ADAMANT

A Letter from the Heartland

Institute, that is . In March it organized a conference on climate change in New York which I attended, and one of the heartland execs. has just sent me this letter. My response is in italics

"I am writing to protest the misrepresentation of the views of scientists who spoke at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute in March, in the BBC series “Earth: The Climate Wars.”

 

The BBC series is entirely one-sided and riddled with scientific errors. We regret that film taken at our conference was used in such a partisan and even mean-spirited piece of propaganda. It was particularly unfair and unethical to deliberately quote out of context scientists who spoke at our conference, plainly with the intent to mislead viewers about what they actually said and believe.

 

For example, climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels gave a 30-minute keynote presentation at the International Conference with a theme (that has appeared in virtually all of his writing on the subject) that while some warming is taking place and human activity is partly responsible, there is no evidence that a pending global warming crisis. Michaels demonstrates how many "skeptics" in the global warming debate do not "deny" the basic science of climate change, but rather, understand that science better than most of the "alarmists" in the debate. Global warming is "real," but it is not a "crisis."

 

What does Taylor take us for?  Could this be the same Pat Michaels seen before and since on Fox TV and elsewhere declaring global temperatures are flatlining and / or  likely to head down for years to come ?

 

BBC presented a few of Michaels’ short statements out of context to assert that he “is in surprising agreement with the advocates of global warming.” BBC entirely and deliberately obscures Michaels' central point, that it is the amount of warming and its likely consequences that are the crux of the debate.

BBC showed a brief clip of Dr. Roy Spencer, who oversees satellite temperature data for NASA, acknowledging minor errors that needed correction in the NASA temperature datasets.

 

Translation:  The satellite temperature trend aberrantly pointed down for decades while in reality temperatures were going up.   The rest of the record speaks loudly to the mendacity of Taylor’s contention that Michaels and fellow keynote speaker Fred Singer have  acknowledged the reality  of global warming all along. A month before Spencer freely admitted the reversal in Science, the Michaels  and Singer baldly denied in a Cato institute article  that a  satellite screw–up  had occurred  at all, insisting instead  that ground-based instruments were at fault    satellite data interpretation  algorithm  pointed the orbiting  instrument’s global temperature trend  down instead of up for a decade.

 

BBC then took Spencer’s statement out of context to assert that Spencer now agrees that the corrupted data from poorly located surface temperature stations confirm an alarming rise in global temperatures. Even the most cursory look at Dr. Spencer’s scientific website confirms that Dr. Spencer certainly does not believe what BBC asserted he believes.

 A deeper look reveals that he did indeed, - just read his statements on the older pages of the same website. Taylor has really put his foot in it by trying to deny the scientific record. -- in  a 2004 Cato Institute paper, Michaels  loudly declared the ground and balloon data  were right and the satellites wrong , and denied  the reversal of the satellite temperature trend that Spercer acknowledged in Science at   . 

 BBC repeatedly asserts that only a very small minority of “maverick” scientists disagrees with the proposition that humans are causing a global warming crisis. Yet BBC fails to mention that there were more than 500 "skeptical" scientists, economists, and policy experts at the conference.

 Taylor fails to mention that most of them were sent by the  political and religious think tanks , newspapers and magazines  that employ them ,  and that  all who spoke, myself included – ( I have written for the WSJ on the political abuse of science ), received $1,000  plus expenses , from the Heartland Institute for doing so.  Those who were paid to attend far outnumbered  those who paid in the hope of learning anything new, and any scientists who did – must have been sorely disappointed, since scarcely a  paper presented there  has been scientifically published in  the peer reviewed literature.

 fails to mention that more than 32,000 scientists have signed a petition presented by a past president of the National Academy of Sciences documenting that humans are not creating a global warming crisis.

BBC also fails to mention that an international survey completed by more than 500 climate scientists found widespread doubts about how much of the warming of the 20th century was due to human activities and the reliability of forecasts of future warming. Or that fewer than half of the scientists surveyed believe the science is sufficiently settled to justify turning the issue of global warming over to policymakers.

