The existence of bunk when science lumbers into the political sphere with what to some are uncomfortable observations seems to be a remarkably resilient feature of our landscape. I learned this more than a decade ago when I spent a good deal of time reading the work of quasi-scientific young-earth creationists. The arguments raised by …
Daniel Sarewitz had a piece in Slate today arguing that science is not going to settle the current political fight over greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Michael Tobis thinks Sarewitz is wrong. I agree with Sarewitz. Here is why. The core of Sarewitz’s argument is that the contest over the science serves to mask the …
In which my daughter makes an appearance in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req): Nora Heineman-Fleck, social networking liaison for the University of New Mexico and a frequent user of online networks, has learned to tailor her personal networks like Facebook to make them more useful. “I very rarely actually ‘unfriend’ people,” she says. “I usually …
Dan Vergano* has an important piece in USA Today that tries to step out of the climate wars echo chamber (apologies for metaphor butchery) to look at the data on the effect the whole CRUKerfuffleGate thing is having on the body politics. He bases his argument on data from Jon Krosnick, a leading academic pollster …
This whole Up Front thing we’re doing at the Journal, with a rotating cast of writers doing front page columns on pretty much whatever amuses or intrigues them, is a bit of an experiment. My entry today was more experimental than usual, not sure if it worked entirely, but it was fun. The back story: …
Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based …
Continue reading ‘Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science’ »
One of the things my colleagues and I found when reviewing the history of the ’70s global cooling myth was the consistent way alleged evidence was recycled through the literature by those perpetuating the myth. It was easy to verify the recycling in two ways. First, there were characteristic mistakes and elisions introduced early that …
Writing in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, physicist Mark Boslough argues that scientists are being held to a higher standard in the media and political debate over climate change than those who oppose them: Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data …
Continue reading ‘Boslough in SI: Playing By Different Rules’ »
From the work blog, a fond look back at what I was doing ten years ago today: Given as we are to the measurement of time in human terms – the second of a heartbeat, the day of waking and sleeping, the year of spring planting and fall harvest – the time scale of an …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Riffing on the Millennium’ »
It’s Science Saturday in the Albuquerque Journal. By which I mean that, when editors wander the halls looking for copy to fill the holiday news doldrums, there’s always an extra science feature on offer. (sub/ad req if you follow the links) VLA gets an upgrade: Rick Perley had a big smile on his face as …