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How Global Warming Disrupts Biological Communities - a Chronobiological Perspective

Since this is another one of the recurring themes on my blog, I decided to republish all of my old posts on the topic together under the fold. Since my move here to the new blog, I have continued to write about this, e.g., in the following posts: Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking Hot boiled wine in the middle of the winter is tasty.... Global Warming disrupts the timing of flowers and pollinators Global Warming Remodelling Ecosystems in Alaska ----------------------------------------------- Clocks, Migration and the Effects of Global Warming (December 23, 2005) Circadian…

How Global Warming Disrupts Biological Communities - a Chronobiological Perspective

Since this is another one of the recurring themes on my blog, I decided to republish all of my old posts on the topic together under the fold. Since my move here to the new blog, I have continued to write about this, e.g., in the following posts: Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking Hot boiled wine in the middle of the winter is tasty.... Global Warming disrupts the timing of flowers and pollinators Global Warming Remodelling Ecosystems in Alaska ----------------------------------------------- Clocks, Migration and the Effects of Global Warming (December 23, 2005) Circadian…

How Global Warming Disrupts Biological Communities - a Chronobiological Perspective

Since today is the Blog Action Day and I am swamped at work, I decided to republish one of my old posts concerning the environment (under the fold). ----------------------------------------------- Since this is another one of the recurring themes on my blog, I decided to republish all of my old posts on the topic together under the fold. Since my move here to the new blog, I have continued to write about this, e.g., in the following posts: Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking Hot boiled wine in the middle of the winter is tasty.... Global Warming disrupts the timing of flowers…

School shooting in Finland

There has been another tragic shooting at a school, this time at Jokela secondary school in Tuusula, Finland. It was a single gunman on a rampage, and at least seven people have been killed. We're going to hear much more about this because the murderer claims to have carried out this act in the name of natural selection. Some of the murderer's files are available online (so far; that link may not function for long), and they portray a sick man with a distorted view of evolution that he used to justify his actions. He planned this action. One file is called "Attack Information", and contains…

Science isn't perfect, but it's better than the alternative.

It often comes as a surprise to proponents of alternative medicine and critics of big pharma that I'm a big fan of John Ioannidis. Evidence of this can easily be found right here on this very blog just by entering Ioannidis' name into the search box. Indeed, my first post about an Ioannidis paper is nearly a decade old now. These posts were about one of Ioannidis' most famous papers, this one published in JAMA and entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. It was a study that suggested that at least 1/3 of highly cited clinical trials may either…

Two Americas: Past, Present and Future

This post from November 26, 2004 was my fourth (out of five), and longest, analysis of the 2004 election. With Balkans and Creationism sprinkled in. How did it stand the test of time over the past two years? Oftentimes, an outside observer can see what a native observer cannot. The native is too deeply immersed in one's own culture, takes too much for granted, sees too many things as "normal" ("doesn't everyone do it this way?") that an outsider finds highly idiosyncratic and unusual. I spent the first 25 years of my life in a nicest country. Life was great. I had everything I wanted, and…

Two Americas: Past, Present and Future

This post from November 26, 2004 was my fourth (out of five), and longest, analysis of the 2004 election. With Balkans and Creationism sprinkled in. How did it stand the test of time over the past 3.5 years? Oftentimes, an outside observer can see what a native observer cannot. The native is too deeply immersed in one's own culture, takes too much for granted, sees too many things as "normal" ("doesn't everyone do it this way?") that an outsider finds highly idiosyncratic and unusual. I spent the first 25 years of my life in a nicest country. Life was great. I had everything I wanted, and…

New cancer drugs: Fitter, happier, more productive? Or not?

It's known as "targeted" therapy, and it's the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it's the path towards "personalized medicine" that improves survival with much lower toxicity, in which, instead of using the hammer that is chemotherapy, precisely targets specific molecular abnormalities that drive cancer growth. With the advent of the revolution in genomics that has transformed cancer research over the last decade, including the petabytes of sequence and gene expression data that pour out of universities and research institutes, the promise…

Integrating patient experience into research and clinical medicine: Will this lead to true "personalized medicine"?