 The BBC goes to great lengths to assert that scientists at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change engaged in a scientifically baseless and mean-spirited campaign to cast doubt on Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph of alleged global temperatures during the past 1,000 years. The BBC somehow fails to note that a panel of scientists and statisticians appointed by the U.S. Congress concluded that the hockey stick graph is based on cherry-picked data and is not supported by sound science.

 

 The BBC failed to report that The Heartland Institute invited scientists who believe global warming is a crisis to attend its conference and defend their thesis; none attended. (Joseph Bast reported this in his opening remarks at the conference; it was not a secret.)

 

That's not true. Taylor can hide behind the word "crisis" but  I stood up to be counted when bast raised the rhetorical question ' How many people here believe in global warming ?  ' which sits very oddly with his present equivocation. and found the event overrun with evangelists  and political operatives up to and including Ralph Reed and Marc Morano  bent on converting me from what they styled the  “Warmist” creed. 

 

Or that the conference featured one hundred speakers from a dozen countries and more than 30 universities who delivered presentations that asked questions that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change refuses to address, and delivered reports on new research casting doubt on the fundamental assumptions of the alarmist position. Somehow, the BBC managed to miss those presentations, and its "documentary" hides them from its viewers. That is a disservice to the BBC's viewers.

 

Thankfully, the BBC has a chance to "get it right." The Heartland Institute is hosting a second International Conference on Climate Change, once again in New York, on March 8-10, and we once again expect to attract hundreds of scientists from around the world “

 

Really ?  There were well over a hundred speakers, but from day one to the end , I could find only 20  individuals  presenting anything  touching on the science in question .  At both of the conferences  main events- a dinner and a luncheon , Bast  twice summoned  all those styling themselves scientists to be photographed for the record .

 

 The numbers talk-  instead of  the hundreds Taylor claims  but a grand total of 19 of his  equally mythical cohort  32,000 came forward . if Heartland wants to persuade us  more qualify as bona fide scientists , it should  run the lot through Science Citation Indes, Scirrus and Google Scholar – a list of their peer reviewed publications before the conference and since would be most illuminating, since I am still awaiting the appearance of the keynote speech in an AGU journal.

 

“ who want to be heard in the debate over global warming. The BBC is once again welcome to attend and film presentations. This time, we hope they have the integrity and honesty to share with the BBC's viewers what the speakers actually have to say.”

 

 I am looking forward to seeing it. especially in the light of this e-mail from Senator Inhofe's office :

"The organizers of a March 2008 conference that brought together more than 500 scientists, economists, and other experts on global warming today unveiled plans to hold a second conference on March 8-10, 2009, once again in New York City.

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change will serve as a platform for scientists and policy analysts from around the world who question the theory of man-made climate change. This year's theme, "Global Warming Crisis: Cancelled," calls attention to new research findings that contradict the conclusions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Hosting the conference for the second consecutive year will be The Heartland Institute, ...

"Last March we proved that the skeptics in the debate over global warming constitute the center or mainstream of the scientific community, while the alarmists are on the fringe," said Heartland President Joseph Bast. "In the past six months, the science has grown even more convincing that global warming is not a crisis. Opinion polls and political events, including the defeat of 'cap-and-trade' legislation in the U.S. Senate, also suggest this 'crisis' is over. It has been cancelled by sound science and common sense."

Marc Morano

Communications Director

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) Inhofe Staff

Alas, Marc Morano   seems to share the scientific commonsense of his previous employer , Rush Limbaugh . I wish them both a good deliverance .

THE GENESIS OF EXPELLED

                      IN 2002, BEN STEIN ASKED FORBES READERS
                      WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO  DESTROY AMERICA?
                           He answered  his own question thus :

"Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge..

Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--...to an equal status with technology in the public mind... and act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo."

Say Again?

