The War on Science
tlambert | November 25, 2010Crikey reports:
A former senior News Limited journalist has described trying to write about human-induced climate change at The Australian newspaper as "torture" and has blamed the editor-in-chief for limiting coverage on the topic because he has "taken a political view".
Asa Wahlquist mounted an off-the-cuff defence of environmental reporting on a panel at yesterday's journalism educators conference in Sydney, explaining the difficulties of having stories published about climate change because of the attitude of and pressure from senior editors at the paper.
Chris Mitchell apparently felt…
mikethemadbiologist | September 26, 2010For those who don't know, Texas is very important in determining what is found in U.S. textbooks due to its large purchasing power. While keeping anti-science wackaloons off of school boards is a good thing anywhere, it goes double in Texas. Sheril Kirshenbaum explains:
There are two, local races, where every penny goes to work, that have big implications for science education all over the country. The outcome of either contest could tip the balance away from anti-science extremists who seized control of the schoolboard to professional educators with the students' best interests in mind.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 22, 2010Amanda Marcotte makes a very astute observation about the opposition to the non-mosque not-that-close-to-the-former-World-Trade-Center* that has arisen over the last month (italics mine):
Make no mistake---all soft language about how it's just too close to the WTC or how this is an assault on 9/11 victims is just crap to keep this whole controversy going, and to gin up more paranoia about Muslims in America. This is very classic behavior for conspiracy theorists, to roll up what they're really trying to say and put it in softer terms. They feel that most people aren't "ready" for the real…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2010Can we once and for all recognize that movement conservatives do not believe in the fair exchange of ideas?
A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.
"The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I'll continue to bury their…
mikethemadbiologist | July 27, 2010Well, we can always hope. In a recent column about global warming, Paul Krugman makes this ancillary point (italics mine):
Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You've probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers -- allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of "Climategate," and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2010Like Digby, I had the same thought pop into my head when I read this LA Times story about the continued suppression of scientific findings in government agencies: this is the work of Bush-era 'burrowers'--conservative apparatchiks who refuse to carry out the mission of the agency. What I don't get is this bit (italics mine):
Officials at those agencies maintain that scientists are allowed and encouraged to speak out if they believe a policy is at odds with their findings.
The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John P. Holdren, said in a statement last month…
tlambert | July 9, 2010The Australian's coverage of the story of the emails stolen from CRU has been extensive -- my Factiva search found that there have published 85 articles so far that mention the matter, with repeated allegations that the emails showed that the scientists were corrupt, had acted dishonestly and that the science could not be trusted. In February they reported on the Independent Climate Change Email Review:
The university had already announced a wide-ranging probe into whether its researchers manipulated information about global warming. That review, headed by senior British civil servant Muir…
mikethemadbiologist | July 7, 2010Chris Mooney is encouraging people to read the longer paper on which his Washington Post op-ed piece was based (some of my thoughts on the op-ed are here). So I did.
My short take: there's some good, mixed in with some bad. I'll behave unusually and describe the good first.
