hrynyshyn | March 29, 2007A friend of mine, who has a pretty well-exercised brain, tried to get under my skin the other day by invoking the specter of climate change "alarmists," suggesting that we've been there before and should reserve a fair bit of skepticism for anyone who says the sky is falling. Which is true, to a point. No one wants to be dismissed as an alarmist. But then he brought up Paul Ehrlich and the famous "population bomb" as a classic example of alarmism that amounted to nothing. I fear my friend has bought into one of those fables that continues to dog the environmental movement. This post is an…
hrynyshyn | March 28, 2007Bjorn Lomborg, the ex-Greenpeace bad-boy of statistics, is back at it. In last week's National Post, Canada's right-wing embarrassment of a newspaper, he once again takes on climate change activists. The problem with Lomborg, a man trained to play with numbers but seemingly devoid any understanding of how to understand what those numbers really mean (recall The Skeptical Environmentalist, his widely discredited attempt to argue that things aren't really all that bad), is that he doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes. Here's his essay, and my attempt to show why almost everything he says is…
hrynyshyn | March 27, 2007This week's Nature explores the growth of university-level instruction in that most incredible of non-conventional medical therapeutic techniques, homeopathy. That's troubling enough, but apparently it's only a part of an even more disturbing trend: the granting of BSc degrees, by otherwise respectable institutions of higher learning, in fields that don't even qualify as pseudo-scientific, let alone science-oriented. Among the new science degrees one can earn in the UK are:
Geography of Mountain Leadership, Staffordshire University
Hospitality Management, Manchester Metropolitan University…
hrynyshyn | March 20, 2007You've got to hand it to John Edwards. He's always trying to do the right thing, or at least appear to be doing the right thing. Last week he announced that his campaign for the White House will be a sustainable one, through the use of the latest fad in environmental circles: carbon offsets. It's a nice idea in theory -- facing the reality that one can't tour the country without producing significant amounts of greehouse gases, he's going to pay someone else to compensate for his emissions. But I've never been too enamored of the idea, and last week one of my favorite science journalists,…
hrynyshyn | March 16, 2007Just because you were right yesterday doesn't mean you're going to be right tomorrow. Even if you're one of the most important contributors to biology, like Lynn Margulis, there's no reason anyone should keep paying attention to you if you abandon the skeptical foundation of the scientific method. I doubt that Margulis, she of the endosymbiotic theory that revolutionized evolutionary biology a few years back, cares what people think of her, but she sure has undermined her reputation with what I would say are some poorly chosen words in a guest post at Pharyngula.
Margulis' theory that…
hrynyshyn | March 14, 2007Marine biologists have discovered that there's a lot more life in the ocean that can turn sunlight into fuel than anyone thought. The authors of the paper in which the finding appears don't come out and say it in their scientific publication, but the Washington Post convinced one of them to hint at the possibility of using this alternative to photosynthesis to design new and clean energy sources. It's way to early to start counting your chickens, but it is a fascinating possibility...
In "The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Northwest Atlantic through Eastern Tropical Pacific" a…
hrynyshyn | March 13, 2007Often have I tried to draw attention to creationist propaganda masquerading as reasoned discourse. Lest I leave the impression that the mainstream media are incapable of portraying biological evolution as the only scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, it is perhaps appropriate to praise a couple of articles from a couple of the country's top science writers. Both treat evolution for what it is and make no concessions to the alleged, pseudo-scientific alternatives.
First is Sharon Begley's cover story in Newsweek,"Beyond Stones and Bones." The lengthy feature explores the…
hrynyshyn | March 12, 2007Sciblogger Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions has learned that the best way to attract comments to a science blog is to post something about religion. (Hence the title of this post; we all like site traffic). I suspect that religosity -- the official SciBlog descriptor is the euphemestic "Culture Wars" -- is one of, if not the most popular category here. Why is that? Probably because it's much safer to weigh in on a subject that doesn't actually constitute a field of knowledge than something like epidemiology, particle physics or behavioral ecology. When it comes to the supernatural, everyone…
hrynyshyn | March 9, 2007On the occasion of PZ "Pharyngula" Myers' 50th birthday, I'd like pay homage to the one science blogger who can bump another's site traffic by an order of magnitude with one link. Also, who else but PZ could generate dozens of comments with a blank post, a null-set blog?
It is an honor share the blogosphere with such a guy. But I have one question: when does he have the time for all those posts?
hrynyshyn | March 8, 2007Towards the tail end of Al Gore's climate-change slide show -- the one in "An Inconvenient Truth" -- there's a slide on three misconceptions propagated by those who, for lack of a better term, have been called skeptics. One of those misconceptions always struck me a bit odd, and until yesterday, I wondered if it really belonged in the presentation. This is the problem line in question:
OK, if we accept that it's real and that we're causing it, isn't this problem so big that we can't possibly fix it?
