Bad Astronomy » Antiscience

An ear to the ocean

Phil Plait — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:06:29 +0000

The Terra satellite is designed to study our planet from space, examining the environment over large scales and in high resolution. While passing over south Africa it took this seemingly normal — if still very beautiful — image:

I rotated it, so north is to the left. You can see land to the left, the southernmost tip of Africa, called Cape Agulhas. To the top is the Indian ocean, with the Atlantic to the right. A weather system is forming there, and all looks as it should… until your gaze settles all the way to the right (south). Wait… what’s the blue swirly thing?

Holy otology! Is that a giant ear?

Nope. It’s an eddy, a vortex, in the ocean, probably spun off the ocean current that flows around the southern cape of Africa. These eddies can dredge up material from deeper waters, including nutrients. Phytoplankton in the water feeds of those nutrients, and bang! Plankton bloom.

The plankton flows along with the water, coloring it blue, making it stand out eerily against the water. As I pointed out ...

A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target

Phil Plait — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:00:35 +0000

Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing.

But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it’s a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection.

Stick around for all of this. It’ll be… interesting.

Our story so far

OK, first, here’s the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK’s Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science, and another I myself wrote. Finding actual scientists destroying that claim is not hard at all; those ...

What caused the Little Ice Age?

Phil Plait — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:31 +0000

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly ...

While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower

Phil Plait — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:20:22 +0000

Over the weekend, two amazingly bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.

Just so we’re clear here.

The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called No Need to Panic About Global Warming, is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."

What the what?

That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical Science website destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.

The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it, but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. ...

The Gingrich Who Stole The News Cycle

Phil Plait — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:38:39 +0000

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe ...

Five shots against global warming denialism

Phil Plait — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:41:58 +0000

It’s a truism that whenever I write about the solid fact that the Earth is warming up, that post will get comments that make it clear that denialists — and please read that link before commenting on my use of the word — are like religious zealots, writing the same tired long-debunked arguments that are usually debunked in the very post they’re commenting on.

Still, we press on. The noise machine only wins if they can outshout reality, so it’s important to keep writing about it. Here are five news items about climate change that might help mitigate the nonsense.

1) Last week, I posted the results from studies showing 2011 was the 9th hottest year on record. Forbes online has more information on this. They take a different tack on it, but get the same results I do: the Earth is warming up, and humans are why.

2) Some very welcome news: the National Center for Science Education — who for years have been at the forefront of battling creationists getting their "curriculum" into schools — is adding climate change to their syllabus. ...

2011: The 9th hottest year on record

Phil Plait — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:34:50 +0000

If anyone tells you the Earth isn’t warming up…

… tell them they’re full of it.

2011 was the ninth hottest year on record, and those records go back 130 years.

And then they might say, well, sure, but that could be coincidence. Then you look them straight in the eye, and you say:

Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been since 2000.

Stop antivaxxers. Now.

Phil Plait — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:00:26 +0000

There are times when reality is so obvious, so clear, so rock-solid 100% amazingly in-your-face incontrovertible, that it is beyond belief that anyone could deny it.

And yet, antivaccination groups exist.

Let me be very, very clear: they are wrong. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines save millions of lives. And not just directly, like they did by wiping out smallpox, a scourge that killed hundreds of millions of people. But also, through herd immunity, vaccines save infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly with weak immune systems, and people whose immune systems are compromised due to chemotherapy, genetic issues, or because they are taking immunosuppressants for other illnesses (like arthritis).

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines don’t contain dangerous levels of mercury. Vaccines don’t contain fetal tissue. Each of these – and many, many more — is misinformation spread by antivaxxers, statements that are easily proven wrong (like, in order, here, here, and here). But many antivaxxers continue to use them.

What does that say about their willingness to tell the truth?

Yesterday, in Australia, one of the most vocal antivaxxers alive, Meryl ...

The $37.6 Million Dollar Fine HE Doesn’t Want You To Know About

Phil Plait — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:00:56 +0000

If schadenfreude made a noise, then you’d be hearing it pretty loudly from me right now: Kevin Trudeau — a convicted credit card fraud, and a man who made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars by telling people he could cure their cancer using, get this, coral calcium — has lost his appeal to the federal court, and must pay $37.6 million dollars in fines.

Trudeau, who shilled this false cancer cure as a diet supplement, was ordered by a federal judge in 2008 to stop making and airing infomercials about it. I wrote about this at the time, but I kept seeing those evil infomercials on TV. I wondered about this, but now I understand: Trudeau was trying to sidestep the order by selling books about this false cure, not the supplements directly. And, he kept buying up those ad spots while appealing the order. But on November 29th of this year, the appeals court said "nope".