I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not a distinction without a difference. If we were practicing pure science, we would theoretically be able to create algorithms and flowcharts telling us how to care for patients with any given condition, and we would never deviate from them. It is true that we do have algorithms and flowcharts…

Antivaccine activists gleefully attack and dox a 12-year-old boy who made a pro-vaccine video

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the antivaccine movement, it’s that its members dislike being criticized. Oh, hell, let’s be honest. The really, really hate criticism and react very, very badly to it. Whereas you or I or other skeptics might react to criticism by trying to address it using facts, science, and reason, the first reaction of many antivaccine loons is to attack, attack, attack. They use a variety of methods to attack. One of their very favorite methods of attack when faced with a pseudonymous blogger is to do everything they can to “out” him or her, revealing name and…

Another Week of GW News, June 28, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News June 28, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Waxman-Markey, MTR Coal Protests, Repression Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, MEF, Sarychev, Carbon Tariffs, 140 Million Year Cycle, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals,…

Cranks of a feather, part 3: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the antivaccine movement team up with the Nation of Islam to attack the CDC

No doubt, regular readers are probably somewhat surprised that I didn't discuss the antivaccine rally scheduled to be held in Atlanta last weekend that I wrote about last week. As you might recall, this rally consisted of two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, namely Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the antivaccine movement together with the Nation of Islam. Given that the Nation of Islam, besides being a truly crank religion on its own, of late has gotten very cozy with the Church of Scientology, thus amplifying the crank factor by orders of magnitude (at least). Readers not familiar with…

Quackery invades another once science-based journal

Surprisingly, I made it through an entire three day weekend without posting anything to the blog. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. It means that I actually worked on my grant that's due at the end of the week. Still, a blogger's gotta blog; so I can't just shut down until the end of the week. So, hwere we go. I've long lamented the creeping infiltration of quackery into medical academia in which modalities once considered quackery, such as acupuncture, reiki, naturopathy, homeopathy, and various other dubious treatments, have found their way into what should be bastions of science-…

Damore's Pseudoscientific Google manifesto is a better evidence for sexism than it is for intellectual sex differences

Pseudoscience is effective. If it weren't, people wouldn't generate so much of it to try to justify opinions not supported by the bulk of the evidence. It's effective because people trust science as a method of understanding the world, and ideological actors want that trust conferred to their opinions. They want their opinions to carry that authority, so they imitate science to try to steal some of that legitimacy for themselves. However, science is not flattered by this behavior, it is undermined and diminished. The Damore Manifesto (PDF with hyperlinks) or "Google anti-diversity memo…

Andrew Weil, the Coors Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, or: "Integrative medicine" isn't just for hippy dippy lefties anymore

The question of whether it is worthwhile to debate cranks, quacks, and advocates of pseudoscience has long been a contentious issue in the skeptic community. Those of you who've been reading my posts for a while know that I've always come down on the side that it is not a good idea One thing I've learned in my more than a decade of blogging, both here and at my non-pseudonymous other blog, is that advocates of pseudoscience love public debates. Indeed, whenever you see a skeptic agree to a public debate with an advocate of pseudoscience, it's a damned sure bet that it wasn't the skeptic who…

Just as the H1N1 conspiracy theory machine did in 2009, the Ebola conspiracy theory machine goes into overdrive

Does anyone remember the H1N1 influenza pandemic? As hard as it is to believe, that was five years ago. One thing I remember about the whole thing is just how crazy both the antivaccine movement and conspiracy theorists (but I repeat myself) went over the public health campaigns to vaccinate people against H1N1. It was truly an eye-opener, surpassing even what I expected based on my then five year experience dealing with such cranks. Besides the usual antivaccine paranoia that demonized the vaccine as, alternately, ineffective, full of “toxins,” a mass depopulation plot, and many other…

Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest

Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I've been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents of science-based medicine to do a workshop about how difficult it is to find decent health information on the Internet, and how the "University of Google" all too frequently puts quackery on the same level as reliable sources of medical information because all that matters for most search…

