Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well.  There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam.  The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog and sign up, then enter your bracket.  This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.

Scoring is as follows:

Round 1 correct picks:  1 points
Round 2:  2
Round 3:  4
Round 4:  6
Round 5:  8
Round 6:  10

Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team’s seeds.  So don’t be afraid to go for the long-shots!   The detailed rules are here.

Bracket entry appears to be open.  Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 18th at 12:20pm EDT.  Be sure to get your brackets in early.  Anyone can play — the more the better.  Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.

At the same time, I have had less time to dedicate to this blog  (for those who have not seen it, my appearance on Glenn Beck may explain why).

I will continue to do science-based stories on this site as I have done in the past, but cannot possibly keep up with the evolving political stories surrounding climate change.

• I don’ t have time.  Period.  If I had to spend the time to moderate comments here, I would have to give up blogging.  This is a hobby, and in fact real life has been unbelievably busy of late.  An example here.
• I have little inclination to do so.  If I wanted to constantly monitor the behavior of a couple of hundred people, I would have been a 7th grade teacher
• It is strategic (part 1).  I find that the silliest people whom folks most want to ban do much to undermine their own arguments.  Why not let them?  To paraphrase Napoleon, why interrupt someone you disagree with when they are making a mistake?  I often get asked to ban troll X who opposes everything I write, but frankly I am far more likely to want to ban commenter Y who is doing a bad job of representing or supporting my positions
• It is strategic (part 2).  Many alarmist websites like RealClimate ruthlessly moderate out dissent from their comments.  I purposely try to position this site in contrast to that policy.  If you are an outsider, and see two sides, one of which clearly allows open debate and one which does not, which might you trust more?
• I am learning.  Apparently unlike most everyone else on this issue, I admit that I make a lot of mistakes.  My writing and position on climate change has evolved a lot since the beginning of this blog.  I treat this blog as a voyage of discovery, and many times my commenters are providing me free education.
• At least trolls are visiting sites they disagree with.  A lot of blog readers stay in the echo chamber.

If you really find something absolutely offensive, you can email me and I will (maybe) do something about it.  But in general, the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them.  Really, when you see someone posting every third comment making condescending and unsupported statements with all the social graces of a 12-year-old, is your first thought, “wow, that guy is someone to be reckoned with!”?

Let me end with an example from current alarmist uber-troll Rajendra Pachauri.  If he was a commenter of mine, why would I possibly purge him?  He’s doing so much damage to his own position that even Greenpeace wants his head:

The U.N.’s climate chief dismissed “nefarious” global warming skeptics this week by insinuating that they are deep in the pockets of big business — and suggested that they go rub their faces in cancer-causing asbestos.

Rajendra Pachauri, the besieged head of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that he is the victim of a “carefully orchestrated” campaign to block climate change legislation.

“I would say [there are] nefarious designs behind people trying to attack me with lies, falsehoods,” he told the paper, swatting away allegations that his India-based climate institute, TERI, has benefited from decisions made by the IPCC, which he also chairs.

Climate change skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder,” he said.

“I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”

hat tip Tom Nelson

Lately I’ve found that I spend a lot of time moderating posts that are simply back and forth arguments between just a few people whom have inflexible points of view. Often the discussion turns a bit testy. I’ve had to give some folks (on both sides of the debate) a time out the last couple of days. While the visitors of this blog (on both sides of the debate) are often more courteous than on some other blogs I’ve seen, it still gets tiresome moderating the same arguments between the same people again and again.

This does not surprise me, as I have emailed back and forth to Anthony during a time he was stressed about a particular comment thread.   I told him then what I say now:  Relax.

It might have been that 10 years ago or even 5 that visitors would be surprised and shocked by the actions of certain trolls on the site.  But I would expect that anyone, by now, who spends time in blog comment sections knows the drill — that blog comments can be a free-for-all and some folks just haven’t learned how to maturely operate in an anonymous environment.

I have never tried to moderate my comments (except for spam, which is why you might have  a comment with embedded links held for moderation — I am looking to filter people selling male enhancement products, not people who disagree with me.)  In fact, I relish buffoons who disagree with me when they make an ass of themselves – after all, as Napoleon said, never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.  And besides, I think it makes a nice contrast with a number of leading climate alarmist sites that do not accept comments or are Stalinist in purging dissent from them.

In fact, I find that the only danger in my wide open policy is the media.  For you see, the only exception to my statement above, the only group on the whole planet that seems not to have gotten the message that comment threads don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the domain operator, is the mainstream media.  I don’t know if this is incompetence or willful, but they still write stories predicated on some blog comment being reflective of the blog’s host.

By the way, for Christmas last year I bought myself an autographed copy of this XKCD comic to go over my desk:

Anyway, I have a new page with all my published books and Powerpoint presentations here.  I have a page collecting all my videos here.   Since YouTube crunches all the videos to a resolution too small to really read my charts well, I have also set up a streaming video site with full resolution videos here.  All of these sites are easily reachable by the new menu bar across the top of the site.

This is actually a problem with online applications I had not considered before.  When I heard iTunes 8 was initially bugged or learned to hate Vista, I would just avoid making the "upgrade."  But with online services, I have no choice but to accept the new version, even if I consider it worse (as is so often the case nowadays in software).