I have just meandered the 200 metres to our rural mailbox here in South Island, New Zealand, and was most gratified to find my long-awaited copy of The Hockey Stick Illusion resting therein.

Looking forward to a good read, Andrew; I am sure it will live up to expectations.

If you don't hear from me for a while - you know where I am :)

Judith Curry has a good discussion going on the Monbiot Guardian essay of May 1. See

judithcurry.com/2011/05/04/monbiot-on-environmental-fixes/#more-3152

With no trace of embarrassment or self-awareness the Non Scientist is reporting a Royal Soc Proc B paper about giant thermophile ants crossing into the American continent by a "tropical Arctic" land bridge 50m years ago. How did the earth survive?

The abstract is here http://tinyurl.com/3wksnzu

I sent Andy Revkin a link to Monbiot's 5/1 column that I mentioned earlier and he actually posted it, #21 in the Defense of Plankton Decline thread. I asked that he devote a thread to Monbiot's point about CAGW being a belief system. Please feel free to jump in at DotEarth and second the idea of a separate thread.

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/researchers-defend-study-finding-plankton-decline/#more-32803

Did I miss it or has no one posted about the Moonbat's May 1 column in which he writes, in part:

“You think you’re discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you’re discussing belief systems. The battle among environmentalists over how or whether our future energy is supplied is a cipher for something much bigger: who we are, who we want to be, how we want society to evolve. Beside these concerns, technical matters – parts per million, costs per megawatt hour, cancers per sievert – carry little weight. We choose our technology – or absence of technology – according to a set of deep beliefs: beliefs that in some cases remain unexamined."

This is a stunning admission that we skeptics have been correct all along in that the entire CAGW argument has little to do with the science but rather has become a war over a system of beliefs, aka the religion of CAGW.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/environmental-fixes-all-greens-lost

The eco-loony Nazi style propaganda of the young continues. I kid you not, from the Radio Times about today's edition of Costing the Earth, by the BBC 's resident eco-loon Tom Heap:

An investigation into the role of teenagers in preventing the effects of climate change, including an experiment by Birmingham University aimed at getting them to care about the environment they are going to inherit. The programme also examines a campaign launched by the UK Youth Climate Coalition, which will see all 650 Members of Parliament collaborating with a young constituent in an attempt to keep climate change at the top of the political agenda.

This report, from the Auditor General for Victoria, is as damning assessment of renewable energy "targets" as I've ever seen...

http://download.audit.vic.gov.au/files/20110406-FRED.pdf

Follow on from Woodentop's post on MET and BBC on April weather, 5 degrees warmer than normal and a water lake (can't spell the proper term) is 20% empty (why not say 80% full) on main BBC1 news at 6pm.

Problems with wind and nuclear in Germany says BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804

The BBC and the Met Office at it again with selective statistics for South West Scotland:

The Met Office said the monthly temperatures were higher than those which would normally have been seen in May.

A spokesman said: "April seems to be the month most affected by global warming, with the four warmest months in the past 100 all having occurred in the past eight years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-13265249

Ironically there is an adjacent headline on the page entitled "December 'coldest in a century'"...