Science a positive influence on society and politics should

[mellie]

Check out NOAA's recent sensationist headline,

NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts

By Joe Romm on Oct 27, 2011 at 8:00 pm

DUST-BLOWIFICATION IS COMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dust-Bowlification is coming. The only question now is whether we are going to act quickly to reduce emissions and avoid the very worst of the consequences. As I’ll discussed in a future post, the kind of drying that is project is not something that you can adapt to in any meaningful sense of the word.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/2 ... -droughts/

Now after this authors article was published, he issued a disclaimer on another site, advising this was his first time ever , getting published in this publication.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/2 ... nsecurity/

Just a couple of his endnotes/disclaimers .... lol How old is he, 22? Unfortunately, no.

This is my first piece ever in the journal itself. I did have an online piece, “Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution.” This is not a peer-reviewed article but rather a “Comment” piece.

I was particularly delighted that Overpeck liked the term “Dust-Bowlification.” He really was an inspiration for me to begin studying this topic many years ago when I saw a 2005 presentation of his, “Warm climate abrupt change–paleo-perspectives,” that concluded “climate change seldom occurs gradually”

How did I find this follow-up/discrete disclaimer article of his?

When I googled the term "Dust-Bowlification" I suspected he made up...whats tragic, is that he admits to having done so, actually gives himself credit for having coined the term in a creative, playful context, when over on NOAA's site, it sounds so... "Authoritative"... would their scientists be caught dead using terms like this?
Hell no, thats why they pay mongs like our friend Joe Romm to spin this sensationalism for them, relinquishing themselves of the embarrassment they know they would endure if 10 years from now they were expected to provide a scientific definition for their sensationalist fear-mongering tripe.

So I ask you all, why are our publicly Commonwealth government funded once deemed respectable scientific organisations such as NOAA , CSIRO along with others publishing non peer-reviewed junk-science souped up with scientific terms describing a phenomena the individual who wrote the article and who is not a scientist (Self declared Climate change expert since 2005) made up?

Who is Joe Romm when he's at home?

http://thinkprogress.org/author/joe/

Just another example of progressive climate fucktardery, you guys really need to be more discerning with.

Because in less than 10 years, those who supported it, and 'believed' it will feel like complete idiots, honestly, I blush for them in advance now even, never will they live it down, especially the older more established writers who really should have known better.

What does this say about NOAA, and the public (us) who fund them to keep us informed?

Ps- Note how NOAA cherry-picked their 'respected' (inserts sarcasm) reference list?
These poor pricks wont have jobs in 5 or so years time,(not with NOAA anyway as they will have served their menial purpose) so they will be back to mopping laboratory floors if they are lucky before they know it.

NOAA's link, ha ha they didn't even reference the author, and or genius who coined Dust-blowification, .. not to be confused with blow-jobification of course. -Smirk


http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories201 ... ought.html

Too embarrassing for words.

[mellie]

Who is Joe Romm really?

Well, this depends on what site you read his rap-sheet on...

Joseph Romm is a physicist who edits the blog http://ClimateProgress.org for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Washington DC, USA.

Contact Joseph Romm
Search for this author in:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 8450a.html

He is in fact the editor of a number of barely distinguishable progressive Climate Change activist sites...

http://ClimateProgress.org

or

http://thinkprogress.org/author/joe/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm

How many 'said' scientists come b-rate bloggers are there like Joe Romm spamming out there?




From 1988 to 1990, Romm worked as Special Assistant for International Security at the Rockefeller Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation

When to think, we all assumed these clumsy sensationalist eco-nazis were filthy dread-locked out-of-work arts students living hand to mouth trying to make ends meet, spamming articles like this across the web one after the other, each more sensationalist than the last.

These guys are making a killing out of your gullibility, your inability to critically evaluate what you read.

He looks like our very own David Koch from Sunrise 7.

I wonder if they're related.

[mellie]

Not sure they're related, but they are on the same page...



http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andr ... e/desc/P30

Classic!

Boland, Adam
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2006 5:20 PM
Subject: RE Hi Sunrise: Interesting campaign you have running here.



We’re going to spell it out on air in a fortnight.

Basically, we had an independent company (Energetics) come and complete a review of our operation’s emissions—everything from the lights in the studio to our airfares—EVEN the number of televisions around Australia tuned into Sunrise!!

That review is now being verified by yet another company. It’s very tough to get Government approval (and rightly so).

Once we have the emission totals, we simply offset them by spending money on programs which take CO2 out of the atmosophere. Works out roughly at $5 a tonne.

All businesses should be encouraged to do it—so I’m hoping our experience will encourage others.

Thanks for your interest.

Adam

---- Taken from Andrew Bolts excellent Blog

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andr ... e/desc/P30

Now just two days ago,

Adviser Frank Jotzo proposes extra carbon levies

by: Siobhain Ryan
From: The Australian
October 27, 2011 1:00AM

AN academic adviser to the government on climate change has proposed a $5 per tonne coal export tax, a carbon levy on international flights and shipping, and cuts to fuel tax concessions to fund climate change aid for developing nations.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... 6177748595

So,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... per_capita

Australians emit 18.9 per-capita, x $5 = $94.5

What if every Australian paid for their individual usage, (user-pay) ie a CO2 levy, at $5 per tonne, no more, no less, no penalsing companies and polluters for providing a service, which works out to be $94.5 per person, each year, which works out to be just under $2 per week fir every Australian?

Are we trying to save our environment or commence trading a new global currency, a dirty one at that?

Moneys received in revenue could be put squarely towards cleaning up our environment in general, not just CO2.

I know this sounds overly simplistic, but think of the money that could be put to good use, this opposed to being funneled towards expanding an already top-heavy bureaucracy.

1) The world cant say we aren't doing our bit to clean up our environment
2) The revenue will stay in Australia, this opposed to being traded like a global commodity.
3) We get that nice warm feeling that comes with pissing inside our own wet-suit. This and don't have to pay the UN a 10% rent-tax, or a dry-cleaning fee.

Screw the UN, and their global-tax agenda.... If we must, it should be an environmental tax, not confined to CO2 alone.

[mellie]

whats $95 odd x 23 million Australians p/a?

$2.18500 billion

Almost the cost of a Royal wedding.

[HIGHERBEAM]

That Americans are generally poorly educated is not news, and our younger citizens, as a group, may have learned less than their parents or grandparents did. Our politicians routinely preach a commitment to education, but a look at some surveys demonstrates how hollow that commitment is. The National Geographic Society, in the summer of 1988, released a report on "the dismal state of Americans' knowledge about the globe." Young Americans, "like their predecessors, still lust after adventurous trips to exotic places, but now don't have a clue how to find them on a map." The survey compared U.S. geographic literacy with that of our neighbors Mexico and Canada and other industrialized countries (West Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), on the basis of Gallup interviews "with representative samples of adults 18 and older -- 10,820 in all." Among Americans, 14 percent could not even pick out the United States on a map, "and among 18- to 24-year-olds, the Americans finished dead last" on a complete battery of questions.

This is a terrible indictment of American society, politics, and education, and we fare little better in our knowledge of science, biological or otherwise. A recent study conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement compared students, 10-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and 17-year-olds, among various countries. American 17-year-olds ranked in the bottom 25 percent in biology, chemistry and physics, behind students from England, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hungary, Poland, and Japan, to name a few. Out of seventeen countries, American 14-year-olds ranked fourteenth in science and mathematics, and American 10-year-olds finished in the middle of the group. Results from different American schools varied widely. The American showing was in fact similar to that of developing countries that display sharp contrasts between elite schools and other schools. They concluded the summary with the understatement, "For a technologically advanced country, it would appear that a reexamination of how science is represented and studied is required."

In a survey of undergraduates in three states more than half said they were creationists and one-third or more believed in ghosts, communication with the dead, extraterrestrials, aliens, Big Foot, etc. The prevalence of such pseudoscientific beliefs is an indictment of current science-education practices, which seem less effective than education via supermarket tabloids. The survey also revealed that those who accepted creationism were less likely to read books and had lower grade-point averages than the noncreationists. What that may mean is not altogether clear, but at the least it suggests an anti-intellectual suspicion of knowledge on the part of those sympathetic to creationism.

Several opinion polls have revealed a public sympathy toward teaching creationism along with evolution at both the high school and the university level. Even university students fall prey to the equal-time argument, notwithstanding that the creationist interpretation of life is on a par with the idea of a flat Earth. In spite of a trend toward greater acceptance of evolutionary theory with increasing biological education, well over half the biology graduate students surveyed at The Ohio State University favored teaching creationism in public schools.

Another survey showed that only 12 percent of Ohio's high school biology teachers could select from five choices the phrase that best described the modern theory of evolution! This is pathetic testimony to both science education and teacher training. In an equally alarming survey of 730 Ohio school board presidents, bringing 336 responses, 53 percent felt that "creation science" should be favorably taught in public schools, and most of this group felt it should be presented in biology or science classes. Less than 2 percent of the school board presidents were able to correctly select the statement that best described the theory of evolution from a list of five choices. Nearly 50 percent said they would do nothing of they learned that "creation science" was favorably taught in science class in their district, and 57 percent indicated that school boards themselves should determine whether "creation science" or evolution should be included in science classes. The crisis in science education is certainly alive and well in Ohio.

So what became of the Columbus public schools' Biology Curriculum Guide that I mentioned in the preface? [Proposed in 1982, it was about 50 percent creationist. It misrepresented the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it distorted the fossil record, it claimed a young earth and worldwide flooding as scientific fact -- and it even quoted the National Enquirer as a scientific reference!] As a result of protests by scientists and concerned citizens, it was withdrawn, and in October 1984 the Columbus School Board removed the teaching of creationism from science classes. But when the Board's new outline appeared in March 1985, the word "evolution" was also removed from the list of topics to be covered in biology class. We were assured that evolution would continue to be taught in the genetics unit of biology classes, but that it was prudent to avoid the "E" word. That the central unifying theory of a major discipline, accepted almost without exception in the rest of the educated world, must be smuggled in the back door of the classroom, for fear of offending the fundamentalists and creationists, is an incredible commentary on the state of public education in the United States.

Following a speech to a fundamentalist coalition in Dallas in 1980, then Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan held a press conference at which he was asked if he thought the theory of evolution should be taught public schools. He replied, "Well, it's a theory, it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory, but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught" (Science, 1980, 209: 1214). One must wonder where the President got his scientific advice. Here is ignorance (and pragmatic politics) celebrated at the highest level through an anti-intellectual appeal to a voting constituency.

In just such ways, a great deal of misinformation has been propagated in the public media about the evolution/creation controversy. For this the scientific community must accept some blame. We have done a very poor job of explaining our work to the public, to the press, and even to biology students, as the dismaying recent surveys have shown. Scientists are usually deeply involved in research, and do not feel moved to spend time popularizing their work. Some scientists cherish the isolation of their ivory towers, and it is in any case difficult and time-consuming to explain elaborate technical theories in a way easily understood by the public. By failing to explain our research, however, we invite its misrepresentation at the hands of unqualified spokespersons.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Anyone seen those Zeitgeist films (free online)? Some of the propositions are dubious but not the one in which scientists are in charge rather than politicians.

[HIGHERBEAM]

When will politicians stop trying to be scientists?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/he ... 6205387379