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.

It’s not often you can actually say "case closed", but in this case it’s literally true: climatologist Michael Mann has been cleared of all wrongdoing by the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation.

Did I say "has been cleared"? I meant has been cleared once again, since there have been several investigations into his research and Dr. Mann has been cleared of all charges every single time (like here and here). All of this stemmed from the "ClimateGate" nonsense of the past couple of years, where leaked emails were taken hugely out of context by the press and climate change deniers, and used to smear scientists. Dr. Mann was at the center of the whole manufactured controversy, being the biggest target of the people who want to deny the Earth is warming up.

This latest, and hopefully last, investigation into Dr. Mann’s research (PDF) again shows he is not guilty of misconduct. A couple of the report conclusions are worth pointing out:

We found no basis to conclude that the [Climategate] emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence.

That’s clear enough, I think. They also said:

There is no specific evidence that [Mann] falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

A big claim by the deniers is that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that’s not true. The most damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that’s not scandalous at all; there’s always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn’t a big deal, or else they would’ve been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked.

What does this mean for global warming? A lot of these attacks can be traced back to the famous "hockey stick" diagram, showing how Earth’s temperatures have been increasing rapidly in recent times. This graph is what really clinches the idea of man-made global warming, and so has been the epicenter of the manufactroversy. The fact that Dr. Mann has been cleared again, and that his data are good, shows that this graph is even more solid — or at least is not as weak as so many would lead you to believe.

And what does this mean about "ClimateGate"? That’s clear enough: all the outrage, all the claims of fraud and fakery, were just — haha — hot air.

Not that this will stop or even slow down the denial machine. Politicians from the Virginia State Attorney General to members of the House of Representatives have been on what I would characterize as witch hunts. Dr. Mann has been vocal in his opposition, and I applaud him. Still, needless to say, the attacks will continue.

Here are the facts: the Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and caused by humans.

Those are simply the facts. It’s not hard to connect them, as long as you stick to reality and don’t let ideology sway you.

Tip o’ the thermometer to DeSmogBlog.

I see a lot of amateur rap videos made to support one cause or another, some good, and some, um, not so good.

This one, though, is really good: I’m A Climate Scientist [one or two moments may be NSFW]:

I LOLed a few times at this, and it makes a good point. We need more climate scientists speaking up, especially if they can do it in a way that connects to people.

Yo.

Tip o’ the thermometer to Ellen Ward.

To say I am not a fan of Rick Perry, Republican Presidential candidate, is to seriously underestimate my antipathy toward him. He is anti-science in almost every sense of the word, and his stance on nearly every issue on which I’ve heard him speak is the exact opposite of where I stand.

But then something like this comes along, and shows just how far outside of reality he is. In this video, a little boy asks him how old the Earth is, and Perry then gives an astonishing answer:

After equivocating about the age of the Earth, Perry — a man who, if elected President, will swear to uphold the U. S. Constitution — says, "In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools."

This is a jaw-dropping assertion. I find it difficult to interpret this as other than him saying he supports blatantly violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by teaching religion in public schools. Gawker does take a different tack saying, " Texas does not, in fact, teach creationism, or anything like it." But even if that’s true, it means Perry is — at the very least — woefully out of touch with his own state’s school system, and — at the worst, which is where I think we stand — he is unfamiliar with the very first amendment of the document upon which all the laws of the United States of America are based.

I could go on and on — though apropos of this it’s worth reminding you that Perry appointed creationists to be the head of the Texas State Board of Education three times in a row. It’s very clear that this man has no concern at all for science (like, say, global warming, about which the Washington Post strongly implies he’s a liar) or for doing and saying whatever it takes to push his religious agenda.

Every day, it seems, Perry says something similar to this, and it’s very early yet in the campaign process. Yet, incredibly, he’s leading in the Presidential candidate pool among likely Republican voters in the primary next year. We have a long, painful election journey ahead of us.

Tip o’ the Burgess Shale to Ken Plume.

