The War on Science
tlambert | December 1, 2008Last week Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant declared:
People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate.
It seems that Windschuttle has no confidence in the articles on climate science he has been publishing. Windschuttle rejected without even looking at it, an article by David Karoly correcting the errors and misinformation in those articles. His reply to Karoly (quoted with permission):
Thanks for your offer but at the moment Quadrant is focusing on offering a platform for the sceptical position on this issue. We find that the pro-IPCC position is very well represented…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2008Apparently, humanism is selfish. That would have been news to Albert Camus, Nobel Laureate and resistance fighter. This is from a military chaplain's presentation about suicide prevention that apparently is cribbed directly from evangelical preacher Rick Warren:
In March 2008, this presentation, titled "A New Approach To Suicide Prevention: Developing Purpose-Driven Airmen," was shown at a commander's call that was mandatory for an estimated 1,000 of Lakenheath's Air Force personnel, and sent out by email to the entire base of over 5,000 the following day. As the use of the phrase "Purpose-…
tlambert | November 29, 2008On Tuesday the Australian had a piece by David Bellamy claimed to be victimized for his dissent:
The sad fact is that since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming, I've not been allowed to make a television program. ...
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on children's program Blue Peter, and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock. ...
At that point, I was still making loads of TV programs and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren't getting taken…
tlambert | November 27, 2008Miranda Devine, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald brings us the sad story of how Ian Plimer is being shouted down and silenced:
Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics." ...
It is difficult for non-scientists to engage in the debate over what causes climate change and whether or not it can be stopped by new taxes and slower growth, because dissenting voices are shouted down by true believers in the scientific community who claim they alone have the authority to speak.
The same…
tlambert | November 21, 2008Quadrant follows the fashion of much of the rest of the right in Australia in making war on science. It has promoted Creationism, HIV/AIDS denial, the DDT ban myth and, of course, global warming denial. But ever since new editor Keith Windschuttle took over earlier this year, Quadrant has cranked the attacks on climate science up to 11. Harry Clarke reports:
Recent issues of Quadrant contain a number of 'denialist' views on climate change issues that will leave those concerned with the implications of climate change troubled. Quadrant could analogously act as an outlet for the flat earth…
mikethemadbiologist | November 21, 2008There's been a bit of talk about a recent PLoS Medicine article about the chilling effect of political controversy on research. The main conclusion--yes, political controversy surrounding topics including "the sexual health and/or orientation of adolescents; abortion; emergency contraception; condom use; anal sex; childhood sexual abuse; homosexuality; and the use of various harm reduction strategies" does influence researchers career and research decisions:
This probably isn't news to anyone who regularly reads ScienceBlogs, and is probably one of the reasons why researchers in the life…
tlambert | November 13, 2008The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which is usually a collection of quotes from recent opinion columns in other papers. But like every other part of the paper, it has been used in their unending war on science. Look at the November 12 edition of "Cut and Paste":
ABC Radio's Peter Cave reports the IPCC claim the island nation is in imminent danger of climate-induced flooding
Mohamed Nasheed (the new Maldives President) has named battling the effects of rising sea levels as a key priority. He's hatched an audacious plan to buy his people a new homeland and one of the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 12, 2008Admittedly, this isn't anything regular ScienceBlogs readers haven't seen before, but it's nice to see it enter the mainstream media (albeit eight years too late). Sharon Begley:
The truly poisonous legacy of the past eight years is one that spread to much of society and will therefore be much harder to undo: the utter contempt with which those in power viewed inconvenient facts, empiricism and science in general.
