WaPo:Canwepleasecutitoutwith

WaPo: Can we please cut it out with all of this anti-GMO asininity?

posted at 2:41 pm on June 3, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Human beings have been using various agricultural techniques to genetically modify (i.e., breed for preferred traits in) their food for thousands of years, and the more recent and more rapidly innovative advent of genetically modified foods via laboratory has helped scientists and farmers to develop hardier, more nutritious, pest-and-weather-resistant crops that have the ability to feed more people while using up less space and fewer resources (which, I might mention, is a pretty great environmental development to boot).

Despite their boundless potential for feeding the hungry and alleviate poverty the world over, genetically modified organisms have inspired a small but vociferous and well-marketed opposition campaign among many of the same types of people who would probably dismiss you as a knuckle-dragging, anti-science flat-earther for questioning the absolute and catastrophic imminence of climate-change disasters. If rising global temperatures are indeed the all-consuming environmental problem that The Party of Science portends, then GMOs are going to be an essential part of any adaptation strategy — but let that not deter the voters of Jackson County, Oregon, who last month joined several other counties spread across California, Hawaii, and Washington to ban the cultivation of genetically modified crops:

Residents in a southwest Oregon county voted emphatically to ban genetically engineered crops following a campaign that attracted a bushel of out-of-state money.

With most of the ballots counted in Tuesday’s all-mail election, Jackson County voters approved the measure by a 2-to-1 margin. ..

Though genetically engineered crops are common and no mainstream science has shown they are unsafe, opponents contend GMOs are still experimental and promote the use of pesticides. They say more testing is needed. …

“Regrettably ideology defeated sound science and common sense in Jackson County,” Barry Bushue, president of the Oregon Farm Bureau, said in a statement. “We respect the voice of the voters, but remain convinced Measure 15-119 is bad public policy. While this election is over, this debate is not. We will continue to fight to protect the rights of all farmers to choose for themselves how they farm.”

The editors of the Washington Post would agree with that sensible assessment, as they outlined in a piece this week criticizing the anti-”Frankenfood” “fundamentalism” of these anti-science and trend-chasing yuppies:

There is no mainstream scientific evidence showing that foods containing GMOs are any more or less harmful for people to consume than anything else in the supermarket, despite decades of development and use. If that doesn’t convince some people, they have the option of simply buying food bearing the “organic” label. There is no need for the government to stigmatize products with a label that suggests the potential for harm. Outright bans, meanwhile, are even worse than gratuitous labeling.

The issue is not just one of agribusiness profits, though some companies certainly stand to make money by creating and selling GMOs. The application of current biotechnological tools to agriculture offers a wide array of benefits , benefits that are only beginning to be seen. There is the potential to create crops that are easier to grow, better for the environment and more nutrient-rich. Smart genetic modification is one important tool available to sustain the world’s growing multitudes. Making good on that promise will require both an openness to the technology and serious investment in GMOs within wealthy countries. The prospect of helping to feed the starving and improve the lives of people across the planet should not be nipped because of the self-indulgent fretting of first-world activists.

Amen to that.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: agriculture, economics, food, genetically modified crops, health, hunger, poverty, science

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

NotedscientistfearsaliensignoredEarthbecausewe’re

Noted scientist fears aliens ignored Earth because we’re too stupid

posted at 5:01 pm on June 1, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

What do you get when you put one of the smartest people in the world – astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson – in the same room with MSNBC talker Chris Hayes? Answer: You get a lot of science interview questions, not all of which will be gems. But to their credit, they did manage to cover the one burning issue which awaits resolution – where are the aliens, and why haven’t they contacted us?

Tyson may not know for sure, but he has a theory.

Astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil DeGrasse Tyson told MSNBC host Chris Hayes that while it’s audacious enough for human beings to say they’re capable of defining intelligence, he would still like to know if there’s other intelligent beings in the universe.

“My great fear is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens,” DeGrasse Tyson said to Hayes. “But they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth. How’s that for measures of intelligence?”

One reason it’s presumptuous for humans to act like they’re the arbiters of intelligence, DeGrasse Tyson said, is the possibility that planets much older than ours are already sending us messages in a format that, while basic to them, is incomprehensible by our current standards.

