Conservatives and Science
cmooney | March 21, 2009My oped is second only to a roundup of business news, as of 4 pm ET. See here.
The op-ed has generated some 440 comments, too, at last count. I wonder if we will hear anything further from Mr. Will....
UPDATE: Scratch that, as of 7 ET, it is the number one article on the website....
cmooney | March 21, 2009As any reader of this blog knows, I was for a while very critical of the Washington Post editorial page amid the George Will affair. Now, my view has changed.
Today the Post publishes, replete with links to many scientific sources, my op-ed answering three claims Will made in his now infamous "Dark Green Doomsayers" column, and also making a broader point about why we need standards in science-centered journalism and commentary.
I'm extremely heartened that the Post ran the piece, and has at least allowed me to correct Will--or, to "debate" him. Without further ado, the oped begins like this…
sheril | March 20, 2009Several readers have emailed me to comment on Michael Steele's ummmm...imaginative explanations of both global 'cooling' and Greenland:
"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long."
You want me to respond to that gibberish? Seriously? The…
cmooney | March 9, 2009In the looking glass world of some conservatives and contrarians, the Democratic war on science continues today....just see here for proof.
Not only has our new president reversed Bush's stem cell policy, and directed his science adviser--who really, really needs to be Senate confirmed--to "develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making" (something I and many others have called for). But in some ways better still, he has given a big speech about embryonic stem cell research that is scientifically accurate, cautious, and does not oversell its potential--…
cmooney | March 7, 2009So, I have to say I find this funny.
On the one hand we have the current, perverse attempt to forecast all the ways in which Democrats and scientists are going to fall into big conflicts soon, now that the Dems have so much power. The idea here is to construct a false equivalence between the egregious abuses of the Bush administration and a few potential conflicts of a very different nature that could maybe happen sometime in the future under this administration.
Meanwhile, we have Obama about to stand up and, you know, liberate embryonic stem cell research. Jeez, Mr. President, didn't you…
cmooney | March 6, 2009A lot of people right now are striving desperately to establish this notion. Neil Munro's big story in the latest National Journal (here, subscription) is the latest example. In essence, it postulates a bunch of new rifts that are going to open between scientists and Democrats now that the latter are in power. I'm quoted in there with this comment:
"There is not going to be enough money to go around, so there will be a lot of scientific priorities that will be hard to meet," Mooney said. But, "I don't think it's going to be the same adversarial situation [seen in the Bush years]. Very few or…
cmooney | March 4, 2009
My latest Science Progress column sets Bobby Jindal's latest comments mocking volcano monitoring in the context of longstanding attacks on individual scientific grants--which goes all the way back to Senator William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" awards, if not further. While this tradition is to some extent bipartisan, it has certainly been more honored of late by conservatives, as the examples of John McCain's and Sarah Palin's sneering at grizzly bear and fruit fly research during the campaign show. Or as I put it:
In each case--as with Jindal--experts patiently explained that this research…
cmooney | March 3, 2009We can if we're Fox News. Or Matt Drudge.
These people use any snowstorm as reason to cast doubt on global warming. It's as predictable as...well, no, it's a lot more predictable than the weather.
I really regret that important global warming protests and actions always seem to be timed so that they coincide with winter weather. Mostly, the activists can't help it; it's just rotten luck. But I'll say it again: Having the U.N. Copenhagen meeting in Denmark in December is just asking for this kind of stuff.
That doesn't, of course, excuse the dishonesty from right-wingers who continually try to…
cmooney | March 2, 2009At a time when there is big controversy going on concerning George Will's February 15 column, why on earth did this scientific institute--centrally involved in the issue--not leave their refutation of Will concerning sea ice up on their website?
You can see it in the Google cache here. But it is not available live, and I can't find it on the website.
