LOL, people are making fun of Robert Bryce after his latest idiotic op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Here are two articles by Joe Romm and Phil Plait ("The Bad Astronomer").
Phil Plait calls it "one of the most head-asplodey antiscience climate change denial pieces I have seen in a while — and I’ve seen a few."
Joe Romm:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/08/338766/robert-bryce-science-wsjscience/Robert Bryce Makes Mockery of Science, Is Mocked in Return. Join the Fun via #WSJscience
By Joe Romm on Oct 8, 2011 at 11:01 am
Please post below your tweets of the form ” If serious scientists can question Einstein’s relativity, there must be room for debate about (whether the Earth goes around the sun). #WSJscience“ I’ll tweet out the best. Click on cartoon to enlarge.
Writing in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Koch-fueled disinformer Robert Bryce has published two of the most laughable arguments against climate science ever seen in “Five Truths About Climate Change.” One of them has quickly become the focus of online laughs and a tweet-fest with the hashtag #WSJscience:
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Yes, a report on one as-yet unreproduced finding in a completely different area of science that might — repeat, might — mean one well-known theory needs modification means we should call into question everything we know about everything. Stop taking all your medicine now, just to be safe!
Apparently Bryce hasn’t been reading his Conservapedia or he’d know that the theory of relativity is actually a discredited liberal plot:
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold. Here is a list of 37 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.
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Phil Plait:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/06/wall-street-journal-neutrinos-show-climate-change-isnt-real/Wall Street Journal: neutrinos show climate change isn’t real
OpEds — editorials expressing opinions in newspapers — are sometimes a source of wry amusement. Especially when they tackle subjects where politics impact science, like evolution, or the Big Bang.
Or climate change.
Enter the OpEd page of the Wall Street Journal, with one of the most head-asplodey antiscience climate change denial pieces I have seen in a while — and I’ve seen a few. The article, written by Robert Bryce of the far-right think tank Manhattan Institute, is almost a textbook case in logical fallacy. He outlays five "truths" about climate change in an attempt to smear the reality of it.
I won’t even bother going into the first four points, where he doesn’t actually deal with science and makes points that aren’t all that salient to the issue, because it’s his last point that really needs to be seen to believe anyone could possibly make it:
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Seriously? I mean, seriously?
It’s hard to know where to even start with a statement so ridiculous as this. For one, there is always room for questioning science. But that questioning must be done by science, using a scientific basis, and above all else be done above board and honestly. But that’s not how much of the climate science denial has been done. From witch hunts to the climategate manufactrovery, much of the attack on climate science has not been on the science itself, but on the people trying to study it. And when many of those attacks have at least a veneer of science, it’s found they are not showing us all the data, or are inconclusive but still getting spun as conclusive by climate change deniers. And if you point that out, the political attacks begin again (read the comments in that last link).
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