Bad Astronomy » Debunking

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 ...

Q&BA: What happens if you are exposed to the vacuum of space?

Phil Plait — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:21:08 +0000

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

A lot of people, it seems, have morbid thoughts about space. Why else would I get asked this so much: "What would happen to the human body exposed to the vacuum and cold of space?"

Of course, this sort of thing is depicted in scifi movies a lot, and people are curious about it. And even though the movies always get it wrong — you don’t explode, or freeze instantly — it does make folks wonder about it. And while the reality isn’t maybe as gooey as in the movies, it’s still pretty nasty.

I wrote about this in my review of the movie "Mission to Mars", as well as answering a question many years ago from a reader. And even though it’s an icky thing to think about, it does give me a chance to talk about heat transfer, which is pretty, um, cool.

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. ...

CSU Pueblo talk January 25

Phil Plait — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:27:50 +0000

Are you in the southern Colorado area? I’ll be in Pueblo, Colorado on the evening of Wednesday January 25th to give my "Bad Astronomy" talk. The talk is at 7:00 p.m. at Hoag Hall on the CSU campus, and is the keynote speech for an all-day Space Exploration Seminar. While the seminar is only for CSU students, my talk is open to the public and free. Free I say!

You can read more about it in The Chieftan, the local newspaper.

The talk is part poking fun at misinformation, part asteroid impact discussion — there’s a lot of the former in the latter, so it all fits together. Plus, I’ll be standing eggs on end! Can there possibly be a better way to spend a Wednesday evening?*

Hopefully, a few days is enough notice to mark your calendars, find babysitters, and hide your valuables. I hope to see some of you there!

* Yes.

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.

Skeptic Zone interview: Doooooomsday

Phil Plait — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:37:28 +0000

My old pal Richard Saunders from Australia skyped me up (which sounds dirtier than it is) and we chatted about doomsday prophecies — 2012, mostly, but also all the endless failed predictions of years gone by — for his podcast The Skeptic Zone (you can grab the MP3 here too). It’s always fun to chat with Richard. We’ve known each other a long time (as you can tell by the picture of the two of us there — click to southernhemispherenate) and I think that helps.

I also gush a bit about the live stuff I’m doing with Fraser Cain on Google+, including astronomy news roundups every Thursday, and live video telescope viewing via webcams. My part starts at about 12:30 in, but you should listen to the whole thing. It’s a good podcast, and he has an adorable accent.

No, SETI has not detected an alien signal from a Kepler planet

Phil Plait — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:41:42 +0000

Last night, I started getting emails and tweets asking about a possible detection of a radio signal coming from two of the newly-discovered planets orbiting other stars.

Cutting to the chase: yes, a signal has been seen, but no, it’s not coming from some alien civilization. It’s almost certainly something much closer, like a satellite interfering with the observation.

So what’s the deal?

You talkin’ to me?

The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a privately-funded group of scientists and engineers who are trying* an ongoing effort to figure out ways to detect signals from space that could be coming from other intelligences: aliens. They focus (haha) mostly on radio signals, since it’s very easy to send radio waves across the vast light years separating stars, it’s easy to detect radio waves (so primitive life like us can pick up the call), and it’s easy to encode information that way. Heck, we’ve been broadcasting coded radio waves for over a century now!

Currently, no unambiguous alien "Hello there!" has been detected. The sky is big, there are a lot of stars out there, and the radio spectrum is really wide, too. Think of how many radio stations there ...

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 ...

Blastr: Invasion Earth!

Phil Plait — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:00:53 +0000

I watched "Battle: Los Angeles" recently, a movie about aliens invading the Earth. It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great. It was watchable, and worked sufficiently well in lowering our supply of popcorn at Chez BA.

But like every alien invasion movie I see, there’s one small, really eensy-weensy problem: the reason they give for the invasion itself was dumb. [SPOILER] They came to steal our water? And use it for fuel? Say WHA?

Ignoring the silly idea of using water for fuel — that’s got physics exactly backwards, since you get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and it takes energy to crack them apart — there’s an even bigger problem…

… which I won’t tell you here, because I go into all sorts of detail in my latest Blastr article, 6 Reasons Why Aliens Would NEVER Invade Earth. Mind you, I’m not talking about aliens just coming here to shoot the breeze, but aliens coming here to shoot us. It’s hard to think of a good reason they’d do so, and certainly the reasons given in pretty much every movie don’t make ...

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 ...

“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 ...