The idea that the first hint an extraterrestrial species will have of us is old I Love Lucy reruns is not a new one. But would a space-faring race really assume we are all that stupid? A quick inspection would show that we have manned and unmanned artificial satellites orbiting the planet. A modest visual survey would show cities, roads, and all manner of intelligent design. It just seems unlikely to me that aliens would ignore anyone who had not yet mastered the warp drive.

I’ll suggest two other possibilities and you are free to add in your own.

First, assuming there are other intelligent species alive at this time in this galaxy, I’m guessing there aren’t going to be that many of them. Given the number of stars in the Milky Way it would have to take many times the span of years that we have had an advanced civilization to search them all. So they may be out there and looking, but they just haven’t found us yet.

The second possibility I am sure is far more likely. At roughly the same time they invented their own warp drive, they also invented politics. In the ensuing squabbles, the budget for the warp drive was diverted, and they never got off the ground.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: science

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Istheglobal-warmingestablishmentsuppressingdissent? posted

Is the global-warming establishment suppressing dissent?

posted at 8:01 am on May 16, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

•  Share on Facebook

Science, most of us learned in school, is a collaborative and ongoing effort to learn the truth through research, hypotheses, testing, and challenge. These days, science appears more to be a belief system in which heretics are summarily dismissed. Such was the case with Lennart Bengtsson, a climate research fellow at the University of Reading, whose heresy was to challenge the anthropogenic global-warming establishment — not by disputing AGW, but to point out the errors in the hypotheses and models and postulate through collected data that the effect was much slower and milder than the IPCC claims. For this, Bengtsson claims his work has been suppressed, and the Times of London has followed up on the story (via Jeff Dunetz):

Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of the authors of the study, said he suspected that intolerance of dissenting views on climate science was preventing his paper from being published. “The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist,” he added.

Professor Bengtsson’s paper challenged the finding of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.

It suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September, and recommended that more work be carried out “to reduce the underlying uncertainty”.

The five contributing scientists, from America and Sweden, submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters, one of the most highly regarded journals, at the end of last year but were told in February that it had been rejected.

A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process wrote that he strongly advised against publishing it because it was “less than helpful”.

The unnamed scientist concluded: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate skeptics media side.”

The report from the ToL is significant, in part because the skeptic views have largely been covered only by the Telegraph in the UK. In Germany, Bengtsson’s plight drew the attention of the usually AGW-friendly Der Spiegel earlier this week when Bengtsson joined a skeptic think tank:

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

GWPF, based in Britain, is a non-profit organization and self-described think tank. Conservative politician Nigel Lawson founded the organization in 2009 in order to counteract what he considered to be an exaggerated concern about global warming. The organization uses aggressive information campaigns to pursue its goals.

The lobby group’s views markedly differ from those of the UN climate panel, the IPCC, whose reports are the products of the work of hundreds of scientists who classify and analyze vast amounts of climate knowledge accumulated through years of research. The most recent IPCC report states that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to significant global warming, with serious environmental consequences.

Bengtsson was known for maintaining moderate positions even during the most vitriolic debates over global warming during the 1990s.

However, Bengtsson didn’t stick around GWPF for long, after being hounded into resigning within days:

A climate change researcher has claimed that scientists are confusing their role as impartial observers with green activism after his paper challenging predictions about the speed of global warming was rejected because it was seen as “less than helpful.”

Professor Lennart Bengtsson says recent McCarthy-style pressure from fellow academics forced him to resign from his post on a climate sceptic think-tank.

The research fellow from the University of Reading believes a paper he co-authored was deliberately suppressed from publicatoin in a leading journal because of an intolerance of dissenting views about climate change by scientists who peer-reviewed the work. …

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which was founded by former chancellor of the exchequer Lord Lawson, was established because of concerns that government policies to combat climate change may be too radical.

The think tank describes itself as ‘open-minded on the contested science of global warming’.

Lord Lawson has agreed that Professor Bengtsson’s reference to McCarthyism were “fully warranted.”

The only criteria that should be used to publish a scientific paper is the science itself, not whether it gives aid and comfort to one’s political opponents. It’s episodes like these, and declarations that the “debate is over” and that every hot summer and brush fire proves AGW but every cold winter is just weather, that have more and more people scoffing at global-warning hysteria. The models produced by the IPCC have not accurately predicted anything as of yet, and Bengtsson’s paper may have an explanation for why. However, those who have a vested interest in pushing AGW want to make sure that no one gets a chance to see it in a peer-reviewed journal, and then will later attempt to discredit Bengtsson for not having published his findings in the traditional manner.

That’s a lot of things … but it’s not science.

•  Share on Facebook

Tags: dissent, global warming, science, weather

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Interiorwouldlikeabiggerfirefightingbudgetbecause

Interior would like a bigger firefighting budget because — you guessed it — climate change

posted at 6:51 pm on May 2, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I feel like I am taking crazy pills.

If the Department of Interior really needs more money for their firefighting budget, fine. I totally get that. There is no denying that we have seem some absolutely devastating wildfires consuming ever-bigger swaths of the arid West in the past few years, and it is obviously better to be prepared than to get caught with your trousers around your ankles — but can we please, please, please be honest about the real reasons why Interior really needs that extra cash, courtesy of us, the taxpayers?

The Department of Interior and the U.S. Forest Service expect to spend $1.8 billion to fight wildfires this season, $470 million more than Congress provided, the agencies said Thursday, blaming climate change for the increased costs.

The agencies said climate change is causing longer and more intense wildfire seasons. …

“While our agencies will spend the necessary resources to protect people, homes and our forests, the high levels of wildfire this report predicts would force us to borrow funds from forest restoration, recreation and other areas,” Robert Bonnie, the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) under secretary for natural resources and environment, said in a statement. The Forest Service is part of the USDA.

The cost prediction is the highest since a 2009 law took effect requiring three wildfire forecasts each year, the USDA and Interior said. The extreme drought in California, as well as other factors, will make the fires particularly dangerous this year.

In the name of all that is holy, stop using the weather as an all-purpose excuse for every single one of your self-administered problems. At best, warming temperatures may be a contributing factor in worsening the West’s historically parched summertime conditions, but for these guys, climate change is really just a convenient excuse for covering the Department of Interior’s utter failure to exercise smart land-use policies within the third of the surface area of the United States the federal government insisted on bringing under its ownership/stewardship throughout the 20th century.

Warming temperatures, these bureaucrats like to claim, are causing winter snows to melt and rain to evaporate more quickly, so droughts are getting worse and the fire season is getting longer — all of which completely glosses over the way the federal government caved to eco-radicals for decades and suppressed logging and grazing activities in a misbegotten attempt to protect whatever endangered sage grouse was in vogue at the moment. The Forest Service has improved and innovated on some of their policies in the past decade-ish, but we are now reaping the results of the previous decades of untended forests that subsequently got overly dense, overly dry, and are sittin’ pretty, ready to blow.

I can maybe understand why eco-radicals (mistakenly) think that free markets aren’t the best resource manager when it comes to environmental stewardship, but why on earth do they think that putting the landscape at the mercy of the inefficiencies of top-down bureaucratic control (and hence whatever political lobby happens to be most powerful at the moment) is any better? It’s a recipe for disaster, and maybe I’m beating a dead horse here, but the Obama administration and its eco-radical supporters cannot be allowed to act as if the federal government is the virtuous, efficient savior of all things green, when in reality, the federal government directly created a lot of this problem in the first place.

Tags: climate change, Department of the Interior, environmentalism, Obama administration, science

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Video:Getreadyformeaslesdeathsascases

Video: Get ready for measles deaths as cases “surge”

posted at 10:01 am on April 25, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Remember when we all but eradicated measles in the US, along with the 500 or so deaths it caused each year among children? Good times, good times. The rapidly increasing number of infections so far has not caused any fatalities, but those will be inevitable — especially since the medical profession has become so unfamiliar in handling patients infected with the disease:

Since 2000, the highly contagious disease has been considered eliminated in the United States, aside from occasional small outbreaks sparked by overseas travelers. For most of the last decade, the nation was seeing only about 60 cases a year.

But since 2010, the average has been nearly 160.

“This increase in cases may be a `new normal,’ unfortunately,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Contributing to the problem: Decades of measles vaccination campaigns have been so successful that many doctors have never seen a case, don’t realize how contagious it is, and may not take necessary steps to stop it from spreading.

Among the 58 cases reported from California, at least 11 were infected in doctor’s offices, hospitals or other health-care settings, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New York City health officials say two of their 26 cases were infected in medical facilities. …

There has been no measles deaths reported in the U.S. since 2003. “But the way we’re going, we feel it (another) is inevitable,” Schuchat said.

