Tag: Global warming

Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Climate Change Deniers, Evolution Deniers

Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces

—By 

lightning hitting earth
Are religion and end times thinking now wrapped up with the denial of global warming? Igor Zh./Shutterstock

All across the country—most recently, in the state of Texas—local battles over the teaching of evolution are taking on a new complexion. More and more, it isn’t just evolution under attack, it’s also the teaching of climate science. The National Center for Science Education, the leading group defending the teaching of evolution across the country, has even broadened its portfolio: Now, it protects climate education too.

How did these issues get wrapped up together? On its face, there isn’t a clear reason—other than a marriage of convenience—why attacks on evolution and attacks on climate change ought to travel side by side. After all, we know why people deny evolution: Religion, especially the fundamentalist kind. And we know why people deny global warming: Free market ideology and libertarianism. These are not, last I checked, the same thing. (If anything, libertarians may be the most religiously skeptical group on the political right.)

And yet clearly there’s a relationship between the two issue stances. If you’re in doubt, watch this Climate Desk video of a number of members of Congress citing religion in the context of questioning global warming:

Indeed, recent research suggests that Christian “end times” believers are less likely to see a need for action on global warming.

And now new research by Yale’s Dan Kahan further reaffirms that there’s something going on here. More specifically, Kahan showed that there is a correlation (.25, which is weak to modest, but significant) between a person’s religiosity and his or her tendency to think that global warming isn’t much of a risk. Perhaps even more tellingly, Kahan also found that among highly religious individuals, as their ability to comprehend science increases, so does their denial of the risk posed by global warming. Here’s some data he presented:

Among the highly religious, more science comprehension leads to less concern about global warming.

Among the highly religious, more science comprehension translates into less concern about global warming. Dan Kahan

“I have to say, those effects are bigger than I would have expected,” wrote Kahan of his findings. The researcher went on to say that he isn’t sure why greater religiosity predicts greater denial of climate change. But in his data—with a representative sample of over 2,000 Americans—it clearly does.

There are two major possibilities. And there is probably some truth to both of them.

There is the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory. In other words, anti-evolutionists and climate deniers were both getting dumped on so much by the scientific community that they sort of naturally joined forces. And that makes sense: We know that in general, people gather their issue stances in bunches, because those stances travel together in a group (often under the aegis of a political party).

But there’s also the “declining trust in science” theory, according to which political conservatives have, in general, become distrustful of the scientific community (we have data showing this is the case), and this has infected how they think about several different politicized scientific issues. And who knows: Perhaps the distrust started with the evolution issue. It is easy to imagine how a Christian conservative who thinks liberal scientists are full of it on evolution would naturally distrust said scientists on other issues as well.

Further research will no doubt unravel what’s going on here. In the meantime, we can simply observe: In the political science wars that have wracked America for well over a decade, both sides are consolidating their forces.

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Crap, Hogwash, Wikipedia and Other Strong Evidence

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Uncategorized

Crap, Hogwash, Wikipedia and Other Strong Evidence.

By rossleighbrisbane

“I mean in the end this whole thing is a question of fact, not faith, or it should be a question of fact not faith and we can discover whether the planet is warming or not by measurement. And it seems that notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man made CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world’s warming has stopped. Now admittedly we are still pretty warm by recent historical standards but there doesn’t appear to have been any appreciable warming since the late 1990s.”

Tony Abbott: A REALIST’S APPROACH TO CLIMATE CHANGE Speech – July, 2009

From Abbott’s Interview with Andrew Bolt:

Bolt: (Volunteering to fight) the fires. Was there an element of running away from the office?

PM: Ha! Mate, I got up to the station at 4pm Saturday and I got back to the station at 10 Sunday morning. So there’s no question of running away from the office, because the office is closed then. The office is closed.

AB: I’ve been struck by the insanity of the reaction in the media and outside, particularly linking the fires to global warming and blaming you for making them worse potentially by scrapping the carbon tax.

