cmooney | March 6, 2006Last week, in a post that got a fair amount of attention, I observed that we may well have a global warming case heading towards the Supreme Court. In the comments thread, the issue then quickly arose: Is that a good thing? Is it something that we ought to be drawing attention to? Could drawing attention actually have any impact on the court's decision about whether to take this case?
The first question is perhaps the easiest to tackle. This case (involving the Clean Air Act) has been appealed to the High Court by environmentalists and a collection of state attorneys general. If these…
cmooney | March 6, 2006I haven't read the latest issue of Harper's magazine, but apparently it contains a major article challenging the notion that HIV causes AIDS, as well as discounting the severity of the African AIDS epidemic. This is very troubling, especially since Harper's editor Lewis Lapham has generally been a good defender of science against the Bush administration's abuses. Say it ain't so.....
cmooney | March 4, 2006I've managed to fill up the next three months--and especially April--with a number of speaking engagements, including my first real swing through the Midwest, with talks at Bowling Green (April 5), Michigan State (April 6), and Kalamazoo College (April 7). Meanwhile, there are also some really fun events coming up, like a D.C. "Drinking Liberally" (April 12) and, of course, the Yearly Kos science panel in Vegas (June 9).
Please see here for a complete listing of everything that's been scheduled so far--some 14 events in different parts of the country over the next several months. Meanwhile,…
cmooney | March 4, 2006This is just a post to thank everyone for the many, many great comments on my recent post about Firefly. As you can see, I am doing my part to evangelize for Firefly/Serenity and spread the word to a few more viewers. (My brother will be getting all 5 DVDs as a gift soon.) In this way, we can all help make Fox look just a little bit stupider for canceling the show.
In this respect, I was particularly delighted to see that the Firefly series DVDs have been hovering all week in the top 5 on Amazon, despite the fact that they have been out since late 2003 (!). On Amazon there are also well over…
cmooney | March 3, 2006Last summer, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, two judges on the court paraded their scientific ignorance. As I've previously shown at length, Judge A. Raymond Randolph as well as Judge David Sentelle displayed a considerable lack of understanding of climate science in their opinions (PDF), with Randolph abusing scientific uncertainty and Sentelle ridiculously suggesting, in order to deny standing, that global warming will affect the entire world in the same way.…
cmooney | March 3, 2006From today's Post piece on the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet:
But some scientists remain unconvinced. Oregon state climatologist George Taylor noted that sea ice in some areas of Antarctica is expanding and part of the region is getting colder, despite computer models that would predict otherwise.
"The Antarctic is really a puzzle," said Taylor, who writes for the Web site TSCDaily [sic], which is partly financed by fossil fuel companies that oppose curbs on greenhouse gases linked to climate change. "A lot more research is needed to understand the degree of climate and ice trends in and…
cmooney | March 3, 2006DarkSyde, doing wonders for the scientific blogosphere as always, has an interview today with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book The Swamp, a history of the Everglades. I just picked up a copy and am hoping to start reading it this weekend--it looks fascinating. Hopefully the book will serve as a kind of guide for me when I go to the Everglades this April (figure I'd better catch them while they still exist!). I'll have more to say about it soon, but in the meantime, check out DarkSyde's interview....
cmooney | March 2, 2006Best sci-fi television drama ever, or damn near to it: Firefly. I have a confession to make: I have recently become one of the many obsessive fans of this prematurely-killed Fox series, probably the only unsuccessful television show ever to be reincarnated as a big time movie (the recently released Serenity).
I completely agree with all the other junkies out there that what makes this story so great is the characters and their interactions. It's kind of like Friends set onboard the Millennium Falcon, but with a lot more action thrown in (and much smarter humor).
But what's probably best…
cmooney | March 2, 2006I'm really proud of two of my old high school classmates who still live in New Orleans, Cory Morton and Hal Braden. Not only did they get in Sports Illustrated recently--they did so for a good cause.
Here's the story: These guys are big basketball fans, and have season's tickets to see the New Orleans Hornets play. Only, lately the Hornets haven't been playing in New Orleans because of Katrina. Instead, the team has been playing in Oklahoma City.
So, my two buddies, presumably because they're season tickets holders (and big movers and shakers to boot), got to attend a private cocktail party…
cmooney | March 1, 2006My last post was about whistleblower Susan Wood, and her apparent reluctance to explain why access to Plan B emergency contraception is being held up within the administrative bowels of the Food and Drug Administration. Wood seemed hesitant to offer a political explanation for what is, unmistakably, a political phenomenon.