Medical-facility retransmission, however, is a secondary problem. The primary issue in the US for the resurgence of measles is a lack of vaccination, and measles isn’t the only disease making a comeback:

In the past 20 years, a concerted public health campaign, especially among lower-income families, has made measles outbreaks rare. The disease has been considered eradicated since 2000. But today, the number of unvaccinated children has begun to become a problem, Schuchat said. Some people are choosing not to have their children immunized for personal reasons and others are unaware of, or unable to get, vaccinations, before they arrive in the U.S. She said the CDC is also seeing growth in the disease pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Before vaccinations were available, about 500,000 people were infected with measles annually in the U.S., a number that fell to about 60 after the disease was all but eliminated in 2000. Since 2010, it has increased to an average of 155 cases per year. …

The proportion of vaccinated children varies by state, depending on the toughness of their immunization laws, Sammons said. Nationally the measles, mumps, rubella vaccination rate is over 90 percent, but in 15 states it is below that standard, she wrote. New York magazine reported last month on schools in California and New York with low immunization rates among students, in part because parents are choosing not to vaccinate them.

Ohio is also seeing a rapid increase in measles and mumps:

The CDC takes a positive approach in its advice to parents urging vaccinations on time and on schedule. Parents frightened off by anti-vaccination advocates like Jenny McCarthy should review actual research by the CDC, released last year, showing no connection between vaccinations and autism diagnoses:

A new study published in the Journal of Pediatrics Friday may put them at ease. Researchers found no association between autism and the number of vaccines a child gets in one day or during the first two years of the current vaccine schedule.

The research was led by Dr. Frank DeStefano, director of the Immunization Safety Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Together with two colleagues, DeStefano and his team collected data on 256 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 752 children who did not have autism. The children were all born between 1994 and 1999 and were all continuously enrolled in one of three managed-care organizations through their second birthday.

The researchers not only counted how many vaccines a child was given, they also counted how many antigens within the vaccines children were exposed to over three different time periods: birth to 3 months, birth to 7 months and during the first two years. They also calculated the maximum number of antigens a child would receive over the course of a single day.

An antigen is an immune-stimulating protein found in a vaccine that prompts the body’s immune system to recognize and destroy substances that contain them, according to the NIH.

Some vaccines, like Hepatitis B, only contain one antigen for this one virus. However, at the time these children were vaccinated, the typhoid vaccine had 3,000 antigens per dose and the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine had 24.

“When we compared those roughly 250 children with ASD and the roughly 750 children who did not have ASD, we found their antigen exposure, however measured, were the same,” said DeStefano. “There was no association between antigenic exposure and the development of autism.”

The researchers also found no association between antigenic exposure and ASD.

The return of these childhood diseases should be a national embarrassment, and any preventable deaths or damage done cause for shame.

Tags: CDC, measles, mumps, science, vaccination

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Poll: Majority of Americans not too confident in Big Bang theory

Poll:MajorityofAmericansnottooconfidentin

Areglobalwarmingalarmistsjustaconglomerateof

Are global warming alarmists just a conglomerate of eco radicals and third world grifters?

posted at 6:41 pm on April 7, 2014 by Bruce McQuain

While doing a  review of Rupert Darwall’s book “The Age of Global Warming”, Charles Moore does an excellent job of succinctly identifying the alarmist movement’s core origins and core identity:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

Indeed, the resulting grouping was a natural one.  Eco radicals out to ‘save the world’ from evil capitalism (and man) and poor countries looking for a way to extort billions from rich countries.

The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China and India, from its rigours.

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.

The UN was the natural forum for this push and the IPCC, headed by an railway engineer, the natural “scientific” instrument.  We know how that story has turned out to this point.  No global warming registered for 17 years and 6 months despite all the dire, but apparently scientifically groundless, predictions.  The irony, of course, is it is those who have been skeptical of all of this are the one’s called “deniers”.  And the alarmists have become so bankrupt and shrill that some of them are calling for the arrest of “deniers.”  One supposes since the alarmist cause most closely resembles a religious cult, the call for arrest is on the grounds of heresy … or something.

Meanwhile, “green energy” – the eco radical solution to all – continues to not be ready for prime time, while fossil fuel becomes cheaper and more plentiful.

