The antiscience stance of the Republican candidates for President is getting so chaotic I swear I need a scorecard to keep it all straight. The latest: Michele Bachmann goes antivax.

No, seriously. Generally associated with the far left, antivaccination rhetoric reared its head at the latest Republican candidate debate. In 2007, Governor Rick Perry of Texas — and current front runner of the cohort of White House contenders — issued an Executive Order mandating the Gardasil vaccination for girls. This vaccination prevents girls from getting the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a virus that is a major factor in contracting cervical cancer later in life. This cancer has a greater than 30% fatality rate once contracted, and is a horrible, horrible condition. 20 million people in the US alone carry the virus.

Mandating vaccinations is actually something of a difficult topic, and my stand on it is somewhat nuanced (though I do lean towards saying "yes, they should be under most circumstances").

Representative Bachmann is not quite so subtle. During the recent debate, she tried to hammer Rick Perry on this issue, saying it’s wrong to mandate vaccines, saying that Gardasil "can have very dangerous side effects".

That’s pretty misleading. Gardasil’s dangers are minimal, and have been grossly exaggerated by the media. But Bachmann is going for broke with her claims; she’s now saying this:

"There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate," Bachmann said after the debate, where she had told Perry on stage that she was "offended" by his decision. "She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine."

There has never been a single confirmed case of anything like this happening (in fact, a bioethicist has offered Bachmann $10,000 if she can come up with some evidence for her statement; no word from her campaign so far). Some people do have adverse reactions to vaccinations, but they are rare (like a girl who had an extraordinarily rare mitochondrial disorder which might — might — have caused a vaccine-related problem). But mental retardation from Gardasil is totally unheard-of.

The source is incredibly suspect, too. A unnamed woman came up to Bachmann and told her this unsubstantiated story? And Bachmann goes on national TV to score points with it? The line of evidence breaks down at every step here. Bachmann saying this during a nationally televised debate is nothing short of shameful. And reckless.

She’s not the only one making hay of this, either. A PAC backing Ron Paul has a video that calls Gardasil "an STD vaccine". That a pretty cynical spin on it; the issue of vaccinating against HPV is not about sex, it’s about health. However, because HPV is contracted through sexual contact, this also plays into the far-right’s morality issues.

Generally speaking, antivaxxers tend to be to the left of the political spectrum. I doubt Bachmann is sincerely trying to woo that vote. More likely, she is just displaying more of her antiscience predilections like creationism and global warming denialism.

I also doubt Bachmann would’ve gotten the Republican nomination even before she said something like this, but mirroring the thinking of the far-left could very well sink her once and for all inside her own party. We’ll see. But don’t forget: even if and when she’s gone, we’ll still have a coterie of antireality candidates to deal with on that ticket.

So, last night was another debate among the Republican candidates for President. While Ron Paul appears to have done quite well, at least according to an MSNBC poll, it was Rick Perry who is grabbing headlines.

Of course, that’s because what he said was outrageously awful. About climate science, he said, "…just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell." That analogy is so ridiculous it’s hard to know where to start; but a good place might be to simply say that Galileo had the advantage of being right. Just because a tiny fraction of people claim global warming isn’t real, or that humans aren’t responsible, doesn’t make them correct. Especially when going up against the overwhelming evidence compiled by a consensus of 97% of scientists who study climate as their career.

Also, the religiously conservative Perry should be a bit more circumspect on his analogies. It wasn’t scientists who were fighting Galileo, it was religious conservatives.

Bismillah, no!

Jon Huntsman, as expected, stood up for science, as Sheril Kirshenbaum points out on her new Culture of Science blog. And while I disagree with Huntsman on a number of social and government issues, it’s nice to know one of the Republican candidates is willing to at least dip his toe in reality. But how messed up is it that supporting actual evidence-based research is considered political suicide in the GOP?

If you’re curious about where the other candidates stand on issues of global warming and evolution, Luke Scientiæ has compiled an overview. I’ve looked it over and that article falls into line with what I’ve read elsewhere as well. It’s not a pretty picture; with the exception of Huntsman essentially all the currently viable candidates have gone out of their way to deny basic science such as evolution. That includes Ron Paul.

