An open letter:
…you do have an unparalleled opportunity, which is to turn what has become just another glossy advocacy magazine back into a distinguished scientific journal.
Unfortunately, during the intervening 35 years of your remarkable scientific career since you were a graduate student, a once-stellar magazine has fallen on hard times. Starting with Donald Kennedy, and continuing under Bruce Alberts, it has become a shabby vehicle for strident climate activism … and that experiment has proven once again that Science can’t be both an activist journal and a scientific journal. Science magazine has thrown its considerable (but rapidly decreasing) weight behind a number of causes. And yes, some of those causes are indeed important.
The problem is that you are convinced the causes are hugely important, and you want to convince us of the same. But once you convince people that your causes are more important to you than your science, that’s it for your authority regarding the science. You either get to have activism, or you get scientific authority. You don’t get both. And the past actions of your magazine have clearly demonstrated that these days your activist causes are much more important to you than the science.
Read all.
I saw something tangentially related the other day on the drug war, a research study which found drug users ignored the “just say no” campaigns because they were more aware of the risks and side effects than the people making the commercials. That ties in with findings that global warming skeptics know far more about climate science than the believers.
Combining the two ideas, the alarmist campaign fails because the skeptics regard them as poorly informed fools with an agenda and no reputable science to back it up, so their constant harping about polar bears just makes them look like idiots.
But those idiots destroy entire economies, millions of jobs, and TRILLIONS of dollars in global wealth.
The logical conclusion of their path is Soylent Green, with Al Gore’s children eating strawberries and Sarah Palin’s children on the menu.
Want level-headed non-magical-thinking treatment of the science and technology issues of the day.
Popular Mechanics
Not Popular Science, and gosh no, not Scientific American. And I would put their Editors head and shoulders above what the scholarly journal Science appears to be putting out with respect to science policy.
I will gladly make the following sexist statement: she will definitely be the hottest Science editor ever.
“In addition, perhaps you could point to an example of a thermally-caused “ecosystem collapse” from the two and a half degrees C warming of the last two centuries? You know … evidence?”
The Chesapeake bay used to have so many fish in it, you could scoop them out with a pot and the watermen used to make a nice living on mollusk sales. All that’s been a dead end business for 20 years.