Category Archives: Science

Funny, That

Posted on September 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

An article in today’s New York Times laments the difficulty of “building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”

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Posted in International, Science, The New Religion

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Geographical Determinism?

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

The FT interviews Jared Diamond.

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Posted in Great Thinkers, History, Science, The New Religion

Rough Toilet Paper, Soft Science

Posted on February 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

The kerfuffle over soft toilet paper has hit a new low. The NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz is now saying that “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

I had to chuckle after reading that last sentence (it is silly, is it not?). But then I decided to take Hershkowitz seriously. Hardcore environmentalists like the NRDC are sometimes loosey-goosey with scientific data; science and their religion rarely get along.

Let’s see how big the impact of softer toilet paper really is. Maybe, hyperbole aside, Hershkowitz has a point. Let’s look at the data and find out.

Despite the proliferation of tree-intensive soft toilet paper, forest area in the U.S. has remained almost unchanged over the last century. Right around 33% of total land area.

Over that same time period, U.S. population more than tripled. That’s a lot more bottoms, demanding ever softer toilet paper. And yet — no net deforestation.

That doesn’t sound like ecological destruction. To use one of the New Religion’s buzzwords, that sounds… sustainable.

Deforestation is happening on a worldwide scale, according to a handy table from the Earth Policy Institute (data from the UN). They try to make it sound scary, but it isn’t. I crunched the numbers. The decline amounts to roughly 0.2% per year. Not exactly a crisis. Even that slow rate appears to be in decline.

I’m going to go ahead and say that Hershkowitz and the NRDC are promoting a baseless scare story.

There is still a tremendous upside to all this hemming and hawing. If toilet paper is all that environmental activists have to get worked up over these days, it is a sign that, environmentally speaking, we live in good times.

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Posted in Science, The New Religion

Peanuts: EVERYBODY PANIC

Posted on January 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

Salmonella-contaminated peanut products have caused quite the uproar of late. 6 people have died. 486 have gotten sick at latest count.

Will I get sick? Let’s calculate the odds. U.S. population is currently about 300 million people. Odds of death? 1 in 50,000,000.

Let’s assume 600 people get sick before the outbreak ends. Odds of illness? 1 in 500,000.

Pardon me while I continue to enjoy delicious peanut-based snacks.

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Posted in Mankind's Doom, Science

Political Science

Posted on December 22, 2008 | 1 Comment

Over at the New York Times, John Tierney has some excellent analysis of Obama’s choice of John Holdren to be his science advisor.

The Bush administration was often criticized — rightly, I think — for pursuing faith-based science policies. With Holdren as science advisor, it appears this will not change in the new administration. This is to be expected. President Bush is a thoroughly political creature. So is President Obama; you don’t get to be president if you aren’t.

The most important part of the scientific method is its humility. At its very heart is the ability to admit that maybe, just possibly, you could be wrong. If that’s what the evidence shows, then it’s ok to admit it. If you (gasp) don’t know something, that’s ok, too. Instead of just making up an answer, you try to find it out.

The new political science is very different. It replaces humility with Certainty. A large part of the politicized scientist’s job is simply to disagree with the other party. It’s an effective way to raise funding. At least, it is when funding is allocated by political means.

Holdren displays all the hallmarks of The Certainty. For one, he accuses people who disagree with him as being operatives of the other party. Of course they’re wrong, just look at how they vote!

This is not a strong argument. Neither is his primary defense for his party’s preferred global warming policies – the argument from authority. Scientific consensus is on his side. Of course, there once was a time when scientific consensus said that the earth was flat, and the center of the universe. The world as it actually is matters more than merely what people think about it. Millions of people can be wrong, and often are.

But Holdren is Certain. He knows he is right. Scientific consensus is on his side. Just as it was when he and Paul Ehrlich lost that famous bet with Julian Simon. Just as it was when he and others attacked Bjorn Lomborg — who is no Republican — for the crime of dissenting. Tierney notes that Holdren and his co-writers actually “made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in [Lomborg's] 540-page book.”