As Tom Chivers wrote for The Telegraph about this cohort of antiscience candidates:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, as the old saw goes. Nothing: not anatomy, not biochemistry, certainly not genetics. Not species distribution or death or the immune system or sex. Nothing. It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football.

As I’ve pointed out before, the same is true for climate science. It’s de rigeur for Republican candidates to deny global warming, and it’s even worse for Tea Partiers. That’s not surprising as the noise machine rattles on; a recent study that did not link cosmic rays to global warming is being touted as saying exactly the opposite (you can find links to more about that on Greg Laden’s blog). Heck, a paper that got lots of play in the global warming denial sphere was so flawed a journal editor resigned over it, saying it should not have been published. But that won’t even slow things down.

As we get closer to the Republican nomination — yegads, still a year off — expect to see the noise ratcheted up and the rhetoric to get even more heated. This is going to be a very long process, and given what I saw last night, an embarrassing one.

I was interviewed by WGN radio host Mike McConnell this morning about the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures of the Apollo landing sites that were released yesterday. The interview is online, or you can grab the file directly.

We talked about why Hubble can’t see the landing site hardware, how the astronauts walked on the Moon, why the flags may no longer be there, why Moon Hoax stuff is silly, and so on. I had a funny moment of confusion when I was trying to count how many people had walked on the Moon, but that was quickly resolved. All in all it was a fun conversation, and I’m impressed with McConnell’s knowledge of Apollo. It’s always nice to talk to another Apollo fan!

- LRO spots Apollo landing sites in high res
- LRO spots Apollo 12 footsteps
- One Giant Leap seen again
- … and the flag was still there
- Apollo 16 site snapped from orbit

Just some quick notes, to fill my quota give you some interesting reading:

1) Scientific American has a great article online about why it’s important to vaccinate, and how to talk to parents about it. [via George Valenzuela]

2) Speaking of which, the Autism Science Foundation — a non-profit that supports real research into autism, instead of trying to link it to vaccines despite all the evidence — was chosen as the number 1 startup charity in the "Disabilities" category by Philanthropedia/Guidestar. Congrats to them! [via Dawn Crawford]

3) The Discovery Institute isn’t completely honest? Unpossible!

4) Bill Nye helps create a sundial at Cornell University that glows when the Sun reaches its daily peak in the sky. [via Beth Quittman (my agent!)]

5) Frying pans that look like planets. Seriously. Very cool.

The way some of the media report on climate change can be simply stunning. For example, an opinion piece in The Financial Post has the headline "New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans".

There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort. The evidence, as far as the limitations of the experiment go (that’s important, see below), do not show any effect of cosmic rays on global warming, and say nothing at all about the effect humans are having on the environment.

What did you do, Ray?

OK, first things first: why should we even think cosmic rays might affect climate? There are several steps to this, but it’s not too hard to explain.

We know that clouds form by water molecules accumulating on seed particles, called condensation nuclei. The physical processes are complex, but these particles (also called aerosols) are suspended in the air and water droplets form around them. The more of them available, the better water can condense and form clouds (although of course this also depends on a lot of other things, like how much water is in the air, the temperature, the height above the ground, and so on).

Cosmic rays, it turns out, may play a role in this too. They are subatomic particles that zip through space at high speed. We are bombarded by them all the time, in fact! They hit atoms and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, depositing their energy there. This affects aerosol formation rate, and therefore might affect cloud formation. Clouds are bright and white, and reflect sunlight. Therefore they affect global warming.

So the whole idea goes like this: the more cosmic rays there are, the more aerosols are made, the more easily clouds can form, the more sunlight gets reflected back into space, and the less global warming we get. It’s controversial, for sure (Discover Magazine interviewed a proponent of this idea in 2007) but worth looking into.

ConCERNing clouds

In practice, the actual connection between cosmic rays and cloud formation is really hard to determine. So a group of scientists at the European particle lab CERN decided to test the basics. They created a cloud chamber, bombarded it with cosmic rays, and examined the results. They found two very interesting things:

1) The number of aerosols created went up vastly as the particles blasted the chamber. That would seem to indicate that cosmic rays really are tied to global warming. Except…

2) The actual total number of aerosols created was way below what’s needed to account for cloud formation. Sure, there were more aerosols, but not nearly enough.

