wall street journal
gregladen | September 1, 2016But I'm sure you already knew that.
The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don't bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that's on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has…
gregladen | September 20, 2014In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Steven Koonin, former Department of Energy Undersecretary and BP scientist makes the case that global warming is caused by humans, important, that we must do something about it, and that further research on key topics is necessary to help guide policy.
He states,
The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter … We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nor is the crucial question whether humans are…
dr. dolittle | December 16, 2013 Image of a grizzly bear at Yellowstone National Park from http://free-naturewallpaper.com/nature-images/animals/bears/Grizzly-at-…
I was so excited to see a story featuring grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The article was about how Dr. Kevin Corbit at Amgen Inc. is studying grizzly bears in the Bear Center at Washington State University to learn more about obesity. The 12 animals living in the facility were either rescued from places where they were captured after getting too close to humans or were born at the facility. Dr. Corbit was quoted in…
gregladen | January 25, 2013The Wall Street Journal recently published and editorial by Bjorn Lomborg which uses misleading statistics to justify utterly inappropriate delays in addressing climate change. I would like to direct you to a response to that editorial:
In WSJ op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats
hrynyshyn | February 6, 2012For reasons that can only reflect poorly on the paper, the Wall Street Journal recently decided it was a good idea to publish an op-ed that recycled some the of the most soundly discredited notions associated with the climate change denial movement. The piece was signed by 16 ostensible "scientists," though only four have any experience with climatology, and even they work on the extreme fringes of respectable research.
The same editors refused to publish a letter from a longer list of actual climatologists, a letter that does reflect the science of the day and one that the journal Science…
gregladen | January 27, 2012The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.
The scientists who signed to WSJ editorial are:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the…
sastyk | September 19, 2011Daniel Yergin in the Wall Street Journal:
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road.
This specter goes by the name of "peak oil."
Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2011OK. Taking on logical flaws in Wall Street Journal op-ed items is about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't let Matt Ridley's latest affront to common sense pass without firing off a few rounds for practice if nothing else.
Under a staggeringly unimaginative headline of "Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy," Ridley argues that renewable energy isn't really renewable, or at least no more renewable that fossil fuels. How does he go about this without shattering his backbone? By pointing out that Haitians are destroying their half of their island home by cutting down…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2010In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically "So much for the science being settled. Now what?" The following day the Wall Street Journal's editorial page weighed in with a review of "what used to be called the 'settled science' of global warming."
Both offerings betrayed a solid lack of understanding, not only of recent events involving recent allegations…
sciencewoman | April 25, 2009ScienceGrandma pointed me to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It's titled "So You Want to Be a Professor?" but I think it should have been called "The Perils of a Ph.D."
The article begins by citing some examples of graduate schools that are reducing admissions of PhD applicants for next year, in what may be a cost-cutting move. As we all know, graduate assistantships cost $25K or more per year, even if the grad student doesn't see much of it and returns those costs to the university by teaching labs, grading papers, and doing other grunt work. Apparently, some universities…
oracknows | January 12, 2009The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of "alternative," that it is in fact mainstream and even "scientific." That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why "alternative" medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the "alternative" label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical…