Climate change on cruise control

TPP usually starts his day listening to NPR, but this AM the news was enough to put him off his toasted muffin. The interview was with Ted Cruise [sic]. TPP learned that Ted thinks all climate scientists are dishonest conspirators who ignore satellite data so that they can reach conclusions on climate change for liberal political purposes. Because you know they used to say the climate was cooling, don't you know, and now they've changed their tune.  Wow, they're all liberals in their political outlook? How do you explain such a skew? Since it can't be due to chance alone, does this  mean that  the conservative mind just cannot handle science?  And that's why all those fossil fuel industries whose by-products drive climate change support conservative candidates, to proclaim the truth about all those dishonest climate scientists. And so Ted isn't a denialist because he knows what the true data interpreted without bias actually says, "no change at all".  TPP felt like he needed another shower.

Ideology is no way to do science

Ideology is no way to govern, and ideology is no way to do science either. And yet, the GnOPe seems bent on giving it a try. For those of us who know the history of science, ideologically driven science has been tried, and it was an abysmal failure known now as Lysenkoism, named after its chief proponent. It took Russian agricultural science a couple of decades to recover even after it ended. You know you just can't let scientists, real experts, decide what research merits government support via grants because you just don't know if you will like the results or not. Now by all rational accounts, science is a description of objective reality, but that doesn't matter. Reality is apparently what the GnOPe says it is. So the chair of the congressional science committee, Lamar Smith)(TX, but you guessed that already) wants to do away with peer review, he wants his staff to be able to analyze your climate change data (Wow, huh?), and only wants to fund science whose outcomes will support their ideological perspective, which presently focuses on climate change. Can you guess what industries have supported Rep. Smith's career? When ideological science is put together with the dismantling of higher education, you can see where things are headed, a new hotter and darker ages. Well, when you vote for fundamentalist ideology, that's what you get. Good thing TPP is not on their radar or their committee may be investigating his "useless" botanical studies done without a cent of federal money (at least recently).   

Suspicions confirmed - Phlox News draws its own conclusions about dinosaur greenhouse gas production

The Phactor is quite impressed by university faculty who have time to read papers this time of year, and he is grateful when a colleague actually reads the original paper about dinosaur greenhouse gas production and the climate and reports what it really says.  Suspicions confirmed, the paper's authors never said a thing about extinction.  Phlox News drew that conclusion because they liked where that idea leads.   If you rely on Phlox News for your information, you get exactly what you deserve, a regular hosing.  But be assured this will turn up in the climate change "controversy" to suggest our extant methane producing herbivores are all to blame, so what are corporations and people to do?  

State Farm hurts the Heartland (Institute)

In north central Lincolnland the corporate headquarters of State Farm Insurance arise from the maize and soybean desert like a black monolith reminiscent of the scifi movie 2001.  The president once told me in a polite email, in response to my criticism of their failure to accept climate change, that the jury was still out and he indicated that the SF corporate position was in line with that of many "experts", real experts, not just a university biologist whose opinion just doesn't count for very much.  But thank you for your concern and long association with our company.  Hello, Allstate!  Well, of course those experts may well have been the Heartland Institute's experts, those professional deniers and corporate shills.  Here's an open letter to SF from a climate scientist announcing his decision to change insurers, using the free market approach to influence their corporate behavior, and pointing out how doing nothing about the situation is going to do nothing but hurt their bottom line.  Now SF has withdrawn its support from Heartland because of its despicable ad campaign the Phactor mentioned the other day.    

Mailbag - Conference Invitation

Wow!  The 7th International Conference of Climate Change Denialism is being hosted by Heartland Institute those wonderful people who used to shill for Big Tobacco by denying that smoking was harmful.  Here's some of the insightful questions that will be addressed by "Real Science" to provide you with "Real Choices".  Is carbon dioxide "pollution" or a boon to human and plant life?  Would future warming be harmful or beneficial?  In man-made global warming a fact or a theory? Sounds like Heartland has been learning from the Discovery Institute.  But you know only us left-wing nut cases, mad scientists, and environmental terrorists actually believe these things, which raises the question of why if you are only trying to counter a few far left crazies, is the HI spending so much money to throw a conference and produce all those "real science" billboards?  You would just ignore fringe cranks because obviously main line science would be on your side.  So right away you smell something a bit off.  So even though the world's leading climate scientists, policy experts, and political leaders will be at the conference, us crazies have field work to do, more of that unreal science.  

Confirming your suspicions on climate change denial

Particularly with the topic of climate change denialism, it was pretty easy for us skeptics to believe that corporations and individuals whose fiscal interests are wrapped up in polluting businesses were promoting denialism by paying think tanks, even pseudothink tanks, to produce counter arguments, counter "studies", to convince people that the issue is still a matter of some debate, something still disputed, so reasonable, but gullible, people still might think inaction is OK or maybe even warranted.  Now someone has spilled the beans on the Heartland Institute, that wonderful organization that pioneered denialism for the tobacco industry.  And it worked so well for so long that it only made sense to use their tobacco-causes-cancer denialism play-book on climate change.  You can find all the details in some leaked documents via Greg Laden's blog.  The best part is how you portray climate change as "uncertain and controversial" as a means of dissuading teachers from teaching science!  Yes, keep them uneducated about science; they're just so much more gullible that way.  An awful lot of people will be very defensive, if not downright belligerent, because it isn't fun to find out you've been played.  The same tactic has worked pretty well for religious opposition to evolution too.  And why shouldn't it?  Grifters know that the same old cons continue to work. 

Climate change denial - the bad side of blogging

The Phactor admits he is unable to read or completely understand research that is outside his area of expertise. Oh, here and there you make mistakes, interpret or explain something incorrectly, but generally if you want to be an authority, to speak with some expertise, knowledgeably, you must first have an expertise in something and second stick to it. As a result, my reaction to blog reports that cosmic rays, not human activities, are affecting climate change and global warming was skeptical, always a good initial position, because you simply have to wait for people with real expertise to explain things. Unfortunately, as residents of the blogosphere know, blogs have a way to propagating, link by link, and spreading, especially if the purported information appears to support a favorite position or cause. So it is always a pleasure when someone with real expertise, someone who can read the actual research paper on cosmic rays, and then explain what it really says, and what it doesn't say, and then show how bloggers who can't and don't read such papers spread disinformation on climate change. However we live in a world where disinformation works quite well to convince the easy to convince that they have it right and the experts have it wrong. The Phactor gives the little video on climate change at the link above 2 thumbs up.