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The vaccine problem: are we doing it wrong?

Author Chris Mooney has a provocative piece up at the Washington Post today. He argues that scientists are misunderstanding the dynamics of science-policy debates. Because, he argues, ideology often trumps scientific fact in the minds of the public, we (scientists) need to work harder to engage the public to win their hearts before we win their minds (please forgive me, Chris, if I didn't get this quite spot on). While I appreciate Chris's general point---that we can't just "fact" people into submission---I think some of his arguments beg for a more critical analysis. Point one,…

The Cleveland Clinic Foundation: Mixing cow pie with apple pie in pediatrics

Thanks to a winter storm that dumped a heapin' helpin' of heavy wet snow on us last night, we lost power before this post even got going. However, I did have a bit of time this morning to finish it up as a quickie (by my standards) before my laptop battery indicator started expressing its displeasure. Since it's a topic that doesn't really necessitate a long post anyway, it's a perfect fit for today, and I'll just put off what I was going to write about today until tomorrow. Or the day after if nothing else comes up between now and then that interests me more. You see, the power company is…

Leaving on a jet plane: CSICon and quackademic medicine, plus random blather

Instead of the usual logorrheic (usually) well-thought out Insolence you've come to expect every day, Instead, you'll hvae an announcement and a couple of random thoughts. The reasons are multiple. First, today's a travel day. I'm heading off to Nashville to attend and speak at CSICon. My topic? What do you think it will be? Why, quackademic medicine, of course! (What else would it be?) Not only will I get to share the stage with old friends and blogging collaborators, but with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education! Yes, as part of the overall discussion of the problem of…

I'm sure Ken Ham is sincere in his faith…

…and that's exactly why he is a slimy ass-pimple, a child-abusing freak. Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies. "Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?" 2300 children. 2300 young minds poisoned. Nothing new…

A well-deserved honor is bestowed

Congratulations are in order. Earlier this week, someone whom I admire has received a well-deserved honor: The IOM announced the names of 65 new members and five foreign associates today in conjunction with its 41st annual meeting. Election to the IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. "It is a great pleasure to welcome these distinguished and accomplished individuals to the Institute of Medicine," said IOM President Harvey V. Fineberg…

Zidane's Interview

This will be my last entry on this topic (i.e. the World Cup) ... c'est fini après ça. Here is Zidane's interview: For all those of you that don't understand le français, I'll translate a couple of things ... He was first asked if there was bad blood between the two teams, any insults being thrown about. Zidane says that there wasn't anything too bad, there's always a lot of tension but nothing that doesn't usually go on in a big game. He never had any problems with anyone of the Italian players, not even Materazzi. Then they switch to the incident, Zidane says, that nothing had happened…

Bittersweet End to the World Cup

How can I say this? I'm happy for Gli Azzurri, but life isn't perfect. The day started off superbly. Having won a bet on the Italy-German semifinal, we had an incredible brunch on Veit's roof deck in Beacon Hill. (Thanks Veit, we need to have more bets!) On the menu: smoke salmon, croissants, eggs, waffles, champagne and many other goodies. The plan: head down to City Hall Plaza to watch the game. It was the beginning of a bittersweet day. (many more comments and pics below the fold) The World Cup in Boston. Bitter: I'm burnt to a crisp. Sweet: Watching the game in City Hall Plaza with…

Analysis of the US Performance in the World Cup

Wow, what a tournament. A day after the US loss and I'm flabbergasted by the attention that the US team is getting. Soccer mania is spreading in the US, and I'm happy for it. It might be that unlike other areas (the Olympics, military might, world economic supremacy) soccer is hard. It's the happenin' party that the American public wants to attend, but just can't get invited to. It's that itch that is just a little too far to scratch. This is the sensation that turns bystanders into soccer nuts. So the US lost. Unlike most commentators (especially ESPN - get rid of those jerks and get real…

Will Smith must be stopped

He has a new movie coming out this summer, After Earth. It looks awful, but then, that's what I've come to expect from Will Smith's Sci-Fi outings. Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because usually what you find is that the story is a concoction by committee with an agenda solely to recoup the costs and make lots of money…so we get buzzwords and nods to high-minded causes and the usual action-adventure pap. Just looking at the trailer, I'm getting pissed off: it's supposed to be a…

It's another exam day!

