Have conservatives lost faith in science? Or should the journal editor responsible for this paper resign?

Have conservatives lost faith in science? Many MSM outlets are reporting that. The LA Times, for example, writes:

As the Republican presidential race has shown, the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science — making Newt Gingrich, for one, regret he ever settled onto a couch with Nancy Pelosi to chat about global warming.

Is the story true? Instapundit reader Mary Ritenour researched the issue and reports:

I tracked back to the original paper (http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/asr/Apr12ASRFeature.pdf) to see what the exact survey question was.

“The GSS asked respondents the following question: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them [the Scientific Community]?”(page 172)

The confidence in “people running these institutions” was being measured, not “Science” itself. Huge difference. HUGE!

After ClimateGate I, ClimateGate II, GlacierGate, and FakeGate, Ms. Ritenour is certainly correct: the difference is huge.

The misrepresentation of the paper's results started with the paper's author, Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist from the Univ. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the abstract of his paper, he misrepresents the meaning of his survey as "trust in science" rather than, as the survey asked, the "people running [the] institutions" :

This study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney's (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. [Emph. added]

If one gets to the small print in footnote 2 at the end of the paper, the author does explain that he uses the word "science" to refer to something other than science:

For purposes of clarity and consistency, this study uses science to refer to a group of people, the organizations they belong to, and the professional boundary that central institutions in society agree is a source of credible expertise (Gieryn 1999). Terms like scientific establishment or organized science might be more appropriate, but these ideas are often simply referred to as "science."

In other words, the author was well aware that he was using the wrong word. Abstracts are supposed to be a brief, honest, and accurate summary of the paper. No one who depended on the abstract alone would be aware of his false terminology.

Worse still, the wording in his definition in footnote 2 is not an exact match for the wording used in the GSS survey which was the source of all his quantitative data. Thus, far from clarifying the issue, his footnote 2 just adds to the confusion.

The paper was published in the American Sociological Review, a peer-reviewed journal. Everyone expects the social sciences work to be sloppy but how did the reviewers not catch the conflict between the actual study and its abstract? Didn't they also notice the internal inconsistency in the study's definition of "science"? Shouldn't the reviewers have insisted that the abstract provide an accurate representation of the paper's main result? Where were the journal's editors in this process? Shouldn't the journal publish a retraction? Who was the editor responsible for this paper's faulty review process? Shouldn't he resign?

Will this paper about loss of trust in "science" cause people to lose trust in social science?

Charges against spotted owl scientists may go Federal

In a case that has left environmentalists in shock, two "widely respected" environmental researchers are accused of fraudulent research on spotted owls and currently face state charges. The Times Standard reports that state proceedings have been temporarily postponed as the US Attorney's Office is now considering filing Federal charges. The two scientists specialized in endangered species studies and had been paid $870,00 by the Yurok Tribe using Federal funds for spotted owl research that is now alleged never to have been done. The Times Standard reports:

Mad River Biologists' senior biologist Ron LeValley, 65 [picture at right], and associate biologist Sean McAllister, 45, have pleaded not guilty to charges of embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime stemming from their alleged roles in a scheme carried out by former Yurok Tribe Forestry Director Roland Raymond, 49, to defraud the tribe of more than $870,000 over the course of more than one year by billing for surveying work that was never done.
Raymond remains at large, wanted on a $1 million arrest warrant. He was last seen the morning of Feb. 23, hours before law enforcement officials arrived at his home with search and arrest warrants, according to Del Norte County District Attorney Jon Alexander.

The case began as the tribe noticed that equipment was missing.

[Del Norte County District Attorney's Office investigator A.C.] Field said the investigation started in October when the Yurok Tribe came to the Del Norte County District Attorney's Office with information about Raymond. He said the district attorney's office has had the full cooperation of the tribe during the investigation.
”The Yurok Tribe discovered missing items during an inventory search, and it spilled out from there,” Field said. “They couldn't find the equipment (Raymond) supposedly bought.”
Alexander said the alleged embezzlement is related to spotted owl research by Mad River Biologists and other incidents, including charging the tribe for the cost of putting tires on a personal vehicle and paying for new shower doors. He said at least $870,000 of the embezzled funds are specifically related to the spotted owl project. [Emph. added]

The spotted owl has been in the news recently after the Obama administration decided to start killing barred owls in an attempt to favor the spotted owl. Previously, much of the Oregon lumber industry was shut down after the spotted owl was given endangered species status.

Windfarms have been killing endangered species of birds but that seems not to bother environmentalists very much.

This case comes in the wake of "respected" climate scientist Peter Gleick's admission of using identify theft against the Heartland Institute (Gleick still claims not to be the source of the fake document) as well as the investigation of Charles Monnett, the environmental scientist whose questionable work led to the classification of polar bears as "endangered." It makes one wonder how much of "environmental science" is actually real.