PM: I suppose, you might say, that they are desperate to find anything that they think might pass as ammunition for their cause, but this idea that every time we have a fire or a flood it proves that climate change is real is bizarre, ’cause since the earliest days of European settlement in Australia, we’ve had fires and floods, and we’ve had worse fires and worse floods in the past than the ones we are currently experiencing. And the thing is that at some point in the future, every record will be broken, but that doesn’t prove anything about climate change. It just proves that the longer the period of time, the more possibility of extreme events … The one in 500 year flood is always a bigger flood than the one in 100 year flood.

Bolt: The ABC, though, has run on almost every current affairs show an almost constant barrage of stuff linking climate change to these fires.

Abbott: That is complete hogwash.

Bolt: It is time to really question the bias of the ABC?

Abbott: But people are always questioning the “bias” of the ABC.

Later in the same interview:

PM: I would say that there tends to be an ABC view of the world, and it’s not a view of the world that I find myself in total sympathy with. But, others would say that there’s a News Limited view of the world.

     From “The most depressing Discovery about the Brain, Ever”

“In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions.  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem.  The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are.  We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically,  is no.  When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.”

And just in case you missed it at the time:

“I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.”

People are entitled to their own point of view. We all accept that. It’s a free country, after all. I’m sure that Andrew Bolt would agree that we’re all entitled to express a point of view. Even if it’s demonstrably wrong. For goodness sake, if Bolt had to rely on facts for his point of view, he wouldn’t have a column.

The trouble with the exchange of opininons is that it very rarely goes beyond, “You’re wrong and  I’m right, therefore nothing you have to say could change my mind.”

And so I find our beloved leader’s comments – the ones I highlighted – in the Bolt interview disturbing. Tony Abbott seems to be saying that extreme events aren’t evidence of anything, and it doesn’t matter how many we have, that’s just the nature of things. Records are made to be broken, after all.

This is fairly consistent with the way in which climate deniers view things. One extreme weather event is just the exception. Two is just coincedence. Three, well, that’s the norm – we have weather like this all the time.

Now, I think that there is a discussion to be had about how much of a link can be drawn between climate change and the current bushfires. And I have some sympathy for the view that maybe Adam Bandt could have timed his comments a little more sensitively. I can accept that we’ve always had large bushfires and that, in the distant past, some of them even occured in October.

However, I think that we need to actually look very closely at the evidence – even if it means hours on the computer looking up Wikipedia. To say, as one person wrote in response to the Climate Council’s Bushfires and Climate Change in Australia – The Facts (which suggested that bushfires in the last thirty years had been more frequent),  that we had large bushfires in the past too. The person then went on to talk of three over the space of sixty years prior to 1983.

It’s difficult to argue about climate change when people like Bolt and Abbott seem to suggest that every event can be taken in isolation and therefore nothing is part of any pattern. Bolt may be right. There may be no significant warming. But he is no more of less qualified to assert his position than the bloke down at the pub who tells me that Greater Western Sydney will make next year’s Grand Final. He is not an expert and lacks formal training in the area – something that he is quick to point out about those he disagrees with. After arguing for years that the climate is actually cooling, Bolt jumped on the IPCC report which suggested the planet wasn’t WARMING as fast as they predicted, completely ignoring the fact that this went against his contention.

So, records are always being broken, according to the Prime Minister. Linking the fires to climate change is “complete hogwash”. We don’t need a Climate Commission to look at evidence. We know these things. Who needs a Science Minister? It’s either part of trade, or something you do at school. Science, itself, what’s that?

As for the Audit Commission, who thinks that they may recommend delaying or scaling back the Liberal’s Direct Action initiatives?

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Reality Check: We all need it (Book review)

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Reality Check, Science Deniers, Skeptical

Reality Check: We all need it (Book review)

Posted by idoubtit

There are some writers for which you know pretty much exactly what you are going to get. Donald R. Prothero is one of those writers. I expect a well-researched, comprehensive treatment of the topic with a flavor of emotion here and there. That’s what I got with Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future, 2013, Indiana Univ Press.

