Blogs / The Intersection

How many things are wrong with this video?

Let’s see some serious myth-busting in comments…

Nick Sundt of the World Wildlife Federation’s climate blog has a post on how, as Arctic sea ice reaches its low this year, lots of walrus corpses are turning up:

Just days after Arctic sea ice receded to the third lowest extent on record, forcing thousands of walruses ashore, researchers flying along the Alaska coast stumbled upon a grisly scene: 100 to 200 walrus carcasses along the shoreline of Icy Cape, southwest of Barrow….

You can read the full post here.

CNN’s got an interactive map of the progress since Hurricane Katrina:

Many are still struggling: The city ranks first for murder and second in poverty. More coverage here.

The Heartland Institute has bought an exhibit booth to promote their petition for overturning the ACS statement on climate change.  I encourage those in attendance to join Eli by heading over to discuss the issue. Start preparing here…

I just did my first national radio interview for the book–with NPR’s Living on Earth. They put together a really fun segment in which I not only explain the book’s arguments to host Jeff Young, but also provide running commentary on one of the best examples I’ve seen of using the new media to communicate positively and entertainingly about science–CERN’s “Large Hadron Rap” video:

You can listen to the whole “Living on Earth” segment here. Here’s an excerpt:

YOUNG: Well give me some examples of challenges we face where the average Joe needs to know something about science.

MOONEY: Well there are certainly many and I think by far the largest right now is the climate change issue. That’s the one where the most is at stake for the future, and it’s also the one where you see such a huge gap between the average American in terms of what they think the state of scientific understanding is and then the scientific community on the other hand. The scientists are something like 85 percent sure that it’s human caused. And the public is more like, you know, 50 percent sure. And if you break it out by party affiliation, and this has been done many times, the Republicans overwhelmingly don’t accept the science. So you got a politicized issue and you’ve got a huge gap between scientists and the public. You add that to unfortunately a lot of bad media coverage of the issue over time and you pretty much get the gridlock that we have.

YOUNG: Something you point out here I found pretty interesting and that is among those Republicans who do not think that climate change is caused by humans, it doesn’t seem to matter how educated they are. Even well educated Republicans hold that belief.

MOONEY: Yeah, it’s really amazing, isn’t it? This is a different Pew study. They studied global warming opinions and they looked at party affiliation and level of education. And what they found for Republicans is that the higher the level of education, the less likely they are to accept scientific reality. And for Democrats and Independents it’s precisely the opposite. I don’t find that actually surprising having been involved with debating the climate debate for a long time.

You look at someone who doesn’t accept the science of global warming, like George Will the Washington Post Columnist or Michael Criton the late novelist, someone like that, these people are not stupid, you know, they’re actually quite intelligent, and their intelligence itself is what lets them come up with arguments against the scientific position of the scientific community that are quite ingenious and very misleading.

Again, the full “Living on Earth” segment is here.

In this post, we continue our response to PZ Myers’ review of our book, Unscientific America. For those who’ve just arrived, we previously laid out the course our response would take here, and began to respond here. This is the third post, and there will be one more after it.

5. American Anti-Science. Myers claims the book “entirely neglects the anti-scientific forces.” This is false.

First, Chris wrote an entire book dealing with this problem. That book, The Republican War on Science, dealt very extensively with the anti-science forces and put them in their place.

Unscientific America tries not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to go beyond its predecessor–and indeed, we’ve been describing it as the sequel to The Republican War on Science. This time around, we don’t structure the book by scientific topic, so you won’t find chapter-length refutations of the creationists, the global warming deniers, and so on. However, Chris has refuted them all at great length elsewhere, and they get more than adequate licks in the new book as well. (Indeed, we’ve added some smackdowns of the anti-vaccinationists this time around!)

Perhaps Myers would have preferred a book that contained nothing more than entertaining skewerings of anti-science idiocy–but Chris wrote that book already. Unscientific America tries to take the next step and explore the reasons for the disconnects between science and society, because understanding the true nature of anti-science sentiment and its causes is no less important than debunking it. They’re both important.

6. Root Causes. Myers claims the book “demands we avoid addressing the structural roots” of the problem of science in society. That’s false.

A more charitable reading would be that we differ with Myers about what the root causes are, or place different emphases upon them. Clearly, he thinks religion is a much bigger root cause–if not the only root cause–than we do. But why then doesn’t he just say that we differ, instead of mischaracterizing our position?

We too want to address root causes–we just don’t think religion is the root of all our problems. It is one cause of anti-science sentiment, to be sure–a very prominent one. But not the only one. Our book also deals with many others: The nature of the media; the nature of politics; the nature of the scientific community, and so on. It may be easier to simply single out religion, but we’re not convinced it gets us where we need to be.

7. Science in the Entertainment Industry. Chris spent a month out in LA meeting with experts on the entertainment industry or talking with them by phone, trying to work out why science often gets such a bad shake in film and on television. The result was a report on how the entertainment industry works, and why scientists are often unhappy with the result–and what can be done to change this. (Some of this content is now reiterated in our Salon.com adaptation from the book.)

From this chapter, Myers finds a single sentence about Richard Dawkins to quote [his emphasis]:

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot.

This Myers dubs “exasperating nonsense, in which Mooney and Kirshenbaum are discussing how to get science into the popular media.”

Myers is quoting out of context in order to criticize us. Here’s what he (and all of his readers who have not read our book) are missing.

Dawkins was quoted in the New York Times saying that the film Jurassic Park didn’t even need to have human characters in it, because the dinosaurs were so stunning. His words were: “The natural world is fascinating in its own right. It really doesn’t need human drama to be fascinating.” We provide this quotation, and the accompanying context, in the book. Myers does not.

