opinions by Ryan Maue
While we breathlessly await the publication of “critical reviews” from the soon to be defunct Journal of Cosmology, experts from a variety of fields are crawling over each other to denounce the claims of Dr. Hoover, who claimed to found definitive proof of alien life from extraterrestrial meteorites (Meteorite Alien Life). It would be an interesting exercise to compare the immediate broad-spectrum skepticism of this study to, let’s say, the Nature flood papers or the contrived Union of Concerned Scientists snowjob conference call. But, one could describe the reception of pro-global warming literature, whether peer-reviewed or not, as quite partisan in nature. So what has triggered this inherent skepticism of Dr. Hoover’s research, which is grandiose and ground-breaking, or something?
As mentioned in the Gawker blog post by Adrien Chen yesterday, Fox News apparently had the “exclusive” first crack at breaking Hoover’s research paper. You can set your watch by this — whenever Fox News is mentioned in the first few sentences of an article or blog posting, expect biased and vitriolic language to follow — even in this new era of civility. Dr. PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist, accurately and more than adequately disassembles the claims of Dr. Hoover with humor and wit. I’ll snip and encourage you to read his own blog.
Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it’s not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I’ve mentioned Cosmology before — it isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn’t exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: “Northern California”), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific “publications” on this web site.
In this instance, the gratuitous reference to Fox News in the first sentence immediately soils the otherwise readable post. Obviously, Dr. Myers does not have the ability to separate the hard news and opinion shows on Fox News, since there is little evidence of how this NASA discovery exclusive is evidence of any bias. It simply detracts from a very good article, and turns off readers who do not watch MSNBC or wrap their dead fish with the NY Times editorial pages.
He brings up near the end a very cogent argument on how science matriculates, and ideas are vetted:
While they’re at it, maybe they should try publishing it in a journal with some reputation for rigorous peer review and expectation that the data will meet certain minimal standards of evidence and professionalism.
I agree completely. And, whenever the Union of Concerned Scientists or World Wildlife Fund marches to the podium with some obvious politically tinged research, I’ll expect the same level of skepticism from both sides of the proverbial aisle. The hair trigger response to a “Fox News exclusive” has brought out the armchair experts, who have unloaded a salvo of rhetorical firepower at the listing Journal of Cosmology. Unfortunately, in their zeal to score a partisan political point, most neglected to see the rest of the media reported the same exclusive story. This is called “science by press release”, and it has to stop.
/sarc alert
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Little green men *sell newspapers*.
“Dr. PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist, accurately and more than adequately disassembles the claims of Dr. Hoover with humor and wit. I’ll snip and encourage you to read his own blog.”
PZ Myers is one of the ugliest personalities on this planet as well as a 100% supporter of consensus science. You ought to take more care in who you treat kindly. I’ll assume it’s sheer ignorance of Myers on your part. Try reading the comments on his blog and compare the “civility” to this blog, dummy.
[ryanm: i think just got the point of the whole blog posting 😉 ]
Such is the world.
It is easy to see the errors when others do it, but not so easy to look critically at oneself. Or in simpler form, double standard.
Coupla things stand out in the blog article: The predictable FoxNews rant and disdain for pseudo science. I then read the FoxNews article and found they added nothing to the story but simply reported what they learned from the pro and anti sides of the issue. The FoxNews writer seemed skeptical with “hard to swallow” but otherwise it was pretty typical of what you get in most MSM and press. So what we have is a guy ranting about pseudo science based solely on the organization involved, and bad reporting based on the new outlet alone, and most importantly, shredding any notion he may have of impartiality in the science or the messenger.
I vote for finding a better representative of the anti-life in alien meteors faction. Someone who ignores the letterheads and focuses on the science.
between overs in the world cup cricket, i foolishly turned on the news channels, including Fox News, to see what they were headlining.
Fox had Steven Solomon, author of “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization”, talking of Pakistan running out of water because of the melting Himalayan glaciers. here’s a taste of Solomon:
7 Dec 2009: HuffPost: Steven Solomon: Water Is The New Oil
Extreme droughts, floods, melting glaciers and other water cycle-related effects of global warming are why there’ll likely be 150 million global climate refugees within a decade…
Although no Al Gore of water has yet arisen to sound the political clarion, radically improved efficiency — which the combination of free market forces and water ecosystem regulations have begun modestly to produce — is the best solution…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-solomon/water-is-the-new-oil_b_380803.html
Fox followed with a lengthy piece on the UK releasing secret UFO files, same as Sky a few days previous:
3 March: Sky News: Secret UFO Files Document Hundreds of Sightings
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/03/secret-ufo-files-document-hundreds-sightings/?intcmp=obinsite
now Fox has this:
5 March: Fox: Garrett Tenney: Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite
That’s the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.
Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth..
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-alien-life-meteorite/?test=latestnews
Fox is not the only media pushing such stories lately, but what is the purpose?
Hoover is about as far from a crank as it gets. You however are a mauron.
This is a bit of Hoover’s scientific biography:
http://spie.org/x17397.xml
Maybe we should have Fox News report that CAGW is real. That should put the last nail in its coffin. 🙂
And ethanol subsidies are good, wind power works, Obamacare is great…
apologies for linking the Fox NASA/meteorite article which you had already posted:
OT but isnt it time this site was clasified as 100% pro AGW
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/Science
in your list of lukrewarmers etc. for future record
Hoover has a list of publications in mainstream journals a mile long.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=&num=100&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=richard+b+hoover&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=%22rb+hoover%22&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=1.&as_sdtf=&as_sdts=33&hl=en&as_vis=1 (over 300)
As well as 10 patents:
http://www.google.com/patents?hl=&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS290US290&ie=UTF-8&q=%22richard+b.+hoover%22
PZ Myers on the other hand has less than a tenth the number of publications and none of them have jack diddly squat to do with prokaryotes or extremophiles. If you want to know about the mating habits of zebra fish then associate professor of biology PZ Myers at the prestigious (ha ha) cow-town extension campus of the University of Minnesota then he’s the go-to guy. Outside that he’s a babbling blunderbuss of ignorant opinions.
[ryanm: blunderbuss reference gets bonus points. you see now what i was getting at?]
Dr Hoover found something in this piece of material. Here is a chance to do some science. Can someone give an explanation that they are satisfied with?
The Journal of Cosmology is an absolute joke. And it will stop “publication” in May because of “liars and thieves” per a press release last month.
Hoover may be a legit scientist, but JoS clearly has a pro-ET mantra. You can go back to their first article back in Oct 2009 and go from there. Maybe you’ll like the thought-provoking “Sex on Mars” paper, too.
Hoover submitting his “paper” to this “journal” is either a “mauronic” move or an act of pure desperation while being unable to get his research published at a legitimate journal.
The Journal of Cosmology is about as reputable and “peer reviewed” as Real Climate.
OT but as frightening:
1. Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations
J. Samson1,*, D. Berteaux2, B. J. McGill3, M. M. Humphries1Article first published online: 17 FEB 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00632.x
“Keywords:Climate change;climate vulnerability;demography;ecological niche model;geographically weighted regression;human populations;moral hazard
ABSTRACT
It has been qualitatively understood for a long time Aim that climate change will have widely varying effects on human well-being in different regions of the world. The spatial complexities underlying our relationship to climate and the geographical disparities in human demographic change have, however, precluded the development of global indices of the predicted regional impacts of climate change on humans. Humans will be most negatively affected by climate change in regions where populations are strongly dependent on climate and favourable climatic conditions decline. Here we use the relationship between the distribution of human population density and climate as a basis to develop the first global index of predicted impacts of climate change on human populations.
Global. Location
We use spatially explicit models of the present relationship between Methods human population density and climate along with forecasted climate change to predict climate vulnerabilities over the coming decades. We then globally represent regional disparities in human population dynamics estimated with our ecological niche model and with a demographic forecast and contrast these disparities with CO2 emissions data to quantitatively evaluate the notion of moral hazard in climate change policies.
Strongly negative impacts of climate change are predicted in Central Results America, central South America, the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and much of Africa. Importantly, the regions of greatest vulnerability are generally distant from the high-latitude regions where the magnitude of climate change will be greatest. Furthermore, populations contributing the most to greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis are unlikely to experience the worst impacts of climate change, satisfying the conditions for a moral hazard in climate change policies.
Regionalized analysis of relationships between distribution Main conclusions of human population density and climate provides a novel framework for developing global indices of human vulnerability to climate change. The predicted consequences of climate change on human populations are correlated with the factors causing climate change at the regional level, providing quantitative support for many qualitative statements found in international climate change assessments.”
Pat
The story on UFO files was widely reported, including on the BBC. It has been long time coming, and the news was made even greater when they realised that the most credible encounter’s files were put through a shredder. The reason for the shredding was also put through a shredder. That got the UFO believers excited, which makes an interesting story even juicer.
This meteorite topic and UFO story are not related at all, and I can’t see any reason why they should be linked. In my view, dates both articles were posted on is nothing but coincidence.
I’m just astonished that PZ Myers thinks that journal peer review is meant to be “robust”. As PZ can plainly see the real review is happening in the open: on blogs.
PZ writes too angrily to be taken seriously. When he dials down the rhetoric (and he does occasionally), he’s an excellent writer.
Could this have been a giant ruse to discredit Fox at a time when News Corp is buying Sky. If PZ Myers is hailed as a wit and we are encouraged to read his blog, you know that something is rotten in Denmark.
The main controversy around this paper, is, if I understand it right, that it is just a repeat of this guy’s earlier paper, and nothing new has been done, except another Press Release.
Now shut up and enjoy Brasil’s Carnival.
Pat, you clearly have not been watching the last two England games … a dramatic tie and a dramatic loss!!!
I have pretty much the same visceral reaction to the name P.Z. Myers that Dr. Myers has to Fox News. He is an odious little mind who has done quite enough to promote science as a new religion rather than a rational method of inquiry. One is often defined by one’s enemies: it seems I’ve developed a sudden affection for Dr. Hoover and his theory.
Ha, ha. Fox is doing exactly the right thing when it gets this kind of attention from the leftist/statist/pseudo-intellectuals!
TomRude says:
March 6, 2011 at 4:07 pm
“OT but as frightening:
1. Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations”
They missed the UK. (Energy security and all that…) Think they gotta recalibrate their model.
“This is called “science by press release”, and it has to stop.”
Why should it stop? The beast is always hungry. If he’s not fed he gets very angry and uncontrollable.
Robert of Ottawa says:
March 6, 2011 at 4:56 pm
“Pat, you clearly have not been watching the last two England games … a dramatic tie and a dramatic loss!!!”
And another dramatic win against South Africa last night!
http://www.ufodisclosure.com/skulls.shtml
http://www.wanttoknow.info/a-Arizona-Governor-Fife-Symington-Phoenix-Lights-UFO
http://xfacts.com/xfactsblog/2010/05/02/alien-implant-removal-2010/