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World Parrot Trust Speaks out Against HR 669

tags: HR669, pets, exotic animals, invasive species, pet animal trade, pet parrots, World Parrot Trust, politics Those of you who are following the situation with HR669, the Nonnative Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act [full text : free PDF] know this resolution survived its initial House subcommittee hearing and will be heard again on an as-yet unnannounced date. Even though I support the stated purpose of this resolution -- preventing invasive nonnative wildlife from being introduced into the United States -- this bill, as written, will not accomplish that goal. I have been communicating with…

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

There are no more excuses. None. The defining characteristic of all arguments with creationists is how damned ignorant they are. I'm sure many scientists have been stupefied into stunned silence when they first encounter these people; these advocated of creationism are typically loud and certain and have invested much time and effort into apologetics, but when you sit down and try to have a serious discussion with them, you quickly discover that their knowledge of basic biology is nonexistent. It's worse than that. We're used to freshmen entering our classes who don't know much about the…

The swine flu prepping controversy

The reaction to our post on Sunday about preparing for the ongoing flu pandemic was mixed. Some thought it was right on target while others expressed dismay over what was perceived as minimizing the possible effects, especially as we have been talking for well over four years about the potentially pervasive nature of widespread absenteeism. Still others thought we had retreated to a narrow view focused on the pressure on the health care system while neglecting what might happen in the wider world. There is some truth to all these perceptions, but we didn't take this tack because we changed…

Quick Update

Just to keep you all updated, we learned yesterday that the children's social worker has decided to separate the children, and place them in three homes. Two will stay with the current foster mother, one with one home, and they are seeking a home for one child and the newborn. Since we will take larger groups than two and there are very few homes that take three or four, we are not candidates to take any of the kids. I admit, I'm relieved not to have to make a decision about taking these kids - it isn't the numbers, so much as the ages - I realized about myself that while I would happily…

Poultry is a Feminist Issue?

First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that. Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices. Hayes pointed out that the original "…

Michael Reiss's big mistake

Should creationism be taught in the classroom? It depends on what you mean by "taught". For instance, I recently lectured our freshman biology majors on the age of the earth. I first made up a list of facts and concepts that I wanted them to take away from the class: there were plain dry facts, like that the earth is 4½ billion years old, the Cambrian was about 500 million years ago, the Permian extinction was about 250 million years ago, etc. — the bony outline of a geological history of the earth that every biologist should know. Then there were the major events in the history of the…

NHTSA, Rollovers and Amnesty for Automakers??

In 1999, the CDC announced its selections for the 10 greatest achievements in U.S. public health history in the 20th century, and among them was improvements in motor vehicle safety.  I've nothing against looking at success over a long term, but we know that much still needs to be done.  The rate of motor vehicle fatalities has indeed declined substantially over the last 100 years, but the rate of deaths and serious injuries in roof-crush and rollovers has actually increased. In 2006, (the most current NHTSA data available), nearly 11,500 people died in rollover crashes, and another 163,…

This day in Crankery, November 16th

So who here has actually read the health care bill?. I've been devoting a bit of time each week to peruse more and more of it, and while there are endless obstacles to a complete understanding of it (including legalese and the annoying tendency of legislation to contain edits to other bills without including the text of the other bills being edited) it is telling that opponents of the bill are having some difficulty coming up with real criticisms of it. For example, the now infamous death panel fiasco was a willful misunderstanding of a completely wholesome concept, the idea that physicians…

Obesity - A new study and what it means to be a "healthy weight"

In response to the conversation on "Obesity, Evolution and Delayed Gratification" on the main page and Razib's coverage of a fascinating new study on the relationship to the lactase gene and obesity, I thought now would be a good time to write about an important new study that helps define the boundaries of what normal and healthy weights are in humans. This study, entitled Body-mass index and cause-specific mortality in 900 000 adults: collaborative analyses of 57 prospective studies is a whopper of a meta-analysis. That is, a study that increases the power of other similar studies by…

A Query about Q fever –Answers to the Questions you should ask

This is the tenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Jean DeNapoli.  I own a small back yard flock of sheep and lambing season is the most exciting and rewarding time of the year.  Nothing is more enjoyable than watching a lamb who takes a few wobbly steps and nurses for the first time as her mother nickers encouragement.  Within a day, the lamb will be playing, bucking, running, and exploring her world. Despite the pastoral wonders of the season, lambing is also inherently stressful.  I must constantly check the barn to monitor for birthing problems and help out when necessary.   This…

