama Administration’s decision to delay ozone standards. As has been reported several times before, he finds the meddling hands of Cass Sunstein and Chief of Staff Bill Daley. At least Sunstein, the head of OIRA, has some tenuous connection to regulations, if not science and the environment. But if you thought that it makes no sense for a White House Chief of Staff to be involved in ozone regulation, well, you’re right.

All of the news stories that we hear about this medical study and that medical study, all of which seem to eventually be at odds with each other or that tell us “eating rutabagas appears to lessen your chance of getting eyebrow cancer by 0.4%” First of all, I’m not going to rag on the people who do the studies. They work hard and are generally intelligent people (maybe not the whiny, cry baby pre-meds who used to take my non-calculus physics classes, but most of them). They do good work and uncover interesting things.

The problem lies in the P.R. people and the media people who grab hold of their results and plaster them (National Enquirer style) all over the papers, magazines and TV, misrepresenting the actual research findings.

While the Secessionist was taken to task by the legacy media for his rube-ish views on science, he’s paying no penalty at all within the Republican Party.

In June the Dawn probe from NASA decelerated into orbit around the mini-planet. Since then we have been getting more and more images. The picture above is one such. It is three large craters that overlap just enough make them look like a snowman.

A lot of people are talking the Secessionist’s response to a question about evolution.

Let’s put aside the fact that evolution isn’t just a “theory that’s out there,” that there aren’t “gaps” in it — and that Texas doesn’t teach creationism. All of that is just factually wrong and crazy, to boot.

In 2005, the most important court decision on evolution since the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Edwards v. Aguillard, came about: the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Edwards had nailed the door shut on teaching “creationism” as science in schools. Kitzmiller nailed it shut on trying to the same with “intelligent design.” Both were definitive. Perry should know that, as should the entire field of GOP 2012 hopefuls.

To me, this is an important subject, and has been for some time. Science education is vital to our future as a nation, as a planet. Whenever I read, watch or listen to a media person bringing up creationism, intelligent design or evolution as if there might be a scientific component to more than one of those three ideas, I just shake my head.