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ I've been terrible about updating everyone about my class the last few weeks — we're coming up on the end of the semester, so I've been going a little bit mad. We've been focusing on vertebrate development lately, and right now we've got a few dozen fertilized chicken eggs…

Sea turtle advocates appeal to the Vatican

Did you ever want to write a letter to the Pope, but you didn't know what to say? Well, here's your chance to write that letter. Sea turtle advocates did all the work for you, and they vastly improved your only likely chance of an audience. Your voice will be one of thousands calling upon His Excellency to stop the slaughter of our oceangoing innocents during the Lenten season. The Baja California Sur environmental group ProPeninsula is engaged in a letter writing campaign to His Excellency Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican asking him to remind Catholics everywhere that sea turtles are not…

Japanese Villagers Eat Mercury-Laden Dolphin Meat

CNN.com reports this morning on "Fried dolphin on menu in japanese town". I do not want to bear on the ethical issues of harvesting dolphins. Every culture has their animals they eat that other cultures are disgusted by, as stated in the article: "Locals know they offend Western sensibilities by eating dolphins, but they say it's a tradition hundreds of years old. And they say outsiders have no more right to tell them to stop eating dolphins than they would have to demand that Westerners stop slaughtering chickens or cows." In Sweden, some villages eat horse. In the U.S. we eat all sorts of…

Science, the Science Advisor, and Ethics

Dr. John Marburger, the current Presidential Science Advisor, has a little question-and-answer piece over at Newsweek. Nick Anthis has some comments on the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of the article over at The Scientific Activist. On the whole, I agree with Nick, but there is one point that Marburger made that I think deserves a bit more attention. In the article, when asked about stem cell research, Marburger says: Objections to embryonic stem-cell research are rooted in ethical principles and the idea of compromising these is repugnant to many U.S. citizens. Science alone cannot…

Curious George

My seventeen year old daughter is keenly interested in politics and political figures so I wasn't surprised that she wanted to see Oliver Stone's biopic W. We saw it on Friday night in an almost full theater. In a nutshell, the movie was entertaining in a squirm-in-your-seat fashion. Josh Brolin (l) [No Country for Old Men] starred as the Lame Duck (r). Although not a doppelganger, Brolin nailed Bushie's mannerisms and speech patterns perfectly. Interestingly, Christian Bale was originally cast in the role, but dropped out for various reasons. As I reminded Spawn the Yonger, this is an…

Another Lactivist-Scientist-Mom Here - It's Not Just Facebook.

Speaking as a mother who breastfed both of my kids and was a card-carrying member of LaLeche League (an uneasy relationship since I worked outside the home but valuable all the same for many other reasons), I figured I'd weigh in on this, but not from the Facebook angle. There are plenty of other offerings among my SciBlings on the Facebook debacle, and I am sure you can find them via the main page so I am not linking them here. I can't say I am surprised at FB's reactionary response to the photos of the mother in question. Breastfeeding is ridiculously sexualized in the US. So here I…

35 Years Later and Still Sweaty

I decided to do something a little different the other day. This doesn't seem to have much to do with science per se, but eventually perhaps it will. Just how sensitive are a musician's "hands" to their instrument? For over two decades I have been playing electronic drums, designing my own in the pre-MIDI days, and currently playing a system based on a Roland TD-20 MIDI module. For many years prior I played acoustic drums. As I am not an economy size human, being a giant only in the land of dwarves and peoples of a similarly diminutive proportion who might look upon my 5'10" 142 pound frame…

An Explanatory Note

I have put in (literally) decades of work acting on the assumption that folks are reasonable and well-intentioned, and trying to be effective and get messages across. Part of that time I was even paid to do so. IRL, for the most part, I try to interact with people like that. However, I'm sick to puking of seeing so much shit go down for so long and seeing so little change and seeing progress for women in engineering shudder and stall and hearing over and over and over and over again "we just have to wait for the old guard to die off and for spots to open up and for women to work their way up…

Let Me Mansplain That Sports Illustrated Cover For You, Little Lady!

Lindsey Vonn is on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Womentalksports.com notes Vonn is first a GREAT athlete, but she also represents norm of feminine attractiveness. The combination of athleticism and attractiveness make Vonn the likely poster girl of the US Olympic Team, and the media hasn't disappointed in constructed her as such. Not to be left out, Sports Illustrated is featuring Vonn on their February 8,2010 cover (pictured here). For those of you who follow SI Covers, know that female athletes are RARELY featured on the cover. Over the last 60 years researchers have shown that about 4…

Prior restraint

The Pitch Weekly reports a clearly unconstitutional judicial order. Having obtained a document which apparently showed how the Kansas City Kansas Board of Public Utilities may have violated clean air laws, the Pitch and the Kansas City Star each ran stories about the potential fines that the Board could be accountable for, according to its own attorneys. When the articles were published, the BPU sued, and astoundingly, a judge ordered the articles to be spiked. Not only that: Moorhouse … barred the papers from publishing information contained in the confidential document, copying it or “…

IPCC Summary for Policymakers released

Key findings: The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m-2 In addition: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level. As predicted, human actions have "more likely than…

More SOTU previews

I reviewed the energy proposals from tonight's address, so I may as well offer quick takes on the rest of it. He breaks it down into eight categories: energy, health care, education, immigration, HIV/AIDS, malaria, defense, and spending reforms. The health insurance portion will be the most discussed, and is also the least interesting. The plan for health care is to reduce taxes on people who already have health insurance. It also offers some unspecified benefits to support states that offer insurance to their citizens. The plan does not itself extend insurance to anyone who doesn't…

Someday...

As I sat on the beach reading Ann Gibbons' The First Human this morning, I couldn't help think of the summer that could have been. For months I had a professor and some friends tell me "You really need to come out to Kenya" (specifically the Koobi Fora Field School). I attempted to stay positive, trying to figure out some way to put together the money to go, but as the spring semester got underway it soon became clear that I was not going to make it to Africa. Being that I did not have the money or opportunity to go to Kenya I thought that I would try to start up my own research project…

Do these books make any difference?

Those of you who stopped by this blog on Friday afternoon might have quickly glimpsed a post that is now missing. There's a good reason for that. I had noticed that in May at least three books about theistic evolution/the "theology of evolution" were released (Creation and Evolution: A Conference With Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo, The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal, and Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution) and I made a few snarky comments about them. Being that I haven't read any of them I didn't…

John Scopes and textbook cardboard

I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e. Richard Owen was a creationist, Cuvier rejected uniformitarianism, Huxley debated Wilberforce at Oxford), and a recently published paper in PLoS follows this trend in invoking the example of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial." The paper (Berkman et al. 2008) produces a picture of John Scopes, the…

Writing goals for 2008

I haven't yet been up to write personal responses to everyone who e-mailed me yesterday, but I deeply appreciate the support many of you provided. I'm feeling a bit better now that I can at least see a glimmer of light at the end of the undergraduate tunnel, and I most certainly keep on writing no matter what I do. On that general topic, I wanted to set out a few goals for myself. Right now what I'm going to be doing this summer is up in the air, and writing for a few hours a day might end up becoming my "job." Even if it doesn't, I definitely want to outdo myself in 2008 and make the most of…

Reconstructing "the Chambered Saurian"

Camarasaurus is an unappreciated sauropod. It wasn't the heaviest or longest of the earth-shaking dinosaurs, but the blunted skull and large teeth of the Jurassic sauropod indicate that it had a different lifestyle than the more famous Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. In 1920, paleontologists at the AMNH created a skeletal and muscular reconstruction of the dinosaur, Camarasaurus being proportionally bulkier for its size than other sauropods then known. The reconstruction of a model of Camarasaurus had another purpose, as well. In 1908 Oliver Hay published a paper advocating a sprawling, crocodile…

Is anyone going to read this book?

There's Icons and Evolution, and then there's Icons of Evolution. The first one I (unfortunately) became acquainted with shortly after my interest in evolution was sparked and the second was just released this past December (although I knew nothing about it until Greg mentioned it), but I doubt that the newer book is going to have any lasting effect. Outside of it seeming like a collection of more technical essays, the sticker price on the 2-volume set is $175.00 (the cheapest copy on amazon.com being $145.00), and I know I wouldn't pay that much money for a book that contains information…

Oekologie! #10

Welcome to the 10th edition of Oekologie, the best of what the blogosphere has to offer when it comes to the eponymous area of natural science. This edition is particularly special, however, in that it falls on Blog Action Day, so be sure to visit the event's main page to peruse the best of today's environmentally-focused posts. Agriculture Diversity is not only important to natural ecosystems, but it can be invaluable to agriculture as well. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog fills us in on why it's better to encourage variety when you're growing rice. If you're interested in organic growing…

Videos and traditional lecture

I see that Doug at Nanoscale Views has fond memories of the hit show The Mechanical Universe. If you have never seen this show, it is quite excellent (even if old). Perhaps the best thing about The Mechanical Universe is that it might be the best that traditional lecturing can provide. Oh, I know it isn't quite the same. Students can't ask questions while watching a video. But the main point is that if you want to go with some type of traditional lecture style format for a class, you would be hard pressed to do better than this. Or maybe something similar - there are other good video…

