Home » Archive by category "Politicized Science"

UK greenies apparently suffering from massive brain tumors

3 comments

At least, that’s the only way I can explain this completely insane propaganda piece intended to pressure people to reduce their carbon emissions:

Let me know if the embed goes dead, since there’s reportedly a huge CYA effort underway in response to the collective puking that met this film.

Note: In case the video is disabled, this is a seriously intended video, partially funded by the British taxpayers. It features Gillian Anderson (the most recognizable face to Americans) and starts with schoolchildren being urged to slash their carbon footprint by 10%, with those who decline being blown up on the spot, splattering their guts on their classmates. Yes, really.

When the regulator is also a competitor

1 comment

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. government analysis of black box data from Toyota cars revealed that the “sudden acceleration” problem so widely reported in the media was actually a problem with drivers who couldn’t tell their left from their right and stomped the accelerator instead of the brake. If true, that would support claims made by the demonized auto maker based on its internal investigation.

But there’s no official Department of Transportation report to that effect — the Journal story is based on leaked information which has been denied by some government apparatchiks.

Now a recently retired National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official says that’s no accident — the government is sitting on the inconvenient data.

Senior officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation have at least temporarily blocked the release of findings by auto-safety regulators that could favor Toyota Motor Corp. in some crashes related to unintended acceleration, according to a recently retired agency official.

George Person, who retired July 3 after 27 years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in an interview that the decision to not go public with the data for now was made over the objections of some officials at NHTSA.

“The information was compiled. The report was finished and submitted,” Mr. Person said. “When I asked why it hadn’t been published, I was told that the secretary’s office didn’t want to release it,” he added, referring to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

How can I say the data is “inconvenient”? Mr. Person thinks the NHTSA might be concerned about looking too cozy with a car maker — a relationship of which it  has been accused in the past. But there might be another reason. Remember … the federal government is now in the automobile business as a direct competitor with Toyota through General Motors, and heavily invested in the reorganization of Chrysler, another rival to the Japanese car maker. Any data that might exonerate a company of manufacturing defects would obviously be inconvenient for its competitors.

Basically, it’s a lot like letting McDonald’s preside over the regulation of Burger King, including assessments of the safety of the competing brand’s products.

The thing is … No matter how definitive or tentative the DOT data ultimately turns out to be, how is the federal government’s relationship with the auto industry anything other than highly suspicious and open to gaming?

Senior officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation have at least temporarily blocked the release of findings by auto-safety regulators that could favor Toyota Motor Corp. in some crashes related to unintended acceleration, according to a recently retired agency official.

George Person, who retired July 3 after 27 years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in an interview that the decision to not go public with the data for now was made over the objections of some officials at NHTSA.

“The information was compiled. The report was finished and submitted,” Mr. Person said. “When I asked why it hadn’t been published, I was told that the secretary’s office didn’t want to release it,” he added, referring to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Climate science under fire in new paper

Reply

Who wrote this?:

A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change.

Was it a cranky skeptic grinding away on his personal blog? Or was it a prominent professor at a major university?

OK. I telegraphed that one. In fact, the author of those words is Jason Scott Johnston, Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, in a paper published by The University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics: Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination (PDF).

Johnston also writes:

Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.

Johnston says that establishment climate scientists have taken to cherry-picking data, dismissing information that would bring their models into question and then hunting up evidence that supports their premises. He criticizes this tendency as resulting in a “faith-based climate policy.”

I’ll note here that Johnston isn’t questioning assertions that the climate is changing; he’s challenging the certainty that many climate scientists express in dismissing possible natural factors, such as solar variation, and their enthusiasm for the supposed accuracy of computer models intended to describe what the climate is doing now and will do in the future. He also points to overtly bad science and the substitution of opinion for inquiry in the claims made by many climate scientists.

All of this matters because the bad science and dismissal of contrary evidence and dissenting opinions is useful only for “conveying a very scary and also very simple picture of the state of the science. Such coarse understanding leads to a very coarse policy prescription: ‘Do something, anything, now!’ Such a policy prescription justifies virtually any policy, however costly or inefficient…”

Interestingly, even though the latest version of the paper was published in May, the only mainstream media mention I can find is in Canada’s Financial Post.