Silence is the enemy

"I always think someone is following me and wants to rape me. It is better to die." --Darfuri refugee Sometimes there comes a public health issue that's so big, so overwhelming, so heinous, that you just don't know where to begin discussing it. Nevertheless, the conversation should, and must, happen just the same. Silence may be easier, but speaking out is the only way to demystify the taboos and bring attention to what's going on for those who can't bring attention to it themselves. And maybe, just maybe, bring about some change. It's no secret that rape happens during wartime.…

Election Fraud? Or just bad math?

I've gotten an absolutely unprecedented number of requests to write about RFK Jr's Rolling Stone article about the 2004 election. RFK Jr's article tries to argue that the 2004 election was stolen. It does a wretched, sloppy, irresponsible job of making the argument. The shame of it is that I happen to believe, based on the information that I've seen, that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. But RFK Jr's argument is just plain bad: a classic case of how you can use bad math to support any argument you care to make. As a result, I think that the article does just about the worst thing…

Birds-of-paradise: encountered in passing, on the street

I love seeing tetrapod-themed art, especially in unexpected places. While in London recently I noticed this 'tropical bird' painting on a piece of wooden boarding, erected to conceal building work. As you can see (larger version below), the work is mostly a brilliant montage of birds-of-paradise (properly Paradisaeidae), the remarkable resplendent "rainforest crows in fancy dress"* of New Guinea and its surrounds. * Sherman Suter, 1998. I'd prefer it if it was birds-of-paradise only, but it also features a few parrots (right at the top) and a Great blue turaco Corythaeola cristata too. The…

In which the Conakry Monster carcass leads to a digression on 'tubercle technology'

Yet another 'sea monster carcass' was brought to my attention recently (thanks Paul), and in the interests of tradition and of bringing it to a wider audience I thought I should include it here (I'm very late to the party: Cryptomundo discussed the case when it broke three years ago). Dubbed the 'Conakry Monster', it washed up on the coast of Guinea in May 2007. It was described as being a gigantic crocodile/lizard monster with an armoured back, fur, a long tail and 'four paws'! The blackened surface to the skin led some people to think that it might have been burnt... somehow. The Russian…

Four years of Tet Zoo: to infinity... and beyond!

Readers with good memories will recall both that January 21st 2010 was Tet Zoo's fourth birthday, and that I wrote about 'four years of operation' on that day. I had more to say about the subject in 2009, a year of Tet Zooery. Buuut... then things went downhill, and I had to take that break, and then all that other stuff happened, and - well - I ended up not finishing the 4th birthday series. Purely in the interests of publishing it and getting it out of the way (better late than never), herewith find the last, very belated, instalment in my thoughts on the whole fourth birthday thing [the…

The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org, and it's called [Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++](http://www.greythumb.org/blog/index.php?/archives/152-Programmers-rant-…). It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the sense of needing to be able…

Introducing the Surreal Numbers

Surreal numbers are a beautiful, simple, set-based construction that allows you to create and represent all real numbers, so that they behave properly; *and* in addition, it allows you to create infinitely large and infinitely small values, and have *them* behave and interact in a consistent way with the real numbers in their surreal representation. The surreals were invented by John Horton Conway (yes, *that* John Conway, the same guy who invented the "Life" cellular automaton, and did all that amazing work in game theory). The name for surreal numbers was created by Don Knuth (yes, *that*…

Bad, bad, bad math! AiG and Information Theory

While taking a break from some puzzling debugging, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. Today, I came across a gem called ["Information, science and biology"][gitt], by the all too appropriately named "Werner Gitt". It's yet another attempt by a creationist twit to find some way to use information theory to prove that life must have been created by god. It looks like the Gitt hasn't actually *read* any real information theory, but has rather just read Dembski's wretched…

A Pathological Way to Paint: Gammaplex

Today's a mighty cool example of bizzare language design, called GammaPlex In terms of language design, it's nothing particularly special: it's yet another stack language with a befunge-like graphical syntax. What's unusual about GammaPlex is that it's strongly focused on graphics. It's got built in support for ascii graphics, OpenGL, and mouse input. Gammaplex is by far the most complicated of the pathological languages that I've discussed. It's got a lot of instructions, and a lot of weird tricky little things in how the machine works - and frankly, most of them aren't particularly…

