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Global warming is today’s most prevalent false controversy. The current scientific consensus is that increased temperatures over the past fifty years are caused by the increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the widespread burning of fossil fuels. Ice core samples from over the past 450,000 years show that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide occur at the same time as increases in global temperature. There is little doubt among scientists that we have caused the most recent rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus global temperature. But the media has been giving equal time to non-scientific skeptics and have confused the issue among the people in the United States. This confusion has sapped the political will of our leaders to take any action to stop this destructive trend, and every year that we do not take action increases the cost of reversing the damage done that our children will have to pay.

As an example of just how out of step the media consensus is with the scientific consensus; a study in the December 2004 edition of “Science” found that of the 928 articles about climate change published in peer reviewed scientific journals over the past ten years, not a single one disputed the idea of anthropogenic global warming. A similar study of major media articles on climate change studied 626 randomly selected articles in the same time period and found that 53% of those cast doubt upon the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Just to make sure that people understand, the methodology of these studies was disputed by a British social scientist named Benny Peiser, his work though has been discredited because the “consensus breaking abstracts” that he cited were in fact on papers which were testing climatology models and statistical uncertainty of climate change experiments.

How could the media be so out of touch with the scientific consensus concerning global warming as to openly question its validity in the same breath as they report empirical evidence proving it? Because the media is lobbied constantly by groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank based in Washington DC that presents itself as an advocate for “sound science”. The fact is though that CEI is a well funded, media savvy, PR front group for Exxon-Mobile (which has reported giving the think-tank over $2 million between 1998 and 2005). CEI has most recently begun an ad campaign advocating for carbon dioxide emissions with the almost Swiftian tag line “Carbon Dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life”. It should be noted that carbon dioxide is classified as a narcotic poison and in concentrations above 8% by volume causes hypercapnia and death in human beings.

The scientific community does not have media consultants, public opinion pollsters, or professional spokespeople to present the fifty years of data that has been collected which points to an alarmingly rapid warming trend in the world’s climate. The scientific community is not a large business with deep pockets and it does not have well heeled supporters donating large sums of cash to assist it in raising the warning flags about the anthropogenic source of the warming trend. In fact the scientists who are making the most money in climatology studies are the small few who are publicly voicing skepticism about the anthropogenic source of global warming. Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have presented a hypothesis that variations in solar intensity may be triggering global warming, but they do not presently have observational data proving their claim. Dr. Tim Patterson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Ottawa has evidence showing that a period of ice age activity 450 million years ago had carbon dioxide levels ten times that of today to claim that the gas has no effect on global temperatures. The issue with his evidence is that the period he is measuring from is known as the Ordovician extinction, the second most devastating mass extinction in Earth’s history. And while the Ordovician period did have very high carbon dioxide levels and temperatures, at the end of the period there was an unexplained drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the a sudden freezing of the super continent of Gondwana, plunging the planet into one of its most dramatic ice age.

Other than skepticism over anthropogenic Global Warming these three scientists, have another less honorable thing in common, they are all contributors for a non-peer reviewed journal called Tech Central Station (TCS), which is published by DCI Group. DCI Group is a Republican lobbying group which specializes in creating astroturf organizations (false grassroots organizations created through mass mailing schemes). TCS is a satellite operation of DCI which generates scientific articles to order for paying clients to further that client’s agenda. One of DCI major clients is none other than Exxon Mobile. DCI and TCS are only part of a network of organizations (which include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and many others) that receive money for Exxon Mobile and distribute it to scientists in the US, Canada, and UK who are willing to openly deny Global Warming. Exxon Mobile gives almost $5 million a year to these organizations to make sure that there is always a choir of doubters, because they predict that they have the most to lose if the major industrialized nations start to move away from greenhouse gas producing fuels and technologies in favor of cleaner alternatives.

These media outlets that exist just for the purpose of spreading misinformation also disseminate misquotes of real scientific studies. For instance there is a quote that has been floating around recently concerning glacier melt in Greenland. The quote has been used to suggest that counter to global warming, inland glaciers in Greenland are thickening instead of melting as would be suggested by global warming. The full study though shows that the thickening ice in the center of the island is actually a sign of the effects of global warming. What is occurring is that lakes are forming on the surface of the glaciers, collecting energy and melting the ice underneath them further. The water in these lakes drill holes through the glacier down to the bed rock and refreeze at the bottom, filling the crevices and cracks that exist at the bottom of the glacier, thus causing the glacier to thicken. The ice at the coasts of Greenland though is rapidly becoming thinner because of the same mechanism carries the melt water out from under the glaciers into the sea.

Global Warming is happening, and it is because of human activity… of this there is no doubt. There are means by which we can slow or even reverse the growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Changing the atmosphere of the entire planet may seem like a daunting task, but the fact is we did it accidentally before. And as proven by the shrinking ozone hole over the Antarctic we have the capability of undoing past mistakes. We have just as much power of turning from our current path as we did with the shrinking ozone layer a little over ten years ago, we just need to summon up the will to act.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized

Continuing my previous vein I am now going to address the false controversy surrounding Evolution, and its teaching in schools. The ideas behind biological evolution have existed since first postulated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. The mechanism behind evolution though was not established until the 18th and 19th centuries by the work of Jen-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. The hypothesis of species transmutation was accepted by most scientists well before Darwin’s Origin of Species. The role of Darwin’s work though, much like Newton’s Principia Mathimatica, was creating a cogent theory for the mechanism by which evolution occurs. After over one hundred and fifty years of experimentation and research the scientific theory of biological evolution has been clarified and tested to the point of being accepted scientific fact.