The core of the book is summed up in the John Burroughs quote given on page 1:

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

RC

Once you observe the methods of creationists as the classic example of science denialists, you can recognize the same tactics in those that reject climate change. I have also noted the same tricks in environmentalists or those holding contrarian views about vaccines, the paranormal, and various consumer products.

The premise of Reality Check is that when “a well-entrenched belief system comes in conflict with scientific or historic reality” the believers in this system will actively discount, ignore or distort the facts that go against it. They may stop at nothing to defend their belief – they will lie, hide evidence, manufacture evidence, pay people off, bully, harass, discredit, and even threaten the scientists who are  supporting the “inconvenient” conclusion.

The book highlights denialism rampant in the fields of environmentalism, global warming, evolution education, vaccine information, AIDS treatment policy, medical claims, energy policy and population size and growth. Each chapter exposes the hidden agendas of those who reject the scientific consensus and provides the reader with the solid, established evidence.

As one example, Reality Check exposes the devious doings of the tobacco industry. I learned the history of the manufactured controversy surrounding the dangers of smoking about 5 years ago in my Master’s degree program in Science and the Public. I was appalled. I had no idea that there were people running an industry that was knowingly making people addicts and killing them just so they can keep their profit margins. The lies and deceptions were hard for me to accept but it was real! The facts are out there now and we know the truth about tobacco.

Citizens and consumers would be smart to learn the pattern of denialism as outlined in this book. Democracies need well informed citizens. Instead, we have a population that seems to prefer their news spoon fed from the internet or television, choosing outlets that support only their worldviews to begin with. There is no deliberation taking place, no deep thinking. Many are happy to exist only in their echo chambers never hearing the whole story.

The absolute strongest part of the book is the second chapter entitled “Science, Our Candle in the Darkness”. It enlightens the reader about what science is, what it isn’t, and how some exploit the public’s weakness in understanding how science works to convince them that the consensus is inaccurate. The “Baloney detection” section was particularly pointed, as Prothero explains the harm in false claims: “Pseudoscience robs people of their time or money or resources they really need in moments of stress and hardship and sells them phony answers and snake-oil just for temporary reassurance.” (Page 19)

Fake claims anger me. Fake claims backed by an agenda are even more devious and dirty. This compels me to do skeptical advocacy as I do. I know Don Prothero feels the same. Don is a wealth of knowledge.  What he has to say is important, not because it provides him income or notoriety. It’s because it’s the right thing to do. It’s what society needs to know in order to function to its highest purpose. I would pull out Chapter 2 and make it required reading in all senior high school classes. Kids need to be armed with information that can save them from losing money, health or wits by falling for nonsense ideas, quack cures and fast-talking dealers.

I learned many new things from this book, which is why I read books in the first place. Reality Check can be used as a college textbook and students will find their own personal well-entrenched belief system challenged. I recommend it for anyone interested in science, society or politics.

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Australia | New Right Wing Government Leaps Forward into The Dark Ages

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Australian Right Wing, Catholic Right Wing, Tony Abbott Right Wing

New Australian Government Cancels the Future

The following is a comment from a Facebook friend, Shane C which he left under a topic I posted on Facebook yesterday; Victoria Rollison’s “Abbott is hiding from the future“. It deserves wider readership than the Facebook page could offer and it is my pleasure to post it here. You will agree that Shane raises some thought-provoking points. Here is what Shane said:

The Cabinet of the new Australian government has just one woman, no science ministry, only one member who takes scientists’ findings on global warming to be true (but who believes a future proof broadband network is not needed), and a particularly dense education minister who thinks advanced tertiary education is a privilege that only the rich should have.

This is a cause of great concern.

A number of breakthroughs in science and technology will start to emerge over the next five to twenty years. Some of the main ones will be breakthroughs in medical science, breakthroughs in materials technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nanotechnology.