Just in case they re-edit Expelled ,to reduce the cognitive dissonance level, note this comment by David Berlinski:

 

Just for the record: I have never endorsed any creationist views whatsoever; and I am a published critic of intelligent design. I take airplanes because I believe in the principles of fluid dynamics; when I must use a cell phone, I place my faith in quantum electrodynamics.

So what?

DB

Pajamas Media Apr 28, 2008 - 11:17 am

God And Taliban At Yale

If conceptual art has a point at all, it is to get a rise out of aesthetes who know what's not art before they’ve seen it. Tom Piatak detects none   in the work of a Yale arts major he wants expelled for raising the artistic yuck factor beyond the realm of pickled sharks and plasticized cadavers, but thinks her case grounds to remind that:

"Chief Justice Story, the chief constitutional theorist of his day, explained the purpose of the First Amendment" thus: “The real object of the amendment was ...to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”

 It is hard to criticize  the uncreated. Moss Schvarts art  exists in part only in her imagination, and in this case even shee seems unsure of what would go on display .But this much is clear- she does not favor the overthrow of Roe V. Wade, and the responses to her position-- and this article---  illustrate that rivalry between Christian sects, and schools of art is alive and well.  Many evangelicals, and traditionalists today are not famously devoted to the separation of powers, let alone church and state, and were Chief Justice Story still on the earthy bench; his constant vigilance might be greatly exercised in curbing their zeal, especially since Miss Schvart’s stunt is calculated to inflame it . But let it not be said that her performance is original - let us not forget the Sokal Affair.

A decade ago, cultural relativists fell for physics professor Alan Sokal's fish slap to the credulity and incoherence of post-modern literary theory. Contempt for Deconstruction as an academic way of life, led him to draft, a paper entitled

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
which appeared in the “Science Wars" issue of Social Text in 1996. The same month, in another publication, Lingua Franca, Sokal announced the Social Text article was a hoax, calling his own paper:

"a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics"

 The response was outrage - and laughter. A dozen years later, a sophomoric version of the same wheeze has come out of Yale, and the literally, or rather apocryphally, gory details have driven cultural critics on the right to heights of apoplexy worthy of Captain Ahab, witness Tom Piatak's April 17 piece in Taki's Magazine  “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up To Be Yalies"

 Thinking it a fair cop that  Anne Coulter's anti- understudy at Yale should succeed in rumbling the cultural apparat, left , right and center, I commented :

"Tom, what part of “Sokaled” don’t you understand? As the e’patered party you may now challenge Ms. Shvarts to a pie fight, but along with a barely passing grade in conceptual art, she gets an A for successfully transgressing the boundaries of credulity. Mencken would love it."

 But my fellow columnist would have none of it

"Mr. Seitz:

Shvarts doesn’t deserve an “A” for anything. She either attempted the serial murder of her own children, or is a publicity-seeking liar. What she did is not “art” in any reasonable definition of the term. Indeed, the only thing she “transgressed” are the standards any civilized institution would uphold. I agree with Yale alum John Zmirak: she ought to be expelled."

 My objection merely incensed him into arguing that the scientific terms on which Roe v. Wade in part hinges  are subject to redefinition in the service of religion and law alike- in other words, he began to slide into the cultural relativism -- and legal activism--he customarily decries:

"There is no need to amend the Constitution each time the Supreme Court misinterprets it. Under Article III, Section 2, Congress has the power to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court (and to abolish all inferior courts). Congress also has the power to impeach justices and judges, and issuing an unconstitutional decision, as Roe v Wade was and is, is a proper grounds for impeachment.... as I’ve argued

I don’t quite understand your comment about religion, either. The fact that my views on abortion are informed by my religious beliefs do not make them illegitimate, nor would they make illegitimate any properly enacted legislation inspired by those beliefs. The ACLU’s interpretation of the First Amendment has more in common with the French and Bolshevik Revolutions than the American Revolution.