Hat tip: Leonard

PREVIOUSLY on the failures of environmental science:
•Whistleblower exposes Obama junk science •Politicized Science, the delta smelt, and California farmers
•EPA uses phony peer review
•Environmentalism inspires more murders •National Academy of Sciences warns EPA on junk science
•The failed science of environmentalism
•Federal Judge rejects Federal enviromental "science" as "arbititrary and capricious"
•2 more examples of politicized science: Gulf oiil spill and California's air regulations
•Bee colony collapse disorder: the cause is whatever your politics say it is
•Ozone hole and politics

4.5 Billion to die this year, or maybe not

In 2007, The Canadian, which bills itself as a "socially progressive and cross-cultural national newspaper," warned of a possible global warming disaster to occur by 2012:Since the world population in 2007 was only 6.6 billion, the claim that 4.5 billion of us would die by 2012 is non-trivial.

In science, hypotheses ("theories") are tested against experiment. Hypotheses which fail to agree with experiment are to be discarded.

Newspaper reporters operate by a different standard: if something is scary and attention grabbing, then it should be printed before anyone has a chance to refute it. In John Stokes case, he has been promoted to National Co-Managing Editor at The Canadian.

Hat tip: WattsUpWithThat.

PREVIOUSLY on global warming:
•More ethics problems among Global Warming "scientists"
•Global warmists propose mass killing of animals
•Democrat: Global Warming will destroy Washington DC by the year 2000
•Earth Day: environmentalism and the test of science
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•Environmentalists at war with environmentalists over green energy
•EPA's new global warming rules, illustrated
•California global warming rules backfire
• France's carbon tax ruled unconstitutional
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Surprise: EU's carbon trading riddled with fraud
•Global warming and the test of science, III
•Global warming and the test of science, II
•Global warming and the test of science, I
•141 scientists wrote letter to UN challenging global warming hysteria.
•Ma'am Sen. Boxer for and against climate whistleblowers.
•BBC propaganda on global warming
•Climate alarmist Phil Jones to step down pending review
•Why Penn State's investigation of its global warmist will go nowhere
•Former boss calls James Hansen call an embarrassment to NASA
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data
•The resemblance of global warming true-believers to Islamists
•James Hansen "muzzled" by Bush White House?

National Academy of Sciences warns EPA on junk science

From Inside EPA, as quoted by PJ Tatler, the Environmental Protection Agency gets a scolding:

A key EPA science adviser is warning that the agency must succeed in making its scientific research programs more transparent and sound in order to to bring credibility back to agency science, or EPA will risk increased scrutiny from House Republicans and industry that could prompt a “crisis.”

“You can’t fail this time,” Thomas Burke, associate dean of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who also chaired a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel on ways to improve EPA risk assessments, told EPA officials and other scientific advisers during a discussion on the agency’s new chemical safety research program June 30.

“The sleeping giant is that EPA science is on the rocks . . . if you fail, you become irrelevant, and that is kind of a crisis,” Burke told a joint meeting of EPA’s Science Advisory Board and EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) charged with looking at the reorganization of the agency’s research programs.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

PREVIOUSLY on politicized science:
•The failed science of environmentalism
•Federal Judge rejects Federal enviromental "science" as "arbititrary and capricious"
•The politicization of medical research funding
•2 more examples of politicized science: Gulf oiil spill and California's air regulations
•AIDS advocates distorted science
•Politicized science of crime statistics
•Politicization of medical science
•Bee colony collapse disorder: the cause is whatever your politics say it is
•Ozone hole and politics

Robbie the robot on patrol in Nevada; Also was Biden right?

As a reminder that we are now living in the 21st century, General Dynamics has developed a robot that patrols the roads and confronts intruders. It is currently operational at the Nevada National Security Site:

On the subject of advanced technology, Vice President Joe Biden recently said:

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,”

He is, of course, wrong (he said "every") but not as wrong as his critics claim. For example, at reason.com, Matt Welch proposes as counter-examples:

How about the personal computer? The mobile phone?

However, both of those technologies involved both government and private industry. The underlying technology for both is semiconductor electronics which started with the transistor which was invented by a government-sanctioned monopoly: Bell Telephone. After that, semiconductor electronics were further developed to practical use by various companies under funding from DoD and NASA. Taking a longer view, mobile phones, for example, were widely used by soldiers in World War II decades before they were in common use by civilians. The reason is that, for the military, communications are a critical life-and-death matter and therefore worthy of investment over a long period. Long term planning has similarly characterized DoD investment in aircraft and space. For private companies, by contrast, a long term plan is likely to be closer to 2 to 5 years rather than 20 to 50 years that the DoD is comfortable with. Consequently, the government, principally through the military, has had a strong role in the development of new technologies.