From Surreal Numbers to Games

Today we're going to take our first baby-step into the land of surreal games. A surreal number is a pair of sets {L|R} where every value in L is less than every value in R. If we follow the rules of surreal construction, so that the members of L sets are always strictly less than members of R sets, we end up with a totally ordered field (almost) - it gives us something essentially equivalent to a superset of the real numbers. (The reason for the almost is that technically, the surreals form a class not a set, and a field must be based on a set. But for our purposes, we can treat them as a…

Basics: Mean, Median, and Mode

Statistics is something that surrounds us every day - we're constantly bombarded with statistics, in the form of polls, tests, ratings, etc. Understanding those statistics can be an important thing, but unfortunately, most people have never been taught just what statistics really mean, how they're computed, or how to distinguish the different between statistics used properly, and statistics misused to deceive. The most basic concept in statistics in the idea of an average. An average is a single number which represents the idea of a typical value. There are three different numbers which can…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

There are new articles in PLoS ONE, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Computational Biology today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Does the Clock Make the Poison? Circadian Variation in Response to Pesticides: Circadian clocks govern daily physiological and molecular rhythms, and putative…

Oxytocin and Childbirth. Or not.

When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action potential, the blood clotting cascade, emptying of the urinary bladder, copulation, breastfeeding and childbirth. The last two (and perhaps the last three!) involve the hormone oxytocin. The childbirth, at least in humans, is a canonical example and the standard story goes roughly like this: When…

Lindau Nobel conference - Thursday

Thursday morning was the Biofluorescence morning, with lectures by the three most recent Nobelists who received their prize for the discovery and first uses of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) and its derivatives that glow in other colors. It's hard to think of an animal that is as non-model in the lab as jellyfish and a discovery as important and useful for modern biological research. Unlike PZ who was a diligent liveblogger in the conference hall, I watched all three lectures from the press room, livestreamed on my laptop, while multitasking and generally enjoying the perks of being "…

Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin? - the winner of the synchroblogging contest

Happy Anniversary, PLoS ONE! Today is PLoS ONE's second anniversary and we're celebrating by announcing that the winner of the second PLoS synchroblogging competition is SciCurious of the Neurotopia 2.0 blog. "This fluent post captures the essence of the research and accurately communicates it in a style that resonates with both the scientific and lay community" - Liz Allen, PLoS. Here is the winning entry, cross posted in its entirety: ==================== Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin? I already wrote one entry for PLoS ONE's second birthday, but I'm feeling sparky…

Doing science publicly: Interview with Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude Bradley and I first met at the First Science Blogging Conference where he led a session on Open Science. We then met at SciFoo and later joined forces on a panel at the ASIS&T meeting and finally met again at the second Science Blogging Conference back in January where Jean-Claude co-moderated a session on Making Data Public. Jean-Claude is famous for being the pioneer of the Open Notebook Science movement. He started posting his daily lab activity and results on his blog Useful Chemistry. Soon, he attracted a lot of feedback and subsequently some excellent collaborators…

Oxytocin and Childbirth. Or not.

When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action potential, the blood clotting cascade, emptying of the urinary bladder, copulation, breastfeeding and childbirth. The last two (and perhaps the last three!) involve the hormone oxytocin. The childbirth, at least in humans, is a canonical example and the standard story goes roughly like this: When…

Oxytocin and Childbirth. Or not.

When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include opening of the ion channels during the action potential, the blood clotting cascade, emptying of the urinary bladder, copulation, breastfeeding and childbirth. The last two (and perhaps the last three!) involve the hormone oxytocin. The childbirth, at least in humans, is a canonical example and the standard story goes roughly like this: When the…

Michael Egnor pounds his shoe

"WE WILL BURY YOU!" seems to be his message in his latest complaint. He is very upset that The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting Louisiana, and he informs us all in a long argumentum ad populum that the ignorant outnumber us, addressed to the president and members of SICB. Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don't accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They…

Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America

tags: birding, bird watching, bird field guide, birds, Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America, book review Several new field guides to the birds have been published in the last few months and The Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (NYC: Collins; 2008) by Ted Floyd is one of them. The most obvious distinction that sets this large book apart are the photographs of birds: most field guides rely on paintings instead of photographs. Despite the fact that I prefer paintings to photographs in my field guides, there is plenty in this new field guide to interest…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does…

