At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/28/congratulations-finally-to-spencer-and-braswell-on-getting-their-paper-published/ is a post about arguably the most important climate sceptic inroad into climate science - aimed right at the bull's eye.

At http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com Donna Laframboise does a demolition job on the lead author for the Health chapter in the up and coming AR5 IPCC Report (which is under construction). He is branded a shrill alarmist that in the past has urged doctors in New Zealand to discuss with their patients the AGW threat. What this might have to do with a diagnosis of illness is anyone's guess - and needless to say he is an academic and not a practitioner.

At www.physorg.com/print201498071.html .... we have a story about wild boar numbers in central Europe rising - as a result of climate change. Oak trees are producing bountiful crops of acorns (C02 is feeding them perhaps) and Beech trees are loaded with larger amounts of mast. The wild pigs feed on these and hunters, it seems, are taking advantage of a bounty on boar meat - that proves to be radio-active.

At http://geology.com/nasa/plant-productivity/ is a piece of NASA field research on how AGW will affect plant productivity. It seems to be an attempt to counter evidence that crop yields and terrestrial vegetation has increased as C02 has risen - some 6 per cent between 1982 and 1999. However, models would seem to disagree with the field data - hence the story. Warming temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth - that is obvious.

At http://climateaudit.org August 19th ... there is a guest post by the author of the blog, Air Vent, and he thinks he has solved a mystery concerning the Mann 2008 updated hockey stick model and the temperature data at the root of the computer generated modelling. In fact, the authors utilised already existing 'model data' which they claimed as a 'known' temperature signal and added various levels of white noise. The latter tends to flatten the hockey stick handle by obscuring its ups and down.

At www.physorg.com/print201191962.html we have news of a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (August 16th, 2010) which purports to provide an explanation for the paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate. It seems that as the hydrological cycle accelerates there is more precipitation in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica - and increased snow falls on the continent.

It's not yet published but it is raising a storm of dust on the blogosphere. For example, go to http://wattsupwiththat.com where it has been top of the blog for several days past and at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2773 where there is a quite succinct look at what it might mean for Michael Mann, originator of the hockey stick graph. Basically, the argument is that the hockey stick is cracked (but it has been for a number of years) - irreparably.

A short post at www.bishophill.squarespace.com August 17th with the simple subject Plant Food - which is of course C02. The argument has been made that C02 is a plant food and that we should welcome increased concentrations of it as it leads to bumper crop yields. A paper on this subject is set to be published in the Royal Society Phil Trans B, one article among several devoted to C02 (so The Royal Society has not run off the rails).

At http://notrickszone.com/2010/08/16/lebedev-physics- August 16th is a post gleaned from Ria Novosti the Russian news agency, which reported there were five clusters of sunspots on the Sun, leading some scientists to think the lull was over and the Sun was coming back to life. However, recent sunspots have been fairly weak affairs - and this week the Sun has returned to being inactive. So what is going on?

At www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103 we have an important message about a virus infection that might upset your computer well being. The Anthropogenic Global Warming or Human Induced Climate Change virus was first isolated in a laboratory at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia ...

The external effect of the virus is visible as a tendency of graphs and data to dip in the middle and then rise sharply at the end for no apparent reason ....

etc.