Gore's thesis is that very same people who not so long ago argued that the Earth isn't warming…
hrynyshyn | March 5, 2007Another day, another example of the moral bankruptcy of the James Dobson gang.
For those few of you not familiar with Dobson's particular brand of twisted faith-based logic, he's the head of Focus on the Family, a national organization devoted to holding back the tide of liberty, fraternity and equality through the promotion of patriarchal, homophobic and dishonest ideas that contradict science, decency and common sense.
Until today, his most recent breach of what most of us would consider common human morality came in the form of a screed claiming that "children do best on every measure of…
hrynyshyn | March 4, 2007Titled simply "Darwin's God," the feature in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine is a overview of theoretical musings -- you can't really call them full-fledges theories -- on why religion is so common among human societies. Not much in the way of new ideas, but a good survey of the current thinking among evolutionary psychologists. It doesn't give enough attention to the latest from the more interesting, and testable, field of neuroscience, however. For that, follow PZ Myers' introduction to a speech by Robert Sapolsky on what schizophrenia and shamanism have in common. There is some food…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2007Tomorrow's lunar eclipse has got the moon on my brain, and I'm not the only one. Washinton Post columnist Charles Krauthammer gets it wrong so often that I rarely bother to even glace at his output, but today he touches on a topic that appeals more to intuition than intellect, one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers. Today he takes on the question of whether we should settle the moon.
Let's cut to the chase. After justifiably lambasting the space shuttle and International Space Station as orbiting white elephants, he argues that a permanent settlement on the moon would be worth the…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2007Every now and then, a science story comes along that reminds me just how full of awe and wonder the real world is. This particular story is a few weeks old, but it didn't seem to generate a lot of attention when it came out, so I will.
Astronomers and physicists using the Cornell-managed Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico have discovered radio interpulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar that feature never-before-seen radio emission spectra. This leads scientists to speculate this could be the first cosmic object with a third magnetic pole.
A third pole? How weird and wonderful. Such musings…
hrynyshyn | March 1, 2007A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it was more that little appropriate that I might be reminded of that particular truism by a friend of mine who just happens to be a librarian. The lesson involves a variation on that most modern of phobias, the fear of radio waves, and it's a classic case of how paranoia can spring from a dilettante's familiarity with the science behind a technology.
Just about everyone has heard about efforts to gauge the threat posed by cell-phone use. All that mysterious electromagnetic energy propagating through the ether -- and our brains -- what is it doing…
hrynyshyn | February 28, 2007Jerry Fallwell. Can anyone compare to his particular brand of idiocy? He more than anyone else is the reason I blog. From the AP
Falwell says global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus" from evangelism to environmentalism. Falwell told his Baptist congregation in Lynchburg yesterday that "the jury is still out" on whether humans are causing -- or could stop -- global warming.
But he said some "naive Christian leaders" are being "duped" by arguments like those presented in former Vice President Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Falwell says the…
hrynyshyn | February 27, 2007The good people at the Center for Biological Diversity have declared today "Polar Bear Day." It's not that big a stretch, since a bunch of science-types have declared 2007 the International Polar Year. So what the heck? Help save the polar bear. Incidentally, a little while back I was commissioned to write a report on polar bear ecology and conservation. I'm relatively pleased with it, too, if I don't say so myself.
hrynyshyn | February 27, 2007My least favorite story-that's-occupying-too-much-media-attention this week is the Al Sharpton-Strom Thurmond family-ties affair. As a former newspaper editor, I know all too well why the story of the uncovering of the connection between a prominent African-American civil-rights leader and famous white racist senator is irresistible. But should it really be more than a mildly amusing footnote, rather than a front-page feature? And now we hear that Sharpton wants a DNA test? Give it a rest.
First of all, we're not talking about blood relations. The story goes that Sharpton's great-grandfather…
hrynyshyn | February 26, 2007This past weekend in the New Age capital of the New South (Asheville, N.C.), members of the Appalachian chapter of the American Society of Dowsers were scheduled to hold a quarterly meeting. I know this because the alternative weekly in these parts, the Mountain X Press, decided to devote a few scarce column inches to the subject in its current edition. I have no idea how the meeting went or what goes on at such things, nor do I really care all that much. But I am a little curious as to what drives these "water witches" and adherents of other fields of non-expertise.
According to the X Press…