hrynyshyn | February 22, 2007Texas Gov. Rick Perry is having a bad week. The state House Public Health Committee just voted to rescind the governor's executive order requiring all pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against HPV and a county judge ruled against another executive order requiring the state to fast-track a review of proposed coal-fired power plants. On the surface, the two decisions point to conflicting political motivations, but I see a connection.
Perry's order that all young girls should have the benefit of Merck's new vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer constitutes a nice big Valentine's…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2007After 28 years, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research institute is finally giving up the ghost, bringing an end to arguably the most respectable -- or the least embarrassing -- parapsychological research effort. Is this cause for celebration? I'm not sure, but I think Princeton is probably happy to see it go.
Dr. Robert Jahn founded PEAR and ran it with private money as Princeton wasn't all that keen on the idea of spending its students and alumni's money on ESP, telekenesis and "the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality." According to the CBC,
Jahn, a former…
hrynyshyn | February 14, 2007At the heart of the fuss over the departure of two members of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' blogging team is a science story, specifically the controversy surrounding the "Plan B" birth control pill. This has been overlooked in favor of the larger political fallout and bears re-examining.
Of the two former Edwards bloggers, Melissa McEwan's writings were the less sensational. Her reference to President Bush's "wingnut Christofascist base" and use of profanity suggests she needs to learn to be a little more careful, but it wasn't her personal blog posts that really made the…
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2007Absent anything original to add to the millions of words that have been written about Charles Darwin, on this Darwin Day I'm going to quote from one of his acolytes, Richard Dawkins. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins runs with, rather than away from, the notion that a proper understanding of evolution through natural selection prods the reader closer to a secular, rational view of the universe. In other words, the fundamentalists are right: Darwinism can lead to atheism.
From page 116:
Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2007John Edwards' recent decision not to fire two bloggers from his staff after word got out that they didn't always use the most diplomatic language in during their pre-Edwards campaign days should give him a big boost among those the bloggers were hired to attract -- the so-called "netroots." Such people wanted to see him respect diversity of opinion and the First Amendment. I am one of them, and I like a lot of what I hear and read coming out of Edwards' campaign. Edwards is showing himself to be a mature and sophisticated politician, one that understand the world is not all black and white.…
hrynyshyn | February 9, 2007First, you've got to hand it Richard Branson. Say what you want about his contradictory ways -- promoting wasteful extravagance while saving the planet from the products of those wasteful ways -- but his choice of brand name was brilliant. And it gives newspaper editors and bloggers an irresistible headline for anything he does. This time, it's a generous, $25-million prize for anyone who can come up with a way to scrub the atmosphere of all that nasty carbon dioxide we (including his transportation businesses) are pumping out.
Overseeing the innovations are James Hansen, the noted climate…
hrynyshyn | February 7, 2007I'm talking about Alister McGrath, the author of the unbelievably weak polemic The Twilight of Atheism, who has resurfaced to take on his nemesis, Richard Dawkins. Jason does a good job dismantling McGrath's pathetic review of the Dawkins' The God Delusion, so all I'm going to do is posit that the editorial standards for people of faith are substantially lower than that for experts of most other fields of expertise.
I was asked to review McGrath's Twilight of Atheism a few years back for a magazine in Vancouver. I didn't get paid much for the reviews, but the editor only wanted 150 words, so…
hrynyshyn | February 6, 2007Venerable New York Times reporter William K. Stevens resurfaces today in the paper's Science Times with a few words on the changing nature of the debate over the changing climate. The headline is only slightly misleading:
"On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty"
Technically, there is no certainty, just diminishing levels of doubt. But it is a nice little essay. I just finished writing something similar for a magazine, and found the similarities with Steven's piece almost troubling, except that it's pretty obvious stuff.
To say that reasonable doubt is vanishing does not mean…
hrynyshyn | January 31, 2007It's almost enough to restore your faith in freedom, democracy and the American way (whatever that is). Today in The New York Times appear a couple of paragraphs the likes of which I was beginning to despair I would never read in a leading American newspaper:
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took on the Bush administration's handling of climate change science yesterday, and even the Republicans on the panel had little good to say about the administration's actions.
The subject of the hearing was accusations of administration interference with the work of government…
hrynyshyn | January 29, 2007After Garry Trudeau swallowed the apocryphal story about Grand Canyon park rangers' inability to tell the truth about the age of their charge, one would do well to be skeptical about any future strips based on alleged true stories. Fortunately, yesterday's color Doonesbury is on safer ground. It will rank among my favorite, for obvious reasons.
