Starvin Larry

What would you do?

The science on global warming is settled, so settled that 20 climate scientists are asking President Barack Obama to prosecute people who disagree with them on the science behind man-made global warming.

Scientists from several universities and research centers even asked Obama to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute groups that “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”

RICO was a law designed to take down organized crime syndicates, but scientists now want it to be used against scientists, activists and organizations that voice their disagreement with the so-called “consensus” on global warming. The scientists repeated claims made by environmentalists that groups, especially those with ties to fossil fuels, have engaged in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public on global warming.

“The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer-reviewed academic research and in recent books,” the scientists wrote.

But these riled up academics aren’t the first to suggest using RICO to go after global warming skeptics. The idea was first put forward by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who argued using RICO was effective at taking down the tobacco industry.

“In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies… alleging that the companies ‘engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO,’” Whitehouse wrote in the Washington Post in May.

“We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation,” the scientists wrote to Obama. “The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking.”

“If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s climate, before even more lasting damage is done,” the scientists added.

This year has been a trying one for global warming skeptics. Earlier this year, Democratic lawmakers began an investigation into scientists who disagreed with the White House’s stance on global warming. Many of these skeptical scientists were often cited by those critical of regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Arizona Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva went after universities employing these researchers, which resulted in one expert being forced to get out of the field of climate research altogether.

“I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject,” Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado wrote on his blog.

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Truly amazing.

Attackers have hijacked thousands of websites running the WordPress content management system and are using them to infect unsuspecting visitors with potent malware exploits, researchers said Thursday.

The campaign began 15 days ago, but over the past 48 hours the number of compromised sites has spiked, from about 1,000 per day on Tuesday to close to 6,000 on Thursday, Daniel Cid, CTO of security firm Sucuri, said in a blog post. The hijacked sites are being used to redirect visitors to a server hosting attack code made available through the Nuclear exploit kit, which is sold on the black market. The server tries a variety of different exploits depending on the operating system and available apps used by the visitor.

“If you think about it, the compromised websites are just means for the criminals to get access to as many endpoint desktops as they can,” Cid wrote. “What’s the easiest way to reach out to endpoints? Websites, of course.”

On Thursday, Sucuri detected thousands of compromised sites, 95 percent of which are running on WordPress. Company researchers have not yet determined how the sites are being hacked, but they suspect it involves vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins. Already, 17 percent of the hacked sites have been blacklisted by a Google service that warns users before they visit booby-trapped properties. Interestingly, Cid added, the attackers have managed to compromise security provider Coverity and are using it as part of the malicious redirection mechanism. The image above shows the sequence of events as viewed from the network level using a debugging tool.

Sucuri has dubbed the campaign “VisitorTracker,” because one of the function names used in a malicious JavaScript file is visitorTracker_isMob(). Cid didn’t identify any of the compromised sites. Administrators can use this Sucuri scanning tool to check if their site is affected by this ongoing campaign.

Source

A chicken-sized bird is ruffling a lot of feathers these days.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service faces a court-ordered Sept. 30 deadline to announce whether it believes sage grouse need federal protection by designating them a threatened or endangered species. It is an issue that strikes close to home for many Montana and Wyoming residents — especially hunters.

Why should you care? Well for one thing, sage grouse are seen as an indicator species. That means as the sage grouse thrive, or fail to thrive, so too do other prairie-dwelling species. For hunters, that includes animals like mule deer, pronghorns and sharp-tailed grouse, which inhabit the same landscapes. For bird watchers it includes species like golden eagles, hawks and falcons.

“A new cliche emerging now is: ‘What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,’” said Ed Arnett, of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, at a gathering of outdoor writers in Bozeman.

“We’re trying to protect an entire ecosystem,” said Jim Lyons, deputy assistant secretary of Land and Minerals Management for the Department of Interior. “Forty years after the signing of the Endangered Species Act, we’re on the verge of implementing the act as it was designed — to prevent the listing of a species.”

Apparently the U.S. Department of Agriculture agrees. The agency recently announced an investment of $211 million in Farm Bill funding for sage grouse projects involving private landowners. All of that attention may be paying off, a recent survey found that the number of male sage grouse per breeding ground was the highest it’s been since 1970 — 25.5 males per lek, or courtship grounds.

In Montana

About one-third of Montana contains important sage grouse habitat, most of it in the eastern part of the state, although there is also a sizable population in the Dillon area.

“We have about 18 percent of the world’s population of sage grouse,” said Tim Baker, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock’s policy adviser for natural resources. “Many of our populations are at low risk. In Montana we still do benefit from having significant intact habitat” and secure populations of birds.

Although sage grouse are sensitive to development such as power lines, road building and oil and gas drilling, “livestock grazing is not seen as a disturbance,” Lyons said. Oil and gas drilling are a big threat to sage grouse, but “more than half of the areas that are high priority for oil and gas development are not in priority sage grouse habitat,” he added.

Much of Montana’s sage grouse population, about 66 percent, lives on private land. Only 8 to 9 percent reside on state land, the rest live on federal lands – mostly the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM has already drawn up its plans to preserve 3.5 million acres of priority sage grouse habitat in Montana and the Dakotas. The BLM’s plans will still allow some gravel pits to be created, bentonite mining to continue and will not restrict motorized use on designated and open routes. But they do require “no surface occupancy” for oil and gas drilling in priority habitat.

“There was a rumor (roads) would be closed. That’s not true,” said Jamie Connell, BLM’s Montana-Dakotas director. “We will try to maintain this Western working landscape.”

The state of Montana also has crafted a sage grouse management plan. The USFWS is reviewing the plans to determine whether adequate protections are in place to preclude listing sage grouse as threatened or endangered.

“I don’t think we’ve reached a perfect solution,” Connell said. “But I feel very good about what we’re handing over to the Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Complex issue

Although coordinating a response to protect sage grouse habitat on the state scale is difficult, consider that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is examining plans across 11 states involving an alphabet soup of state and federal agencies.

“This is not a one-size fits all plan,” Lyons said. “Montana, Wyoming and Idaho all have different plans.”