Yet somehow, the so-called “elites” have decided – based on what, one isn’t sure – that the threat to the globe is real.  More irony.  On the one hand, the eco radicals don’t care at all if it costs lives since they’ve been convinced for decades that it is man that’s the problem.  Less of us is a “good thing” in their world.   On the other hand you have the elites, aka, politicians, who see an opportunity to both expand government power and create revenue literally out of thin air.  The fight is over who will get the money.

Meanwhile the reputation of science – real science – will suffer because of this very political cause and the actions of some scientists to serve it.

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”.

And that is a complete disservice to science.

~McQ

 

Tags: alarmists, deniers, global warming, Rupert Darwall, science, warmists

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Leadingclimateresearcheraskedtoberemovedfrom

Leading climate researcher asked to be removed from UN study over its “alarmist, silly” statements

posted at 4:41 pm on March 31, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their foremost and super-cereal authoritative body on the matter, released phase two of their four-part report they compile every so often to make recommendations to policymakers the world over about how much the world is warming and what to do about it. As Jeff already noted this morning, this latest issue is replete with dire warnings about food security and declining crop yields, economic shocks, drought and water supplies, regional conflicts and war, and etcetera. So, in a nutshell, the same type of catastrophic warnings that progressive environmentalists have been prophesying for decades now, without any such calamities coming to pass.

The IPCC has several available explanations for the pause in warming we’ve been experiencing since the late 1990′s (and indeed, the panel hotly debated how best to present that information to the public in their first chapter of the report released last fall, ahem), ranging from particles from volcanic eruptions blocking out the sun’s heat to the accrued warmth currently residing within the depths of the oceans — but the point is, climate science is an extremely complex and nuanced science with a million different factors going into it, and we don’t quite know what we don’t quite know. That’s not to say that climate change isn’t a serious problem and that human activity couldn’t be some of the impetus behind it, but when climate scientists and globalist bureaucrats make huge, sweeping, and obviously politicized conclusions that they insist are absolutely beyond dispute and that the science is therefore “settled,” they kind of discredit their own cause, no? Like when, say, they dismiss one of their own as “fringe” for daring to step outside the very tiny box they have decided is the only way to think about climate change? Via the Financial Times:

Two of the world’s leading climate researchers have clashed over a report on the impact of global warming and rising sea levels. The chief author of the study by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said an economist drafting a key chapter had made “meaningful errors” that had to be fixed and was on the “fringe” of the scientific community’s thinking.

Chris Field, professor of environmental studies at Stanford University in California, made the comments about Professor Richard Tol of the University of Sussex in the UK, a senior author of the report’s chapter on climate change’s economic impacts.

Professor Tol revealed last week that he had asked for his name to be removed from the study’s summary – the most widely read section of the IPCC report – because he believed it was too “alarmist” and included “silly” statements about the vulnerability of people in war zones to climate change. …

“When the IPCC does a report, what you get is the community’s position. Richard Tol is a wonderful scientist but he’s not at the centre of the thinking. He’s kind of out on the fringe,” Prof Field said.

The good news, as rational optimist Matt Ridley explained in the WSJ this weekend based on leaks of the IPCC’s latest report, is that the UN actually did actually take a slightly more conservative stance this time around with making precise predictions and admitting to some of the vast areas of uncertainty to which climate science is prone. Even while it exaggerates the amount and causes of warming, the IPCC did get a little more cautious with the effects, Ridley writes:

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists’ accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.

The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. ..

It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government. …

The forthcoming report apparently admits that climate change has extinguished no species so far and expresses “very little confidence” that it will do so. There is new emphasis that climate change is not the only environmental problem that matters and on adapting to it rather than preventing it. Yet the report still assumes 70% more warming by the last decades of this century than the best science now suggests. This is because of an overreliance on models rather than on data in the first section of the IPCC report—on physical science—that was published in September 2013. …

And the group’s dislike of dissent hardly breeds confidence in their methods or their motivations. As I’ve said before, these guys would be doing themselves a huge favor if they would just abandon the catastrophe-or-bust alarmism strategy on which they’ve been relying for years and the subsequent recommendations that require the world’s economies to conscientiously contract to save the planet — rather than more marginal and growth-oriented ideas that could actually convince more people to get on board.