As the court papers say:

The protections, unfortunately, were too weak: Trudeau aired infomercials in violation of the order at least 32,000 times. He should not now be surprised that he ...

Congressional funding disaster

Phil Plait — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:00:33 +0000

I recently posted a lengthy analysis of the fiscal year 2012 budget Congress and the President approved for NASA. I didn’t mention it then because it was off-topic, but in the press release for the funding bill, they list bullet points of "Important Policy Items". I took a screen grab of the last item listed, and the note below it:

Perhaps I’m the only one who sees irony in a bullet point saying Congress won’t appropriate $322M for an NOAA climate change service, while then immediately below it noting how the natural disasters that have befallen this country have required " historic levels of relief and recovery assistance", necessitating $2.3 billion in relief funds. Hmmm.

[Note: While it can be hard to pin any one natural disaster like a hurricane, heat wave, or snow storm on climate change, as we warm up we will see more things like those. I want my tax dollars to go to more scientific investigation by NOAA and other agencies. But then, I'm not funded in any way by the oil industry, and ...

“Alternative” cancer clinic threatens to sue high school blogger

Phil Plait — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:57:59 +0000

Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. If you haven’t had it yourself, the odds are extremely high you know someone who has, and who has died from it. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer, and it’s awful; it can take years filled with tests, hope, lack of hope, expensive therapy… and in the end the odds are what they are. It all makes for desperate times for those involved, with an emotional distress level that is beyond my ability to describe.

There are people out there who claim they can cure cancer, or have therapies that can mediate it. Some of these people are simply con artists, ready to swoop in as soon as they smell blood in the water, vermin that they are. Others are honest but wrong, thinking they have stumbled on some therapy that no one else has found. However, time and again, when these alternative methods are tested rigorously using controlled, properly done studies, they are shown not to work. In general this does not stop people from making the claims, however.

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it ...

Climategate 2: More ado about nothing. Again.

Phil Plait — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:30:33 +0000

Geez, this again? Seriously?

Two years ago, someone hacked into a University of East Anglia server and anonymously posted thousands of emails from climate scientists. Quickly dubbed "Climategate", global warming deniers jumped on this, trying to show that these scientists were engaging in fraudulent activities. However, it was clear to anyone familiar with how research is done that this was complete and utter bilge; the scientists were not trying to hide anything, were not trying to trick anyone, and were not trying to falsely exaggerate the dangers of climate change.

I wrote about this when it happened and then again quickly thereafter, showing this was just noise. Accusations of fraud were leveled at climate scientist Michael Mann, but time and again he was exonerated: like this time, and then this time, and then this time, and of course this time, and then my favorite, this time.

Climategate was widely denounced as a manufactured controversy, except, of course, by denialists. Because they denied it. That’s axiomatic.

However, like a bacterium festering away someplace dank and fetid, Climategate is poised ...

Mister Terrific gets it right

Phil Plait — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:02:22 +0000

I get mail. Some good, some bad, some cryptic. In the past few days I’ve gotten some of the latter; people telling me I should take a look at the new DC Comics reboot of "Mister Terrific", a super-genius superhero who uses science and intellect to defeat the forces of evil.

The thing is, nobody would tell me why. OK, I figured, I’ll check it out when I get a chance.

Then I got another email, this time from my pal Eric Wallace, who writes for the TV show "Eureka". And who, it so happens, writes "Mister Terrific"! He asked me if I’d like to get a copy of the first couple of issues, and not being a complete idiot, I said yes.

I got them in the mail the other day, and sat down to read them. By the time I got to the end of the first issue, all the cryptic notes became clear to me. It’s because of this panel, where Michael Holt (aka Mister Terrific) is holding a fund raiser for a politician:

Ha! Perfect!

And does it sound familiar? It should. Unfortunately, this exact scene ...

Just to be clear: asteroid YU55 is no danger to Earth

Phil Plait — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:46:31 +0000

Tomorrow, November 8, the 400-meter-wide asteroid 2005 YU55 will glide past the Earth, missing us by a very comfortable margin of 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles). This distance is three-quarters of the way to the Moon, and is in fact so far that you’ll need a decent telescope to see it at all.

However, I’m starting to see rumors that the asteroid will have an effect on us. I expected this — it happens every time there’s a decent-sized rock that whizzes past us. That’s why I wrote a post about it a few months back, but I want to follow up on it. Why? I’m getting wind of some folks worried about YU55, including a couple of notes on Twitter saying there are people blaming Saturday’s earthquake in Oklahoma on YU55!

Let me be clear: no asteroid, YU55 or otherwise, can cause earthquakes as they pass. Even Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, would have to practically skim the top of our atmosphere to have any real effect on us. YU55 is dinky, and will miss us by 25 times the diameter of ...

