War on Science

William Wehrum is a lawyer and once, apparently, worked for the EPA. Trump is trying to appoint him to be assistant administrator for air and radiation. This is a reasonably important job that concerns many aspects of the environment. Watch: https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/status/915704243335700481 The Republicans have already said they love this guy. Of course they do. There is a The War on Science going on, and in Washington, the Republicans are winning it. They are winning it in over 30 states. When they have finished winning it, that is the end of civilization at least in this…

You will remember Clement as the whistle blower at the Department of the Interior who was harassed for showing how climate change affects communities in Alaska. He was removed from his job by Fake Interior Secretory Zinke and given a new job removing staples from paperwork or something similar. Zinke similarly reassigned several others at around the same time. The inspector general has been investigating this but nothing has come of that yet. Clement hung on for a long time but today he left his position. According to the Washington Post: “Keeping my voice is more important than keeping…

About once a day, someone tells me that human caused climate change is not real because this or that thing in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contradicts something I, or some other scientists or science writer, has said. I've noticed an uptick in references to the IPCC report by those intent on denying the reality of climate change. This even happened at recent congressional hearings, where "expert witnesses" made similar claims. How can that be? How can the flagship scientific report on climate change, the objective source of information about the…

The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, supported by Education Minnesota, ran the 29th annual Minnesota Book Awards ceremony tonight, and Amanda and I were graciously invited by author Shawn Otto and State Auditor and Gubernatorial Hopeful Rebecca Otto to join them at their table. Shawn's wildly popular, and extremely, increasingly relevant book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It was up for the award in General Nonfiction. There was a great deal of suspense, as Shawn's category was the very last one of several, and there were several other…

Indivisible is a lot like #Occupy but instead of being in tents, we are intense in other ways. I have been at a few Indivisible meetings over the last few weeks. One of the questions I have about the movement is this: How many people in Indivisible now had voted for Trump, or in my case, our local Republican house representative, Erik Paulsen, or the like, elsewhere? Also, how many people in Indivisible had not voted at all in the last election, or at least, were not reliable voters? And, how many people in Indivisible had voted, and generally voted Democratic/Progressive/Whatever but had…

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the once funny but now highly repetitive cartoon about a nerd who has a job in an office. Dr. Gavin Schmidt is high up in the top ten list of world class climate scientists. He is Director of the currently under siege GISS Unit of NASA, where much of the climate science done by that agency is carried out. If you read my blog, you've read his work, because you also read RealClimate, where GS writes about climate science in a manner designed to be understandable to the intelligent, honestly interested, thoughtful individual. Adams has a history of going…

Outrage at Donald Trump has coalesced around several political loci, including women's rights, immigration, environmentalism, and scientific endeavor at large. As Trump threatens to roll back regulations and de-fund universities, Mark Hoofnagle points out that science has always been political, increasingly so in an age when politicians control huge sums of money devoted to basic research. Despite major discoveries funded by taxpayer dollars, Mark says scientists have failed "to explain the benefits of basic science to the public and to our representatives in government, and failed to defend…

Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher) Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children. The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…

I'm going to publish my full review of The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto closer to the publication date, which is June 7th. (I believe you can use the above link to pre-order the book.) But I just wanted to let you know the book exists, and is amazing, you will want to read it. You will definitely, absolutely, not want to not read it. It is a must read. This isn't just someone yammering about the lack of respect for science in America, or about the Republican Party's antiscienceosity, etc. Shawn's book is actually a history of…

You are a scientists and you are doing two things. First, you have finished a preliminary study and submitted a grant proposal based on your evolving idea about something, and you have just submitted a related paper to a peer reviewed journal. Well, OK, that's a bunch of things, but they are all related to the temporal stream of the research you are expected to do as a member of the academic community. Second, you are having conversations with your mentor, your colleagues, others, about this research in which you are traveling up and down various alleyways searching for answers to…

Modern media being what it is, I should get out in front of this, so: I am guilty of putting words in Einstein's mouth. I mean, go watch my TED-Ed video on particles and waves, or just look at the image up top-- that very clearly shows Einstein saying words that he probably never said. And it's my fault. Well, OK, I didn't actually put those words in his mouth-- the animator did that. What I wrote is "Einstein himself described [the photoelectric effect] as the only truly revolutionary thing he did." Which isn't really a quote, but a paraphrase. And it's really a paraphrase of something…

I'm probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait's (in)famous "Don't Be a Dick" speech, but I finally got around to it, and it's really excellent: Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo. Phil has posted about the speech itself, online reactions to it, and the in-person response after the talk. His thoughts are well worth reading, to put the whole thing it better context. I really don't have anything to add, which is fine, because I should spend less time typing blog stuff anyway.

Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial: I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…

There's a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be: Yeah, let's criticize that she didn't get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping - she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let's not pretend that her impression ain't shared by anyone else. For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that's not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That…

The kerfuffle of the moment in the science blogosphere once again relates to Chris Mooney, who is pretty much a kerfuffle looking for a place to happen at this point. This time around it centers around a Washington Post op-ed that is basically the executive summary of a American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper that is itself the executive summary version of a series of four workshops on science and the public. You can get a reasonable sense of the kerfuffle from the links in Chris's responses to the responses. I'm currently making one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person--…

The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy. I wasn't surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago, when I updated the slides for my talk on public communication of science-- the figure showing survey data in the current talk doesn't include those questions, while the original version has them in there. I noticed it, and thought it was a little odd, but it had no effect…

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean's been taking a beating over his negative comments on an atheist anti-Christmas sign. There's no small irony in this, given that Sean is a vocal atheist. His sentiments, which basically boil down to "it's good to promote atheism, but there's no need to be a dick about it" strike me as perfectly unobjectionable, but as he's learning first-hand, that's not enough for a lot of people on the Internet. The difference between an unjustly accused "accommodationist" like Sean and a real one like myself is here: The problem with accommodationism isn't that its adherents…

While I'm thrilled to see How to Teach Physics to Your Dog listed on Amazon, I am distressed to see it offered as a pair with something called The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. I'm not linking to the Amazon page for that book, because it's a giant pile of crap, and I wouldn't want anyone to accidentally one-click-order it after following a link from my page. If you should choose to look it up, you can read bits and pieces of it via the "Look Inside" feature, and it's true that the opening chapter or so is a reasonable-sounding description of the physics of quantum entanglement,…

The big topic-of-the-moment is the hacked stash of emails from a major climate research group. The whole climate change discussion is one of those "no upside" topics that I try to stay out of, but I have some thoughts and comments about issues surrounding the email incident. These are largely based on reactions to yesterday's posts by Derek Lowe and Coby Beck, so if you're looking for something to read to understand what I'm talking about, those are the two. The unifying thing in all of these is the intersection of science and politics. Most of what's described is normal scientific behavior…

Some years ago, I heard Bob Park give a talk about pseudoscience, using "How to get rich and famous abusing your science knowledge" as a framing device. He ran through the deceptions involved in a bunch of high-profile "science" based scams and scares-- homeopathy, free energy, power lines causing cancer, etc. Over at Live Granades, there's a four-step guide to creating a scientific controversy that gives you something close to Park's template: 1. Pick something that is regarded as true by the vast majority of scientists in the field and claim that it causes something bad. 2. Demand that…