As I noted a couple days ago, denial of science is bi-partisan. The only difference is the issues affected by the denial.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Carbon Emissions Reductions
The U.S. leads the world in them, but don’t tell anyone:
Efforts to curb so-called man-made climate change had little or nothing to do with it. Government mandated “green” energy didn’t cause the reductions. Neither did environmentalist pressure. And the U.S. did not go along with the Kyoto Protocol to radically cut CO2 emissions. Instead, the drop came about through market forces and technological advances, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.
…”It’s good news and good news doesn’t get reported as much,” John Griffin, executive director of Associated Petroleum Industries of Michigan, said of the lack of reporting about the CO2 reductions. “The mainstream media doesn’t want to report these kinds of things.”
Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Politicians’ “War On Science”
Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses
But I disagree with this:
So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.
Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.
Saving The Incandescent Bulb
A one-man crusade against bi-partisan stupidity.
Telomere Length And Aging
There seems to be a correlation.
So what’s cause, and what’s effect, or are they both effects of some other cause?
Also, how much does it cost to determine one’s telomere length? And what are the prospects for increasing it, if that is indeed helpful?
Fire Up The SUVs
Carbon emissions may be staving off a new glacial advance.
Proteins
Now they just have to figure out how to get them to do useful things.
The World Isn’t Going To End This Year
…at least according to the Mayans.
But what do they know, anyway?
Vitamin D
Well, this is certainly counterintuitive:
“We found that the offspring of nonagenarians who had at least 1 nonagenarian sibling had lower levels of vitamin D than controls, independent of possible confounding factors and SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] associated with vitamin D levels,” write the authors. “We also found that the offspring had a lower frequency of common genetic variants in the CYP2R1 gene; a common genetic variant of this gene predisposes people to high vitamin D levels.
These findings support an association between low vitamin D levels and familial longevity.” They postulate that offspring of nonagenarians might have more of a protein that is hypothesized to be an “aging suppressor” protein. More research is needed to understand the link between lower vitamin D levels, genetic variants and familial longevity.
Of course, correlation is not causation. For now, I think I’ll continue to supplement.
Global Warming Did Not Cause Sandy
Some thoughts from Bob Zubrin.