A number of consequences will follow which will include but not limited to; the cure for all diseases, not just cancer, resulting in very long life, the catch being that only the rich and privileged can afford it, automation of labour in all mining and heavy industry resulting in the sudden unemployment of all non-skilled labour.

Because of the exponential nature of technological development, the nations that develop the three key technologies first, AI (artificial intelligence), QC (quantum computing), and NT (nanotechnology) will rule the world. Their medical and materials technologies will be as to the rest of the world as current technological societies are to stone age ones.

Not only will the nations who get to the key twenty-first century technologies first have a gigantic economic advantage but access to advanced technologies will bootstrap their advantage even further because they will go on to develop advanced means to accessing space with AI designed, NT grown, single stage to orbit (SSTO) spacecraft that will be relatively cheap to produce and operate.

We could be looking at a twenty-first century that will be dominated by a few AI/QC/NT enhanced societies taking humanity’s first truly permanent steps out into space. Those nations that will be successful will be those who take scientific research seriously, provide the world’s best telecommunications infrastructure, and provide their populations with the best access to medical care and education.

And the new Australian government is not interested in any of this

.

(Photo credit: Toban B.)
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Global Warming Has Not Slowed

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Climate Change, Climate Denial, Climate Denial Machine, Climate Deniers, Climate Science, Environment, Global Warming

Global Warming Has Not Slowed

We’re seeing an onslaught of misinformation on climate in the build up to the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change release later this week.

Here’s some truth to push back.

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Exclusive: Billionaires Secretly Fund Attacks on Climate Science

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Americans for Prosperity, Climate Science, Climategate, Koch Brothers, Koch Industries, Oil Companies, Right Wing, The Donors Trust

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science
Audit trail reveals that donors linked to fossil fuel industry are backing global warming sceptics
Via:- Steve Connor
The headquarters of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas
A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate “counter movement” to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism – some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a “donor advised fund”, meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

Anonymous private funding of global warming sceptics, who have criticised climate scientists for their lack of transparency, is becoming increasingly common. The Kochs, for instance, have overtaken the corporate funding of climate denialism by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. One such organisation, Americans for Prosperity, which was established by David Koch, claimed that the “Climategate” emails illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia in 2009 proved that global warming was the “biggest hoax the world has ever seen”.

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.

The trust has given money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is currently being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.

Dr Brulle said: “We really have anonymous giving and unaccountable power being exercised here in the creation of the climate countermovement. There is no attribution, no responsibility for the actions of these foundations to the public.

“By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise.”

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The 2013 Climate Change Wake-up Call

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Heatwave

The 2013 climate change wake-up call

Is an extreme heatwave enough for people to start taking the science of climate change seriously in Australia? Dr Paul Willis hopes so.

By Paul Willis

BoM heatwave map

Bureau map for January 8 shows area of deep purple over Australia. Shades of deep purple and magenta have been added to the forecast map for temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (BoM)

The hot weather that has besieged the nation since the beginning of the year and the associated bushfire threat has, I hope, been something of a cathartic experience for Australia. Finally an event that can be linked to climate change has been of such magnitude and impact that many people are now sitting up and taking notice.

Even so, we have been slow off the mark to discuss the linkage between extreme weather events and climate change and those discussions were still limited in extent. I’m hoping that the extreme heatwave is a ‘shot across the bow’ notice that we need to take climate change seriously — but already the climate denial camp are viewing these extreme events as business as usual.

The USA had a similar experience last year with Superstorm Sandy: a nasty, unprecedented weather event of horrendous impact that was also in line with the predictions made by climate science over the last couple of decades. Most of the US and indeed most of the world were shocked at the pictures of widespread devastation delivered by a single, freakish storm. Sandy came off the back of an even more devastating drought across much of the USA during the preceding northern summer that has also been linked to climate change.

Finally many Americans started to ask if these were the hallmarks of climate change. The country which has been the most inactive of nations with respect to recognising climate change and implementing measures to mitigate against its worst effects started to sit up and take notice. Climate change suddenly became very real and very serious. And to just drive the message home a little more clearly, last week it was announced that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the continental USA.

