doubters, and that the warming is "fast". Both these conclusions are badly wrong. Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the extraordinary story of modern chicken genetics. Of all the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in the world, the most abundant species is probably the chicken. At any one time, approximately 20 billion cocks and hens are alive on the planet (though never for long). Donna Laframboise is a journalist and civil libertarian in Toronto, who made her name as a fearless investigative reporter in the 1990s. She has recently been investigating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has come up with startling results about how its reports are compiled. For those of us who took the IPCC's evaluations of climate at face value when they came out -- I know I did -- and thought that they were based on an impartial and careful process that relied on peer reviewed evidence, these revelations are shocking. Her book The Delinquent Teenager is now available on kindle and will shortly be in paperback. It is one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in recent years. It demolishes the argument that we need the mainstream media because the blogosphere will never do the hard work of investigative journalism. The opposite is true. Here I take the liberty of extracting one fairly lengthy tale from the book, but there are many more: The IPCC's transparency shortcomings have been obvious for some time. In 2005 Steve McIntyre,