Assuming Dawkins was quoted accurately, these words shows how little he understands about mass entertainment. A film with just dinosaurs running around would never have been so successful (and would never have been made). That was our point. Dawkins’ statement about Hollywood and Jurassic Park epitomizes the type of mindset that has kept scientists from having more productive encounters with the entertainment industry.

Now look at how Myers strives to defend Dawkins against us:

What Mooney and Kirshenbaum fail to grasp is that to a scientist, factual accuracy must be paramount; it is not a matter on which we can compromise. Further, what they fail to recognize, and what they excuse for Hollywood, as that accuracy does not have to compromise narrative, drama, and character! They berate Dawkins as if he has no awareness of the basics of what makes a good story, which makes me wonder if they’ve read any of his books at all — do they think he simply drily recites a body of abstract thoughts at the reader? Perhaps they should take a look at The Ancestor’s Tale^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)} to discover that he actually has addressed this imaginary deficit.

But of course, in context, it is absurd to think that factual accuracy would be paramount in a movie like Jurassic Park.

And for that matter, what can Myers possibly be saying about Dawkins’ admittedly very good writing? That The Ancestor’s Tale could be made into just as successful a movie as Jurassic Park, which grossed nearly $ 1 billion worldwide? Again, that’s pretty hard to believe.

8. Solutions. Myers claims the book “offers no new solutions.” That’s false–the book is brimming with solutions. Chad Orzel even found one we couldn’t fit into the main text–the idea of forming a Science PAC to get more scientists elected to Congress–buried in an endnote, and built an entire discussion around it.

There are solutions in each chapter of the main body of the book, broken down by sector–politics, media, entertainment, religion. And then there is the grand solution in Chapter 10–which emerged from our collaboration, and which we don’t think either of us would have come up with on our own. So far as we know, it really is new in its particular way of analyzing the academic pipeline and finding, in it, a solution to our problems at the science-society interface.

Again, we would ask that readers consult the book, rather than Myers’ review, to determine whether it really offers “no new solutions.” And we’d also direct them over to the review at RealClimate, where a productive discussion about solutions has, indeed, been sparked by the book.

This difference in perceptions in these reviews is certainly remarkable. It’s clear that those who are invested in the “New Atheism” have a strong negative reaction to the book–but is that surprising, in that the book strongly criticizes the “New Atheism”?

But for those who do not have such a strong investment, yet care about the promotion and communication of science–like Michael Mann of Real Climate, Darksyde of Daily Kos, and many others–the book has prompted much valuable thought, response, and commentary. We’re very honored to see that it is having this effect.

In our final post, tomorrow, we will conclude our responses to the claims in PZ’s review.

The popular website Buzzflash.com has added Unscientific America to its premiums–where you can buy the book and also throw in a donation to Buzzflash–and now they’ve also run a commentary piece by us, setting our failure to act on climate in the context of the continuing gap between science and society. An excerpt:

The climate issue is the most powerful — and also the most catastrophic — example of how our society dysfunctionally managed matters of science. The stakes are literally enormous: We’re threatened with an unrecognizably changed planet, many of its largest cities submerged. The science is extraordinarily clear: It goes all the way back to 1859, when the Irish scientist John Tyndall first described the nature of the greenhouse effect. In modern times, meanwhile, the issue has been on the agenda for fully two decades now. Yet still, only about half of the public follows or trusts scientists on the matter. And so nothing has happened politically, and the problem has had all those years to steadily worsen — and even if we do get a global warming law for the first time in 2009, in a sense we’ve already failed.

So perhaps we ought to ask, what could we possibly have done differently?

Read the whole piece for our answer. And don’t forget to check out Buzzflash.com’s premium offer of the book!

Today is the official publication date of Unscientific America, and the first of our articles related to the book is out, in Salon.com. It’s a piece focused on the entertainment industry and its role in perpetrating negative images of science–with a central focus on Michael Crichton, who also perpetrated outright misinformation about global warming.

The article starts with the film Angels & Demons, and the story of CERN, wrongly thought to be carrying out all manner of dangerous science–and then gets to the big thesis:

The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent — an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron (”Aliens,” “Terminator,” “Titanic”) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists “as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.” That’s not only unfair to scientists: It’s unhealthy for the place of science in our culture — no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science — heavily influenced by politics and mass media — and that’s a very different matter.

You can read the full piece here….

We did a Q&A about the book here that should be of interest to some. I’m going to skip the science-religion stuff, but here are some other important parts of the exchange:

Chris pointed out here that climate change denier extraordinaire Marc Morano may be dead wrong, but he’s articulate, well funded, and there’s no one on the science side that competes with him. What specifically can be done to change that?

It’s simple: Things won’t change until the world of science invests in creating counter-Moranos. There are many talented and extremely young intelligent people in science today who could fill that role, but there is little training available for them, and even less of a career trajectory for them to get there.

(more…)

Here it is, and I think it may be the best diavlog we’ve done yet:

These are the different segments of the conversation, and we actually had some significant disagreements about the role of education in solving our problem, and other matters. I think it was a great talk:

Science Saturday: The War on Ignorance
Chris’s new book, “Unscientific America” (02:23)
Carl vs. Chris on how to fight scientific illiteracy (16:03)
A brief history of science’s image problem (09:10)
Do we need another Carl Sagan? (04:46)
If bloggers can’t make science cool again, who can? (09:17)
The culture gap between Hollywood and the scientific community (08:38)

Carl is also going to be introducing me when I give a book talk in New Haven, CT, on July 21. Details here.