Look at how Bush justified inaction on greenhouse gases. Not by arguing that cuts would have cost too much, a stance that would at least have been intellectually honest, albeit…
mikethemadbiologist | November 10, 2008While the talk about symbolism is important, a president actually has to do stuff. I've been hoping that somewhere there are a bunch of smart people figuring how to unfuck all the stuff that Little Lord Pontchartrain has fucked up using the power of the Executive Branch (here's one example)--hell, just coming up with a list of said fuckups would be a challenge. So I'm delighted to read this in the Washington Post:
Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse…
mikethemadbiologist | October 25, 2008...it's applied research. As far as I can tell, the McCain campaign is referring to a study of olive fruit flies which are an agricultural pest. From the congressman who wrote the earmark:
"The Olive Fruit Fly has infested thousands of California olive groves and is the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries," he said. "I secured $748,000 for olive fruit fly research and irradiation in the (fiscal year 2008) appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA will use some of that funding for their research facility in France. This USDA research…
tlambert | October 19, 2008This column in the Australian from Frank Devine is mainly about how the latest Disney cartoon is "pernicious and propagandistic" and threatens our freedom, but he also includes some war-on-science stuff:
An alternative view of good coming out of the financial crash is that, with another global threat to worry about, we may be less attentive to assertions as axiomatic that we are guilty of causing catastrophic climate change.
It is a gross misrepresentation to pretend that anthropogenic global warming and its impacts are just axioms. See the various IPCC reports.
In fact, hundreds of…
tlambert | October 15, 2008The latest salvo from the Australian in their war on science is a column from Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg tells us:
Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?
This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost…
tlambert | October 5, 2008This piece by Brendan O'Neill in the Australian combines two of the Australian's favourite things: making war on science and supporting Republicans. Here's O'Neill:
In May this year, Palin, as Governor of Alaska, said she would sue the federal Government for labelling polar bears as officially threatened. She argued that giving special protection to polar bear habitats would cripple oil and gas development off Alaska's northern and northwestern coasts. She also said there was not enough evidence to support the listing of polar bears.
That's what she said, but she appears to have been lying…
mikethemadbiologist | September 13, 2008Yes, I'm being mean, but this clip below has all the legitimacy of creationism--which is to say none:
Really, creationism is just as nutty, this is simply not dressed up in pseudoreligious baggage.
Bonus Insanity: A creationist has put together a site opposing Electronic Arts' game Spore because it is brainwashing kids into 'believing in' evolution. Apparently, we "Evolutionaryists" are very mean too.
tlambert | September 9, 2008The latest volley from the Australian is an article by John McLean. You might remember him as the guy who kept steering Andrew Bolt into brick walls. He's now styling himself as a "climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition", which might sound impressive if you didn't know that the only qualification he holds is a Bachelor of Architecture and that the Australian Climate Science Coalition doesn't contain any climate scientists.
Anyway, his article is just a rehash of his earlier one where he accused the IPCC of lying about the scientific support for his…
tlambert | August 25, 2008On Saturday the Australian published an article by Jennifer Marohasy. It's the usual cherry-picked global-warming-ended-in-1998 nonsense, and Barry Brook has written a detailed refutation.
But I felt I should post this graph from Marohasy's piece where she tries to make global warming go away by changing the scale on the graph:
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2008By way of Michael Tomasky, I stumbled across this site hosted by presidential debate moderator Rev. Rick Warren (?!?). Here's what the good reverend has to say about evolution:
What about dinosaurs?Question: How do they fit in with the idea that God created the world rather than the world evolving on it's own? Why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs?
Answer: The Bible tells in Genesis 1 that God made the world in seven days, and that he made all of the animals on the fifth day and the sixth day. All of the animals were created at the same time, so they all walked the earth at the same…
mikethemadbiologist | August 19, 2008Republican John McCain has repeatedly portrayed a study that uses bear DNA to estimate the population size of potentially endangered bears as an example of government waste and pork barrel spending. There's one small problem, however.
McCain was for it before he was against it (italics mine):
While he tried to cut money for several other projects in the same bill, he never proposed cutting the bear study and voted for the final bill containing it....
The ad goes on to criticize an earmark that provided "$3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana." This is not the first time McCain has…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2008Olivia Judson, in an excellent op-ed, lays out the utility argument for why students should learn evolution as part of biology:
The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve -- and fast. And I'm not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2008As Jesse at Pandagon notes, even though the presidential race is stagnant in that the numbers aren't shifting much, that's not the same as the race being in a dead heat. This would be obvious, if your typical political reporter wasn't a mathematically illiterate moron.
Yes, I know that there's only one poll that matters and it's in November, blah, blah, blah. But based on the available poll data, there's no way this is a dead heat. Why? Because, in 40 out of 41 polls since Clinton dropped out of the race, Obama has led McCain. If they truly were in a dead heat (i.e., 50/50), the…