A pox on antivaxxers

Phil Plait — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:00:02 +0000

A couple of antivax stories hit the web in the past day or so, and both have me pretty angry, shaking my head about how people can manage to get things so wrong.

First, the antivax organization that is (Orwellianly) called the National Vaccine Information Center has paid for ads to run on in-flight Delta airline TVs. These ads give what can charitably be called misleading information about vaccines. Skepchick has the details, as does Harpocrates Speaks.

NVIC is an organization that is resolutely antivaccination, despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines are one of the greatest medical science triumphs of all time, having saved hundreds of millions of lives. NVIC, on the other hand, is a group that likes to try to sue critics into silence while at the same time spouting statements so ridiculous they make my irony gland fear for its life.

I decided to make a short and simple tweet about the ads being run on Delta airlines:

I mean it, too. The link in ...

You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true

Phil Plait — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:49 +0000

Here at BA Central, I have my hands full trying to battle the Forces of Darkness: those who would spin, fold, and mutilate reality for their own gain. They may be motivated by greed, or power, or ignorance, or ideology, but the thing they all have in common is, they’re wrong. They come in many flavors: homeopaths, psychics, creationists, antivaxxers… and yes, sadly, far too many politicians.

And I can rail against them time and again, my arsenal filled with the facts from an entire Universe at my disposal, yet make hardly a dent in their armor.

Sometimes, though, a small dose of satire penetrates right through that shielding and pierces the very heart of antiscience. Thank you, The Daily Show, for fighting this good fight:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Weathering Fights – Science: What’s It Up To? www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Related posts:

- You can’t explain Bill O’Reilly
-

Great Tyson’s ghost!

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:10:53 +0000

If you’re looking for some spooky listening for your Halloween, then aim your ectoplasmic resonator at astronomer Neil Tyson’s Star Talk radio show, because last night he hunted ghosts… or at least, talked to some folks who know about ghosts. He chats with author Mary Roach, skeptic ghost investigator Joe Nickell, and… me!

Yeah, I’m not really an expert on ghosts — still being alive and all — but I’ve seen a few ghost movies in my time, so we chat about those, and why I don’t personally think dead people are floating around, knocking on walls and hoping some "ghost hunter" will notice us and anxiously whisper, "Did you hear that?"

As always, talking with Neil is a lot of fun, and you’ll enjoy the whole show. You can also download the MP3 directly, too. [UPDATE: you can subscribe to Star Talk using iTunes, as well!]

My interview is broken up into several segments; the first starts around 11:30, the second at 24:50, the third at 36:15, and the fourth at 41:00. But of course you should listen to the whole show; it’s pretty ...

Psychics leave me in shambles

Phil Plait — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:00:05 +0000

You know what really eats me up? People who claim they can talk to the dead, when it is far, far more likely they are simply using psychological tricks (like cold reading) and random guesses, making it seem like they have some supernatural power.

A while back, the James Randi Educational Foundation publicly challenged so-called "psychic" James van Praagh to take their Million Dollar Challenge and prove he can do what he claims. It’s been weeks, and he hasn’t replied. I can’t imagine why, can you? It’s almost as if he’s afraid of being tested in a controlled environment.

The JREF decided to follow up on their challenge to van Praagh, to see if they could make sure he got the message. And this time, they brought some friends…

Man, I would’ve given an arm and a leg to be there for that. But c’mon, do you really think van Praagh will ever respond?

Gnaw.

Related posts:

- Cold guessing
- D.J. Grothe: skepticism and humanism
- A: Ghouls. Q: What do you call psychic mediums?
- Blastr: I was a zombie for science

New independent climate study confirms global warming is real

Phil Plait — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:00:46 +0000

Before I say anything else in this post, I will start off right away and say that the results I’ll be discussing here have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because of that, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, due to the nature of the study’s foundation and funders, which I will get to in a moment, the results are most definitely news-worthy.

The study is called the Berkeley Earth Project (BEP), and what they found was stated simply and beautifully in their own two-page summary:

Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1° C since the mid-1950s.

Wow. Of course, I would change one word in there. Can you guess what it is? The answer is below.

Big deal

Now, we’ve known this for a while. Study after study has shown that the Earth is warming, that the past decade has been the hottest on record, and that the rise in ...

Scientists are from Mars, the public is from Earth

Phil Plait — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:00:29 +0000

The American Geophysical Union blog has a link up to a very interesting table, and I feel strongly enough about this topic that I want to share it with you. It’s a list of words scientists use when writing or otherwise communicating science, what the scientists mean when they use that word, and most importantly what the public hears.

[Click to enverbumnate.]