True, the refutation has been quoted a ton, and so it has entered the public record. But why isn't the Arctic Climate Research Center proud to be taking a stand for the knowledge it produces? Do the people there just want to keep their heads down…
cmooney | March 2, 2009I just sent Fred Hiatt a roughly 900 word oped, with references, that I believe soundly refutes George Will's three central climate science claims from his February 15 column. I also make a larger, more resonant point. I hope the Post will publish the column--but you folks will see it in some form no matter what, this I promise. Stand by, and thanks for your support.
cmooney | February 27, 2009In the wake of the latest developments in the George Will scandal, I sent him this:
Dear Mr. Hiatt,
[Introductory Comments]...I believe what I've called the "Republican War on Science" continues, and the George Will saga represents a stunning example. In my opinion, the Post editorial/oped
page makes a terrible mistake by not correcting his manifest errors; but leave that aside--you've said people should instead "debate him." Would you publish an oped by me exposing Will's egregious errors, misrepresentations, and distortions of the science of global warming,
and thus further debate?
What do…
cmooney | February 27, 2009George Will wrote another deceptive global warming column. It's full of utter nonsense, retracts nothing, and pathetically tries to defend his previous errors:
The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
This I can only call a lie. A blatant one.
Many of the column's incorrect factual assertions were challenged, and as Will is revisiting the column due to the response it has garnered, it's inconceivable that he doesn't know that. For God's sake, Will claimed that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has…
cmooney | February 25, 2009My Science Progress column is now up: I try to set the George Will scandal in the broader context of what's happening in the media:
We often hear that "technology" is what's killing newspapers--innovations like Craig's List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can't even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the…
cmooney | February 24, 2009I kinda suspected--but didn't bother to prove--that George Will was recycling parts of his anti-global warming balderdashery, particularly his strained paragraph about global cooling in the 1970s, replete with misleading references.
Well, Brad Johnson has done the work: It appears Will has a rotating (and very limited) set of global warming talking points that date back to 1992. Once in a while, he simply rejiggers the column. Wow.
The George Will scandal grows larger now. Not only is he not constrained by, or answerable to, facts; but for a national columnist, such recycling is pretty…
cmooney | February 20, 2009Over at Wonk Room, Brad Johnson is trying to get responses from the Post about why George Will is allowed to ignore fact and reality, and why the Post won't run a correction of his errors. It's pretty pathetic. The great conservative "intellectual"--Will--is apparently unaccountable.
And you wonder why newspapers are failing today.
I think we need them desperately--see this Paul Starr cover story of the latest New Republic--but when the Washington Post acts in such a boneheaded manner in defending one of its columnists' egregious errors, it's hard to feel too bad for them.
cmooney | February 18, 2009There is this strange idea out there that George Will is a smart person's conservative. Maybe it's the bow-tie.
But if you read his latest, scandalously hackish global warming column, you realize that nothing could be further from the truth. Any person who respects thought, ideas, knowledge, or the contemplative life--any person, in short, who deserves to be called an "intellectual"--could not write such a column; because any such person would have undertaken to learn something real about climate science before writing about it.
Yet this Will manifestly has not done, or he could not make the…
cmooney | February 10, 2009In the last post, I introduced Francis Bacon--chiefly via the New Atlantis--and described a very interesting, if ultimately perhaps too strong, feminist reaction. But it's as though some feminists are Bacon's only enemies.
Neoconservative bioethicists, for example, see Bacon as the place where it all started to go wrong. Leon Kass, the great granddaddy of this school, and first head of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, took Bacon to task in his 1985 book Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, a polemic against many new reproductive and biomedical technologies. As Kass…
cmooney | February 10, 2009
Male chauvinist pig? Or worse?
I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on.
History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our section on Francis Bacon and The New Atlantis. (Not satisfied with the course packet excerpt, this is the version I ordered from Amazon.) Man, here was a dude who, although writing in the early 1600s, sounds stunningly "modern"--a term I must now put in quotes due to the fact that I'm studying…
cmooney | February 5, 2009My latest Science Progress column takes on those, like right wing columnist Deroy Murdock or Lou Dobbs, who persist in trying to claim that winter weather refutes global warming. There are so, so, so many reasons this argument is dumb; and yet at the same time, who can dispute that the prevailing weather at a given time does highly influence the trajectory of the climate debate?
So while it's intellectually silly to pretend that winter weather refutes global warming, it was also strategically silly to hold the giant United Nations conference in Copenhagen this December.
You can read the full…
cmooney | January 30, 2009I know, the Bush administration is history. So, I've argued, is the "Republican war on science."
But if you never yet got a copy of the book of the same name, now's the time--Amazon is selling the paperback, new, for $ 4.99.
I don't usually hawk my wares like this, but that's damn cheap.