CTT and global climate change

by Clearly Ambiguous
The Denial Industrial Complex:
[Via Deltoid]

Matt Nisbet reports:

A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

(Clarification: A couple of readers thought Nisbet was saying that one particular CTT was linked to 90% of the books. Nisbet means that 90% of books can be linked to CTTs.)

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A thorough debunking of some of the denialist literature. Most of it comes from ideologically driven groups who just do not want to examine the science. Knowing why this is will help in further debunking.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Bad old days

Gnah! Gagrella! Headdesk!:
[Via Catalogue of Organisms]

‘Gagrella’ splendens – is this the face of Evil? Photo by sswroom.

Please permit me to vent some frustration. I’ve written before about the ghastly legacy left to many areas of harvestman taxonomy by the work in the first half of the 1900s of Carl-Friedrich Roewer, henceforth referred to as the Antichrist of Arachnology, through his use of artificial classification systems and slipshod taxonomy. In the past, I personally have managed to remain relatively unscathed by the dark influence of Roewer, who did not deal much with the Australian opilionidan fauna. In the last few days, this has sadly changed dramatically. I have found myself wandering into the toxic wasteland that is Gagrella.
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I expect very few readers to make much headway here. It is full of minutiae and jargon. But what you can surely get is the frustration of a scientist who has modern tools at his disposal and who is trying to place a species into the right category. DNA can tell us very clearly where a species should be put – or at least where it should be put.

But Systematics has spent several hundred years developing criteria for placing species, without the use of DNA. So mistakes have been made and once made, they tend to be hard to correct. Here is a nice discussion of having to deal with one such mistake. It may seem arcane but the debates here are very important because they often provide interesting links to new experiments and theories about the relatedness of organisms on the planet.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Life on a meteorite

by kevinzim
Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008.

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Finding some of the basic components of DNA in meteorites is pretty interesting. It is not outside the realm of possibility that some of the early chemical moieties needed for life came from outer space. Some chemical reactions are probably more likely to occur there than on Earth. It will be pretty interesting to see how all this plays out, as we gain more knowledge of the Solar System.

Technorati Tags: Science