cmooney | February 3, 2006Everyone is buzzing with the news that John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, has been elected the new majority leader in the House. So far, though, I have not seen any journalist ferret out this 2002 letter to the Ohio Board of Education (reported on here in the Post), in which Boehner teamed up with another Ohio Republican (Steve Chabot) to push an attack on evolution.
The Boehner-Chabot letter interprets the controversial Santorum Amendment as indicating the following: "Public school students are entitled to learn that there are differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution…
cmooney | February 3, 2006Once again, folks, I'll be doing an online chat at WashingtonPost.com today--in about two hours, or at 11 am ET--and I would love to hear your questions. I'll answer as many as possible. Blogging will resume here after I'm done posting over there....
cmooney | February 2, 2006One response I got from readers of The Republican War on Science was that the book depressed and outraged them, but provided little release, and didn't devote adequate energy to proposing positive solutions to the problems I had identified. I fully understand where this reaction is coming from, and began trying to address it in my column in the latest issue of Seed, available here.
There are many things that can be done to address the problem of science politicization and abuse, but certainly part of the burden falls on scientists themselves. They must work much harder to communicate their…
cmooney | February 1, 2006A while back I did a public debate with Ron Bailey of Reason and Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute, sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation. Well, Reason magazine has just put audio and video of the event online. Check it out here.
And another update: I'm doing a WashingtonPost.com "Live Online" discussion about The Republican War on Science this Friday at 11 pm ET. Here's the webpage. I hope many of you will tune in, and, hopefully, pose interesting questions.
cmooney | February 1, 2006Sounds like fun, no? Yesterday in the Times, Cornelia Dean reported on a science policy meeting for members of Congress:
More than 100 committee staff members, Congressional aides and at least one senator, Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, crammed into a basement meeting room. With all of the seats filled, people leaned on walls, sat on the floor and spilled out into the hall.
I'm glad members of Congress are getting cramped together to think about how they ought to structure their science advice, even if the necessary revival of the Office of Technology Assessment still seems quite far…
cmooney | January 31, 2006Sure enough, Bush did the "science" thing last night. I've already preemptively explained why he's not a credible messenger on this topic; so has DarkSyde (and I'm sure many others on the blogs). Still, let's parse the president's message a bit more:
First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America's most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology and supercomputing and alternative energy sources. Second, I propose to make…
cmooney | January 31, 2006A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the "science" president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who "last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is 'on a losing path' in the global…
cmooney | January 30, 2006House Science Committee chair Sherry Boehlert--who has countered attacks on science before--isn't going to stand for the current games at NASA that are being played to restrict scientists from speaking. In a letter to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, Boehlert writes the following:
It ought to go without saying that government scientists must be free to describe their scientific conclusions and the implications of those conclusions to their fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public. Any effort to censor federal scientists biases public discussions of scientific issues,…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Call me crazy, but I've agreed to appear at 1 pm ET, for half an hour, on the Bob Dutko Show. Here is how it's described on the show's website:
In addition to interviews, the show offers up a steady stream of faith building information and apologetics. In addition to faith in Jesus Christ, Bob often presents evidence showing that belief in the Bible, Jesus, His death and resurrection can be backed up historically, logically and intellectually. All other religious beliefs crumble under scrutiny, yet Christianity stands firm with Jesus Christ alone as the one and only true means by which we…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Juliet Eilperin, too, had a front page story in the Post yesterday about global warming. Alas, it wasn't as juicy as the Times piece about James Hansen (though it included a bit about him). It was mainly about the future risk of dangerous or abrupt climate change, but I found myself puzzled by the story framing introduced in the very first paragraph:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
Isn't Eilperin…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Well, folks, Andy Revkin has done it again. Previously I have written about how Revkin has basically broken every major story about abuses of climate science, and climate scientists, by the Bush administration. And I must say, it's quite a litany of abuses. That's why I'm glad that so many bloggers (here, here, and here) have realized that Revkin's latest story provides yet another point of evidence of the "Republican War on Science."
The meme is spreading, my friends.
