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The Island of Doubt

An irregular exploration of the struggle between the power of rational discourse and the scientific method on one hand, and the forces of superstition and dogma on the other. Mostly regarding climate change, though.

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me-fergus.jpg James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.

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Inspiration

The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle
in the Dark, by Carl Sagan
(A review)

The Doubter's Companion:
by John Ralston Saul (Excerpts)

Skeptic Magazine: www.skeptic.com

Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: www.csicop.org

A poem by Yehuda Amichai:
The Place
Where We Are Right


The Meaning of the
Island of Doubt


Author's site: cyamid.net


Add to Technorati Favorites! Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
--- H. L. Mencken

By doubting we come to inquiry; and through inquiry we perceive truth.
--- Peter Abelard

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
-- Richard Dawkins

As for evolution, it happened. Deal with it.
-- Michael Shermer.

"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving, and tiny blasts of tinny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."
--Walt Kelly

November 20, 2009

The hacked climate science email scandal that wasn't

Category: climate

Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change.

I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in any meaningful way. Just as you'd expect from bits and piece of correspondence never intended for public consumption. Next.

The ultimate anti-tar sands message

Category: climate

I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book:

Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.


November 18, 2009

Canada learns to love global warming

Category: climatehumor

Too precious not to pass along:

Canadian Tourism Federation Welcome Video from Canadian Tourism Federation on Vimeo.

In case there's any doubt. There is no "Canadian Tourism Federation."

November 12, 2009

Record high and low temps: An interesting trend

Category: climate

A fascinating paper about to be published in Geophysical Review Letters compares the number of record highs and lows at temperature stations across the U.S. since the 1940s. The authors found that we're getting more record highs and fewer record lows, in a pattern that yet again confirms that climatologists know what they're talking about. They also extrapolate that trend into the future, with some interesting results, but first let's deal with the past.

November 10, 2009

George Will gets something right

Category: climate

In an otherwise typically error-dominated Newsweek column, George F. Will spelled "minuscule" correctly. So I don't want to read any complaints that Will gets everything wrong each time he writes about climate change.

Of course, that doesn't mean we can't correct his myriad other mistakes. Here's one paragraph, with some necessary edits, just to get us started.

There is much an unremarkable level of debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased continued for that long [11 years]. What we know is that computer models did not did predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions uncertain sums of dollars and diminished increased freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data that is entirely consistent with the prevailing consensus on the theory of anthropogenic climate disruption. Soon after the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man's Thinking Man [George: who calls him this, other than you? -- ed ]--reported that global warming is "unequivocal," there came evidence that the planet's temperature is beginning to cool continuing to rise. [George: temperatures rise or fall, they don't cool or warm; only the subject of measurement warms or cools -- ed] "That," Ball writes, "has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect," although climatologists confirmed that the models are performing as well as expected."

November 9, 2009

Climate Cover-Up

Category: climate

Climate Cover-Up
The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

Greystone Books, 250 pages

Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott this week.

That might sound like a dismissive review, but it I don't mean it to be taken that way.

November 4, 2009

Bjorn Lomborg launches campaign against logic

Category: climate

(Pseudo)-Skeptical Environmental Bjorn Lomborg advises in the Wall Street Journal that spending money on anti-malarial campaigns makes more sense than, and by implication is morally superior to, spending money on cutting carbon emissions. But to make his case, he has to abandon all hope of ever being invited to join the Vulcan Science Academy.

It may be true that every dollar we spend combating the vectors of malaria and the treatments for it will save more lives than those who would be spared the disease if we spend it instead on avoiding catastrophic global warming. But Lomborg is abandons all logic when he writes:

October 30, 2009

The link between the climate denial and anti-vaccine crowds

Category: climatescience culture

Rarely does a blogging day pass that I don't stumble upon some post or comment or email that champions the value of skepticism of anthropogenic global warming and the need for scientists to answer their critics. So it's refreshing to read a concise and cogent reminder of why such attacks are misguided. From UBC's Simon Donner we get this rejoinder, made in reference to demands that real-climatologist Michael "hockey stick" Mann answer the criticism of non-climatologist Steve McIntyre

Think of it this way: wouldn't you rather that doctors spend their time actually developing treatments for autism, rather than refuting the crazy theory that MMR vaccinations cause autism?

October 29, 2009

Climate control in Canada: And now the good news

Category: climate

The costs of doing something about climate change are the subject of much debate these, and Canada is no exception. The federal government, like the ones before it, has shown little interest in honest analysis, so one of the country's biggest banks, TD Bank, decided to pay for a study all on its own. The results, which the bank's economists call "robust," represent perhaps the most comprehensive effort to nail down those costs, at least for one country. And what did the consultants they hired to write the report find? Good news, actually.

Unless, of course, you happen to own a piece of the fossil-fuel industry.

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