There is a movement though to silence the teaching of this one scientific truth in schools, because it goes counter to a literal translation of the creation story of the Bible. This faction puts forth a counter hypothesis that they call Creation Science or Intelligent Design. At issue is that creationist theories are in no way scientifically based, but instead fallacious attempts to spread confusion and uncertainty about evolution sciences and promote a supernatural idea behind the origin of life over the a scientific one. This would be a harmless exercise by zealots if their ideas were not reported in the media as a valid counterargument to evolutionary theory. Because their opinion is given equal weight to scientific facts, they are able to confuse the issue and create a controversy where there truly is none.

Creationists use a number of disinformation tactics to spread their agenda in the media, commonly they throw up a number of red herrings based around incorrectly used established scientific laws. One of these is the incorrect use of the second law of thermodynamics to claim that the self-organizing nature of evolution is impossible without supernatural influence because of entropy. This is incorrect because the second law of thermodynamics describes closed systems only and biological systems by their very nature are open systems. Open systems allow for self-organization and increasing complexity over time.

Another fallacy that is used by the creationist movement is an appeal to ignorance claiming that macro-evolution has never been directly observed. By macro evolution I refer to the change of one species to another species through natural selection. This though is an incorrect assertion as DNA evidence and the fossil record show species evolving from one form to another over millions of years. Part of the claim is there are gaps in the fossil record which creationists believe do not adequately show how one class of animal has evolved into another class (such as reptiles to birds). But there are thousands of already described fossils and ancient species, some of them are what are known as transitional species because they are members of one class of animal which have traits of another class of animal (such as the bird like archeoptryx). And there are millions of undescribed fossils sitting in basements of universities and museums around the world waiting their turn to be classified and placed into the fossil record. Even though hundreds of transitional species exist in the fossil record, with each new discovery creationists move the bar into the new smaller gap demanding it be filled to prove that evolution occurs. In effect the creationists are using Zeno’s dichotomy paradox to supply themselves with an endless number of missing links to deny existing evidence.

If the media did not give this false controversy equal time as if creation science was actual science there would not be as much confusion in the public about evolution. And there would not be as many ambitious politicians trying to replay the Scopes Monkey Trial at their local school board meeting. The fact is these people have an agenda to get their religious beliefs taught in public schools on the tax payer’s dime. Attacks against the education of evolution are nothing but attempts to get Christian evangelism’s foot in the door of the school house. We need to reject the promotion of agenda driven pseudo-science in the media as valid counterarguments to scientific fact. When the media lends credibility to lies and worthless rhetoric it fails in its role as the informer of the voting public… and Democracy fails when the public is not properly

code_archaeologist Uncategorized

Earlier I talked about false controversies spread by the media and how these false controversies create confusion and cloud the truth among the public. One of those corrosive false controversies is that surrounding Stem Cell Research. Doctors and medical researchers have known about stem cells since the 60s, and have been using them since the 70’s to treat nearly a hundred different ailments including leukemia and lymphoma. But to listen to the media one might think that Stem Cell research was some new untested treatment whose proponents were akin to modern day Dr. Frankensteins.

There are a few levels to this false controversy, and I am going to try to hit them one at a time here. The first level is that stem cells can only be gained from aborted fetuses. This is absolutely false, primarily because an aborted fetus makes for an unviable source of tissues for research or medical treatment because of the means by which an abortion is done. This is actually a sensational claim aimed at aligning anti-abortion partisans against this research. Medical researchers are actually interested in blastocysts, which are human embryos of between 50 and 150 cells. The most common source of blastocysts is unclaimed embryos at fertility clinics. Every year fertility clinics destroy thousands of unwanted frozen embryos to make room in their freezers for new couples trying to have a child. A few of them every year are donated to universities for medical research, specifically for embryonic stem cell research. Claims that this is a type of abortion are fallacious since the only other reasonable fate of these unwanted frozen embryos is destruction.

The second level of this false controversy is the claim that other types of stem cells, specifically adult stem cells, are just as useful for the treatments of diseases as embryonic stem cells. This is a patently false statement. Adult stem cells are also known as multipotent or somatic because they are limited to becoming cells of a closely related “family” of cells. The most common use of therapeutic stem cells today is the use of adult stem cells from bone marrow in the treatment of leukemia. The donated bone marrow is used to replace the stem cells killed by the cytotoxins used to kill the leukemia. Without the adult stem cells in the donated bone marrow the cancer victim would quickly perish when their body is unable to make any new blood cells. But the stem cells found in bone marrow would be completely useless for creating skin cells, pancreatic cells, or nerve cells, as they only have the instructions to create blood cells.

Embryonic stem cells are known as totipotent because they can grow into more stem cells or any cell in the human body. It is that universality that doctors want to harness and use for future treatments. Which brings me to the final level of this false controversy; there is no proof that stem cells will be able to heal anything, once again blatantly false. Skin grafts and bone marrow transplants are just a couple of ways that we currently employ adult stem cells to heal the sick and wounded. Researchers have repaired spinal cord injuries in mice and cured mice of diabetes with embryonic stem cell treatments, and are working now on proposals for human trials for these treatments.

The question about whether we as a nation should fund and support stem cell research is not a controversial one. It is a question of performing research which will expand an already successful family of treatments into something that might make the curing of diabetes as common as curing an infection with antiboitics. The people carrying water for this false controversy are doing nothing but standing in the way of progress and extending the suffering of millions of people with their petty obstinacy over a single moot point about abortion.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized