cmooney | May 30, 2006Well, folks, my debate with Ron at the Skeptics Society conference is coming up this Saturday. We did a virtual coin toss today and I won, which means I go first. Whatever else this event will be, it will certainly be illuminating.
The question at the center of the debate, you will recall, is, "Distorting Science: Who's Worse, The Left or the Right?" Honestly, I'm not sure which way Ron will go on this. Given past comments from him I wouldn't be surprised if he says, "both" or "impossible to say." As for my own basic answer: You can probably guess, but the position will be suitably nuanced. (…
cmooney | May 30, 2006Just read the following in the Washington Times from an April 28 article:
With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy. The first tropical storm of this season showered light rain yesterday on Acapulco, a Mexican Pacific resort, but forecasters said the weather could worsen. Tropical storm Aletta was stalled 135 miles from Acapulco, with maximum winds of 45 mph, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, which said the storm could move…
cmooney | May 30, 2006This morning, I'm just finishing up final edits on the paperback version of the book. Especially as these things go in the publishing industry, it contains quite a ton of new material: A lengthy new preface that covers recent developments, puts everything in a still broader context, and discusses what scientists themselves can do about the problem of political attacks on science; and seven chapter updates, bringing the storyline up to date on climate science, "data quality," obesity and mercury, endangered species protections, evolution, stem cells, and reproductive health. The paperback…
cmooney | May 27, 2006Does the Republican mayor of New York accept the Republican War on Science critique of his own party? Recent remarks delivered at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine--where he discussed global warming, stem cells, and the Terry Schiavo case--suggest that perhaps he does. It is of some interest to me how someone like Bloomberg, if he really thinks like this, can feel at all comfortable in today's GOP....
cmooney | May 24, 2006Commenters here were beating up on Michael Shermer of Skeptic mag a while back, so let's acknowledge that he too is now on the record accepting anthropogenic global warming. And it seems that Al Gore helped give him a push! Now, as in the case of Easterbrook, I don't see why people like Shermer held out so long...but as we all know, there's a lot of misinformation out there that can lead earnest people astray. So perhaps we should simply applaud these rather late AGW converts, rather than presuming to judge...
cmooney | May 24, 2006I am not particularly impressed by his piece in the New York Times today. The evidence on global warming was in long ago; there was no particular reason for Easterbrook to hold out this long. But that's not what really troubles me about Easterbrook's argument. He writes:
Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions -- and this was hardly just the contention of oil executives. "There is no evidence yet" of dangerous climate change, a National Academy of Sciences report said in 1991. A 1992 survey of the American Geophysical Union and the American…
cmooney | May 24, 2006There's a good Slate piece up about GW, but unfortunately, one of its paragraphs says this:
....consider Hurricane Katrina. When it first reached Florida, it was a Category 1 storm. While traveling across the warmer-than-usual surface of the Gulf of Mexico, it brewed itself into a Category 5 then actually weakened to a Category 3 before causing the destruction still so fresh in our minds. Why were the Gulf's waters warmer than usual? You guessed it--and models had forecast this type of change, too.
Memo to writers: Global warming is a *global average change* in temperatures. Talking about…
cmooney | May 24, 2006...and since then have recommended it to my audiences at two public speeches. Randy Olson's documentary is funny, humane, and completely spot-on when it comes to the blind spots of scientists, the would-be defenders of evolution who often don't have a clue about how to connect with the rest of America. Olson inspires all of us to ask questions like these: How could the smartest people on earth actually be so bad at political communication and strategy? And when are scientists going to wake up and realize that part of the blame for the spread of anti-evolutionism in the US falls on their…
cmooney | May 21, 2006This Monday morning at 11 Eastern, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is going to be releasing its first seasonal prediction for Atlantic hurricane activity for 2006. If the prediction is anything like the one that William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University have already released, then NOAA will be calling for another very active season. That will in turn generate quite a lot of chatter (and worry), and I'll do my best to follow whatever play-by-play there is. Of course, it's going to be tricky because tomorrow I have to travel to New York for an evolution…
cmooney | May 20, 2006By now, everyone is having fun with the amusing Competitive Enterprise Institute ads with the following slogan : "Carbon Dioxide: They Call it Pollution. We Call It Life." I have little to add, except a few parodies:
1. Earth: They call it being buried alive. We call it life.
2. Air: They call it tornadoes. We call it life.
3. Fire: They call it arson. We call it life.
4. Water: They call it drowning. We call it life.
Feel free to suggest others...
cmooney | May 19, 2006I must admit, I was starting to worry about this upcoming Yearly Kos science panel in Vegas. In the city that never sleeps, the event was scheduled for 8 am (!)--the one time, if ever, when people visiting Vegas probably do sleep. I had a suspicion that nobody would even attend.