 .. Chief Justice Story, the chief constitutional theorist of his day, explained the purpose of the First Amendment: “The real object of the amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”

 I agree with Chief Justice Story, and not with the leftists who have perverted the First Amendment to advance what Story termed “infidelity.”

  am of course relieved that the ACLU is not the arbiter of constitutional law, but I am not so sure about Chronicles of Culture either.

 It is hard to say how Story and Marshall would view Miss Schvarts’ bizarre fiction, since ‘novels’ were as new-fangled to the Founders as conceptual art is today.   The Chief Justice’s name on a granite plinth in the Harvard Observatory suggests he might find astrophysicist Sokal’s antic amusing-. Story’s last public act was leading the subscription that bought the faculty of arts and sciences  the world's most powerful telescope in 1845- an instrument whose continuing  utility amazed Russell Kirk in 1971.

 Wondrous was the wisdom of the founders, but today one fears for Princeton Observatory as much for Yale’s art department. Some dark and  cloudy night, well-wined Federalist Society students might  converge to look through the wrong end of the telescope in hope that the resulting broad  view of man's place in the universe will improve their prospects of a clerkship under Justice Alito.

Stimulating as some find Chronicle of Culture, Taki’s plays a different role. It is a salon des refusees in the face not just of PC, but the intellectual captivity of National Review ,and the aesthetic dominion of The New Criterion. Besides, other proponents of conceptual minimalism, like the Taliban, have put Miss Schvarts efforts at reifying  obscenity to shame. It pales before the demolition of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan, in which the performance artist known as Mullah Omar overthrew Althuserian conceptions of the linearity of time’s arrow by showing  that dynamite artistically deployed can not only transform featureless rock into monumental art, as at Mount Rushmore , but vice versa. Now that’s deconstruction!

 It would be unfortunate if by amplifying Miss Schvarts fame , Tom Piatak’s essay were to overshadow her Yale classmate Mr. Hashemi, the former Taliban PR man, when a timely grant might enable them to devise a joint installation. But that is for the MacArthur Foundation to decide--let others be friends to philistinism everywhere. We are guardians only of our own.  Can we look forward to Chronicles giving The New Criterion a run for its money? As a metric, forget  the Yale fiasco- count the  galleries voluntarily running ads in its pages.

 

PLEASE, SIR, MAY WE HAVE LESS?

Marxists who decry history devouring its children tend to forget how feeble its powers of digestion can be. After a decade of dining on freshly mugged Liberals, and gristly Trotskyites,  it disgorged the hairball of Neoconservatism into the pages of  The Weekly Standard.

Thence Bill Kristol's column has trickled down to make its The New York Times debut, with the historic assurance :
'We don't want to increase the scope of the nanny state'
This is cold comfort for  Republicans, but the real value of neocons to the Times lies in their capacity to alienate palaeoliberals. The newspaper's motive in putting his column front and center is as electoral as Time Magazine's was in dropping it. Republicans need no reminding of the recent authorship of their woes, but what better way to motivate Democrats to get behind the party, and shove the neocons over the transom, than to limelight Kristol dishing up gems like this weeks :

" December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003"

Sharp rhetorical practice that--besides witnessing the Marines' and Army's first and fiercest attack on the Republican Guard, March 2003 saw Kristol declare:

" We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."

23 days after our troops set foot in Baghdad he opined: "The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively."  Five years later, he fears an administration yet unelected may “snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory .”

.It remains to be seen if his  science advisers  from The Discovery Institute will tag along, or his Center For Ethics And Public Policy cohort will arrive to reinforce the Times own inimitably communitarian  Ethicist. Conservatives once entertained hopes of Kristol's reformation in Dan Quayle's  service, but Hail To The Vice-Presidential Chief Of Staff  has never been much of an anthem of change.  He was a social democrat when first I met him thirty years ago, and such he remains. I wish him joy of his journalistic homecoming.

Radio Free Transnistria

Best Of The Web, Islamodneistrofascist Affairs expert and culture czar James Taranto, tunes his transnistor hearing aid to Radio Free Tirsapol :

'Here Lenin is venerated, journalists are muzzled, dissidents are jailed and  history is invented. Run by a crowd of unrepentant Communists led by Lenin look-alike Igor Smirnov, Transnistria is a haven for arms smugglers, money launderers and outlaws on the lam. . . "It's as if a tiny terrorist group took over part of the U.S.," says Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown University. 

Maybe Paul should move there and run for office.  Sounds as though he'd be an  improvement'."

Taranto's name is also being floated, for all Tirsapol is applauding heroic disconnection of reader feedback link to his glorious column, and Axis of Paulopraxis running dogs fear Tirsapol Peoples Hall Of Head Squeezing and Sheep nomenklatura appoint him to make cultural benefit as Minister Of Journalism For Life, or possibly Look or Ramparts.

The Last 6,000 Years Are The Hard part

Exhibit A: a Crocodile Buried With Humans In Egypt

 

Exhibit B: a sign in the Creation Museum

Junk Epistemology

Think the Nobels are arbitrary ? Try  Steve  Milloy's Junk Science X-Prize  --

"$125,000 will be awarded to the first person to prove, in a scientific manner, that...

...1 Manmade emissions of greenhouse gases do not discernibly, significantly and predictably cause increases in global surface and tropospheric temperatures along with associated stratospheric cooling....2 The benefits equal or exceed the costs of any increases in global temperature caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions between the present time and the year 2100, when all global social, economic and environmental effects are considered.

RULES

*  Entrants acknowledge that the concepts and terms...in the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge hypotheses are inherently and necessarily vague... JunkScience reserves the exclusive right to determine the meaning and application of such concepts...
* JunkScience, in its sole discretion, will determine the winner, if any,
* JunkScience does not promise or guarantee that the UGWC will have any winner.
* A fee of $15 is required for each entry...There will be no refunds..."

Does Anyone Bid 120% ?

The Daily Telegraph's man at Climate Camp tells how

George Monbiot motivates the camp 

 

"George Monbiot urged us all to act before it is too late

George Monbiot is all our movement has for a hero nowadays. His factual knowledge about the science behind climate change is outstanding,

He announced for the first time that the IPCC's estimate that we would have to cut global carbon emissions by 90% was probably optimistic and that research done by NASA indicates that it may have to be 100% or even 110%.

110%!  No one could put a good shine on that statistic.  One feels that we are living in the last days of Rome's Glory,"

Does Global Warming Cause Contageous Idiocy?

Why turn to Rush Limbaugh for terminal scientific illiteracy, when you can catch  a Blue State TV station president spewing Gonzo climatology on prime-time ?

"Industrialization,  deforestation,  pollution,  all man made
factors,  are to blame for the  depletion  of our  ozone  layer,
resulting in what's commonly called the greenhouse effect"

-- Bill Fine , President and General Manager , WCVB TV Boston, & President of the Massachusetts Broadcasting Association, editorial aired August 9, 2007

Hassett's Pique

Tired of Peak Oil?

 
Swerve away from the Hubbert  curve , and compare

 <<this highly creative Laffert  curve generated by Kevin Hassett of  AEI

With what

 a mere mathematician considers a fair data fit >>

The Economist owlishly notes that, if you factor in oil and gas revenue, energy rich Norway slides to the right hand side, moving from 26% to 52%,and the linear fit gets even better.

The Sum Of All Dumb

The AAAS and the Cult of Pop Humanism

Confronting a fire-breathing Humanist with a zealous Cultural Conservative may seem a recipe for a great debate, but all too often the outcome is indistinguishable from Talk Radio. The American Association For The Advancement Of Science seems to be toying with a related sub-genre. Call it  The Sum Of All Dumb. A recent letter in its journal Science , questioning the wisdom of a retreat from primary scientific sources in its book reviews , drew a response from the reviewer, Scientific American columnist and Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer, equating  PBS icon Jared Diamond with Charles Darwin.

Elevating Guns Germs and Steel to the level of The Origin of Species seems as bizarre as equating Carl Sagan with Copernicus, Thor Heyerdahl with Homer, or taking a step back from the brink of inanity, Neo-Creo idol Micheal Behe with Diamond himself.Transcendent failures of critical taste seem a permanent feature of cultural life and can have many causes. Diamond, at least.  revisits a good if unoriginal  Big Idea, but confusing the present Amazon ratings  of books embodying  current memes with their place in future history makes onw wonder what became of some soi-disant Humanist's sense of the sardonic ?  Once

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Foram

The umpteenth part of the Canadian mining & energy subsidized series in The Financial Post  on why we should view  climate change claims skeptically fails to sustain  the level of critical argument of  the best of the early ones.

The latest , which has been seized upon by   a political spectrum extending al the way from The Hudson Institute ( where agronomist Dennis Avery  holds forth on cosmic rays )to National Review ( where fact checking seems no longer in vogue) implies we should fear global cooling  asmuch as warming because a  2005 study in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeclimatology, Palaeoecology [V. 226 p. 72-92]is said it show a radical  rate of change in marine microfauna in a 4400 year old  section of British Columbian sea-bottom.  The Financial Post piece author claims this proves the theory of a  maverick astrophysicist--that sunspot cycle solar output variations can be far larger than any thus far measured in reality , and that these hypothetical anomalies are likely to recur. This mostly inspires eyeball rolling among sober science guy ,because the FP author is citing his own  work,making the FP piece is less a scientific op-ed than a highly speculative advertorial.

The SEC might take a dim view of such standards of evidence  in a stock offering, but that hasn't stopped the Rush Limbaugh Academy of Science from  greeting it as the best thing since the last thing they hyped for six weeks before it was fisked to death. I'd  no sooner doubt the intellectually seriousness of talk radio than believe a Canadian geologist would fib on behalf of a penny stock on the Vancouver Exchange, but the blog  coverage afforded this meta-news glosses over  Professor Patterson's neglecting to mention his must recent scientific publication in the same journal [ Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (2007) 243, p. 471-473.]

It's a correction to the paper he cites in The Financial Post :

Corrigendum to “Climate shift at 4400 years BP: Evidence from high-resolution diatom stratigraphy, Effingham Inlet, British Columbia, Canada”[Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 226 (2005) 72–92]   Chang, A.S. and Patterson, R.T.

COCKBURN'S CLIMATE COCKTAIL

Those who enjoyed the tot of Cockburn's heady contrarian brew offered here earlier under the rubric  'New Maps of Hell'  will find it flowing from his Beat The Devil column in the new issue of The Nation  like Pimm's Cup at a Spectator garden party.

The trouble is that with the appearance of incendiary friends like Cockburn , enemies of climate hype will need additional pitchers of warm spit to put out the media brushfires lit by Vice President Gore's scary movie.

Bombed In Boston

................................

......      And This Is Not A Bomb.

 

................             A week after opening Boston's new Museum of Contemporary Art  his Honor Mayor Thomas Menino was reeling before the attack of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force . He responded to the LED sandwich board movie publicity invasion by going to red alert ,  paralyzing traffic with an anti-terrifying  Chinese fire drill of a bomb squad sweep that turned up only two of the infernal machines. Shortly after the million dollar fiasco hizzoner  Mumbled :

"I’m not saying we are banning the movie, because I can’t ban it, but out of respect to the people of Boston, I am going to ask local movie theater executives not to. They are not deserving of our respect." 
.......................IT OPENED TODAY ANYWAY, AND BY  GOD, IT IS A BOMB!

Which Way Would Pascal Bet ?

When it comes to climate change ,WSJ Opinion Journal  editor  James Taranto has made the basis of its skepticism  perfectly clear.  Quant fund fans will find no sign of  dimensional analysis- he  invokes the power of  'intuition'  as he avers to " lack the time, the inclination and possibly the intellect to delve deeply into the science."

Yesterday, he provided a splendid demonstration of the high intellectual seriousness of this New  Scientific Journalism . All that  double-primary-source nonsense the paper's front page zealously adheres to is evidently something up with which Taranto will not put. But is he prepared to put his money where his mouth is ?

Proceeding from a magazine's reference to a survey described in a blog , he yesterday chose only one of the survey's  hundred -odd questions, which happened to address religion , and cited the opinion of  the sum of  those answering that multiple choice question two ways out of four  as a metric of scientific authority in the Climate Wars, concluding :

" 58% agree that "as the Bible says, the world was literally created in six days." So according to Scientific American, the biblical story of creation has only slightly less scientific merit than global warming. And if you think the people in the survey are unqualified to weigh in on such matters, they beg to differ: 71% of them agreed with the statement "I consider myself an intellectual,"... We'll bet a high proportion of them read Scientific American."

OK, James :  How much do you want to bet ?        I'll  lay:
100    to 1       That that proportion is smaller than 10% ,
1,000 to 1  That among them WSJ subscribers outnumber those subscribing to Scientific American & 
1,000,000  to 1  That  fewer still subscribe to any of the top ten peer reviewed primary scientific journals, starting with Science and Nature.   

What's really at stake is the American economy, because the most negative impact of unabashedly anti-scientific views may be their tendency to repel the minds of technologists who have somewhere else to go  and start their start-ups. We already import a larger percentage of our scientific talent than we do energy . So I'm laying the bet pro bono , in the forlorn hope that Taranto's Editor may read another piece by Christopher Mims. Not the Sci Am column that started this skirmish in the long running comedy of manners that is the Climate Wars , but his Seed essay entitled  America's War Against Science

It is as bipartisan as Scientific American is not , and profoundly disturbing. Forget how many nations are ahead of us in science education. The scarily Darwinian fact is that Mexico and Turkey are just behind us , and coming up fast on the inside.  In an era of globalization , outsourcing reality may not be a very smart bet , especially for a financial journal of record.

The Green Revolution Eats Its Children

Not a word of protest from consumer advocates that ,  contrary to all the Truth In Advertising  laws so far  enacted , the makers of "EnviroKidz Gorilla Munch" breakfast cereal  have flagrantly neglected to incorporate either namesake ingredient into their  best-selling  primate chow.

Were the culpable marketing department fired en masse , the cost saving might serve to remedy the product's other nutritional deficiency- it is gluten as well as child and bush meat free , and silverbacks  need protein aplenty to muster the energy needed to chastise cannibalistic youngsters ,  and drive off spear-throwing forest chimpanzees.

At present , the bullet points on the Gorilla Munch box do not reveal if the "1% of sales donated to wildlife" enrich the simian merchants of death purveying  spears to bellicose bonobos or pongid touts bent on guiding National Geographic readers to take snapshots of  Bonzo's grandkids or gorillas trying to get some shuteye ?  It's enough to make a mandrill weep blood diamonds.

Thank You For Not Ticking

The U.S. Postal Service has removed all visible clocks from the retail areas of its 37,000 post offices. Officials claim their removal at a cost of  several million dollars will give " a more uniform look"  to areas where customers waiting in line have been known to go postal at the sight of their lives ticking away.

Some Dare Call it Reason

About twenty years ago, Fred Smith , generalissimo of the Competitive Enterprise institute summoned me  from Harvard to his Washington office and offered me the world : "How would you like to be the next Carl Sagan?"

No , thanks, I replied-- one  was too many.

"Do you believe in global warming ?" Fred continued.

Of course , said I. Having spent several years getting up to speed on the fundamentals of the physics on which the  climate modeling racket depends, how could I possibly deny that  carbon dioxide bracket creep was raising radiant heat retention by the earth's atmosphere?

That was pretty much  the end of the interview .
The Sagan to whom  Smith referred had championed a bad climate model, styled "nuclear winter." which the late Cornell astronomer and  media maven aspired to use as a policy lever to save the world , incidentally collecting the Nobel Peace Prize in the process.

