Chris Mooney emails me to tell me that his book, about the so-called "Republican War On Science," has been released in paperback today, with a new introduction and call to arms against ID.

As I told Chris, while I disagree with a lot of the things that Republicans do with respect to science, I think that the war is more than bi-partisan. Democrats and so-called "progressives" peddle a lot of junk science toward their own agendas, and arguably (and historically) do it even more than Republicans (e.g., think the eugenics movement). Lysenko wasn't a "right winger," after all...

In fact, it might be interesting to have a blog debate on this topic. I don't think we'd resolve quantitatively who is worse, but I suspect that we could convince a lot of people that there's plenty of guilt to go around.

Anyway, go get the book, if you haven't, and judge for yourself.

[Update in the evening]

Chris has kindly offered to consider a debate. But if I do that (not definite yet) I'd have to read his book first. A review copy is on the way.

Don't forget that most of the so-called animal rights activists who engage in vandalism and intimidation and the occasional fire-bombing, are not Republicans, either.

I think the second-hand smoke controversy is an example of junk science that came out of the Clinton administration.

Whatever your feelings on smoking, I believe most risk assessement people would say that EPA used a bogus confidence level of 90%, when the standard in 95%. Even then, the meta-anlysis gave a relative risk of 1.1 for those exposed to second-hand smoke, barely distinguishable from noise.

I am still waiting to see the science that shows that implementation of the Kyoto protocol would make one whit of difference in global warming -- or even a shred of evidence that global warming is mostly caused by man.

It's hard to judge, and I suspect which party is "at war with science" depends a lot on your voter registration. But certainly the idea that this is a uniquely Republican problem is absurd. Yet, it is one which just about all liberals believe unquestioningly.

And, of course, part of the Republican "war on science" is the war on _junk_ science beloved of lefties. Debunking the wilder claims of Al Gore isn't responsible truth-seeking, that's part of the "war."

And if you bring up ecoterrorists and animal rights terrorists, they change the subject.

Lol, read Nature or Science about global warming.
What part don't you understand? CO2 release, CO2 measurements or radiative forcing? Temperature measurements? Ice cores? Trees?

It's a pretty clear issue to the scientific community, just not the media for some reason.

Go see An Inconvenient Truth, it's explained averagely in that movie.

Here goes once more: CO2 molecyles let visible sunlight through but not infrared radiation.
When the sun shines on earth, a lot of the sun's light radiation is captured by the surface. The earth surface then emits it as infrared radiation. But some of the infrared radiation is bounced back from the atmosphere. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more is kept inside of the atmosphere. This effect is called the greenhouse effect, because greenhouses use special glass for a similar effect (visible light gets in but infrared radiation doesn't get out).

CO2 has increased in the atmosphere by a huge amount because of the doings of humans.

Go see An Inconvenient Truth, it's explained averagely in that movie.

What's really hilarious about this is that you're perfectly serious. Given the subject of this post, you're apparently irony challenged.

Does it make the science unreal if it's explained by a partisan figure?

My post was at Ed Minchau, I was unclear about that.

Does it make the science unreal if it's explained by a partisan figure?

No, not intrinsically, but it's foolish to do an argument from authority in general, and particularly when the authority is a partisan figure who never got good grades in science (or much else, as far as I know). And even more particularly when it's by a political hack who wrote a polemical book that is largely indistinguishable from the tract of the Unibomber.

The science is the science. Algore's crockumentary is no more science than Michael Moore's crockumentaries are history.

I like JunkScience.com's feature article on the warming issue.

Lol, my argument was not about authority, simply just an easy way to get updated on the thing.

Here's some real climate scientist talking about the movie. Some mistakes and inaccuracies yes, but mostly good:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/

I'll get to that junk science bit later.

Somebody named "Lol" around here? ;^)

This is hilarious. "You're making an argument-from-authority!" "I am not! And I'll quote an authority to prove it!"

This is hilarious. "You're making an argument-from-authority!" "I am not! And I'll quote an authority to prove it!"

My problem with AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (and most "docu-props") can be summed up by a bumper sticker (and if a concept can't be summed up by a bumper sticker, how valid can it be): "If you want to take my gun, why would I trust you?" No hardcore "liberal" has ever given me a straightforward answer to that question.

What about softcore liberals?

Bilwick, surely you trust people at least a little at times. Do you ever go to see a doctor? Do you live in a hurricane area and watch weather forecasts?
Has anyone of you actually seen the Gore movie? Everybody's just complaining about "authority". I just mentioned it as a way of getting some information about what is claimed and why, you're not brainwashed or anything if you go and see it.

The actual junkscience.com argument (besides the wordplay on "misconceptions") works ok that it says about [0.5 W / square meter and] 1 K or 1 Celsius of warming would occur with just CO2 doubling and no other effects.

It says that there are perhaps no positive feedback effects and might be even negative, because then there would have been more warming in the latter 20th century. I haven't studied this claim more closely.

There are supposedly positive feedbacks, stuff like this:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/soden_fig1.jpg
and I haven't researched them much more, however, from water vapour this is said:
"How do we know that the magnitude of this feedback is correctly simulated? A good test case is the response to the Pinatubo eruption. This caused cooling for up to 3 years after the eruption - plenty of time for water vapour to equilibriate to the cooler sea surface temperatures. Thus if models can simulate the observed decrease of water vapour at this time, it would be a good sign that they are basically correct. A good paper that demonstrated this was Soden et al (2002) (and the accompanying comment by Tony DelGenio). They found that using the observed volcanic aerosols as forcing the model produced very similar cooling to that observed. Moreover, the water vapour in the total column and in the upper troposphere decreased in line with satellite observations, and helped to increase the cooling by about 60% - in line with projections for increasing greenhouse gases." So the CO2 positive feedback seems somewhat well established to me. Wouldn't it have been exposed already if there was a significant error in it?

It's hard to make a very exact judgement for me yet, I'll just have to live with somewhat incomplete data just like in most things anyway. And then being cautious wins. If it were only 50% sure we would be in for serious pain if we just kept increasing our CO2 emissions, would you act or rather make 100 years of more precise measurements to be able to say with better certainty?

Anyway, warming is already serious, it is happening where I live, and there is an overwhelming evidence of that, that I'm certain of.