Andrew Dessler and Chris Reddy had an op-ed in the Newport Daily News March 16 (the text is in a blog entry by Andrew here) that took a very interesting approach to the scientization problem. It was in response to an op-ed that resurrected the hoary old “water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas …
Continue reading ‘An Interesting Response to Scientization’ »
For my earthquake risk friends, word that Cleveland was rocked last night by a major earthquake, which registered 3.6 on the “whatever” scale. It – I swear I am not making this up – “knocked at least one television off its stand”.
I’ve argued in the past that my enthusiasm for the “scientization” meme comes from my experience covering all sorts of controversies, large and small, that play out in the same way: competing data used to support conflicting political positions. This doesn’t just happen on the big stuff, like climate change. It’s an intrinsic problem, found …
Apparently union regulations require all climate bloggers to weigh in on Bill Broad’s story in today’s New York Times about Al Gore etc. In brief, there’s not much more I could add to what Chris Mooney and Andrew Dessler have said: “surprised it didn’t happen sooner” (Mooney) given that Gore was largely solid on the …
On the latest Clovis research: The Clovis hunters, some of the earliest human settlers in North America, were not around for long, new research suggests. But they made the most of the time they had. The Clovis culture, named for the New Mexico site where its distinctive spear points were first discovered, spread across North …
birds: Via MJH, the Great Blue Heron Flickr project: take a picture of a heron, geotag it, include it in the group, and open source science of a sort occurs paper: Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at low levels: an assessment of reduction strategies and costs: “The net present value of abatement costs for the B2 …
Wish I’d thought of this: OTTAWA (AFP) – A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday. “I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil …
This is apparently not satire (thought it’s sometimes hard to tell): Also, these scientists are mostly liberal athiests, untroubled by the hubris that man can destroy the Earth which God gave him. (See also Unicorn)
Roger Pielke Jr. notes a remarkable coincidence between the text written by Bjorn Lomborg in the Guardian earlier this week and something Roger wrote last month. First Pielke: Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be “policy neutral,” were reported in the media to …
For the last six months or so, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I have been hanging out with University of New Mexico grad student Mel Strong, watching him do science: To the lay outsider, science can look like an edifice of fixed knowledge— the facts in textbooks. The day-to-day business of science is different, a …