It didn't happen , in part because science worked , and the original  model's many shortcomings failed to survive the extended rigors of peer review , and critiques in science journals like  Nature. But CEI is not exactly famed for its science library- or top heavy with staff scientists publishing up a storm.  What evidently impressed  Smith was my ventilation of 'nuclear winter's egregious political intent in Foreign Affairs and  The Wall Street Journal.  Disappointed by my unwillingness to get with the program of saying global warming wasn't so,  CEI instead signed on Ron Bailey , who duly satisfied Smith by producing such books as "Global Warming and other Eco-Myths."

Ron moved on to become Reason magazine's science correspondent  , persevering in his staunch resistance to the notion that  global warming existed well into the 21st century. But unlike most of his cohort,  he continued to read the science literature and  eventually changed his mind-- in public, globally  . On the BBC in fact - and he invites us to listen to his change of view.

Though Ron has very successfully reinvented himself as a first-rate writer on biotechnology , back in chilly Canada , Ottawa journalist David Warren  drones on under the rubric " Sensationalism in the Service of Scientism " : "The more I think about "global warming", in light of the most recent United Nations report, the more confident I become in averring that it is a fraud, a political stunt, a criminal imposture, that every intelligent journalist should be helping to expose. "

Now former next President Al Gore is running for the Nobel Peace prize. He makes much of having scored a  gentleman's C in a Harvard gut course in ecology ,but his peculiar scientific hyperbole  more reflects his taking homiletics in divinity school. Gore at least has tutors force feeding him freshman texts in atmospheric science. Not Warren.  His climate views reflect a charmingly candid  CV that  notes he has a  tenth grade education and scored "37 out of 100 " in a ninth grade math exam. Still, it says he's a great fan of Aristotle , so should he get around to reading the master's  'Meteorology' , he may yet see the error of his ways and apply himself to more recent scientific developments,like caloric and phlogiston.

HOT CASE AT BOSTON LAW

Take a deep breath-it may be your last legal one.

The main beneficiary of Big Tobacco settlements, the trial lawyering industry , has chosen its next strategic defendant.  The best chance  a new generation of  anti-smoking lawers has of  making partner is to take  billion dollar  bite out of fire.

Thomas Reilly , The Surgeon   Attorney  General  of The United States    Commonwealth of Massachusetts  is suing the EPA to toe the United Nations Environmental Program line and declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. Al Gore and  American Association for the Advancement of Science ex-president Peter Raven  have already begun  exhaling vast amounts of the dread greenhouse gas  as they declare there is no debate over climate policy.  A posse of Green eminentoes given to substituting authority for evidence on TV  are in training for  new and highly lucrative careers as expert witnesses  Witness the first rate legal coaching  that has gone into their opening attack- denouncing  their opponents for sounding like lawyers.

This bodes ill for the atmospheric sciences, which rarely advance by having climatologists take time off to  be coached to answer loaded  questions yes or no.  Not that anyone at the Attorney General's office reads the scientific literature   or cares all that much about what we do and do not understand about the dynamic complexity of the interaction of  the Earth's  air and oceans . The dumbing down of interdisciplinary science for Public Television is aready enough to scandalize Judge Judy , so why shouldn't  future episodes of Boston Law follow in  PBS  footsteps as it dishes out Pablumized environmental science to  pre-schoolers in  the Never Never Land of Teletubbies and It's A Big Big World?

Taking science to court  may make  matters worse. PBS at least aims for the center of the demographic bell curve, but lawyers have to please a jury  pool  whose ruling demographic is a bottom half with  two digit IQ's. So stay tuned for another dim dishonest decade of   reruns, as adding legal baggage to  higher definition Public Broadcasting  delivers ever dumber, darker Green TV

Maybe they should just make Alan Alda President of the American Bar Associaton and let the PBS board write  a directed verdict.