Heh, gotta love this. Get popcorn. I was tipped off to this by Chris Mooney in a Tweet where he’s calling for reinforcements:
Kevin Green of the American Enterprise Institute got the war of words rolling with these comments at Mooney’s new digs at scienceprogress:
Ken Green ·
Right, so let’s continue on your dismiss-a-thon of leftist anti-science, shall we? DDT and cancer, BPA and phthalates as carcinogens and endocrine disruptors; claims that organic food are safer because they have less pesticides/contaminants; claims that eating local foods are better for the environment than foods from elsewhere; claims that re-usable cloth bags are better for the environment than plastic or paper bags; false claims of species endangerment; pseudo-scientific claims about species loss treated as gospel; claims that climate models have predictive power; claims that individual weather events represent climate change…I think you missed a few.
Ken Green ·
Oh, wait, I forgot a few: frogs dying from climate change, alligator penis malformations from endocrine disruptors, bees dying from climate change (or is it cell-phones this week?), butterflies dying from BT crops…And, let’s not forget Alar, or cancer from video displays, or cell phones, or anything vaguely reminiscent of modernity.
Ken Green ·
Oops! Oh yes, then there’s the giant plastic ocean graveyard that was never seen again, and, let’s not forget the now-famous drowning polar bears.
Chris Mooney replied, though it is hardly much of one, which is why I suppose he’s trying to get Revkin and Kloor interested in it for defense.
Chris Mooney · Top Commenter · Yale University
This is quite a grab bag of claims. Many are misleading, some might be valid, some are wrong claims that have been made sometimes on the left but refuted just as vigorously by fellow liberals….including me.
I was pretty amazed (as were other commenters on other issues) that Mooney didn’t bother to address the totally bogus and overhyped “frogs dying from climate change” issue, because that was one of the worst blunders in climate science ever.
It turned out to be totally unrelated to climate, as I’ve addressed here on WUWT. The frog decline was definitively linked an infection of the chytrid fungus. The PNAS peer reviewed paper slapping down this nonsense said:
Finally, almost all of our findings were opposite to the predictions of the chytrid-thermal-optimum hypothesis.
Even Hansen’s buddies at Columbia agree. See this: Global Warming not to blame for toad extinction
Mooney was undeterred by the rebuttals, and the war was on. Green made a full post out of it at the AEI blog:
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Over at scienceprogress, Chris Mooney opines that the political Right is more “anti-science” than the political Left. He points to climate change and evolution as areas where the Right is anti-science, and dismisses the idea that the Left is anti-science when it comes to things like their exaggerations of the risks of genetically modified crops, nuclear power, and vaccines.
His reasoning seems to break down into two arguments:
1) Chris argues that one can’t really tag the Left as being anti-science on things like vaccines and nukes because he (and a few other environmental journalists) have done their own policing on the issues, or, at least, walked away from actively shilling them. Chris actually says that he and journalists on the Left have “chased vaccine denial out of the realm of polite discourse.” That’s going to come as a shock to virtually every social-network user, who probably sees half-a-dozen anti-vaccine posts a week.
2) Chris argues that the anti-science issues usually associated with the Left (vaccines, nuclear-danger exaggerations, GMO danger claims) aren’t really left-wing issues, but rather, are held by people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Read it all here at So Who’s Anti-Science?
The “anti-science” label (which I think was coined by Joe Romm, if not he’s the worst serial user of the phrase) is no different that the “denier” label. The idea is to denigrate your opponent by applying ugly labels.
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“On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
So he says that the left can’t be anti-science because some liberals chastise the others when they make exaggerations. But he also says the right is anti-science because some of them don’t believe in evolution, even though some conservatives chastise the others for that……
Should be obvious…anti-science is whoever tries to frame science in the political discourse. But then, everybody does it, so…
Anyway, I can see the trouble with the Left is their living in terror that capitalism and liberal democracy are the way forward indeed, rather than socialism. So whatever results from capitalism and liberal democracy is automatically labeled as “bad”, including most of the material progresses of the past decades.
Therefore rather than saying the average Left Person is more or less anti-science than the average Right Person, I am inclined to think that the former is more trapped than the latter in a frame of mind that will forever push away from science. Unless socialism comes back and then perhaps the roles will reverse.
If you are looking at contemporary US politicians the right has the lead in anti-science nonsense. This is certainly true among the presidential candidates and in the US House and Senate. If you look at pseudo-scientific beliefs in the population at large the picture is more mixed. There have been plenty of times is history when parts of the left were anti-science, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to the Lysenko Affair. But Stalin is not running for president.
Reason.com, CATO.org, Spiked or The Register could never be called rightwing or conservative yet all are skeptical and critical of climate alarmism, apocalypticism and green thinking.
Latitude says:
September 24, 2011 at 3:05 pm
“On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.”
…And I would expect that almost all people with an ounce of common sense would realise that climate has always changed and people will have to learn to adapt or die. Shame that common sense seems to be such a scarce commodity amongst the pro-CAGW believers!
Frogs! Deformed FROGS! In the 1970’s it was the Hanford River and RADIOACTIVITY from the Hanford Nuclear facility.
Then in the 1990’s it was PESTICIDES!
OH MY!
In like 2001 an obscure biology Prof from a small Iowa College (Luther?) found a Nematoad, about the size of the largest bacteria (200X needed to see) which he found infected all the deformed frogs.
Turns out it runs throught the leapord frog population, about once every 20 to 30 years.
Dang, MAN NOT TO BLAME AGAIN!
Add to Green’s list… global warming causes more sex: click
None of these are anti-science, but it is like the label “denier”, it is an attempt to take the high ground. In the case of Evolution and Climate change it is not the science that it the main question, in reality it is the world view that is typical of each side, and especially the various agenda in strengthening these particular world views. Anti-evolutionism and Climate Skepticism have a lot in common in that they challenge the unchallengable othodoxy. The film by Ben Stein “Expelled!” about Intelligent Design and creationism could easily be remade about climate change skepticism and it would receive the same reaction from those who deny that any of the content is true. Indeed, Heartland already has similar videos online (very good too). In the case of Evolution, it is not about science at all but about naturalism, supernaturalism is ruled out regardless of the evidence, because God must be eliminated. At least this is not the same in Climate science, it is rather an attempt at being god that is being thwarted by the skeptics, and it cannot be allowed.
Too many non-scientists fail to understand one of the most important fundamentals of science – that science doesn’t provide answers, it only provides methods that allow scientists to guess where the truth might lie. This is especially true in the natural sciences where data to support those guesses are sparse and usually of questionable quality.
Latitude says:
September 24, 2011 at 3:05 pm
“On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.”
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Damn! Beat me to it.! And Green didn’t even pull out the obvious intentional deception by leftist groups parading as science organizations, such as the bogus polar bear ice floe, and the bogus flooded house.
Of course, the problem is the definition of what “science” is. Climatology is the most anti-science field of study I’ve ever witnessed. I mean really. Some dimwit thinks he can read tree rings and tell us what the temperature was 500 years ago to the tenth of a degree? And they call that science? lmao! Modern phrenology. They find missing heat with out observation or measurements? I love that stuff! Go science! They won’t tolerate other opinions. Another win for science!! But that’s just climatology. There are plenty of fields they’ve hijacked, bastardized and then claim scientific certitude. Paul Ehrlich comes to mind. Yeh, we’re all dead by now.
The left defines science as soiling your pants about every imaginable event and paying some basement dwelling rent seeker to write a paper about it. That’s science in their world. Of course, the eventual side effect of such science is that we get to pass laws that lessen the liberties of the individual and markets and centralizes control in the federal government, all the while confiscating our earned wealth and redistributing it to the people made less advantaged by the very idiocy of the science they hold so dear and claim as their banner.
Did I miss any connecting logic?
I don’t see where “believing” in evolution has any effect on the welfare of the world population. This is a long way economically from “believing” in catastrophic global warming where the lives of millions will be put in danger because of an unscientific belief in effect of carbon dioxide on the climate.
Both a belief in God, and a belief in catastrophic global warming are religious endeavors.
Mike says:
September 24, 2011 at 3:16 pm
If you are looking at contemporary US politicians the right has the lead in anti-science nonsense.
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Mike, by conservative definition, it isn’t pro-science to believe in scary bedtime stories.
Second hand smoke rules and the ban on DDT are perfect examples. Neither had the science to support the bans. AIDS — Govt scientists, at the behest of the left, deliberately choosing to hype the very small threat of straights getting HIV in order to scare the hell out of the public into spending larger sums for research.
John Edwards.
Equating rightwing and religious is dishonest.
Christianity and socialism have a long history together that continues to this day. Just listen to the pronouncements of mainstream religious leaders, Yet you never hear the term Religious Left.
And as for evolution, it’s my experience that many on the Left who ‘believe in evolution’, simply don’t understand it.
Ken Green ·
Oops! Oh yes, then there’s the giant plastic ocean graveyard that was never seen again, and, let’s not forget the now-famous drowning polar bears.
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About 2 years ago I did a google search for “the giant plastic ocean graveyard”, figuring there would be some pictures. I found none. Anyone got any pictures ?
One of my favourites is the giant floating mountain of plastic bags somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Of course no one has ever been able to find this island, despite it being the size of Texas (or is it almost half the size of the continental USA this week?). Tons o’ fun. :->
James Sexton says:
September 24, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Damn! Beat me to it.!
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It’s from your blog ……………..LOL
You already blogged about this very thing…………..
…..I just have faster fingers
BTW James has an excellent blog on this very subject……..shameless plug…..because I’m shameless
I have no problem accepting evolution. God created me as a scientifically-minded reasoning creature who is meant to make observations and subsequent verifiable conclusions. He wants me to know rocks are hard, electricity can shock me. There are all these fossils and even genetic material around that shows progression patterns. Accepting evolution isn’t an issue.
It’s when I refuse to sign the Atheist Addendum, that God was in no way ever involved in the process, which logically must follow from there being no God at all, that I suddenly become an anti-science creationist, presumably a 6000-yr 6-day type. At best I become one of those “Intelligent Design” people. I’m also one of the anti-science Christian right (last two are correct), a redneck (yeah I have a 4×4 pickup, because we have deep snow in winter). I also often become a racist (only white people can be racists), anti-women’s rights, a homophobe, etc.
And these “liberal loons” wonder why I normally find it too exasperating to converse with them and try to find common ground, especially when “common ground” inevitably becomes defined as whatever ground they themselves are rooted to. Go figure.
I have a post on this at Climate Etc.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/24/whos-anti-science/
In Australia, as in other western nations. socialism has been tried and is at present out of favour. But we don’t denigrate it like ‘deniers’, because we have retained many of its better features and we know that they work. I am still amazed that many Americans seem to believe in their bones that ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ are somehow one and the same. They ain’t! One day we will have an elected government that swings furtehr back towards socialism, and we’ll all (in Australia) benefit from it, except for a few die-hard laissez-faire rich basterds, who might (horror!) have to pay more tax for government services to the whole community. That’s socialism.
If you’d sign a petition to ban DHMO (Dihydrogen Monoxide), then you’re anti-science or at least gullible; and I’d bet more liberals would sign such a petition than conservatives.
Latitude says:
September 24, 2011 at 4:15 pm
James Sexton says:
September 24, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Damn! Beat me to it.!
================================================
It’s from your blog ……………..LOL
You already blogged about this very thing…………..
…..I just have faster fingers
BTW James has an excellent blog on this very subject……..shameless plug…..because I’m shameless
———————————————————————————————
I’m putting you in for a cut of my big oil money!
Here’s another take…
http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/ptolemy-mmxi-and-the-epicycles-of-consensus/
PaulH says:
September 24, 2011 at 4:08 pm
“One of my favourites is the giant floating mountain of plastic bags somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Of course no one has ever been able to find this island, despite it being the size of Texas (or is it almost half the size of the continental USA this week?). Tons o’ fun. :->”
How many Manhattans is that? How many areas the size of Wales? How many Belgiums?