On the other hand, Matt Welch is right that PCs and cell phones would never have become affordable for the average citizen without competitive private industry. What happens when there is no private industry is made clear by the example of the Soviet Union where the government did fund a lot of successful research but few consumer products ever resulted. Going back further in history, imperial China invented a lot of new technologies, like the mechanical clock, the compass, and gunpowder, but these technologies reached their potential in only countries not under the totalitarian control of an emperor. Private companies play a role that the government is simply unable to.

First human-powered ornithopter

The (Toronto) Star reports:

A University of Toronto engineering graduate student has made aviation history, successfully flying the first ever human-powered flapping-wing aircraft continuously.

Todd Reichert, a PhD candidate at the university’s Institute of Aerospace Studies, piloted the wing-flapping aircraft, sustaining both altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds and covering a distance of 145 metres at an average speed of 25.6 kilometres per hour.

Ornithopters (flapping-wing aircraft) have been around for a while but this is the first one efficient enough to carry a human while not requiring more than the limited power that a human can produce.

While it is unlikely that ornithopters will ever be as fast as jet planes, there are other uses for airplanes for which the ornithopter's potential for being quieter and more efficient could be important. In any event, this flight is another human accomplishment. Here is the video:

New scientific paper says CO2 irrelevant to climate

A new paper from Prof. Lu of the University of Waterloo suggests that global warming has been caused by halogens, not by CO2. Halogens had previously been associated with the ozone hole and Lu suggests that, through a mechanism that also involves cosmic rays and atmospheric ice crystals, halogenated molecules may also control global temperatures. His 87-page paper on the subject, to be published in Physics Reports, can be found here. In the plot below, he compares the rise and fall of halogen concentrations, measured as "equivalent effective stratospheric chlorine" (EESC), with global temperatures: Since halogens were banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the EESC concentrations have started to decline. Note that this decline seems to match the decline in global temperatures observed this decade. If Lu's theory is correct, then we can expect to see declining temperatures for several more decades as EESC values drop back to natural levels.

More discussion of Lu's interesting hypothesis can be found at Watts Up With That.

Al Gore and B. H. Obama need to add yet another scientist to their enemies list.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of global warming:
Obama's war on science
Scientists failing to back Al Gore
More fraud in Global Warmist research?
Obama and the triumph of ideology over science
Global Warming and Cooling in Review
Global warming and the test of science, III
Global Warming and the test of science II
Global warming and the test of Science
NASA hypes false warming data
Science v. Gore

Does your workplace smell ethical?

According to a Brigham Young University study, people's ethics improve when they are in a clean-smelling environment.

Cell phones, cancer, and press release abuse

The Daily Express reports

MOBILE USE IS LINKED TO BRAIN TUMOURS

LONG-term mobile phone users could face a higher risk of developing cancer in later life, according to a decade-long study.

The report, to be published later this year, has reportedly found that heavy mobile use is linked to brain tumours.

The survey of 12,800 people in 13 countries has been overseen by the World Health Organisation.

Preliminary results of the inquiry, which is looking at whether mobile phone exposure is linked to three types of brain tumour and a tumour of the salivary gland, have been sent to a scientific journal.

As I write, a google search could locate no news or science source more detailed than this Daily Express article. Note that:

1. This is not peer-reviewed study. The results are only "preliminary" and have merely been "sent to a [unspecified] scientific journal."
   
2. It is said that the study was done for the World Health Organization but no specific authors/scientists are mentioned.
3. It is not specified what statistical standards were used or which cancers they claim correlations for.
   

In sum, this is not even information to begin to evaluate the results. News reports like this should never be published.

It is normal for statistical-medical studies to produce the occasional false result. So, statistical studies generally should not be believed until they are confirmed by independent studies. For such cell-phones-cause-cancer claims, despite all the scare headlines in newspapers, there has been no confirmation.

The UN uses a similar press-release technique for hyping global warming. First, they release a press summary with no supporting data. The press accepts the frightening conclusions uncritically. The full report is not released until many months later and, by the time it can be evaluated, the press has moved on to the next scare story.

Teaching self-esteem backfires

A university study finds that teaching self-esteem makes people feel worse:

Despite what all those self-help books say, repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse, according to new research.

Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo in Ontario and two colleagues conducted experiments in which they asked students to repeat statements to themselves such as "I am a lovable person" -- then measured how it affected their mood.

"From at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952), the media have advocated saying favorable things to oneself," the researchers wrote in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science. "At this moment, thousands of people across North America are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves."