But perhaps the greatest influence on the American climate epiphany was not caused by the weather, nor did it even originate within their borders.

Economics counts more than science

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, insurance underwriting giant Munich Re issued a report  just before Superstorm Sandy hit their eastern seaboard. After analysing weather data from 1980 to 2011 they identified that the overall burden of losses from weather catastrophes was US$ 1,060 billion (in 2011 values). Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the costliest single event ever recorded in the US with US$ 62.2 billion insured losses and overall losses of US$125 billion (in original values). The report went on:

“… Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America” and “Anthropogenic climate change is believed to contribute to this trend”.

When an organisation like Munich Re issues a report like that, people, business and politicians sit up and take notice. The bottom line is that, due to the identified increased risk of damage and loss due to more severe weather events in North America, they are going to charge more for their insurance underwriting services. They have made a link between climate change and the wallets of America. And it’s when a dollar cost can be placed on something as esoteric as climate change science that people begin to take notice — we live in societies governed by economists, not scientists.

This message was reinforced this year when noted American economist Joe Stiglitz came out with nine ways that climate change is already hurting the US economy and some of these effects are huge. Stiglitz argues that climate change is likely to cost the US economy $3.8 billion per year by 2020, $6.5 billion per year by 2040 and $12.9 billion by 2080.

One would hope that most Americans awoke to 2013 with some very sobering prospects for their continued indifference and intransigence to climate change. And that’s right when Australia was delivered its climate clout: a savage reminder that what the climatologists have been saying for the last 20 years or more is real and has potentially devastating local consequences.

 

Heatwave coverage a slow burn

The New Year heralded the beginning of a widespread and intense heatwave across Australia. With this heatwave came a catastrophic risk of bushfires which went on to burn out large areas of several states. This infographic from activist group GetUp! neatly summarises the heatwave and bushfires as they stood on 10 January and places them in the context of climate change.

Let’s be clear here: attributing specific weather events to a general cause such as climate change is a tricky proposition. It’s akin to asking which individual cigarette is going to cause the lung cancer that kills the smoker. But, just as smoking has now been shown conclusively to cause cancer, there will also be an increasing occurrence of extreme weather events as predicted by climate change. While this or any specific event cannot be predicted by climate change models, the facts that they occur and their nature, is exactly what climate change models have been predicting.

While news bulletins and front pages across the nation were filled with stories covering the heatwave and bushfires, the Australian media was slow off the mark to explore the link between these events and climate change. After more than a week of record temperatures and scorching bushfires, there were no articles that suggested climate change had a part to play in the catastrophe.

Then on 8 January, The Conversation introduced climate change into the debate, and the Australian Science Media Centre (AusSMC) provided expert comments to the media that explored climate change as a causal factor for the twin disasters. An AusSMC rapid reaction early that day included these comments from Dr Markus Donat, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre, at the University of New South Wales:

“In recent studies we have analysed how extreme temperatures have changed globally. For most regions, including Australia, we found that extremely high temperatures have become more frequent and more intense, while extremely low temperatures are occurring less frequently than they did in the middle of the 20th century.

“Counting the number of very warm days (in this specific case defined as the warmest 5 per cent during the 1951-1980 period) we found that during the most recent 3 decades 1981-2010 the frequency of days in this warmest category has increased by 40 per cent globally.”

It’s a contextual statement not so much directly linking the current events to climate change but providing the wider framework within which the heatwave and the fires could be interpreted. It was reused in the media 77 times over the following couple of days.

Later the same day in another release from the AusSMC, Liz Hanna, a convenor at the Climate Change Adaptation Research Network – Human Health, at the Australian National University, provided these more impassioned comments:

“Those of us who spend our days trawling — and contributing to — the scientific literature on climate change are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilisation. We are well past the time of niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying not to scare the public. The unparalleled setting of new heat extremes is forcing the continual upwards trending of warming predictions for the future, and the timescale is contracting. This trepidation on the part of scientists and researchers, and in some cases flagrant resistance by stakeholders in the fossil fuel industry, to allow the real story to be fully revealed and comprehended by the public at large, has allowed the stalling of action to save the planet, and ourselves.