(more…)

Geez, I hate to keep hitting this theme, but y’know what? It’s important.

Using a fleet of Earth-observing satellites, the European Space Agency is reporting that the ice in the Arctic circle is already retreating considerably, and will once again be below average in extent this summer. This has been going on for a few years now, which isn’t terribly surprising considering that global warming is real and that we keep seeing recent years tied or exceeding records as hottest years on record.

Here’s the map they made showing sea ice extent from June 1 to August 24, 2011:

Yikes. Back in 2007, the Northwest Passage became entirely navigable by sea (without using an icebreaker ship) for the first time in recorded history. It had already been thinning for years, but an icebreaker ship was still needed to get through all of it — that’s changed now.

Moreover, it’s not just that the extent — that is, the amount of area covered by the ice — has dropped, it’s also that it’s thinning, dropping in volume. The ice volume has decreased by unprecedented amounts as well recently.

What does this mean for the current Arctic summer?

"The minimum ice extent is still three to four weeks away, and a lot depends on the weather conditions over the Arctic during those weeks," says Leif Toudal Pedersen, a senior scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. "Whether we reach an absolute minimum or not, this year again confirms that we are in a new regime with substantially less summer ice than before. The last five summers are the five minimum ice extent summers on record."

[Emphasis mine.]

Just to be clear: it’s OK to question the science of global warming. It’s OK to question any scientific findings, as long as that questioning is done with good intentions and in good faith (so to speak). While poking around the web I found denier sites trying to confuse the issue of sea ice extent — for example, some talking about the navigability of the Northwest Passage as far back as 2000, but not mentioning you needed an icebreaker to do it.

As usual, the evidence here is pretty clear: temperatures are increasing, sea ice is going away, glaciers are retreating, ocean levels are rising, and all the while we’re dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while the spin doctors whirl away.

It’s maddening. But it will continue, as surely as the Earth itself turns.

A lot of folks on the web are buzzing about Paul Krugman’s NYT OpEd today about the antiscience convictions of the current cohort of Republican candidates running for President of these United States. I find little fault in what Krugman wrote. Each candidate on the right is simply scrambling to be even more antiscience than the next.

Of course, if that "next" is Rick Perry, then I doubt anyone could sprint away from reality more than he does. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool creationist who apparently has no problem narrowing or stepping well over the line with separation of Church and State, and when it comes to denying climate change he also apparently had no problem with simply making things up (Krugman calls his statements "vile", and the Washington Post blog The Fact Checker rated his claims as "whoppers"). Perry’s stance on other big issues is similar.

And he’s far and away the front runner, which leaves me shaking my head.

Where Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum stand is obvious. Newt Gingrich — who claims he’s a fan of science — equivocates when it comes to Intelligent Design and evolution as well as global warming, and was instrumental in defunding the House Office of Technology Assessment in 1995.

Even the candidates people are calling "moderate" are falling over themselves to appease the base when it comes to science and the lack thereof. Mitt Romney tried to eat his cake and have it too about accepting evolution, and even Ron Paul has now distanced himself from evolution.

Which brings up Jon Huntsman, which is where things get truly maddening. He recently said he thinks both evolution and global warming are real. This makes me sad, and scared. Why? Because this statement is considered bold.

How can it be bold to accept reality, to not deny the overwhelming evidence, and to agree with the vast, vast majority of scientists studying the very topics of discussion?

Huntsman wants his party not to be "the antiscience party". But that shouldn’t be bold. That should be common sense.

As it happens, Huntsman is trailing in the polls by a nearly insurmountable distance. That’s certainly not caused by his statement — he’s been behind for a long time — and may not even be correlated directly; as one Republican strategist commented, he may simply be saying things to try to stand out from the crowd.

But if true, think on that: he’s making clear, logical, rational statements in order to separate himself from the other candidates.

And that’s where we are.