Kevin Grandia's blog

A blog post penned by The Atlantic's Clive Crook today highlights just how hard it is for some people to admit when they are wrong.

Maybe it's a pride thing - the Chinese call it "saving face." Maybe it's something entirely different. After all, who knows what is running through anyone's head?

Regardless of what it is called, Crook has it in spades on the issue of the infamous stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at London's East Anglia University. At the time of the controversy last November, Crook wrote column after column indicting climate scientists in the court of public opinion before any inquiry into the matter could take place.

Only 13 days after the stolen emails were made public Crook had already made up his mind writing that, "the stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering."

But after three inquires into the so-called "climate gate" matter, one of them conducted by a bi-partisan UK government committee and two by academic boards, the overwhelming conclusion is that there was no wrong-doing.

When you have lived in the same place for 20 years and all of sudden your hair turns orange after you wash it, you might be more than a little concerned.

But, of course, don't blame the natural gas company that is pumping thousands of gallons of toxic sludge into the ground just up the street. That can't possibly have anything to do with your hair turning orange or the chemically smelling sediment floating around in your water glass.

After all, the natural gas industry, in a process called hydraulic fracturing (also called "fracking"), says that 99-percent of the sludge they use is just water and sand.

The 1 percent that isn't water and sand is chemicals like formamide, a "reproductive toxicant" that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says targets organs like the "eyes, skin, respiratory system, central nervous system, [and] reproductive system."

Also in the 1 percent is something called Glutaraldehyde, a "developmental toxicant, immunotoxicant, reproductive toxicant, respiratory toxicant, skin or sense organ toxicant."

Now when you consider that the average fracking operation uses more than a million gallons of fluid, that means this teeny tiny 1 percent of toxins is a whopping 10,000 gallons.