I’ll admit, when I read it I laughed. But then my chuckle dried up when I realized just how dead accurate this is. And the smile pretty much left my face when I read that this table is from an article called "Communicating the Science of Climate Change," by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today.

Yup. I think they have a pretty good point.

My career at the moment could pretty much be called "Science Communicator". I do it here on this blog, I do it on Blastr and in Discover magazine, and when I give talks. Before that (and I guess it’s an occupation that never really leaves you) I was a professional scientist for many years. My training ran deep: 4 years undergrad, ...

What to expect from a Rick Perry administration: active suppression of science

Phil Plait — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:52 +0000

Regular readers know I am no fan of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry. The reasons for this are legion, including his stance on evolution and global warming.

Now there’s evidence it’s even worse than I thought: The Guardian is reporting that Governor Rick Perry’s administration in Texas is actively suppressing science. A report about the environmental impact of global warming on Texas was apparently edited by officials, "… deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction."

This action smacks of scientific suppression and censorship. And before you accuse me of overreacting, the scientists involved in writing the report felt this editing was so bad that the original authors of the report asked for their names to be removed from the final version. Yegads.

This story was originally reported in the Houston Chronical, and Mother Jones has an example of the changes made. It’s starting to pop up in other venues as well like Climate Progress and Climate Science Watch.

Looking it all over, the charges that science is being suppressed hold up pretty well. John Anderson is a researcher at ...

Followup on the WSJ climate denial OpEd

Phil Plait — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:30:11 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about an embarrassingly bad OpEd piece published in the Wall Street Journal, the purpose of which was to try to sow doubt and confusion over the reality of climate change. One of the writer’s main points was that if we can doubt Einstein (due to the recent much-argued-over faster-than-light neutrino experiment) we can doubt global warming.

Needless to say, this analogy was such a howler that many, many people besides just me took fingers to keyboard to lambaste Robert Bryce, the author of that OpEd. I think my favorite is by cartoonist Maki Naro, the first panel of which is here (click it to see the rest, which is great). Andrew Revkin, from the somewhat more trustworthy Gotham paper The New York Times, also weighed in, making several fair points about the piece.

This nonsense also started a wonderful Twitter hashtag, #WSJscience, which I am quite enjoying perusing. So much so that I even submitted my own:

If serious scientists can question relativity, then a fatally flawed WSJ OpEd implies the written word doesn’t exist. #WSJscience

See? False equivalancies are fun!

Tip ...

Wall Street Journal: neutrinos show climate change isn’t real

Phil Plait — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:43:55 +0000

OpEds — editorials expressing opinions in newspapers — are sometimes a source of wry amusement. Especially when they tackle subjects where politics impact science, like evolution, or the Big Bang.

Or climate change.

Enter the OpEd page of the Wall Street Journal, with one of the most head-asplodey antiscience climate change denial pieces I have seen in a while — and I’ve seen a few. The article, written by Robert Bryce of the far-right think tank Manhattan Institute, is almost a textbook case in logical fallacy. He outlays five "truths" about climate change in an attempt to smear the reality of it.

I won’t even bother going into the first four points, where he doesn’t actually deal with science and makes points that aren’t all that salient to the issue, because it’s his last point that really needs to be seen to believe anyone could possibly make it:

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, ...

SCOTUS denies mobile phone lawsuit

Phil Plait — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:00:30 +0000

I’m not a huge fan of the current US Supreme Court, but they recently did something right: Bloomberg is reporting the Court denied the revival of a lawsuit against mobile phone companies from a group claiming cell phones cause brain damage, including cancer.

The Court denied the claim for legal reasons — basically, the suit was filed under state law claims, but a court had already ruled that those laws were superseded by federal (FCC) regulations. So the Court ruled the claimant doesn’t get to sue mobile phone companies.

And while you might consider this ruling decided on a technicality, it turned out the right way. Mobile phones don’t cause cancer. Or, if you want to be technically accurate, studies of this topic have shown that any link between cell phones and brain damage is so weak it’s statistically indistinguishable from no link at all.

The exception would be if you’re using your phone while you’re driving. Then the likelihood of brain damage — and spleen damage, and kidney damage, and bone damage, and life damage — jump by a factor of four.

So you can use your phone and not worry about brain damage… ...

Beast of Skeptic Check

Phil Plait — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:18:21 +0000

Every month or so I sit down (virtually) with my buddy Seth Shostak, and we record a short interview for Skeptic Check, part of the Big Picture Science podcast/radio show. Seth’s on the road right now, so they’ve put a "Beast of Skeptic Check" online, featuring some of Seth’s favorite segments. You can also just hear the part I’m in (talking Moon Hoax) on the Big Picture Science blog.