The War on Science
tlambert | February 19, 2010The Australian Government has set up a Coasts and Climate Change Council to plan how to adapt to increases in sea levels and cyclone intensity that global warming will most likely bring. Since its about adaption to climate change and planning for the future, in a rational world even on opponent of mitigation like The Australian would be on board, but they are not. The Australian is certain that scientists are wrong about sea level rise and they have an impeccable authority:
Bondi veteran Lee Boman has swum at the beach for more than 30 years and was adamant he had seen "no change" to the…
tlambert | February 9, 2010As well as Monckton Media Watch also looked at the way Jamie Walker passed off his opinioin piece about the Great Barrier Reef as a straight news story. John Bruno dissects Walker's response.
mikethemadbiologist | February 8, 2010(from here)
By way of Maryn McKenna, we find that the Obama Administration has decided to massively cut the funding for the CDC's antimicrobial resistance and vaccination efforts. I thought this was the kind of anti-science bullshit that the Bush Administration did. From the IDSA (pdf):
Under CDC's proposed budget, the agency's already severely strapped Antimicrobial Resistance budget would be cut dramatically by $8.6 million--roughly 50 percent. This vital program is necessary to help combat the rising crisis of drug resistance, a critical medical problem that the agency deems "one of the…
tlambert | February 3, 2010The Australian seems to have an endless supply of journalists who, with no background in science, write stories about how the scientists have it all wrong on global warming. The latest effort, by one Jamie Walker, is dealt with by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
tlambert | January 23, 2010After embracing Monckton's theory that Copenhagen was going to introduce a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERMENT, Jane Albrechtsen seems to backing away from Monckton's conspiracy theories:
Unfortunately, while Monckton has mastered the best arts of persuasion, he also succumbs to the worst of them when he engages in his made-for-the-stage histrionics. In Copenhagen, when a group of young activists interrupted a meeting, he berated them as Nazis and Hitler Youth. Elsewhere he has called on people to rise up and fight off a "bureaucratic communistic world government monster". This extremist language…
mikethemadbiologist | January 18, 2010If you're in Massachusetts, there's a special election for U.S. Senate tomorrow, and it's much closer than it should be--the Republican Scott Brown (who is horrid--who votes to eliminate tax breaks and aid for 9/11 emergency responders?) might actually win. There are several reasons why I'm voting for Coakley*:
1) Republicans hate science. Massachusetts received $2.25 billion in NIH funding alone in 2008 and another $400 million from NSF. That's equivalent to ten percent of the MA state budget. As someone who works for USDA once told me, "Republicans cut my budget, Democrats increase it…
tlambert | January 11, 2010Christopher Monckton will trouser $20,000 for an Australian Tour with Ian Plimer on backing vocals. To celebrate both The Australian and The Daily Telegraph printed extracts from Monckton's letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd generously offering to brief Rudd about climate science. Monckton always makes lots of errors when he writes about science, but this letter may have broken his previous record for quickest mistake with one in the very first word:
His Excellency Mr Kevin Rudd
Rudd's correct title is
The Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP
The editor at The Daily Telegraph didn't notice the mistake…
mikethemadbiologist | January 3, 2010Before I start, let me say that I have no personal animus towards Chris Mooney: my limited interactions with him have been civil, and I agree with him on many things. But this beating up the victim has to stop. Sure, I agree with Mooney that many scientists need to learn how to communicate with the public better (although Randy Olsen really needs to stop setting up straw men to knock down). But many scientists do communicate with the public, in one form or another, to the extent they are able to do so.
If a reporter contacts me, I always try to make time to speak with, usually to the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 12, 2009It's not as bad as the Great Brooklyn Tampon Shortage, but it's just become a lot harder to study marine viruses. There are two basic ways to figure out how many viruses are in a given sample, such as a milliliter of seawater. One method is to mix a bacterial (or algal) cell with a certain amount of seawater and look for plaques--holes in the lawn:
(from here)
The number of plaques equals the number of viruses.
This method has several problems, perhaps the most obvious of which is that you will only observe plaques if the virus can infect those cells. A culture-independent method filters…
tlambert | November 8, 2009Despite her training in law, Janet Albrechtsen was not able to figure out that the Copenhagen treaty wasn't going to impose a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT, so you just know that she has no chance in hell of understanding a scientific question. Albrechtsen claims that it is a "fact" that "Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years". Study the graph below from the CSIRO to see that measurements from tide gauges and satellites contradict this claim.
