Solution: blame scientists, add fluff

Mooney and Kirshenbaum continue their campaign with an op-ed in the Boston Globe, which, as we all know, has rigorous standards. Their explanation for scientific illiteracy in America is simple: it's the scientists' fault for being so aloof and distant. Their solution is also simple: philanthropists and universities need to give more money to employ media-savvy scientists. How…nice.

I will say one good thing about their op-ed, though. It contains the full content of their entire book. Read the essay, now you don't need to buy the book, since it covers it fully, including all the non-existent details for how to actually implement their solution.

I must offer a significant criticism, however. They start out by pointing out that most scientists accept the evidence for global warming, while only about half the general public does. Right away, the comments start coming in complaining that AGW is wrong. Don't M&K know they aren't supposed to feed the conflict or stir up controversy or throw out ideas the public will find disagreeable? Where's the civility?

More like this

The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want…
Oh, no. Mooney and Kirshenbaum have written another loopy op-ed. I'm reading it in complete bafflement: what is their argument? What are they trying to do? Because none of it makes sense. It's confusing, right from the beginning, in which they sneer at Richard Dawkins for publishing a new book…
I will try to keep this short, especially since the combined length of all the reviews of Unscientific America probably outstrips the length of the book itself.* I did not particularly like Unscientific America. Running a scant 132 pages, it is a scattershot survey of how scientists (according to…
Mooney is at it again, scrabbling madly to refute my criticisms. It's another ho-hum effort. He claims he did spend some effort criticizing the overt anti-science forces in our country — only it was in his previous book, not this one. No, that doesn't rebut me at all: in a book that purports to be…