NRC Rankings: past is prologue

The National Research Council releases its data based ranking of US graduate programs on Tuesday September 28th. NRC website with methodology and FAQ on rankings The rankings are much perused and much abused, by anyone from prospective grads, to axe-wielding provosts. The last rankings were done in 1995, and used the classic "reputational" method. Basically NRC grandees called their old muckers back at the unis and asked them who was any good, starting, please, with Harvard, Princeton and Yale... It worked, though the methodology was somewhat criticized and the results were most definitely…

I get email

It's true — the cracker incident is still dribbling on in my mailbox. The email is down in volume considerably — only a few dozen angry letters a day. I'm still getting a handful of actual letters every day, and those are both comical and pathetic. Usually, they're an announcement of some ceremony that was carried out to rescue me from evil. I've also got lots of pamphlets and even a couple of books about 'eucharistic miracles', which aren't having the effect the senders intend, I'm sure — all they do is demonstrate a greater depth of insanity than I had previously imagined. I've tossed a few…

Evolving spots, again and again

a–c, The wing spots on male flies of the Drosophila genus. Drosophila tristis (a) and D. elegans (b) have wing spots that have arisen during convergent evolution. Drosophila gunungcola (c) instead evolved from a spotted ancestor. d, Males wave their wings to display the spots during elaborate courtship dances. It's all about style. When you're out and about looking for mates, what tends to draw the eye first are general signals—health and vigor, symmetry, absence of blemishes or injuries, that sort of thing—but then we also look for that special something, that je ne sais quoi, that dash of…

Socialized Medicine versus Socialized Business Losses

tags: socialized medicine, uninsured Americans, health care policy, election2008, politics I have a confession to make: I am an American who has no health insurance, and I have been so ever since my postdoctoral funding ended four years ago. But I am not alone: according to the most recently available statistics, somewhere between 45-47 million Americans are living without any sort health care coverage, and every year, more and more working adults and families join the ranks of the uninsured. Shockingly, according to the Urban Institute's estimate, 22,000 Americans actually died in 2006…

Study: Despite health risks tied to industrial food animal production, health departments have little involvement

by Kim Krisberg A couple years ago, two Johns Hopkins University public health researchers attended a public hearing about the possible expansion of an industrial food animal production facility. During the hearing, a community member stood up to say that if the expansion posed any hazards, the health department would surely be there to protect the people and alert them to any dangers. The two researchers knew that due to limited authority and resources, that probably wasn't the case. "We felt like there was this false sense of comfort among the public," said Roni Neff, one of the two…

At California tomato plant, a food-safety measure turns unsafe for workers

by Elizabeth Grossman On Sunday August 21, a cleaning process designed to make tomatoes safe for customers eating marinara sauce, pizza topping, and canned tomatoes resulted in a release of chlorine dioxide gas that sent 43 workers at the Pacific Coast Producers plant in Woodland, California to area hospitals. According to Pacific Coast Producers vice president Mona Shulman, a malfunction of sanitizing equipment caused an "overdosing" of chlorine dioxide, causing the chemical to off-gas to the atmosphere. Chlorine dioxide gas was also drawn into a building through the ventilation system. "The…

Chemical Safety Board's missed opportunity to build public confidence, push reforms

I wasn’t in the room, but watching the webcast I could feel the public’s lingering dissatisfaction and distrust. It was last week's (Sept. 28) public meeting held by the Chemical Safety Board on its investigation into the 10,000 gallons of a toxic soup that poured in January 2014 into the Elk River in Charleston, WV. The river is the water source for residents of the city and surrounding communities. 300,000 residents were affected by the disaster. They did not have safe tap water for drinking, cooking, or bathing. Some still have no confidence that the water is safe to use. Headlines about…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Detroit Free Press, Jennifer Dixon and Kristi Tanner investigate Michigan’s workplace safety and oversight system and talk to the families of victims who say there’s no justice for workers who’ve been injured or killed on the job. During the year-long investigation, the reporters looked into more than 400 workplace deaths across the state, finding “a flawed system of oversight with penalties against employers so low they're not a deterrent.” The article began with the story of Mary Potter, who worked at a group home for people with developmental disabilities. Dixon and Tanner write:…