This is faith, not science. President Obama ran on a platform of change. I have no doubt that he will change some things for the better. But his science policies will probably just as faith-based, and just as Certain in the face of contrary evidence, as his predecessor’s.

So it goes.

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Posted in Certainty, Philosophy, Political Animals, Science

Cell Phones: Mankind’s Doom

Posted on July 24, 2008 | 2 Comments

Dr. Ronald B. Herberman is convinced that cell phones raise cancer rates. This man is no scientist, whatever his credentials may say; scientists use the scientific method. Instead, Herberman has The Certainty. MSNBC reports:

[Herberman] says it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children.

The article also notes that over a dozen studies have found no cancer-cell phone correlation, let alone causation. But Herberman knows he is right, no matter what the data might say. He is Certain.

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Posted in Certainty, Mankind's Doom, Philosophy, Science

AstroTurf: Killer of Children?

Posted on April 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

As I noted before, I think the lead poisoning scare surrounding artificial turf is exaggerated. I take a more in-depth look over at the American Spectator Online.

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Posted in Publications, Science, Sports

Human Origins and Achievement

Posted on April 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

The Economist reports that researchers have been able to determine where and when human populations diverged as far back as 200,000 years ago. It’s a fascinating article.

They also speculate that a severe drought in Africa very nearly wiped out humanity. Total population may have dipped as low as 2,000 people. Today’s population of 6.6 billion is descended entirely from that small pool.

The most amazing part of it is that the researchers were able to piece most of that together just by looking at mitochondrial DNA. To learn so much from so little is absolutely amazing. This is one of those times where I stand in awe of human ingenuity.

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Posted in Science

The Certainty

Posted on April 22, 2008 | 4 Comments

Happy Earth Day, everyone. Some thoughts were provoked by a timely piece by Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. He writes about why he left the organization.

Moore is a scientist, trained in the scientific method. He doesn’t have what I call The Certainty. His colleagues did. They were more rigid, more ideological. More Certain.

The breaking point came when, over Moore’s objections, Greenpeace tried to ban chlorine, which is an element on the periodic table.

Moore laments, “the initial healthy skepticism hardened into a mindset that treats virtually all industrial use of chemicals with suspicion.”

That hardened mindset is The Certainty. It is environmentalism’s ugly side. It turns it into a religion.

We all know that religion can bring joy and comfort to people. But when The Certainty shows itself, religion becomes something darker.

The environmental movement is the same way. It is wonderful that activists have raised awareness. People prefer a clean environment to a dirty one, and sure enough, look at the data. Our environment is cleaner than it was fifty years ago. What a noble achievement.

Then The Certainty came in. Trying to ban this or that chemical without evidence of harm. Advocating technological regress. Attacking those with fact-based disagreements as corporate puppets, without ever touching the substance of their arguments.

There’s a reason why I think of (radical) environmentalism as the new religion. Like religion, environmentalism has done some good. But like religion, the more radical adherents have The Certainty. That can, quite literally, be bad for our health.

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Posted in Certainty, Philosophy, Science, The New Religion

Astro Turf: Mankind’s Doom

Posted on April 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

Fields made of artificial turf are being investigated as health hazards because some of them contain lead. New Jersey has taken an early lead in overreacting by closing two fields.

This would be a cause for concern if there were signs of lead poisoning in people using the fields. But there is no evidence of even a single player getting lead poisoning.

It’s the dose that makes the poison. That dose just isn’t there in the fields.

A spokesman said, “In the 40 years that synthetic sports turf has been in use in the United States and around the world, not one person has ever reported any ill effects related to the material composition of the fibers.”

It really irks me when media outlets frighten people with scare stories like this. Now a government investigation is wasting peoples’ time and tax dollars because of it.

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Posted in Certainty, Economics, Mankind's Doom, Science, The New Religion