- Update: reality wins for sure in Texas!
- Sorry Texas, you’re still doomed
- Texas creationist McLeroy spins the educational disaster he created
- Texas State Board of Education confirms irony is dead
- Michele Bachmann needs to check her ID

Last month, I wrote about the Texas State Board of Education debating the adoption of textbook supplements, some of which had creationist material. As I wrote then, those materials, after much argument, were rejected. Yay!

However, the story wasn’t quite done. One of the pro-science supplements was still being held up by a creationist on the Texas BoE, who obviously didn’t care for the way evolution was being portrayed… that is, accurately.

The good news is that as of last week, that final supplement has been approved! The creationist’s complaints about the supplement have been determined to have been "sufficiently addressed" by the publisher. In fact, the supplement now supports evolution even more strongly. I took a look at the complaints made and the publisher’s response (PDF): it’s actually a thing of beauty. Where the complaints were minor wording issues, the changes were made. When the creationists made more substantive complaints, talking about the fossil record or genetic differences between humans and chimps, the publisher either did not make changes to weaken the science, or did change the wording to make an even stronger case for evolution!

Fantastic! And this is an important distinction: it’s not just a win for science, it’s a defeat for those who would try to undermine it.

So, once again, I get to use a graphic I hope I can continue to use in the future:

Still… a gentle reminder of why this battle took so long and had to be fought so hard by scientists, educators, and parents who supported science: the head of the BoE for many years was Don McLeroy, a staunch creationist whose disdain for actual science and evidence-based reality was palpable (read through the links in the Related Posts section below, especially this one). And who appointed him to this position? Texas Governor and now Presidential candidate Rick Perry.

Note that in 2010, when McLeroy’s tenure was up, Perry considered another creationist for the position, eventually appointed a third creationist, and when her appointment was up he appointed a fourth creationist, Barbara Cargill. To head the State Board of Education.

Just sayin’.

I received a few emails, tweets, and comments on the blog yesterday asking about an Op/Ed article in Forbes magazine that claims that new NASA data will "blow [a] gaping hole in global warming alarmism".

Except, as it turns out, not so much. The article is just so much hot air (see what I did there?) and climate scientists say the paper on which it’s based is fundamentally flawed and flat-out wrong.

It’s clear after reading just a few words that this article is hugely biased. The use of the word "alarmist" and its variants appeared no fewer than 14 times, 16 if you include the picture caption and the headline. The word "alarmist" is pretty clearly slanted against the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming up, and that humans are the reason^*.

Still, what is the article actually saying?

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

That seems pretty clear: if true, it means we may not be heating up as much as scientists predict.

Of course, there’s that pesky "if true" caveat. The Forbes article is based on a paper published in the journal Remote Sensing (PDF). The first author of this work is Roy Spencer — one of the extremely few climate scientists who denies human-caused climate change, so more on him in a moment — and his work has been shown to be thoroughly wrong by mainstream climate scientists.

Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience contacted several climate scientists about Spencer’s paper, and their conclusions were quite harsh. They say Spencer’s model is "unrealistic", "flawed", and "incorrect". As ThinkProgress points out, a geochemist has shown that Spencer’s models are irretrievably flawed, "don’t make any physical sense", and that Spencer has a track record in using such flawed analysis to draw any conclusion he wants.

(more…)

Some great news out of the Lone Star State: the Texas State Board of Education unanimously rejected creationist supplements to textbooks, instead voting to endorse science-based ones.

Yay!

These supplements are for students to use in classrooms in addition to their textbooks. A passel of creationist ones had been submitted for approval by the BoE back in April by a creationist special interest group, as well as materials based on science submitted by mainstream publishers. Last week, the BoE voted on which to use, and science won.

The links above go to the National Center for Science Education. They are a group that fought valiantly for the science-based materials, which is clearly why they won the day; they greatly outnumbered witnesses for creationism. Clearly, showing up is half the battle. At least. My congratulations to everyone at the NCSE for this victory.

Josh Rosenau, who writes the Thoughts from Kansas blog and was one of the people at the Texas hearings, has written about this debate in detail (including earlier posts here, and here) if you’re looking for more info from an insider’s viewpoint.

So, because of this, I am happy to create this new graphic:

I hope I have many, many more chances to use it in the future.