Same as it ever was: Antivaccine crank Bill Maher loves him some HIV/AIDS quackery

I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I'm getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I've been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let's get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it's not…

Rigvir: A cancer "cure" imported from Latvia that cancer patients should avoid

This blog is based in the United States, and I'm an American. Unfortunately, this produces a difficult-to-avoid baked-in bias towards medicine as it is practiced in the US and, to a lesser extent, as it is practiced in the English-speaking world, because English is my language and I can read accounts coming out of English-speaking countries. The same bias exists with respect to pseudo-medicine, with our concentration having been primarily on either quackery that is practiced in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia (and sometimes New Zealand). It's not because I'm not interested in medicine and…

Another Week of Global Warming News, November 11, 2007

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (N.B. Sorry it is late, this is my fault, not Harvey's...) (skip to bottom) Top Stories, Energy vs War Priorities, IEA Report, Expensive Energy, Bali, Ban Ki-moon Tour Arctic Ice, Tabasco Floods, Polls, GreenList, Ethics, Mayors, Forest Fires Hurricanes, GHG Stats, Temperatures, ENSO, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts, Rainforests, Desertification, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel Mitigation,…

Another Week of GW News, May 24, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News May 24, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:UNFCCC Negotiating Text, MIT Study, Obama CAFE, US Poll, Biz Conference, C40 Summit Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Conveyor Belt, Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Desertification, Wacky Weather,…

Mary Rosh's blog

If you don't know who Mary Rosh is, you might want to read "The Mystery of Mary Rosh". Also of interest might be the blog post that unmasked Mary, and the latest Mary Rosh news. [Editor's note: Most of these postings were made to Usenet. Some were made to comment sections on blogs, two are comments on www.freerepublic.com and one is a review posted to Amazon.com. I collected them here for easy reference. ] 1999-08-18 Mary Rosh: SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK -- GREAT BUY!!!! Reviewer: maryrosh (see more about me) from Philadelphia If you want to learn about what can stop crime or if you…

Japan Nuclear Disaster: Update # 35

It has been Just over six months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the hours following that incident, nuclear power protagonists filled the blogosphere, the news outlets, and other media with assurances that little could go wrong, that the reactors would be managed, that the disaster would demonstrate, once things had settled down, that nuclear power was, indeed, safe. One of the first things Ana and I noticed, and we were not alone, is that some of the same stories ... in some cases the same exact wording ... was…

Another week of GW News, May 2, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMay 2, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Cochabamba, SAARC, BASIC, Mediterranean 5+5, Melting Icebergs, Economists Bottom Line, Medupi, Subsidies, Aus ETS, Per-person Quotas, Post CRU, Anthropocene, Volcano, Earth Day Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs,…

The deadly false hope of German cancer clinics

A couple of months ago, I discussed patient deaths at an alternative medicine clinic in Europe, where a naturopath named Klaus Ross had been administering an experimental cancer drug (3-bromopyruvate, or 3-BP) to patients outside the auspices of a clinical trial. 3-BP is a drug that targets the Warburg effect, a characteristic of cancer cells first reported in the 1920s by Otto Warburg in which the cancer cell changes its metabolism to shut off oxidative phosphorylation (the part of glucose metabolism requiring oxygen that produces the most energy) to rely almost exclusively on glycolysis and…

Another Week of GW News, February 10, 2013

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Climate Disruption News Information Overload is Pattern Recognition February 10, 2013 Chuckles, Survival, Lai Pei-yuan, Nickel, Transition, Uranium, Belief Bottom Line, Subsidies, GFIs, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs.…

Another Week of GW News - August 19, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose... August 19, 2012 Chuckles, G20, Ocean Health Index, CSIRO, BEST, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Greenland, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs,…

Is there a reproducibility "crisis" in biomedical research?