Tags: climate alarmism, climate change, politics, science, United Nations

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

The robot revolution already happened, and we lost

Therobotrevolutionalreadyhappened,andwelost

Study: Democrats more likely to think astrology is scientific, less likely to know Earth revolves around the sun

Study:Democratsmorelikelytothinkastrologyis

Isalotofscientificresearchjust…crap?

Is a lot of scientific research just… crap?

posted at 2:01 pm on January 19, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

To be fair, I suppose the use of “crap” in the title might be a bit strong, but if you’re interested in seeing society get the most it can out of scientific research it’s an important question. What set me off on this particular jag this weekend was a very long and well assembled piece by Dr. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway. In it, he analyzes some of the findings in a recent Economist article which looked into the number of published scientific papers which apparently weren’t worth the virtual paper they weren’t printed on.

Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.

A few years ago scientists at Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 studies that they considered landmarks in the basic science of cancer, often co-operating closely with the original researchers to ensure that their experimental technique matched the one used first time round. According to a piece they wrote last year in Nature, a leading scientific journal, they were able to reproduce the original results in just six. Months earlier Florian Prinz and his colleagues at Bayer HealthCare, a German pharmaceutical giant, reported in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a sister journal, that they had successfully reproduced the published results in just a quarter of 67 seminal studies.

I suppose the question here isn’t so much one of how so many respected scientists can get something wrong, (who doesn’t make mistakes from time to time?) but how the errors make it into mainstream publication and acceptance, lasting for ages. Dr. Joyner has some experience in the area of analytical statistics and offers some sensible answers.

The use of statistics to make academic research, even in “soft” fields like psychology and political science, more “scientific” has become the norm over the last half century. Unfortunately, most of us in those fields—and for that matter, most chemists, physicists, and physicians—don’t truly understand the increasingly complicated statistics we’re employing. That is, we roughly understand what they’re supposed to do but not the math behind them. And that makes us oblivious to errors.

Joyner identifies a few major items where these problems could be alleviated to some degree if the will existed to do it. Three of them break down as follows:

- The pressure to publish something … anything with your name on it is incredibly intense if you want to advance in your field. This problem has been a known issue for a long time, leading to the Publish or Perish dynamic in academia, and it opens the door to all sorts of errors.

- The perceived need to employ statistical mathematics to support research, particularly in the “soft sciences” leads to problems when attempting to force fit rather hazy measurements into the hard discipline of mathematics.

- Too many of the people involved in a variety of areas of research don’t have a full – or in some cases, even a fundamental – grasp of the difficult mathematics required to truly prove a hypothesis. And there is little incentive for those who do understand it to go through the strenuous, time consuming work of reproducing experiments or thoroughly dissecting their math just to further the career work of somebody else.

The second two of these problems are highlighted in a story which Ed pointed out to me this morning. It deals with Nick Brown, a man who embarked on what was basically an amateur exploration of psychology in his retirement years. He wound up not only challenging some accepted, published information in that field, but essentially overturning the opinions of the entire scientific community.

The majority of the cases that Joyner is discussing deal with fields of hard science which are at least terrestrial in nature and lend themselves to solid testing in the laboratory. None of this gets into the massive bodies of work which are regularly published in less measurable fields, particularly astrophysics and it’s related, nearly science fictional relatives. One of the hot topics there is the entire question of so called dark matter and dark energy, just for one example, which has led some scientists to already begin asking if these things are real at all. A lot of this may rise from the question of whether or not we really even understand what gravity is and how it is propagated. (We still have scientists being featured on Science Channel shows who think that gravity may be so weak in comparison to the other three primal forces because it’s leaking through to or from other dimensions we can’t perceive.)

The chief argument in favor of the current way of doing things is basically that it will all come out in the wash. Presumably, a significant experimental error, once published, will be exposed as later work attempts to verify or build upon it. But as Joyner notes, there is very little effort being put into challenging these sorts of things once they are published, become embedded in the “common knowledge” and start generating money for people. All of this should give us pause, and prompt more people to be willing to stand up and speak out when we’re told something that just doesn’t seem to pass the smell test. It may turn out to be valid after all, but it’s always worth asking the question.

Tags: research, science

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Yale survey: Average tea partier has better science comprehension than general population

Yalesurvey:Averageteapartierhasbetterscience