Why I don't subscribe to Scientific American any more

Discover magazine is even worse than Sci Am. I was given a subscription to that rag & have asked that it not happen again.

Mike Maxwell,
I’m a sceptic, and I don’t read the popular (?) science mags because of their ridiculous promoting of the CAGW nonsense. But I’m slightly puzzled about the point that you are making about the Y2K problem. I’ve seen it mentioned on sceptical blogs before, and I just don’t get it.
As a programmer working in the nineties, I spent some time working on the problem. It wasn’t a mirage, it was a very serious problem. Perhaps there was a huge panic about the issue in the US that I’m unaware of. Is that what you are refering to? But there’s no doubt that somebody had to go through all the vital computer systems to make sure that they coded the year with 4 digits, and not just 2. To not have done that would have been nuts. It took a lot of time and effort, and a lot of potential problems were averted as a result.

I agree. I haven’t picked up a copy of SA in years, a few other magazines as well. They hitched thier wagons to AGW to chase readership because they believed the science was settled (why I don’t know). I wonder what thier circulation looks like today. Its a shame really, these used to be good magazines.
We moved recently. I discovered a box full of SA, maybe 50 copies from days long ago. Theres an opportunity here for a new science magazine to repalce SA, and Nature etc. Anthony, are you reading this?

I used to feel proud when I purchase SciAm or New Scientist. Now, when I pass them in a store that actually sells them, I hang my head in shame. They have become Lysenkoist poitical mouthpieces for misanthropists.

I read somewhere that when a news or journal article is in the form of a question the answer is almost always no.

@Robinson etc:
Got problems seeing graphics? Got Firefox or a similar Mozilla-based browser? Get the Image Zoom plug-in. Zoom in or out, see the finer detail or even shrink oversized pics. Also does simple 90°-increment rotations. I use it.
Here on WUWT, with wordpress’ system, sometimes “zoom in” will only expand to the width the template allows for the story, so the image gets distorted as it expands as far as wanted just on the vertical. So view the graphic just by itself when zooming in (right-click, View Image or view in another tab). It works great.

I subscribed to SA for years, including the ridiculous costs of having it mailed to me in Southeast Asia in the ’90’s. Gave up after their pogrom treatment of Bjorn Lomberg. Haven’t bought it since.

I believe it was Edward Teller who famously quipped that Scientific American “was neither scientific, nor American.”
I passed on it in the mid-1980s when it was obvious they were “stacking the deck” in their critical articles against the then Strategic Defense Initiative. I was working on those SDI programs at the time, and knew full well the critiques were sophistical puff-pieces.
For similar reasons (mostly AGW-related), I gave up on Science News several years ago. And Popular Science is just a travesty of its former self (I started reading it in 1959). You pretty much have to cut the cord completely, because once they start to tarnish a story, you can never be sure which stories they won’t tarnish next.

I’m not sure how this is scaremongering when all it does is report on an existing debate within the atmospheric research community about whether or not the existing categorisation is adequate for the most severe hurricanes; storms that we are already witnessing and have been for some time (both Camille, 1969, and Allen, 1980, are mentioned in the article).
Further, the article says that wind speed is not a terribly good indicator of a hurricanes destructive power. Not a great approach if you’re trying to instill fear of new, windier hurricanes.
Also, I fail to see why Scientific American should include the graph of Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy. It has no bearing on the article which is only concerned with the most powerful category 5 storms.
I might take your point if Scientific American were speculating about a new breed of super cyclone with hitherto unimagined power, but as it is this seems more like hatemongering on your part that than scaremongering on theirs; an opinion cemented somewhat by the fact at least two commenters have made the “but this one goes up to 11” joke, demonstrating that they haven’t even bothered to read the article and don’t know the author noted the same absurdity in the second sentence.

I remember when scientific articles were thought provoking and interesting and not as politicized, but now it seems most science is reported from the perspective of an anthropologists or some kind of sociologists, and even views from misanthropists and Malthusians get more publication these days than well thought out scientific reports of advancements in science.
Climate science isn’t the only area being flooded by bizarre theories and beliefs, Archeology is riddled with reports of aliens building our Ancient structures such as the pyramids and stone henge, any find these days in Archeology becomes anecdotal proof of a religious ritual of one sort or another, just watch an episode of Tony Robinson Time Team and all the claims of religious rituals and beliefs.
Over the past few years Google has had a link to science news articles which I dread clicking on as it is full of the biggest amount of BS any one can find in one place online, and it is mostly dominated by articles that are promoting a man made climate driven change, or environmentalists co2 taxing drivel from human hating proponents of CAGW.
NOTE: Tony Robinson claims that the archaeologists involved with Time Team have published more scientific papers on excavations carried out in the series than all British university archaeology departments put together over the same period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Team
Too harsh?? 🙂