“To speak of heat alone, heat already kills more Australians than the road toll. If it is not already double, it soon will be.” …

“People who cannot access cooled environments are also at risk. The response of turning on air conditioners only exacerbates the problem of global warming. The only correct response is to slow down, and ultimately reverse, the warming.”

(I’ve reproduced Donat’s quote in full but edited the quote from Hanna as it was provided by the AusSMC).

Hanna’s comments received wider publication than Donat’s with over 202 publications using parts of her commentary. But, of those 202 publications, 182 were reprints of an article by Ben Cubby at Fairfax leaving just a handful of others that discussed the climate-heatwave-bushfire link. Thus, despite there being good and forceful comments from respectable researchers made readily available to the Australian media, the take up was rather poor and some media organisations ignored the issue completely.

The story was picked up overseas by the BBC as well as bloggers, and George Monbiot at The Guardian in the UK drew particular attention to how the heatwave was confronting evidence against climate change denial in Australia specifically naming Tony Abbot, Andrew Bolt, Ian Plimer and The Australian.

 

Force of denial

Almost as soon as the discussion got started in Australia, the forces of denial and ignorance sprang back into life. On 9 January acting Opposition Leader, Warren Truss, was quoted thus:

“Indeed I guess there’ll be more CO2 emissions from these fires than there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades.”

This is, indeed, only his guess with no numbers or data to back it up. This off-the-cuff statement of belief was comprehensively pulled apart by Philip Gibbons, senior lecturer at the Australian National University, in The Conversation. Gibbons showed, in fact, that the amount of carbon released by the current bushfires is around 2 per cent of the annual emissions from Australia’s coal-fired power stations. To equal those annual power station emissions would require incinerating a forest the size of Tasmania.

Other media outlets maintained the business as usual climate denial. In The Weekend Australian on 12 January, the environment editor, Graham Lloyd, wrote a rather confused piece taking some details that have been changed in climate outlook predictions to cast doubt on the credibility of climate science.

It included a statement that, “The jury is out on the cause of the round of heatwaves hitting Australia”, with no clear idea who that ‘jury’ is. Ever fussing in the cracks trying to obfuscate a clear picture of what is actually going on, once again our national paper gets it hopelessly wrong on this issue. And this was after The Australian published this piece on 3 January covering predictions from the Bureau of Meteorology for an increase in both the frequency and intensity of future heatwaves. A rather confused agenda.

Let us hope that future discussions around climate change and what to do about it will be free of invented factoids and misinformation. It’s time to take the science seriously. We are witnessing the consequences of ignoring that science and pretending that climate change isn’t occurring. It’s a heavy price we are paying and that debt is only going to increase if we don’t wise up.

About the author:

Dr Paul Willis is the director of RiAus, Australia’s unique national science hub, which showcases the importance of science in everyday life.  The well-known palaeontologist and broadcaster previously worked for ABC TV’s Catalyst program. This article was first published on the RiAus website.

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Top 10 Reasons Humans Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Apocalypse, Death Wish, Power, Resident Evil, Zombies

Top 10 Reasons Humans Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse
by Alpha

Readers – the end is nigh. Any day of the week there always seems to be some terminal apocalypse just around the corner, poised to finally bring ruin to us all – and severe distress to the gullible. This is true not only in relation to the 2012 Mayan prediction, but regularly throughout human history – going right back to pre-Roman times.

Why our fixation? Writing strictly on a not-for-prophet basis, here are the Top 10 reasons for our obsession…

 

10

An inflated sense of self-importance

El-Mito-Narciso-El-Psicoanalisis-L-Zvvden

Much stems from our difficulty in grasping the tiny walk-on part we all have amid the sprawling enormity of deep time. The human brain just can’t compute the vastness of it. For many, the world doesn’t only revolve around us – it stops around us too. 1 in 7 people in the world right now believe it will all end during their lifetime.