Donald Rasmussen: Coal miners’ physician, humble man

[Updated below (8/3/15)] The occupational health community, coal miners, their families and labor advocates are mourning the loss of physician Donald Rasmussen, 87. For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic. A lengthy story by John Blankenship in Beckley’s Register-Herald written two years ago profiled Dr. Rasmussen’s career. “ In 1962, a young doctor from Manassa, Colorado, saw a help wanted advertisement in a medical journal needing doctors in…

Answering Krauze on Science and Atheism

Krauze at Telic Thoughts has a post about the recent disagreement between Sandefur and I that was posted partially here and partially at Positive Liberty. First was my post objecting to Daniel Dennett's suggestion that Genie Scott is being less than sincere in arguing that evolution and religion can be compatible. Then Sandefur, an advocate of the incompatibilist position, replied at Positive Liberty. I actually never got round to replying to his post, but I may do a bit here. First, I want to answer Krauze's question as best I can. The disagreements between these two camps are usually…

Jonathan's Wittless Revisionism

DI flak Jonathan Witt is back with yet another criticism of Judge Jones' ruling in Kitzmiller, this one no more compelling than the 13,582,196 criticisms the DI has already offered (many of them contradictory, of course). It's chock full of bad arguments and nutty goodness, so let's get started. In keeping with that trope, Jones suggests that intelligent design is just biblical creationism repackaged after a 1987 Supreme Court decision against biblical creationism.* If Jones had read key briefs submitted to him, he would know that the intelligent design arguments in biology pre-date that…

Poker Lesson: Loose Passive Play

I know I've got some poker players among my readers, and though I rarely post about poker strategy, the game Saturday night and the ridiculously long journey home combined to spark some thinking. And since at least one of the guys I played with Saturday night reads this blog from time to time, I write this at the risk of having him improve his game. There were 6 players in the game (a size that I like, I prefer smaller tables to larger ones) and 2 of us ended up winning with 4 losing significant amounts of money. That wasn't an accident. The other 4 players were what poker strategists…

Science Is A Scary Place to Work

Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in science. As you can guess from the title, the piece is a long rant aimed at getting students not to go to graduate school in science. It's an unremitting tale of anecdotal woe: American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut…

The State of ID Research

How bad have things gotten for the ID side? Completely unable to make good on their promise to generate any ID based research, they have now taken to outright lying about the work done by real scientists. Okay, so maybe they've been doing that for quite some time. Still, William Dembski's latest blog entry strikes me as even more brazen than usual. Dembski writes: Here is an ID research paper published in PNAS. Note that some important principles of evolutionary theory are criticized in the abstract. This research shows how ID is capable of being applied in biology. PNAS refers to the…

Michael Egnor wants to know where altruism is

Michael Egnor, tiresome little lackey of the DI that he is, is asking his readers to help me find out where altruism is located. I'm not going to link back to him—sorry, but I'm afraid it would only encourage him, and I don't want to be an enabler—but I will try to address his flawed question. He wants to know precisely where altruism resides, and he bizarrely illustrates his question with this diagram. That makes the answer easy. Are we done now? Of course not. We must plumb the depths of lunacy … because it is there! Especially since Michael Egnor gives the worst rationalization for…

Weekend Diversion: Against Scientific Racism

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence." -Frederick Douglass I thought we were past this, I really did. Having grown up in New York, having lived in eight different states and traveled to 39 others -- as well as maybe a dozen different countries -- I truly thought there were a few things that were obvious. One of them, of course, is that you've got to give something a shot to know whether you like it or not. Hopefully, no matter who, where, or what you are, you'll enjoy this upbeat song by…

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, Must Read Book

Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming by Michael Mann and Lee Kump is everyperson’s guide to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC issues a periodic set of reports on the state of global climate change, and has been doing so for almost two decades. It is a massive undertaking and few have the time or training to read though and absorb it, yet it is very important that every citizen understands the reports’ implications. Why? Because human caused climate change has emerged as the number one existential issue of the day, and individuals,…

Today's Climate Change Congressional Hearings

This afternoon in Washington DC, Texas Republican Ted Cruz, who does not believe in global warming yet is chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, will convene a hearing called “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” The purpose of the hearing appears to be to reify the false debate of the reality and importance of anthropogenic global warming, and is yet another step in the current McCarthyesque attack on legitimate climate scientists and their research. This is an important moment in…