Right Hand Rule: Don't hurt yourself

It is that part of the semester where the Right Hand Rule (RHR) comes out. Really, the best part is the students taking the tests. They make all these funny motions with their hands. That makes tests more entertaining (for me) than they usually are. What is the RHR? Suppose I have two numbers. Maybe these two numbers are the length and width of a piece of paper. Now suppose I need to multiply length times width to get the area (A = L x W). Simple - right? But that is multiplication for scalar variables. How do you multiply vectors? There are two common operations you can do with…

Experimental Rope Logarithms

Sue from Math Mama Writes... sent me an email about wrapping a rope around a pole. In that post, Sue thinks about rope looped around a post. When you wrap a rope around a post, the friction between the rope and the post can help you hold something (like a horse) that is much stronger than you. The first case she thinks about is using several posts. What if you wrap a rope around one post and pull? What if you use 2, or three posts? The idea is that if one posts 'multiplies' the force by 10, two posts would have an effect of multiplying by 100 and so forth. That seems reasonable. The…

Electric eel at the aquarium

We went to the aquarium, the kids like it. In the Amazon river section, they have an electric eel. Here is the sign next to the Eel. Sorry for the poor image quality. I took the picture with my crappy phone and didn't even realize it was bad until later. I used some magic on it to make parts of it readable, but if that was not good enough, here is what it says: The Electric Eel is the most powerful of all the electric fishes. It can discharge up to 650 volts: six times the power of a household current. A shock can fend off attackers or stun prey so the eel doesn't risk getting hurt in…

Labs to not do - mechanical equivalent of heat

Note to self: don't do the mechanical equivalent of heat lab again. It doesn't really work that well and there are better labs to do. So, what is the mechanical equivalent of heat lab? It is actually a pretty cool idea. Take and object and drop it. What happens to the kinetic energy the object had right before it hit the ground? Most of it goes into thermal energy of the object and surroundings. In this lab, the students measure the change in gravitational potential energy for a falling object (where object is really lead shot or something) and then measure the change in temperature in…

Temperature - weirder than you think

Temperature is a pretty weird thing if you think about it. How do you best define temperature? Let me go ahead and give you my favorite definition: Temperature is the thing that two objects have in common when they have been in contact for a long time. Yes, that is a good definition. Maybe now you can see why temperature is weird. Doesn't it have something to do with energy? Well, something - yes. Let me take an example. Suppose pour some hot coffee into a paper cup (I use paper because styrofoam(TM) is trademarked). Further suppose that this is super hot coffee from McDonald's. Can…

That's rich!: Less than 1/1000 are rich, according to McCain

When they were asked how much you have to earn to be rich, the presidential candidates differed wildly: Obama didn't hesitate. "I would argue that if you are making more than $250,000, then you are in the top 3, 4 percent of this country," he said. "You are doing well." McCain took a far more discursive approach to answering the question but ultimately settled on a dramatically higher figure: "I think if you're just talking about income, how about $5 million?" The Arizona Republican quickly added that he was "sure that comment will be distorted," and his campaign said Sunday that he was…

Prideful Ignorance

Barack Obama defends himself from Republican stupidity: Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant. The back story. Obama rolled out a comprehensive energy plan. It's smart, and it'll work (which is more than can be said for anything John McCain has said, even when he contradicts himself). At the end of the speech – a speech in which he proposed increasing fuel economy…

Political effectiveness

Kevin Drum evaluates the Democratic frontrunners on their ability to move an agenda through Congress: Congress is a different kettle of fish [than the public, which he allows Obama could probably swing to his side], and obviously a lot depends on just what kind of majority the new president has to work with. I think everyone's assumption here is that Obama's personal charm and readiness to listen would help him hive off at least a few moderate Republicans to pass his legislative agenda. Hillary, by contrast, is someone who knows how to throw elbows when she needs to, and she'd play a tougher…

Fixing Ourselves

Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at least not yet. The brain is an exquisitely complicated machine, and every beneficial effect seems to inspire numerous side-effects. (Our neurons also have a labyrinth of redundant pathways, which makes it treat any particular bit of errant cellular activity.) It's a little depressing how many of our most effective drugs owe nothing to the…

The Psychology of Subprime Mortgages

The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin. By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can't afford the higher interest rates that will hit later on. It's not unusual for interest payments on a 2/28 loan to double…