Most scientists I know get a chuckle out of the Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR), a humor journal that often parodies scientific papers. Back in the day, we used to chuckle at articles like "Any Eye for an Eye for an Arm and a Leg: Applied Dysfunctional Measurement" and "A Double Blind Efficacy Trial of Placebos, Extra Strength Placebos and Generic Placebos." (What saddens me is that this is basically what research into so-called “complementary and alternative medicine,” now more frequently referred to as “integrative medicine” boils down to.) Unfortunately, these days, reporting on…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - one of the last calls for submission!

Reminder: Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST! Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date (under the fold). You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won't do (I won't even include them here -…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the deadline is looming!

Reminder: Deadline is December 1st at midnight EST! Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date (under the fold). You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): Make sure that the submitted posts are possible (and relatively easy) to convert into print. Posts that rely too much on video, audio, color photographs, copyrighted images, or multitudes of links just won't do. 10 days of science: Astronomical…

Memories of Mount St. Helens on the 30th Anniversary (1980-2010): Part 1

May 18, 2010 marks the 30th anniversary of the dramatic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Now, rather than recount the event when the USGS and the Cascade Volcano Observatory have done such an excellent job, I turn it over to all the Eruptions readers and their memories of the eruption. Now, as I've mentioned, I was all of three years old when St. Helens erupted in 1980, so I have no distinct memories of the eruption. My mother has mentioned that she watched the TV coverage with me and my sister, who had been born a two months earlier. However, the real memories of St. Helens…

Another Week of GW News, July 27, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) July 27, 2008 Top Stories: Wetlands, Green New Deal, WCI ETS, Gore, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science, Carbon…

Final Scifoo Wrap-up

As I predicted, bloggers have waited a day or two before they wrote much of substance abour Scifoo. First, you don't want to miss out on any cool conversations by blogging instead. Second, the experience is so intense, one needs to cool down, process and digest everything. Before I write my own thoughts, here are some links to places where you can see what others are doing: The campers are joining the Science Foo Camp Facebook group (honor system - only campers are supposed to join, but it is open) and exchanging links, pictures and information. There is an official aggregator where you can…

"Germany, we have a problem..." Or: Should anything be done about two bad apples of pseudoscience on the tree of ScienceBlogs.de?

Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time. Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…

Surveying the "integrative medicine" landscape

Perhaps the biggest bête noire for me is the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers; so whenever I see particularly egregious examples, it gets my fingers twitching over the keyboard, ready to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was last Friday when I happened across an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of…

When patient expectations battle with reality

TAM is fast approaching, which means one thing (at least this year). I need to get my Plexiglass blinky posterior in gear in order to have my talks together in time. I spent part of yesterday doing that, but, unfortunately, I have to work today in order to help to make up for the clinic I'll be missing next week; so you'll forgive me if this post might look familiar to a subset of you who know where you might have seen some of this discussion before elsewhere. Those of you who haven't, you're in for some good blogging, if I do say so myself. Whichever group you belong to, we'll get back to…

Another Week of GW News, November 25, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week in the Planetary Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom November 25, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, Pre-Doha Reports: WRI, AII, EEA, UNEP, WB, PwC, IEA Bottom Line, PDSI-Sheffield, Pricing Nature, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…

Another Week of GW News, November 6, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...November 6, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, BASIC, Horn of Africa, Bangkok, G20, BEST, Curry, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Koolaid, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate,…

Another Week of GW News, November 20, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomNovember 20, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, CVF, Horn of Africa, SREX, NY State Lee et al., WEO, BEST, Subsidies, GCF, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, European I-131 Melting Arctic, Polar Bear, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food Production…

Another week of GW News, February 7, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years February 7, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, Copenhagen Accord, Scorecard, COP16 & Beyond, DSDS, G77 & BASIC, Mann FOI as a Weapon, Greenpeace UK, CRU Slugfest Bottom Line, RETECH 2010, Grumbine, WEF, Cold Snap, Solomon Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…

