Worse than potato chips

Climate change in Vanity Fair’s Oral History of the Bush White House:
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

“Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House,” in the February 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, is a 20,000-word article that draws on interviews with more than 40 individuals, including Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz.

[More]

This is really addicting to read. Hard to put down. It is nice they make it available on the web.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Environment, Politics, Science

Not really victims

by päts
Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS):
[Via Climate Progress]

[Note: Watts Up With That, one of the web's most anti-scientific blogs, is a finalist for the Weblog awards "Best Science Blog" (see "Weblog Awards duped by deniers - again!"). Even more farcically, early voting suggests Watts has a chance of winning (see here). Since the fine science blog Pharyngula is doing well in the voting, I'd now suggest voting for it.]

In this post I’m going to present the general diagnosis for “anti-science syndrome” (ASS). Like most syndromes, ASS is a collection of symptoms that individually may not be serious, but taken together can be quite dangerous – at least it can be dangerous to the health and well-being of humanity if enough people actually believe the victims.

One tell-tale symptom of ASS is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.

The other key symptoms involve the repetition of long-debunked denier talking points, commonly without links to supporting material. Such repetition, which can border on the pathological, is a clear warning sign.

Scientists who kept restating and republishing things that had been widely debunked in the scientific literature for many, many years would quickly be diagnosed with ASS. Such people on the web are apparently heroes – at least to the right wing and/or easily duped (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“).

If you suspect someone of ASS, look for the repeated use of the following phrases:

* Medieval Warm Period
* Hockey Stick
* Michael Mann
* The climate is always changing
* Alarmist
* Hoax
* Temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide
* Pacific Decadal Oscillation
* Water vapor
* Sunspots
* Cosmic rays
* Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark
* Ice Age was predicted in the 1970s
* Global cooling

Individually, some of these words and phrases are quite useful and indeed are commonly used by both scientists and non-scientists who are not anti-science. But the use of more than half of these in a single speech or article is pretty much a definitive diagnosis of ASS.
[]

This is a very nice checklist to help diagnose people with anti-science syndrome, although it really only deals with climate change. There will be another list for those that have the evolution form of the syndrome. It will include some of these phrases:

• Intelligent design
• Teach the controversy
• Only a theory
• Violates the first (second)(third) law of thermodynamics
• Still a dog (cat)
• A mousetrap
• Irreducibly complex
• Darwinists

Very few sufferers of of ASS can be cured. Many, even though apparently quite reasonable on many subjects, display such strong ASS symptoms in specific areas that palliative efforts have little effect. Logic, reason and even hard evidence will have little effect.

Recognizing the symptoms can be very important. Save yourself time and do not try to convince them with facts. Those are things that are of absolutely no interest to them.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Does wine work also?

Grape-seed extract kills laboratory leukemia cells, proving value of natural compounds:
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

(American Association for Cancer Research) An extract from grape seeds forces laboratory leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, according to researchers from the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76 percent of leukemia cells had died after being exposed to the extract.
[More]

Nice work. They identify the pathway that is affected and show that the inhibition does not effect normal cells. This work is a long way from showing any eficacy in humans but it is a very interesting observation.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science