Bush is a Hedgehog

President Bush has recently taken up reading. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing, if only because I found his anti-intellectualism and lack of curiousity deeply troubling. The bad news is that we know what books Bush has actually been reading. I think the man has a serious case of confirmation bias. Bush was recently caught reading A History of the English Peoples Since 1900, by the conservative British historian Andrew Roberts: With this book, Andrew Roberts takes his place as the fawning court historian of the Bush administration. He claims this role not just by singing the Bush…

Neuroscience and Science Writing

In response to a recent post on spindle cells in which I referred to that neuronal cell type as a transmitter of social emotions, I received a very astute comment: This doesn't as a statement make any sense "their antenna-like cell body is able to convey our social emotions across the entire brain". Neurons fire action potentials and the best they can conduct is patterns of firing or epsps/ipsps. They can't convey something as complex as 'social emotions'! That sounds like very sloppy thinking, even if they conduct something, some pattern, some information, to other brain regions its not '…

Selective Abortion and Homosexuality

Last week, gay-rights activists led a protest against research being done on sheep at Oregon State University. Andrew Sullivan reports: The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can get them to be interested in the opposite sex. The indifference of many rams to otherwise attractive and fertile ewes is a drag on sheep-breeding, it seems. We don't have any peer-reviewed studies yet, but reports of success in manipulating the sexual behaviour of some rams have led to an outcry. Sullivan is worried that this research will lead parents to…

Christmas tree lights - surprisingly cool

Let me start off by saying I think I first read about this on HowStuffWorks.com (many years ago). So, why are christmas lights so cool? They are cool because they are a whole bunch of lights in series, but they still work if one of the bulbs gets burnt out. If you are not familiar with circuits, a series circuit is one in which all of the current goes through all of the items in that circuit (as compared to the case where the current gets split up). Here is an example of a series circuit with two bulbs. In this case, the current comes out of the battery, goes through one filament and…

Personal Narratives

It sounds like President Obama and his communications staff are getting to know the research of Paul Slovic: After weeks of making his case for the legislation in broad strokes -- including two similar rallies last week in Philadelphia and St. Charles, Mo. -- Mr. Obama used Monday's appearance to pivot to the personal, as he recounted the story of the cleaning woman, Natoma Canfield -- a health care drama that could not have been better scripted for his purposes if he had written it himself. Ms. Canfield, of nearby Medina, wrote Mr. Obama at the end of December to say that she had been…

Sarcasm

Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can't simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social context. For example, if it's a beautiful day outside - the sun is shining, etc - and somebody states "What a nice day!," there is no sarcasm; the sentence makes perfect sense. However, if the same statement is uttered on a rainy day, then there is a clear contradiction, which leads to an interpretation of sarcasm. (We typically exaggerate the expression…

Social Determinism

In my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks: By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.) A…

Creativity

I've got a short column for the Seed website on the neuroscience of improvisation. I begin with one of my favorite stories of improv, which is Al Kooper's organ playing during the studio sessions for "Like A Rolling Stone": Al Kooper didn't know what to play. He'd told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan's recording sessionâ--âthe musicians were working on some song tentatively titled "Like A Rolling Stone"â--âand Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one problem: Kooper didn't play the organ. He was a guitarist. The first takes were predictably terribleâ--âKooper was…

Even More Voodoo

Over at Mind Matters, I recently interviewed Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA. The previous week I asked Ed Vul, lead author of the "Voodoo Correlations" paper a few questions, and I wanted to make sure I gave some of the scientists he criticized a chance to rebut the accusations. (Here's some excellent background reading on the Voodoo controversy.) I think Lieberman makes some excellent points: The argument that Vul and colleagues put forward in their paper is that correlations observed in social neuroscience papers are impossibly high. There's a metric (the product of the…

Evolution, the Muslim world & religious beliefs

In the post below I pointed to an article which claimed: It's hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world's Muslim countries, but it's definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier life forms. Turkey, the only Muslim country in the survey, showed the lowest levels of support - barely a quarter of Turks said they agreed. By comparison, at least 80 percent of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark,…

Did EPA v. Mass. make things worse?

Matt Nisbet thinks the Supreme Court made things worse: Despite the ever growing scientific consensus about the nature and urgency of global warming, Americans remain more divided politically on the matter than at anytime in history. And the Supreme Court just made matters worse. I'm not exactly sure why he thinks that. Yes, a 5-4 decision, with the dissent emphasizing uncertainty, illustrates existing divisions. That doesn't make things better, and I certainly don't plan to "herald [this] as a major event in shaping public perceptions." The Court tends to be a fairly accurate barometer of…