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Josh at work Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.

The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.

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« Five years of wingnuttery | Main | Random Ten »

In which I pick on another Ryun

Category: Planet EarthPolicy and Politics
Posted on: March 27, 2008 7:05 PM, by Josh Rosenau

Drew Ryun, twin brother of equally clueless Ned Ryun, discusses:

the feeling that a vast majority of Americans share. The Democrats are not good on national defense.
Hmmm. "Next, please tell me if you think the Republican Party or the DEMOCRATIC Party could do a better job in each of the following areas:

Making wise decisions about foreign policy: R=40%, D=45%.
Making wise decisions about what to do in Iraq: R=37%, D=47%

This isn't new. Gallup found Democrats taking the lead on national security issues between 2006 and 2007, while Rasmussen found in early 2006 that more Americans trusted Congressional Democrats than President Bush on national security.

Of course, this is all helped by the fact that, not only were many Democrats right about Iraq to begin with, Republicans seem still to think that invading Iraq was meritorious, rather than meretricious.

SPECIAL BONUS RYUN MOCKERY:

Ned Ryun asks: "Global Warming ... or global cooling?" To which I answer: Global warming.

But then I read on and find:

If you look at the cyclical nature of the warming and cooling trends, I tend to think that we’re headed towards a cooling trend.
That might be true in the southern hemisphere, where they are approaching the austral winter. This is explained by the tilt of the earth, which places the southern hemisphere at a more oblique angle to the sun. Here in the north, the trend is rather different, as noted by anyone who regularly walks outside, or has a window. Perhaps Ned wasn't thinking of seasonal cycles. He might have meant multi-decadal cycles of some sort, but then he'd have to be blind or ignorant.

NASA's GISTEMP global temperature record
I'll give Ned the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn't thinking of events on the scale of ice ages, since there is a consensus that we are at the tail-end of an interglacial, and in a few thousand years, that might mean something some day, depending on the Milankovitch cycles. It doesn't mean anything today, when we are seeing faster temperature change than at any other period in the geological record, driven by an unprecedented influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

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#1

The article he based his "cooling" theory was hyped by Drudge, so it's all over the right-wing anti-science blogs. I comment here.

Posted by: Tim Lambert | March 27, 2008 8:38 PM

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