An unreal picture of sunset at the north pole

Phil Plait — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:12 +0000

Every few months, like clockwork, someone sends me an email telling me about a lovely picture they’ve seen. This photo, it’s claimed, shows a sunset at the north pole with the crescent Moon looming hugely over the horizon. Perhaps you’ve seen it via email or a social network; the picture really is stunning, as you can see for yourself:

It is pretty, isn’t it? But it has one teeny tiny problem: It’s not a photograph! It’s a drawing, called “Hideaway”, created by Inga Nielsen. It’s a really, really good drawing, beautifully done, so realistic it can fool people into thinking it’s a photo. I’ve seen people thinking so on bulletin boards for years, and in fact it just popped up again, this time on Google+. And, as usual, a lot of folks thought it was real.

I can’t blame them, since it’s photo-realistic, as many digital drawings are these days. And if you see this without attribution to the artist, and don’t know the astronomy behind the scene, it’s hard to say whether it’s real or not.

So how can I tell it’s a drawing? Ah. Glad ...

In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson

Phil Plait — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:59:39 +0000

Last week, I was checking my feed reader, catching up on all my favorite web comics. One of them is sci-ence, a comic you really should be reading. It’s drawn (in part) by artist and science afficianado Maki Naro, and (like xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) it’s both funny and scilicious.

I got a snicker out of the comic he had just posted, dealing with my pal Neil Tyson and the Moon. Go read it!

Back yet? OK.

Now, I know that just last night I was praising Neil, and today I have no cause to bury him. But I will nitpick a wee bit…

First, of course, who hasn’t wanted to chase Neil Tyson down the street while yelling incoherently at him? But that aside, I must point out that this explanation of the Moon Illusion, while very common, is not actually correct.

The Moon Illusion is when the rising (or setting) Moon looks huge and fat, squatting on the horizon, but appears far smaller when up high in the sky. But it’s not because you’re comparing it with foreground objects! I’ve seen this illusion ...

Updated movie of asteroid YU55, plus bonus SCIENCE

Phil Plait — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:00:21 +0000

Last week, the asteroid 2005 YU55 passed by the Earth. Lots of observations were made, including using the Goldstone radio telescope in California. I wrote about how this works last week. NASA just released a new video showing an updated animation containing 28 frames, showing YU55 rotating as it swung past us:

That’s pretty nifty. Mind you, this isn’t an image like an optical telescope would make, but instead is a constructed 2D representation using what’s called the Doppler Delay technique; that’s why it looks like it’s illuminated from the top. That’s not real; read Emily Lakdawalla’s excellent writeup to get more info on how that works.

However, from looking at the animation you can see several features, including some broad depressions (YU55 is about 400 meters across, so some of those dips are the size of football fields). There are also several bright spots which I find interesting. Those are areas which are particularly reflective of radar pulses from the telescope; you can see them brighten and fade as the rock spins. These may be boulders on the surface, which change brightness as the angle between them and the telescope changes. There’s also an ...

Mea culpa: About studying science to get a job

Phil Plait — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:39:33 +0000

This morning, I posted an article where, looking at a database from the 2010 Census, I concluded that your chances of getting a job are a lot better if you major in a science field. Four of the ten college majors with the lowest unemployment rates were science-related.

It turns out I made some errors in the post. One is a logical fallacy, the other in my structure and wording, implying something I didn’t mean to. These were pointed out to me by a reader who makes several valid points, but then falls into errors of his own. This is worth sorting out, so I want to take a moment to show what’s what.

I was taken to task about my post on Twitter by Noahpinion, who pointed out (in tweets here and here) that many fields of science had higher unemployment rates. I replied that the numbers he quoted (6-7%) were still below the national average.

That was a mistake on my part. Noah pointed out that I was using 9% for the national unemployment average, but that’s overall unemployment. A better figure to use would have been 5%, which is the unemployment rate just for ...

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 ...

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 ...

Did a fragmenting comet nearly hit the Earth in 1883? Color me very skeptical

Phil Plait — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:30:36 +0000

A few days ago, three astronomers from Mexico posted a paper online (PDF) claiming that an observation from 1883 indicates a small comet passed within a few thousand kilometers of the Earth’s surface, and perhaps as close as 500km! Had this hit us, we would’ve been hammered by thousands of explosions as powerful as the largest nuclear explosions ever detonated.

The thing is, I’m not buying it. While superficially the interpretation fits the observations, there are way too many problems with it.

Here’s the deal. During the days of August 12 – 13, 1883, a Mexican astronomer named Jose A. y Bonilla reported seeing hundreds of objects passing directly in front of the Sun. They were small, appeared fuzzy, and left behind a misty appearance. In total, Bonilla says he saw 447 such objects!

The authors of this new work claim that what Bonilla may have seen was the remnants of a small comet that had previously fragmented. We’ve seen comets do this, and in fact it’s somewhat common. In 2006, Hubble took the picture shown above of the comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which had recently disintegrated. ...