Alternative cancer "cures": Nothing's changed in 34 years

Sometimes blogging topics arise from the strangest places. It's true. For instance, although references to how tobacco causes cancer and the decades long denialist campaign by tobacco companies are not infrequently referenced in my blogging (particularly from supporters of highly dubious studies alleging a link between cell phone radiation and cancer and the ham-handed misuse of the analogy by antivaccinationists, who seem to think that vaccine companies engage in deceit on a scale similar to the deceptive practices of tobacco companies in "denying" that vaccines cause autism and all the…

Scientia Pro Publica 13: Nobel Prize Edition

tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power) -- Sir Francis Bacon. As you know, the first full week of October is Nobel Prize week, the week when new discoveries and innovations that benefit humanity are celebrated on the worldwide stage. In short, this is the one week of the year when scientists get to be international "rock stars"! So in honor of the Nobels, I think it is appropriate to celebrate science…

Dyson as Sociologist? Death Trains, Values, & Climate Action

This week's NY Times magazine runs a cover story by Nicholas Dawidoff on Freeman Dyson and his doubts about the urgency of climate change. Many critics have decried the article as another leading example of false journalistic balance. Yet I think there are much deeper issues at play here. On one hand, the social scientist in me views Dawidoff's journalistic narrative as a sociologically nuanced take on what happens when policy debates are simplistically reduced down to a matter of "sound science" and "inconvenient truths" rather than decisions involving values and trade-offs. On the other…

Make Me a Pallet on the Floor: Preparing to Take In Short-Term Refugees in Tough Times

(I really wanted to post Ronnie Gilbert's version of this song, because not only is she a fine old folkie of the sort you are damned grateful exists, but she has one of the finest set of pipes out there. But there's no video anywhere I can find of her singing. I like Mississippi John Hurt's as well, though) One of the inevitable realities where people get poorer and are subject to more climate-related and infrastructure failure disasters is that people have to take in friends and family who have no other place to go. Hurricane Katrina, for example, for several million people represented…

Another Week of GW News, November 27, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Global Warming News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsNovember 27, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Schmittner et al. CRU2, SREX, GCF, Ecocide, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Antarctica Food Crisis, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate ENSO,…

The Huffington Post promotes breast cancer quackery again

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a fact that is hard to escape. It's one of those things that I have mixed feelings about, particularly now that I've had a close relative, namely my mother-in-law, die of breast cancer less than two years ago. On the one hand, the attention that's brought to the cause of breast cancer is helpful for spurring research and donations to support research, as well as promoting screening programs. On the other hand, I do now have a bit of understanding about "pink washing," and some of the whole "pink thing" at times makes me uneasy. Be that as it may, one…

Another week of GW News: October 25, 2009

Logging the Onset of the Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News October 25, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Indian Dance, India & China, South Asia, Obama & Jintao, MEF, WFC, IDoCA, Superfreeks Bottom Line, Cosmic Rays, Cosmic Rays & Trees, Plans, Searchinger et al., 4 Degrees, Planetary Boundaries Melting Arctic, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, March 2, 2014

Featured image is one of 19 illustrated haiku laying out the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, posted with permission, see them all here. This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom March 2, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, WG2 Leak, WOS, RS/NAS, Jacobson, Energiewende, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production Hurricanes,…

A disturbing example of quackademic medicine at an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center

Note: I was busy doing something last night that left me no time to compose any fresh Insolence, which will become apparent by this weekend. In the meantime, however, I'm betting quite a few of you haven't seen this before, and those who have might want to discuss it further in a different environment. Quackademic medicine. I love that term, because it succinctly describes the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. As I've said many times, I wish I had been the one to coin the phrase, but I wasn't. To the best of my ability to determine, I first picked it up from Dr…

In which I am compared to Donald Trump by a pro-quackademic medicine activist

A little over a month ago, I wrote about how proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), now more frequently called "integrative medicine," go to great lengths to claim nonpharmacological treatments for, well, just about anything as somehow being CAM or "integrative." The example I used was a systematic review article published by several of the bigwigs at that government font of pseudoscience, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) about CAM approaches for the management of chronic pain. You can read my whole post for yourself if you want the…