Under the Microscope is a cool website ‘where women and science connect.’ It’s the online component of the Women Writing Science project at The Feminist Press featuring stories from women about science, technology, engineering, and math, and aimed to inspire the next generation of STEM pioneers. Last week I was delighted to chat with one of the hosts, Kristina Necovska. Here’s an excerpt from our Q&A:
UTM: I’m curious whether you’ve found that the public’s ability to distinguish credibility and sound arguments is going out the window?
SK: I’m very concerned. We just saw this hack into e-mails of climate change. Most people made very quick judgments without fully understanding the context of what they were reading. [There is] a survey just released by George Mason University and Yale Center for Climate Change Communication. It’s a dismal report, people more than ever don’t “believe” in climate change.
The big point here is that pseudoscience is on the rise. … It’s dangerous and I’m not sure what it means for the future of science and it’s a big red flag in terms of where we’re going. Science needs a better platform. It’s certainly not about PR in a traditional sense but we have to think about how we’re represented when we’re working against so many other forces that have a certain vested interest. We’re trying to emphasize the best research and [research] is very dynamic. There’s no black and white in the way that the pseudo-scientific [groups] want to represent things. Read the rest of this entry »
I haven’t read all the new material yet that my good friends at DeSmogBlog are producing. But I have long been suspicious of the attacks on leading climate researchers, like the recently vindicated Michael Mann, because they are so obviously diversionary, and yet also so obviously strategic.
There is no doubt that those attacks have been mounting; I believe a new and full scale “war on science” is afoot in the climate arena, something I hope to say more about shortly.
But in the meantime, it appears that following ClimateGate and GlacierGate, we are once again getting some revelations taking on the other side. Maybe this means the pendulum will shift, and good science can move back off the ropes, where it has been for too long. We’ll see. I’ll be watching closely.
Well this is encouraging and I’ll be very interested to hear your reactions…
Straight from my inbox:
New office would target nation’s fast-accelerating climate information needs
NOAA launches www.climate.gov as portal for climate science and services
Individuals and decision-makers across widely diverse sectors – from agriculture to energy to transportation – increasingly are asking NOAA for information about climate change in order to make the best choices for their families, communities and businesses. To meet the rising tide of these requests, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today announced the intent to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency’s strong climate science and service delivery capabilities.
More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the weekend, everybody was emailing me this Washington Post Outlook article, which critiques my first book in the context of arguing that liberals are sneeringly dismissive of the conservative intellect, and guilty of “intellectual condescension”:
This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.
Let me go on the record as saying that I am no fan whatsoever of intellectual condescension. I think there is way too much of it on my side of the aisle. So I should be at least somewhat sympathetic with this author, one Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia.
But here’s the problem. He gets my book’s arguments almost entirely wrong. First, I don’t argue that conservatives “disregard evidence.” The problem is that they make up their own evidence, using their own “scientists” to do so. They then use this pseudo-expertise to disregard expertise and consensus–a very different thing.
Second, I never argued conservatives were arguing “cynically.” It was obvious they believed what they said on matters of science. After all, they had their pseudoexperts to bank on.
Finally, I clearly distinguished between distorting the facts of science on the one hand, and making economic, moral, and policy arguments on the other. So a sentence like Alexander’s last one completely misses the boat: “Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.” This stuff has nothing to do with the arguments of The Republican War on Science.
If there is ever a case for being intellectually condescending–and I’m not sure that there is–perhaps it’s to someone who critiques you while getting your arguments wrong.
This week’s edition of The Science of Kissing Gallery features our first wedding kiss from one of my very best friends, author and primate researcher Vanessa Woods, along with her husband, Duke anthropologist Brian Hare. It’s hard not to smile at this happy moment from their wedding in Australia.
Submit your original photograph or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links. And thanks for so many funny, thoughtful, unusual, and creative images already!
Full video of yesterday’s talk is up, as is the dialogue with former Clinton science adviser and Baker Institute fellow Neal Lane that followed it. You can watch here.
This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.
“Find a CITES, find myself a CITES to live in.” Isn’t that how the Talking Heads song goes? No? Either way, I had the tune stuck in my head all afternoon during our most recent class, in which we discussed the merits of listing species on both the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. The student presentations covered the listing criteria and some of the problems associated with both groups. CITES has successfully impeded illegal trade of tropical reptiles and amphibians, but it lacks the same influence with marine species. For instance, China removed itself from the CITES treaty and freely imports dead seahorses, which are used for traditional medicinal purposes.
Many students seemed puzzled by the role of CITES and the Red List. What exactly are we trying to accomplish by making lists of animals that are in really, really big trouble? Adding a doomed species to a list of other species that aren’t doing so hot doesn’t magically solve the problem, as one student pointed out during our discussion. I came away frustrated at the IUCN’s unwillingness to stand up for the species it so painstakingly evaluates. Each species on the Red List receives a thorough population analysis by groups of unbiased scientists. The product is a detail-rich compilation of thousands of species—some critically endangered, some vulnerable, all meticulously calculated by the IUCN.
I’m heading out for a series of Unscientific America talks this Friday/Monday, as long as the weather permits for the second leg of the journey:
Houston, TX
Lunch Discussion and Book Signing
Friday, February 5
12:30 PM–2:30 PM
Event sponsored by the Science and Technology Policy Program, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dore Commons
James A. Baker Hall
Rice University
Houston, TX Web site
Bethesda, MD
Speech at the National Institutes of Health
Monday, February 8
10:00 AM–11:00 AM
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
NIH Clinical Research Center
(Building 10)
Bethesda, MD Web site
Stop in if you live/are going to be in these areas….
P.S.: I am revising the talk to contain a bit more ethos and pathos, because like many science-focused or intellectual talks, it currently has too much logos. Jokes are still good though…
I’ve been watching the video from ScienceOnline2010 on ScienceInTheTriangle’s youtube channel, where I also found this short interview I did last summer with Sabine Vollmer about Unscientific America. This is part 2 of our informal discussion, which took place after my first UA talk ever at Quail Ridge Books and Music:
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a research associate at Duke University and co-author of Unscientific America. Sometimes she's a classicist, radio jock, or congressional staffer. For more information, visit her website.