Now I'd like to move on to a related case: David Baltimore, distinguished scientist, Nobel laureate, and president of CalTech. If Susan Wood seemed to shy away from explaining the root causes of the war on science, Baltimore has offered a causal explanation that, to put it…
cmooney | March 1, 2006FDA whistleblower Susan Wood, with whom I've appeared publicly in the past, has a nice op-ed in the Post today about her former agency's continuing intransigence on the issue of Plan B contraception. I was a tad disappointed, though, by Wood's agnosticism about what's causing the continual delays in approving a safe, effective drug that would actually reduce the number of abortions if made widely available. Wood concludes her piece as follows:
It's been nearly three years since the first application came in to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter, so that women,…
cmooney | March 1, 2006Back when I was first on my learning curve about climate science, I remember always being confused about the date for each report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The official publication date would be in one year, but as soon as you did any background research, you would learn that everyone had been chit-chattering about the report in the media well before the year of official publication.
Now I understand why. Although the IPCC's fourth assessment report isn't supposed to be out until 2007, the British media are already waving around a draft version of it. IPCC drafts are…
cmooney | March 1, 2006Yesterday Tim did a very nice blog post in which he took apart a Michael Fumento column attacking scientific journals. I contributed a smidgeon to the debunking in the comments section. I was very proud of myself.
But little did I know (mainly because I didn't read to the end of Tim's post) that Fumento's rant had been picked up by the influential right wing bloggers at Powerline, who use it to declare that "in recent years, the politicization of science by the left has become a serious problem" (ha!). Powerline then goes on to show that, in fact, the right is the real problem with a sweeping…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without holding anything back, I've tried to be respectful in my criticisms of Bush science adviser John Marburger. He's a well regarded scientist, after all. And I doubt he's responsible for any of the troublesome behavior of the administration.
But Marburger's defenses of the administration are getting more and more indefensible. His latest interview with NPR is a case in point. The interviewer let Marburger off far too easily, but anyone familiar with recent news about politics and science can read between the lines. So, let's parse this interview, based upon a transcript provided by Nexis…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Talk about a perfect combination of topics that are of interest to Science Blogs readers. I just came across this starred review in Publisher's Weekly:
January 30, 2006
Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Little, Brown, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 0-316-83664-8
When Charles Darwin set out on his voyage of discovery aboard the Beagle in 1831, he was a naive naturalist. Upon his return to England five years later, as nature writer Haupt (Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds ) capably demonstrates, he was a…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without a doubt, 2005 was the year that ignited a fierce and lasting debate over the extent to which global warming might be increasing the strength of hurricanes. That's largely thanks to two back-to-back scientific papers, published in the leading journals Nature and in Science, which provided data suggesting that storms have grown considerably stronger over the past several decades:
1. Emanuel, "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years," Nature, Vol 436, August 4, 2005. (PDF)
2. Webster et al, "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a…
cmooney | February 26, 2006I frequently get asked how I plan on following up The Republican War on Science, a book that received a considerable amount of attention (and that will probably continue to do so, since there's still a paperback to look forward to). This is a subject to which I've devoted a lot of thought--probably too much thought. Over the past year I've been hot and cold on a number of different book ideas, investing too much energy in ideas that didn't merit it and feeling unjustifiably fickle about ideas that probably should have turned into books (like, for example, a narrative account of the Dover…
cmooney | February 24, 2006Hey, maybe when they're done with the rather inappropriate Mardi Gras celebration this year, they can gather up all the trash left on the street and use *that* to plug holes in the levees. Or better yet, how about asking all the tourists who come down to spend half a day cleaning up the mess left behind by Katrina, since the city obviously isn't capable of doing it?
I'm from New Orleans, I'm allowed to be this cynical and nasty.
cmooney | February 24, 2006I often get asked my opinion about who's "worse" when it comes to manipulating and undermining scientific information: corporate America, or the Christian right. My usual answer is the Christian right, because its attacks on science are far more sweeping in their implications, and have the potential to undermine the very nature of scientific knowledge itself. Industry, by contrast, doesn't want to change the definition of science to include the supernatural. It merely wants to conveniently attack and undermine certain isolated bits of scientifc information that have big potential economic…
cmooney | February 24, 2006It wasn't much publicized, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently adopted a statement in reaction to the latest allegations of scientific censorship in our government. You can read it here. According to AAAS:
...censorship, intimidation, or other restriction on the freedom of scientists employed or funded by governmental organizations to communicate their unclassified scientific findings and assessments not only to each other but also to policymakers and to the public is inimical to the advance of science and its appropriate application in the policy domain;
BE…