Category: Science
John Tierney writes:
The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
New research suggests the answer may be yes (at least in part):
In explaining attitudes toward fairness, Dr. Henrich and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor was the community’s level of “market integration,” which was measured by the percentage of the diet that was purchased. The people who got all or most of their food by hunting, fishing, foraging or growing it themselves were less inclined to share a prize equally.
Since the scientific foundation of anthropogenic global warming has been crumbling, shouldn't the EPA be rethinking the economically disastrous regulation of CO2? In another blow to any scientific basis for regulation, a professor of economics who was invited by the IPCC panel to review its last report says his team "concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. Read more »
It's telling that the WH has returned to the "no real scientific dispute" mantra just as it has become obvious that any lack of scientific dispute was engineered. We're seeing a second generation of engineered consensus. Denying questions exist worked quite well for scientists, and this generation doesn't even have to appear to be bound to real world data.
The "mainstream" attention to climategate has been notably absent. Here, the UK TimesOnline at least reports that the original data---upon which the IPCC report was largely based---is long gone. And here is a pretty good overview of the whole affair---and what it means for the claims of global warming.
So far Climategate has been limited to emails describing and hinting at the more damaging truth that "skeptics" have always claimed: that the data relied upon in the IPCC report is unreliable. Computer geeks are right now poring over the code and other computer jargon-laden logs that seem to show that the original data, itself long gone (deleted, in fact) has been processed and reprocessed so much that replication of the results would be scientifically illegitimate. Read more »
Two good takes on the state of Climategate--here, and here. In short, researchers appear to have "massaged" data to reach a presumed or desired conclusion, and to have actively "gamed" the peer-review process. Read more »
Al Gore should have stuck with politics. Last week on the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, the host and the former Vice President discussed geo-thermal energy. In attempting to explain the concept, Gore suggested that it is an untappted resource because the earth's crust is "several million degrees."
The problem: few scientists believe that the earth's core is more than 5,000 or so degrees. And yet, the media keeps lapping it up as truth.
The present administration touted the "return to science" in public policy. But the EPA nixed publication of its own report---showing that climate change was not anthropogenic---because it "did not help the legal or policy case" for the EPA's decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
Tax like a Communist, spend like a Socialist, and now experiment like a Facist. The hard-earned taxdollars of the American people will be going into more wasteful programs. Except in this case, the proven effectiveness of the research is absolutely zero. So much for the promise that money will not be going to programs that don't work. But not only does research on embryonic stem cells not work, it intrinsically involves the enslavement and butchering of tiny, defenseless human lives. Welcome to the Brave New World. Read more »