But in one of their studies involving 32 male and 36 female psychology students, the researchers found that repeating the phrase did not improve the mood of those who had low self-esteem, as measured by a standard test. They actually ended up feeling worse, and the gap between those with high and low self-esteem widened. [emph. added]

RELATED:
Education in Korea vs. the US: does "self-esteem" backfire?

Friendly part of brain identified

According to a University of Cambridge press release, scientists have identified two parts of the brain that are associated with warm and social people:

The volunteers underwent a brain scan using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). They also completed a questionnaire that asked them to rate themselves on items such as 'I make a warm personal connection with most people', or 'I like to please other people as much as I can'. The answers to the questionnaire provide an overall measure of emotional warmth and sociability called social reward dependence.

The researchers then analysed the relationship between social reward dependence and the concentration of grey matter (brain-cell containing tissue) in different brain regions. They found that the greater the concentration of tissue in the orbitofrontal cortex (the outer strip of the brain just above the eyes), and in the ventral striatum (a deep structure in the centre of the brain), the higher they tended to score on the social reward dependence measure. The research is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience. ....

Interestingly, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum have previously been shown to be important for the brain's processing of much simpler rewards like sweet tastes or sexual stimuli.

Wikipedia (source warning) has an image that shows the orbitofrontal cortex (green):


An image from NIH shows the ventral striatum below (purple):

Is it warm here or is it just NASA?

NASA, home to global warming activists Gavin Schmidt (of realclimate.org) and James Hansen, has been caught again hyping false warming data.

Left wing activists oppose science violently

Two UC Santa Cruz scientists, who had been targeted by animal rights activists, were attacked with firebombs last week. One attack caused a fire at a Professor's house. Damage was limited because of his sprinkler system but, since the professor's family was inside the house at the time, the FBI classifies this attack as an attempted homicide. These attacks come after an attempted home invasion at another UCSC researcher's house last February. The FBI has suspects.

The left has had some success stopping science this way. For example, as the LA Times reports, "[i]n 2006, a UCLA neurobiology professor announced that he was stopping his primate research because of harassment and threats to his family."

PREVIOUS attempts by the left to stop science include (peaceful) opposition to research on the relationship between hormones and homosexual behavior
and attempts to stop research into the effects of affirmative action.

Channel 4 (UK) to show documentary skeptical of UN's "global warming" spin

On Thursday, Channel 4 (UK) will show a global warming documentary. This summary includes some quotes from the scientists that they interviewed:

I've often heard it said that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue, that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system, Well I am one scientist, and there are many, that simply think that is not true. -- John Christy, Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center, NSSTC University of Alabama.

As for what does cause climate change, if the human influence is not so large:

Solar activity over the last hundred years, over the last several hundred years, correlates very nicely, on a decadal basis, with temperature. --Ian Clark, Professor of Isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology at the Dept of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa

Separately, Russia has been developing more accurate methods to measure solar activity and Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, believes that solar activity accounts for most of the observed climate changes both here on Earth and on Mars. This result seems to be in line with a Danish study noted here.

Previous posts on this subject are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: A list of 76 scientists willing to go on the record as skeptical of global warming is here.

UPDATE: Another physics professor, Bjarne Andresen of University of Copenhagen, has expressed doubts about the UN interpretation about the usefulness of the "global warming" concepts and warming's affects on the climate. His study will be published in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics.

The Oscar for best politics goes to

Al Gore for his global warming agitprop. While global warming advocates want major reductions in consumer energy use, Al Gore is showing no leadership in this area. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research looked into Al Gore's energy usage:

Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”

Gore’s home uses more than 20 times the national average

Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

The problems with Gore's version of science are addressed more substantively by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels who, for instance, addresses the sea rise issue:

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Dr. Michaels has a Ph.D. in Ecological Climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1979) and is Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virgina. He was a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an author of the 2003 climate science "Paper of the Year" awarded by the Association of American Geographers. This makes is hard for his detractors to call him out of the mainstream but they do anyway.

UPDATE: Gore responds to the house electricity issue here, claiming that he tries to consume "green" energy and, among other things, he uses "solar panels and uses compact fluorescent bulbs." It would seem that solar panels and fluorescents must not be very effective if, despite their use, his electric bills are so high.

RELATED: Michelle Malkin has a post on strikingly similar story of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do in animal rights: PETA activist Pamela Anderson says she had no idea that the sheepskin boots that she made famous were actually made of sheep's skin.

UPDATE: From James Taranto:

Of course we don't begrudge Gore his life of luxury--only his sanctimonious insistence that the rest of us sacrifice our comforts to the dubious god of global warming.

It is interesting to contrast Al Gore's energy consumption with Pres. Bush's relatively eco-friendly Crawford ranch.

UPDATE: For hypocrisy similar to Sen. Gore's, see this report:With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming.