Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic

Turns out liberals are the real authoritarians. A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong.
Read more at the New York Post Read More......

VOA: Meet Your New Co-worker: The Robot

NEW YORK— At the RoboUniverse expo in New York City, robots of all shapes and sizes were being put to work. Companies showed off automated machines designed to perform tasks that many humans would consider less than desirable. --“There are certain tasks in our society… that will stay on and not be attractive for humans to do. And we cannot get rid of them if we want to live our lives in the usual fashion,” said Preben Hjørnet, founder and CEO of robotics startup Blue Workforce.

Read more at Voice of America News Read More......

Big Science is broken

Science is broken. That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part. Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.
Read more at The Week Read More......

What Happened on Oahu Didn’t Stay on Oahu

If modern activist groups held sway in the mid-nineteenth century, countless multitudes would have died from typhoid fever and cholera. The “miasma” paradigm held that the diseases were caused by foul air arising from putrid matter – and only dogged scientific work by William Budd, John Snow and others finally convinced medical and health authorities that the agent was lethal organisms in drinking water.
Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Methane Madness: Science Does Not Support White House Policy

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 18 August 2015 proposed regulations to reduce emissions of methane. These regulations would be the first to directly restrict methane emissions by the oil and gas industry; they build on a 2012 rule that sought to curb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas. Combined, the two regulations could reduce the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 30% by 2025, compared with 2012 levels, EPA says.
The proposed EPA regs are part of a larger effort by the White House to reduce national methane emissions by 40–45% by 2025. [See go.nature.com/o6uzlj for more detail.] But methane has only negligible influence on climate -- contrary to popular belief and contrary to the claims of the IPCC, the UN’s climate science panel. Basic physics does not support White House policies to control methane emissions.


Read more at American Thinker Read More......

Take Your Pick of Lies About Ozone, Methane or Mercury

Is it surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency continues to tell big fat lies about anything it wants to ban, but is reluctant to show the “science” on which the bans are based?  There is currently a piece of legislation under consideration by Congress, the Secret Science Reform Act, to force the EPA to disclose its scientific and technical information before proposing or finalizing any regulation.

Read more at Canada Free Press Read More......

Dr. Mike Newton phone interviews on the Lars Larson Show (Tuesday) and I Spy Radio (Saturday)

FYI (Hat tip: Jane Newton): In a phone interview at 1:06 p.m., Tuesday, March 25th, Lars Larson will be asking Dr. Mike Newton about his findings regarding his systematic studies on streams, water temperatures, fish habitat, and the impact of "buffer strips" on fish food, which he has researched for over 20 years.

Dr. Newton is also scheduled to be on "I Spy" radio this weekend, again a phone interview. Read More......

IBD: Farmers' Almanac More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models

Bad Science: It turns out that a 200-year-old publication for farmers beats climate-change scientists in predicting this year's harsh winter as the lowly caterpillar beats supercomputers that can't even predict the past. ✧ Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted above-normal temperatures from November through January across much of the continental U.S. The Farmers' Almanac, first published in 1818, predicted a bitterly cold, snowy winter. ✧ The Maine-based Farmers' Almanac's still-secret methodology includes variables such as planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action. It claims an 80% accuracy rate, surely better than those who obsess over fossil fuels and CO2.

Read more at Investors Business Daily (Investors.com) Read More......

GOP-Leadership-Backed CR Funds Reg Forcing Christians to Act Against Faith

You know that line liberals love to lob at the Tea Party: you're stupid.  Well, obviously that's not the case, nor has it ever been true.  Now, a Yale professor has released some new research showing that the so-called "Tea Party radicals" are actually scientifically literate.

Professor Dan M. Kahan of the psychology department at Yale says he was surprised to discover a positive correlation between science comprehension and members of the Tea Party:

"Identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively (r = 0.05, p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure."

Read more at CNS News Read More......

WUWT: Dr. Vincent Gray on historical carbon dioxide levels

There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist. ✧ Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all. ✧ This happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis. These substances provide all the food required by the organisms not endowed with a chloroplast organelle in their cells. ✧ This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. ✧ The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages.

Read More (with charts): Watts Up With That?

I'm guessing they don't teach this stuff in school. Shameful, if not. --bc Read More......

George F. Will: The sky, apparently, continues to fall

 Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June, without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh. Read more at the Columbus Dispatch...

(Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) Read More......

The scientific technological elite [Eisenhower's other warning]

 Republished 6/4/2012
AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker...

Read More......

Are cancers newly evolved species?

Cancer patients may view their tumors as parasites taking over their bodies, but this is more than a metaphor for Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cancerous tumors are parasitic organisms, he said. Each one is a new species that, like most parasites, depends on its host for food, but otherwise operates independently and often to the detriment of its host.

Read more at University of California, Berkeley Read More......

Gerson: Whose war on science?

WASHINGTON POST, 12/11/2009 by Michael Gerson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - "...the hacked climate e-mails reveal a scandal, not a hoax. Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust. Read more at Washington Post...

JDH wrote: Scientists are in the business of creating knowledge. When they jump into politics, they loose their credibility as scientists. Read More......

The scientific technological elite

AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1960 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker...

Arrrghh... we were warned! --bc Read More......

1977 book reveals something about Obama's Science Czar

WASHINGTON EXAMINER, 7/14/2009 by David Freddoso - Internet reports are now circulating that Obama's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, penned a 1977 book that approved of and recommended compulsory sterilization and even abortion in some cases, as part of a government population control regime. ∴ Given the general unreliability of Internet quotations, I wanted to go straight to this now-rare text and make sure the reports were both accurate and kept Holdren's writings in context. Generally speaking, they are, and they do. Read more at the Examiner...

Related:
American Thinker, 7/16/2009: Enough is Enough (Hat tip: Patricia Anderson) Read More......

Letter: Concern over climate change is premature (April 6)

CORVALLIS GAZETTE-TIMES, LETTERS, 4/6/2009 by Jean Nelson - The extreme environmental movement appears to be producing a following akin to a religion. Doting on exaggerated claims of catastrophe if we don’t do something NOW, these alarmists blame people for the 0.6 degree Celsius increase in the Earth’s temperature over the past 100 years. Never mind that much of the warming occurred prior to the time that the combustion engine could have affected the Earth’s climate. Don’t pay attention to the fact that today we’re in a period of cooling.

Computer-generated models that predict radical results from global warming have not been able accurately to predict past events. Though now discredited by many scientists, the faithful still cling to predictions of future catastrophe. Oregon’s Legislature is under pressure to declare “emergency” and attempt to reduce greenhouse gases. No scheme seems to be too great. Even eliminating our access to affordable sources of energy is being considered.

Carbon tax, cap-and-trade — they, too, are negative, damaging, premature solutions that are being proposed before adequate alternative fuels are available.

Cap-and-trade is meant to discourage use of fossil fuels by increasing their cost and availability. Some scientists think controlling CO2 emissions will reduce variations in the Earth’s temperature. Others, like prolific writer Prof. Delgado Domingos of Portugal, who founded the Numerical Weather Forecast group, says, “Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense. The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control ….”

Jean Nelson, Corvallis
See online comments here... Read More......

Global Warming: The Backlash Begins

DC EXAMINER, 3/17/2009 by Iain Murray (Special to the Examiner) - Environmentalists and their allies in the Administration were stunned by the news last week that skepticism about the effects of global warming is growing. With complete domination of both the mainstream media and the political institutions by true believers in global warming, the news from Gallup that 44 percent of Americans believe that global warming has been exaggerated must have come as a shock. Yet last week’s news contained two good examples of why this should be, and why the debate that Al Gore claims is over may only just be starting. Continued at www.washingtonexaminer.com... Read More......

Nir Shaviv Joins Skeptics' Conference

Physics professor Nir Joseph Shaviv, one of the world's leading researchers into astrophysics and climate science, has joined the lineup of more than 70 presenters at the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York March 8-10.

Dr. Shaviv, 37, an associate professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a leading proponent of the theory that solar and cosmic rays, not human activity, are the driving forces behind climate change. [Emphasis added]

He will join other elite climatologists, economists, political leaders, and global warming skeptics as they confront the issue, "Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?" Continue at www.heartland.org... Read More......

"It's 2009 and where's my flying car?"

Aviation Week has the lineup of possibilities (with photos and videos)... Read More......