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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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If you read THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 Annual Trend Report you may have seen my article predicting we would make a big advancement on the road to growing one of the Big 5 organs from a person's own stem cells this year.  That will mean no more driver's license donor permission, no waiting lists and no immunosuppressive drugs.

There is no question that increased use of natural gas has been good for the atmosphere - energy CO2 emissions are down to early 1990s levels in America and coal is at early 1980s levels of emissions, just like we all said we wanted.

Enhanced extraction methods like hydraulic fracturing - fracking - have also been good for the local economies in places like Pennsylvania. But as with any industry, Not In My Backyard (NIMBYism) occurs in residents of Pennsylvania just like it does yacht owners in Massachusetts. 

Reuters gets dinged for being off-kilter journalistically when it comes to politics; to the current generation of independent voters they became famous for their Mid-East coverage last decade by retouching photos to make Israelis look bad and Arabs look persecuted, adding in smoke from explosions that didn't exist, etc. Editors and journalists at other corporate media companies never noticed, but bloggers tripped them up.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is continuing its long-standing policy of defending dead animals by exploiting live human women.

Well, clearly it works, since I am giving them free publicity by hammering on their lack of ethics in my blog once again, but at least this time it is not about their being anti-science crackpots or killing animals they say they want to protect, it is about about their annual effort to make vegans sexy by objectifying attractive women in their Sexiest Vegan Next Door contest.

Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, is used by millions of people to show photos of their wedding cakes and pictures of themselves they took in the mirror with their cell phones. 

Or maybe it has a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. And want to take advantage of its popularity and need to talk about something at a conference. 

While the United States is now back at early 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, thanks to a switch to natural gas in the energy sector and a moribund economy, that doesn't apply to Asia. The middle class in China alone has a population that exceeds the entire USA and they all want, and are getting, cars and air conditioners and a better life and the emissions to go along with it. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise but warming, the telltale sign of climate change, has not.

Since 2000, global warming has tapered off and virtually no one in the climate science community predicted that could happen.