In any case, the latest news reported by Revkin--about more attempts to silence NASA climate expert Jim Hansen--reveals an…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Almost a year ago the Washington Post, following on my own work in Mother Jones, reported on Fox News "junk science" columnist Steven Milloy's ties to ExxonMobil. The piece was by Howard Kurtz, and it included a reaction from Milloy:
Milloy says Mother Jones has taken "old information and sloppily tried to insinuate that ExxonMobil has a say in what I write in my Fox column, which is entirely false. . . . My columns are based on what I believe and no one pays me to believe anything." Despite a mainstream scientific consensus, Milloy says that "the hysteria about global warming is entirely…
cmooney | January 29, 2006Media Matters has the latest on dubious statements about science by the editorial page of this seemingly august paper. It seems that two ed page folks have claimed that new findings about methane emissions from trees somehow undercut the case for concern about human caused global warming.
This is a ridiculous position: No matter what's going on with methane, we're still pumping oodles of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's not changing fast, and CO2 is the greenhouse gas that everyone is most worried about (not to say that the others don't matter). So this commentary from the Journal editors,…
cmooney | January 29, 2006There has been a ton of news lately on the climate change front. This is just to let all of you know that I have been assimilating it all, and will be blogging furiously about it tomorrow. I'm devoting the whole day--heck, perhaps the whole week--to this subject. Standby....
cmooney | January 27, 2006Folks, I've been traveling, and while I thought I would be able to blog more on this trip (to Berkeley, CA), it hasn't happened due to technical difficulties and general fatigue. That's too bad, because there's a lot that I want to be writing about. But I'm afraid that I'm not going to be back at it until Monday....
cmooney | January 26, 2006Allegedly the British populace is not nearly so pro-evolution as one might assume. That's the finding of a survey just released in connection with a BBC special, but I'm a bit skeptical of the results in at least one respect.
The survey asked over 2000 participants what best described their view of the origin and development of life, whereupon 22 percent chose creationism, 17 percent chose intelligent design, and 48 percent chose evolution. (The rest were, as usual, clueless.) Now, I suspect that perceptive readers of this blog will have already noticed the problem with this data. That's…
cmooney | January 26, 2006It has been widely noted that U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, who's in electoral trouble in 2006, has been distancing himself from his old buddies in the ID movement. Santorum has flip flopped on the closely linked questions of whether ID counts as science and whether it should be taught in public school classes, and he's backed away from the Dover case (which was set in his home state). But Santorum isn't going to get off that easy.
The senator's close ties to the ID movement remain, and they're fully in evidence at this link. It goes to the Amazon.com page for a forthcoming book celebrating the…
cmooney | January 25, 2006This post isn't about science, but it is about something close to my heart. For a long time, I've been outraged over the eternally-unresolved status of U.S. territorial possessions like Puerto Rico and Guam, and over the disenfranchisement of Americans right here in Washington, D.C., who aren't allowed to have voting representation in Congress.
Now, a cool website is using the Olympics to publicize D.C.'s status plight. The argument is that if DC isn't granted statehood, then like the other U.S. territories (read "colonies"), it ought to be allowed to have its own Olympic team. In essence,…
cmooney | January 25, 2006Just imagine the uproar we would hear if every time a Jew was featured in a Hollywood film or mini-series, he or she converted to Christianity by the end. Such a situation would be intolerable and widely denounced, and rightly so. Yet Hollywood does precisely the same thing to another minority group--atheists and agnostics--and nobody even makes the slightest fuss about it.
It happens again and again: In supernatural thriller after supernatural thriller, an atheist/agnostic character is gradually brought around to a belief in forces beyond. In a UFO flicks, former "skeptics" repeatedly…
cmooney | January 24, 2006There's an article up at OpenDemocracy.net that's attempting to be contrary and counterintuitive about the Bush administration's "war on science." I must say, I found it fairly feeble.
The author's first maneuver is to significantly understate the causes of concern. Thus, the vast scope of science abuses by the administration are culled down to two narrow categories, and some of the most prominent issues (like evolution and stem cells, where the president himself, rather than some sub-lackey, has made scientifically indefensible statements) are ignored entirely.
Once this feat is…