There actually is some controversy over plans for the George W. Bush presidential library, which could cost $500 million, according to a New York Daily News story. Whether it actually costs that much (the most in history, but only about three times the…
hrynyshyn | January 26, 2007A new poll in Canada has climate change at the top of the worry list for the first time, and it's rising fast. The Globe and Mail poll puts the share of Canadians who say the environment is the most critical issue facing the country at 26 per cent, up from 12 per cent in July, and 4 per cent one year ago. To put this surprising finding in context, only 18 per cent said health care was their No. 1 concern. And health care has long ruled the top of that list.
(Terrorism got only 6 per cent and crime just 3 per cent, which might surprise Americans who consider Canada the 51st state, but isn't…
hrynyshyn | January 24, 2007Here's what George W. Bush had to say about climate change in his penultimate state of the union address: "...and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change." That's it. A parathetical afterthought for the most pressing issue of modern times. I suppose we should be happy that even that much made it through the editing process. Oh well.
climate
hrynyshyn | January 23, 2007The lead story in today's Science section of the New York Times isn't really about science at all, but its opposite: superstition. The notion that we're hard-wired to believe in a god has received a lot of attention of late, but now we're told that we also might be genetically programmed to believe in magic, luck and superstition. Great.
The brain seems to have networks that are specialized to produce an explicit, magical explanation in some circumstances, said Pascal Boyer, a professor of psychology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. In an e-mail message, he said such…
hrynyshyn | January 22, 2007When word came earlier this month that Washington state school board is refusing to present An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David's documentary on Al Gore's climate change slide show, to its high school students, criticism was fast and furious. The main problem was the decision was taken in response to complaints from a creationist parent who demanded his somewhat less-than-scientific point of view be offered instead. ("Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore.") I wrote to the school board and suggested that the students can handle the truth, so to speak. The reply I received…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2007Of course, we'll never be absolutely certain about the causes and future trends of climate change. That's not the way science works. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we're getting pretty darn close to that magical 19-times-out-of-20 territory that passes for conclusive evidence in scientific language.
The Toronto Star has got ahold of what is most like a next-to-final draft of the IPCC next report, due Feb. 2, and the language could scarcely be more worrisome. Here are the excerpts,as reported by Peter Gorrie:
"It is very likely that (man-made) greenhouse gas…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2007PZ Myers rarely writes anything I find objectionable, but today he is so bang on that I feel compelled to share it with those few readers of mine who might not be regular visitors to Pharygula.
PZ basically wants to give young students the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming they can't handle anything verging on ethically or intellectually challenging. Responding to Francis Collins' suggestion that kids of fundamentalist parents can't handle it when their world view collides with scientific reality, he writes:
As young people's crises go, the conflict between science and religion is a…
hrynyshyn | January 17, 2007Following up on a couple of posts back in which I trumpeted Gary Trudeau's inclusion in Doonesbury strip an apocryphal story about Grand Canyon park rangers and the age of the geological wonder they are entrusted with explaining to the public: We were duped. Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer offers an apology, which I will borrow.
Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon…
hrynyshyn | January 16, 2007Today's must read, from the Washington Post: The U.S. government is cutting back on environmental science.
The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.
The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans…
hrynyshyn | January 13, 2007Gary Trudeau sticks it to the creationists in today's Doonesbury. The topic of the day is the sad fact that the U.S. National Parks Service sells in its Grand Canyon gift shop a book that offers a Biblical chronology for the world's creation, a fact that makes it very hard to explain how the canyon formed in a mere 6,000 years. Good old Bob Park at the University of Maryland has been following this sad case for three years now, but it's nice to see Trudeau bring it to a wider audience.
There's also this feature from The New York Times that follows a creationist rafting trip down the canyon…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2007When former Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler managed to bump off incumbent congressman Charles Taylor in November, there was much rejoicing here in western North Carolina. Many Democrats kept their hopes modest, however, as Shuler got elected campaigning on "mountain values," a not so subtle code phrase for the Christian fundamentalism that pervades the Blue Ridge Mountains. We didn't have to wait long for those fears to be realized.
Yesterday, Shuler voted against a bill to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Fifteen other Democrats did the same. Why?
"I want…