Well, scratch that: We just learned that General Wesley Clark is actually going to be joining the panel. This is awesome in myriad ways, not the least of them being that Clark has become very outspoken about climate change...
cmooney | May 16, 2006Just a couple of things that I've been meaning to give a plug to:
1. Daniel Collins, a geoscientist and environmental engineer at MIT, has started a new science blog entitled "Down to Earth." Check it out.
2. Defenders of Wildlife has launched a new program, the Conservation Support Network, to help promote the use of good science--not "sound science"--in wildlife protection policy. The scientific integrity movement continues to grow....
3. The website of the National Science Foundation actually won a Webby award recently for best government website. That is seriously cool--congrats.
Enjoy....
cmooney | May 15, 2006I just got shipped six copies of the Korean edition of my book. Man, it's weird; I wish I had a jpeg to throw up here so that I could show you. The cover says "Science War" and there are pictures of belching power plants and what looks like stem cells. Plus lots of characters (presumably Korean) that I totally don't understand. My name is on the cover too--in translation. I wish I could write it here but none of the symbols are to be found on my computer keyboard, although the first one looks like a backwards capitalized "E" and another looks like a "4". This whole experience has made me…
cmooney | May 15, 2006I'm going to be in New York next monday for what looks like a great panel on "intelligent design":
"Intelligent Design" under the Microscope
An evening of presentations on the controversial movement. What is the history of the movement? What are its scientific claims? What impact will it have on our schools? Hear speakers from the fields of science, journalism, theology, and law. Co-organized by Science & the Arts and the Center for Inquiry. Supported in part by the Albert and Lin Bildner Foundation. Monday, May 22, 5-9pm Free
This will be taking place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 356…
cmooney | May 14, 2006While I was out in San Diego last month, I got to do a lengthy interview with science historian Naomi Oreskes for UCSD-TV. UCSD-TV also filmed a keynote speech I did for Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties. The latter hasn't aired yet, but the former is now available online and you can watch it here using RealPlayer. I thought it was a really good, high level discussion. Oreskes had me respond to some criticisms from people like Daniel Sarewitz and the sociology of science crowd, as well as setting the issue of use and misuse of science in its full historical context. I…
cmooney | May 11, 2006Well, there's nothing like a little controversy to make a conference well attended...and now it appears that all of the back and forth on this blog about the upcoming Skeptics Society conference has indeed triggered such a "controversy." John Rennie over at SciAm Observations has done an entire post about it, complete with his take on the matter and a response to the criticisms that you folks have made from Michael Shermer. I encourage you to check it all out. At some point I plan to say a bit more myself; for now, I will only say that I'm attending, debating, and am sure it will be a great…
cmooney | May 8, 2006Well, my last post triggered a lot of comments that raised some very serious issues about science, skepticism, and the upcoming Skeptics Society conference. Some fair points were made (about whether "skeptics" ought to be embracing Michael Crichton), others less fair (slamming Ronald Bailey, who I respect, and who has come around on global warming to a significant extent). I'm in New York at the moment speaking to a class at Columbia, but once I get back and settle down, I just wanted to let you all know that I plan on getting into all of this further....
cmooney | May 5, 2006I'm locking horns with Reason's Ronald Bailey early next month at the following conference put on by Michael Shermer's Skeptics Society:
Why are we still debating climate change? How soon will we hit peak oil supply? When politics mix with science, what is being brewed? Join speakers from the left & the right, from the lab & the field, from industry & advocacy, as we air the ongoing debate about whether human activity is actually changing the climate of the planet.
Bailey and I are debating, for an hour, the question of "Distorting Science: Who's Worse, The Left or the Right?" I…
cmooney | May 4, 2006I spent a fair amount of time last week talking to Iris Kuo, author of this Knight-Ridder story about the meaning of the phrase "sound science." I urged Kuo to check out my book--which contains one of the most extensive analyses of the "sound science" movement that I'm aware of--so that she could actually see that the term has a specific meaning on the political right, and that there are specific "sound science" policies that have been endorsed by conservatives that clearly seek to raise the scientific burden of proof before regulatory action can be achieved.
Oh well. Instead, the frame of…
cmooney | May 3, 2006For many, it might seem as though all the recent attention to hurricanes and global warming is something new. On the contrary, this topic has been with us for a long time. And debates in the past have sounded surprisingly like debates today.
For instance, I just read a 1999 Time magazine story by J. Madeleine Nash, published in the wake of Hurricane Floyd on September 27, 1999. It was entitled "Wait Till Next Time; If a little heated water in the Atlantic can create Floyd, what storms will global warming bring?" The piece quoted MIT's Kerry Emanuel discussing how hurricanes could grow…