So how did Albrechtsen get it so completely wrong? Well, her authority, Nils Axel-Morner, completely ignored all direct measurements…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2009I've often said on this blog that everything I know about movement conservatives, I learned from watching (and opposing) creationists. One major lesson is that words have no intrinsic meaning: they are simply means to manipulate people for your own goals. Well, Margaret Thatcher, an icon of anti-Communist opposition, admitted:
...the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West's interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do…
tlambert | August 17, 2009Malcolm Colless, writing in The Australian declares that human-caused global warming is a beat-up, just like human-caused ozone depletion. I swear I'm not making this up. Look:
Remember, it was not so long ago that we were confronted with the unnerving prospect of being fried like eggs on a hotplate as a result of a widening hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere.
The hole is apparently still there, although it has stopped expanding and has, in fact, started shrinking. Coincidentally, it is now playing second fiddle to global warming in the climate change debate.
Apparently Colless is…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2009I'll get to Whole Foods in a moment, but one of the reasons I wrote about the misuse of heritability by Megan McArdle last week is that I can't stand it when people misuse biology to push a political agenda (and hopefully, I'll be able to get back to that next week). As I argued in a previous post, we can disagree about how to respond to a set of facts, but the facts are what they are.
So, onto the Whole Foods grocery woo. The CEO of Whole Foods recently wrote a far right screed against health insurance reform, in which he argues that it would be unnecessary if we only ate our vegetables.…
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2009One of the parts I liked about Unscientific America was the recognition that many scientists need to be trained in communication--and as importantly, this training requires funding, so universities have a financial incentive to reward scientific communication and outreach. Mooney and Kirshenbaum also think that non-profit organizations should and will play a critical role in communicating science: not only do we have to train people, we need to actually pay them to communicate. So that's all good (TEH RELIGIONISMZ!! AAAIIEEE!!!).
One example of the non-profit model is Rick Weiss, who is an…
Corruption Is Integral to the 'Intellects' of the Conservative Movement: Why This Matters to Science
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2009One of the advantages the conservative movement has is that it can be very lucrative to be a professional conservative, whereas being a professional liberal is rather difficult. There isn't the tight integration of think tanks, conservative magazines, cozy book deals, and the occasional faculty sinecure (e.g., torturer John Yoo) on the left. What keeps this beast fed is money. Last week, Politico described the fickle ideological allegiance of one conservative think tank:
The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group's support…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2009Hopefully, this post won't degenerate into a flame war (ZOMG! TEH RELGIONISMZ!!!), but I've finished reading Unscientific America. Unfortunately, right off the bat (page three), the 'Pluto argument' bothered me (on the other hand, the book could only improve). From my perspective (and what do I know, I'm just a scientist), it seems that if astronomers think Pluto isn't a planet (and there seems to be some honest scientific debate about whether it is or not), then it's not a planet. It doesn't matter if it upsets other non-scientists: a planet means something to scientists and, apparently,…
mikethemadbiologist | July 11, 2009I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but, once again, a major part of the stimulus should have been to make up state budget shortfalls, which stemmed from the economic recession. Not only is it good economic policy (what's the point of the federal government putting people to work, only to have state governments fire other people), but those state budget cuts reduce services:
Franklin Park Zoo, a Boston institution that has drawn generations of city and suburban families, may be forced to close its doors and possibly euthanize some of its animals as a result of the deep budget…
tlambert | June 24, 2009Last week week Senator Fielding met with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong to discuss the link between global warming and greenhouse gas. While Fielding claimed to have an 'open mind', this was rather undercut by his bringing four denialists to the meeting: Bob Carter, David Evans Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth. Naturally, The Australian gives them space to write about global warming isn't happening and how their questions were not answered. Wong has answers to their questions (written by Will Steffen) here, but I'll give my answers as well:
Carter and co write:
Is it the case…
tlambert | June 9, 2009Paddy Manning worked at The Australian between 2004 and 2007, so has inside knowledge about their war on science:
Then on May 9, 2007, apparently at the urging of son James, Murdoch announced News Corp would go carbon neutral by 2010. ...
This put The Australian in a quandary. Mitchell's then 2IC, Michael Stutchbury, was still freely describing climate change as "bullshit" and joked after the announcement, "What would the Murdochs know?" (He is now the paper's economics editor.)
What did The Australian do? In late 2006 Matthew Warren, former PR for the NSW Minerals Council, was appointed -…
tlambert | June 2, 2009Congratulations to Chris Mitchell, editor of The Australian who has won
an award from the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association for journalism that promotes their interests:
In congratulating Chris Mitchell, APPEA's Chief Executive Belinda Robinson observed that "over the past twelve months The Australian's in-depth coverage of a range of public policy issues affecting Australia's upstream oil and gas industry has been of a consistently high standard. The reporting has been thoughtful, balanced, analytical, well researched and a big effort was made to ensure that all…