The War on Science
tlambert | August 9, 2008This piece by Arthur "Let's bomb Iran!" Herman published by the Australian and the CIS, has it all.
the author is a historian, not a scientist
every single claim about the science is wrong
climate scientists are called "knaves" , "a priesthood" and likened to the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis
there is ridiculous alarmism about the costs of mitigation ("trim Australia's GDP by several percentage points a year")
Nexus 6 and Gary Sauer-Thompson have already taken Herman's article apart, but I think it is still interesting to look at what he got wrong about the science (everything!) to see…
tlambert | July 29, 2008Undaunted by the dismal failure of its war on science, the Australian presses on, with a piece by Dennis Jensen. Oops, that's not the link, this is the link:
It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.
Actually it was 80%. It doesn't inspire confidence when the Australian can't even report their own…
tlambert | July 18, 2008The Australian continues to display its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method. They've published this piece of AGW denial by David Evans. Last time I looked at Evans he was saying that new evidence since 1999 had changed his mind about global warming, with this new evidence including the fact that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. Apparently this was too silly even for the Australian, so he now offers us four alleged facts.
1 The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
Each possible cause of global warming…
tlambert | July 6, 2008The Australian welcomes the draft Garnaut report by reprinting an error-filled article from the Wall Street Journal. Their editorial even repeats one of the most glaring errors:
In proceeding with caution, governments need to be alert to all the facts, including arguments such as those noted by the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens reprinted in Inquirer today. NASA, he points out, confirms that the hottest year on record was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954.
And their columnist Janet Albrechtsen repeats it a third…
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2008If Republicans claim that oil pipelines are good for caribou, I wonder what they'll make of the blackfly outbreak in Maine. About the first half of the previous sentence--that's not hyperbole. Really (by way of Digby):
During a radio interview on Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempted to argue that drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) would be beneficial for Arctic wildlife. Bachmann claimed that drilling would cause not only an "enhancement of wildlife expansion," but that the area around oil pipelines would also "become a meeting ground and '…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2008So I emerge from my grant writing burrow only to discover by way of ScienceBlogling PZ that the clowns at Answers in Genesis are pestering National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski about the citrate evolution in E. coli paper he co-authored.
Fortunately, Gerlach at Off Resonance does a great job fisking this creationist crapdoodle, so I don't have to. While I'm glad Lenski responded, he should cut them off at this point. The problem is that his response, which is quite sensible--he presents the data that show that contamination is not an issue among other things--does not matter to…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2008I've discussed Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's public support for creationism before. What's galling is that his idiocy can't be laid at cognitive deficiency or ignorance. I was in the same graduating class as Jindal, and I know that every biology major had considerable exposure to evolutionary biology.
Clearly, Jindal is being willfully ignorant to avoid theologically inconvenient reality. Now Jindal is further attempting to lower the value of my degree: he performed an exorcism, and believes that it cured the 'possessed' woman of cancer.
(Don't tell Orac, or his head might explode…
tlambert | June 5, 2008Matt Nisbet reports:
A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.
(Clarification: A couple of…
tlambert | May 29, 2008Chris Mooney reviews a new book about the war on science
Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels (Oxford University Press, 359 pages, $27.95) ...
Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. "Doubt is our product," reads the infamous memo, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a…
mikethemadbiologist | May 26, 2008Chris Mooney comments on the recent attempt by movement conservatives to rebut the concept of a Republican War on Science:
A new wave of conservative science punditry--epitomized by an essay by Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis entitled "Science and the Left," which was itself recently publicized by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in an oped in the Washington Post--demonstrably lacks such candor. Setting out to debunk the idea that there really is a "war on science" coming from the right, these writers don't bother engaging on the facts of the case at all. They don't attempt to show…
mikethemadbiologist | May 23, 2008The New York Times has a disturbing article today about secret funds given to researchers by Big Tobacco with lots of strings attached. The whole article is worth a read, but this little paragraph makes it absolutely clear why tenure and academic freedom are not trivial things:
A tenured scientist at Virginia Commonwealth, who would not be interviewed for attribution because he said he feared retribution against his junior colleagues, called the contract's restrictions, especially the limitations on publication, "completely unacceptable in the research world."
I guarantee junior, untenured…
mikethemadbiologist | May 14, 2008Someone I knew who wasn't Jewish, once asked me what I could do to stop anti-Semitism. I responded that, if combating anti-Semitism is solely the responsibly of Jews, then we're done for. The point being that you need more than a small minority to fight what is. I've often thought the same about the War on Science: if fighting it is only left to scientists, we really don't stand much of a chance.
This is why I was heartened to read Amanda's double-barreled blast against anti-vaxxers:
Anti-vaccination cranks make me see red, in no small part because there's no excuse for the levels of…
tlambert | May 7, 2008The first four words in this Wednesday's article in the Australian :
In 1633 Galileo Galilei
There is no point in reading further.
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2008Over at the Intersection, Sheril asks the following about new media and science communication:
consider these questions from the program:
* New media addressing S&T issues - what/where/who are they?
* Who do they see as their primary audiences?
* What do they try to convey (or try not to convey)?
* What do they see as missing from the current dialogues on S&T and policy?
* How are they addressing those elements?
* What are the new media missing?
I think the primary role that new media can play is the development of new narratives. Most science stories are…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2008Several of my fellow ScienceBloglings have noted that the increase in measles cases is due to idiots who refuse to get vaccinated. Beyond the obvious health threat this represents, there is a more subtle, yet equally murderous effect of all of this anti-vax woo.
It distracts us from other vaccination programs that we need to institute. Every year, roughly 36,000 U.S. residents die from influenza--the 'boring' kind. Why this isn't viewed as a major health crisis, while breast cancer, which kills approximately the same number annually, is escapes me. Not because breast cancer isn't an awful…
mikethemadbiologist | April 28, 2008Despite the ludicrous, over-hyped claims in the movie Expelled about the intimidation of creationist academics, it's pretty clear that when intimidation does occur, it's by creationists against scientists. Here's one example from Science After Sunclipse:
Gwen Pearson taught biology at the Permian Basin branch of the University of Texas, located in the city of Odessa. Her three years as an assistant professor ended with assaults on her integrity and her physical self:
This all became a great deal more serious when I began to get messages on my home answering machine threatening to assist me…
tlambert | April 26, 2008The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson. Even though it was the Australian which published Chapman's piece a few days earlier, almost half of Pearson's article was a quote or paraphrase of Chapman.
Pearson also gives the view of climate science you get from the Australian's bunker:
What a difference the intervening 15 months has made. In…
tlambert | April 23, 2008As well as Chapman's silly ice-age article, the Australian published a news story about it, treating it as if it was a legitimate paper and failing to get comments from climate scientists. The ABC acted like a real news organization it its report:
DAVID KAROLY: This is not science.
EMILY BOURKE: David Karoly from Melbourne University's School of Earth Sciences is outraged.
DAVID KAROLY: This is misinterpretation or misrepresentation and miscommunication of the factors that influence global temperature.
It appears to be an opinion of Phil Chapman and he's welcome to his opinion, but in terms…
tlambert | April 23, 2008Here we go again. Phil Chapman, in the Australian:
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
and
it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was…
mikethemadbiologist | April 23, 2008Well, I feel better about voting for Obama already. Actually, what's sad is that she really doesn't support the vaccination leads to autism position:
Would you support a large-scale federal study ofthe differences in health outcomes
between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups?
Yes. We don't know what, if any, kind of link there is between vaccines and autism - but we should find out. The lack of research on treatments, interventions, and services for children and adults with autism is a major impediment to the development of delivery of quality care. We need evidence-based research on what…