9

It provides a sense of meaning

Transience-Of-Life-Daniel-Kansky

The idea of an apocalypse pushes all the right buttons at a psychological level because the idea of ‘there’s no meaning’ is a little freaky. It represents the fundamental struggle between order and chaos.

Human societies have always tried to create some kind of framework of meaning to give history and our own personal lives some kind of significance.

8

It’s about a basic human need: power

Preaching Crowd Ii

Apocalyptic predictions are a way for people to try to control the way their (and others’) world works.

The one thing we can never predict is the time and manner of our own deaths. What you get during times of particular discontent – war, famine or general bad times – is a rise in apocalyptic preaching and ideas. And at those times we seem to lap it up like there’s no tomorrow.

7

It’s a collective death wish
 Rev Jim Jones

Immanuel Velikovsky, writer on ancient catastrophes, had an unsettling theory that mankind blocks its memory of the failure of civilizations of the past, while simultaneously desiring those catastrophes – much like a collective death wish.

Considering war, global warming, financial collapse and other ways we might collectively destroy ourselves – this is a little worrying. But we need to distinguish between the end of our species (far more likely) and the end of the planet (highly unlikely).

6

We’re all bored
 Bored Worker Cropped Crop380W-Denverprblog-Com

Life can seem grindingly dull sometimes. Same job, groundhog day – yawn, as the hipsters say.

Wouldn’t a little injection of chaos alleviate all that crap? After all, aren’t depictions of apocalyptic events from the movies downright sexy? We’re sure we’d have Milla Jovovich or Megan Fox running around in tight leather pants saving the world. Might spice up a dull Wednesday morning, non?

5
It’s predicted…
 The-End-Is-Near-Apocalypse-631

…by every single religion. Those in the West are probably most aware of Christian eschatology (religious theory about the end of the world). Until recently it was taken as a given by many believers that the Second Coming and the end of the world were imminent. It’s easier to control a population that clings to a terror of some looming destruction, after all.
4

It’s common sense
 Nuclear-Bomb-Explosion

Robert Oppenheimer had a bet going with other members of the Manhattan Project as to whether the first atom bomb (that they were about to set off) would start a chain reaction that would destroy the earth’s atmosphere. Thank God the other guy didn’t win.

When the Cold War was going on, the most likely culprit for the apocalypse was nuclear weapons – and they certainly came close. Right now it might be a catastrophic climate change scenario that leaves the planet more or less intact, minus humanity – or too much bad rap music causing mass insanity.

3

There are no consequences if there’s no tomorrow
 Screen Shot 2013-01-02 At 9.53.03 Pm

When you’re mortgaged up to your eyeballs, hideously in debt, overworked, underpaid, totally depressed about the global financial meltdown and climate change, a little apocalyptic event might seem like a breath of fresh air.

The power to erase the past is a potent force indeed. After all, you didn’t really want to have to pay off those credit cards for the rest of your life did you?

2

It makes us understand ourselves better
 Know Yourself

Look at any half-decent apocalyptic sci-fi movie. It’s an excellent opportunity to examine our species as a whole.

Good fiction revolves around conflict on a personal level, and there aren’t many scenarios that allow the same style of broad speculation as a good old apocalyptic event. Bring on those zombies, mutants, aliens, because when the going gets tough… you know the rest.

1

You’re right
 

Sun-Huge-W-Three-Snow-Geese--Improved- V5W6852--Bosque-Del-Apache-Nwr,-San-Antonio,-Nm

It’s easy to mock those who have tried to predict an apocalypse and failed, but thinking about the ways the world might end, or the timing of that end, may be fulfilling a basic human need.

End of the world believers, whether religious or not, have one thing going for them. The world will, one day, end. The planet can’t last forever – astronomers predict the planet only has around another 7.5 billion years until it’s engulfed by our Sun.