The powerful influence of politics and ideology is underscored by a rather shocking survey result: Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2010Once again, Chris Mooney has published an article castigating scientists for our supposedly poor communication skills. Since I've dealt with this before, I don't want to rehash old ground. But two good posts, one by ScienceBlogling Evil Monkey and Joe at Climate Progress, are worth noting because they echo some points I've made before (and save me the trouble of doing so again. Sweet Baby Intelligent Designer, this gets tiresome). First, Evil Monkey places this in the appropriate context:
The problem with Chris Mooney is that he doesn't understand the problem. And the reason he doesn't…
mikethemadbiologist | June 10, 2010Back when I owned a car*, car insurance payments were always depressing. In the best case scenario, I'm paying money for no purpose; in the worst case, I've been in a collision. Public health is a lot like car insurance, in that it's really important when something bad happens, but when something bad doesn't happen--either because it didn't happen due to dumb luck, or because other public health measures prevented the problem--public health appears to be wasteful spending. Once the waste charge get bandied about, some people won't be content with that--they have to start indulging in…
mikethemadbiologist | May 14, 2010The COMPETES Act renewal, which would provide additional funding for scientific research and education, and is targeted towards technological development and commercialization was dealt a blow yesterday as Republicans pulled more obstructionist crap. Before the Republican Party was completely taken over by the enraged Uruk-hai wing of their party, they would have not opposed this. But movement conservativism means party before country (italics mine):
House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., Thursday blasted what he described as a "cynical" motion to recommit…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2010For those who haven't heard rightwing extremist Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has subpoenaed all of the documents related to climatologist Michael Mann's state-funded research while Mann was at the University of Virginia (italics mine):
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
If Cuccinelli…
tlambert | May 1, 2010The Hook reports:
In papers sent to UVA April 23, [Virginia Attorney General] Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
Cuccinelli isn't just asking for documents relating to his research grants but all correspondence Mann had with Caspar Ammann, Raymond Bradley, Keith Briffa, John Christy, Edward Cook, Thomas Crowley, Roseanne D'…
tlambert | April 29, 2010Over at The Australian Cheryl Jones seems to be immune to the group think there, writing a straight news story on the debunking of a paper by by Stewart Franks et al, which purported to prove that global warming had no effect on the drought in the Murray-Darling Basin:
In winter, the days are shorter the farther south you go. The Franks team's dataset started with stations in the southern basin, including ones near Canberra and Melbourne, and ended with stations as far north as Moree, near the NSW-Queensland border. By adding data from more northern stations later in the period, the analysis…
tlambert | April 24, 2010The Australian renews its war on science by printing an opinion piece by Richard Lindzen. Arthur Smith comments:
From his latest piece one can only conclude that either Lindzen has descended into the epistemic closure of paranoia and conspiracy theories that has become far too prevalent among some Americans lately or, worse, that he is consciously participating in the malicious disinformation campaign on climate that has recently been extensively documented by Greenpeace and elsewhere
Smith gives a detailed analysis of how he came to this conclusion.
Marc Ambinder also weighs in:
"Climate…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2010Right wing TV bloviators oppose scientific research. And in other news, dog bites man. By way of Bug Girl, I came across this story about Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson opposing the use of $187,632 of stimulus money to buy storage cabinets for Michigan State University's Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection which houses over 1 million insects collected over 143 years:
Fox News host Sean Hannity launched a series of "investigative" reports this week, in which he claims he will reveal oodles of wasteful stimulus spending by the Obama administration. In his first report, Hannity and…
tlambert | March 15, 2010The Australian has been conducting an uncompromising and unrelenting war on science, scientists and the scientific method, but if anyone criticises them for it, they react like scalded cats. So you could predict that they would whine when John Quiggin, in his column in the Australian Financial Review, wrote:
The Australian newspaper has campaigned against science and scientists so consistently that picking a single example would be misleading. Blogger Tim Lambert, who maintains a running series on The Australian's War on Science is now up to installment 46.
And sure enough their editorial…
tlambert | March 9, 2010An anonymous person at The Australian writes:
In serious debates, nothing demolishes credibility as readily as inconsistency and exaggeration.
Indeed, which is why The Australian has no credibility on science.
Many Australians, therefore, will find it baffling that six state governments are working off four different sets of figures for the sea-level rises they expect to be caused by climate change. The projected rises vary from 38cm in Western Australia to 80cm in Queensland and Victoria and 90cm in NSW, creating confusion for councils and developers. Fortunately, all fall far short of the…
tlambert | March 1, 2010A story on climate change by Jonathan Leake that is reprinted in the Australian is pretty well guaranteed to misrepresent the science. And it does -- you only have to compare the headline for Leake's story "Cyclone climate link rejected" with Nature Geosciences headline "Tropical cyclone projection: Fewer but stronger" for the new paper and with what the IPCC report says:
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Clive Hamilton has written a five part series on the attacks on climate science in Australia:
Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial. I already mentioned this one
Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?. Andrew Bolt gets a special mention for his hate mongering.
Think tanks, oil money and black ops. The think tanks in Australia promoting denial and delay are Lavoisier, the IPA, the CIS and now the Brisbane Institute.
Manufacturing a scientific scandal. Jonathan Leake's concoctions are well covered.
Who's defending science?. The Australian's War on Science and how the…