In the meantime: if we do have only the briefest cameo as a small species of carbon-based bipeds in a seemingly interminable epic, shouldn’t we make the most of it in these brief moments we’re on stage?

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Deranged British Climate Change Denier James Delingpole in Wall Street Journal

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Alex Jones Is A Kook, Anti-Science Crazies, Climate Deniers, Global Warming

The precipitous decline of a once-great newspaper.
Today at the Wall Street Journal we find an appalling article titled Climategate 2.0, by one of Britain’s most deranged and dishonest climate change deniers, James Delingpole — who often appears on the crazed radio show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Every sentence in this first paragraph is an outright lie:

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet….

No, these private emails were stolen, by someone with an obvious agenda to sabotage the UN climate summit.

Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data…

Absolutely false. Neither batch of emails shows scientists “fudging” anything. Seven independent investigations confirmed that the first release showed no scientific wrongdoing whatsoever, and the scientists were utterly vindicated. The second release is just a warmed over rehash, with even less substance than the first; if the deniers behind this illegal theft had any real bombshells, they would have released them already.

…conspiring to bully and silence opponents…

Again, absolutely false. The scientists do discuss the bullying and lying tactics of climate change deniers, and how to respond to them, however — the same sort of bullying and lying you see in this article by Delingpole.

… and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

And this is also absolutely false. The emails show discussion about various aspects of the scientific data, and as always in science, disagreements about the meaning of some findings. There’s no evidence whatsoever in these emails of doubt about the “reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory.” None.

The rest of Delingpole’s article continues in this vein, shamelessly lying about the meaning of these stolen emails. The Wall Street Journal should be humiliated to have fallen so low that they would publish such a dishonest article about such an important subject. Disgusting.

UPDATE at 11/28/11 9:27:06 am

Here’s the man tapped by the Wall Street Journal to write about climate change, demonstrating his deliberate ignorance on the subject — and admitting openly that he never even reads any scientific sources. Instead he relies on other people’s “interpretations.”

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What to expect from a Rick Perry administration: active suppression of science

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Anti-Science, Anti-Science Crazies, Republican Anti-Science, Science, Science News

What to expect from a Rick Perry administration: active suppression of science

Regular readers know I am no fan of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry. The reasons for this are legion, including his stance on evolution and global warming.

Now there’s evidence it’s even worse than I thought: The Guardian is reporting that Governor Rick Perry’s administration in Texas is actively suppressing science. A report about the environmental impact of global warming on Texas was apparently edited by officials, “… deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.”

This action smacks of scientific suppression and censorship. And before you accuse me of overreacting, the scientists involved in writing the report felt this editing was so bad that the original authors of the report asked for their names to be removed from the final version. Yegads.

This story was originally reported in the Houston Chronical, and Mother Jones has an example of the changes made. It’s starting to pop up in other venues as well like Climate Progress and Climate Science Watch.

Looking it all over, the charges that science is being suppressed hold up pretty well. John Anderson is a researcher at Rice University, and author of a chapter of the report heavily redacted by the agency in question, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). His opinion is clear:

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the [TCEQ]. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. “The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax,” said Anderson.

Terrific. I’m not terribly surprised by this; after all, Perry nominated creationists to head up the Texas State Board of Education not just once, but three times. Putting a climate change denier in charge of an environmental commission is par for his course.

When Bush was President, science suppression was rampant when it disagreed with political ideology (which was very, very common). If Perry is elected, we can expect more of the same. I’m very glad to see Perry sinking in the polls right now, but as far as science goes, the other options aren’t much better.

As I’ve said before, if you’re a Republican and you support science, you need to make your voice heard. It’s now long-since become de rigeur for GOP candidates to deny all manners of science if they want to get elected. It may not be too late. Speak up… or forever be denied your peace.

via:- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/18/what-to-expect-from-a-rick-perry-administration-active-suppression-of-science/

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