Republican War Policy Explained...

...If its profitable, its a good war.

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Yellow Journalism

I don't know anything about the blog "SwashZone", but they wrote a great, well-documented piece about yellow journalism both past and present.

Check it out.

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Whitewashing the Bush Years

Do you need some ammo to win debates with your conservative "friends" over who caused the current state of our economy? 

Memorize this Krugman column.

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Debunking The Debunkers Who Are Full Of Bunk, Part 1

I was recently blessed with a copy of the "New York Times Bestseller" Unstoppable Global Warming; Every 1500 Years by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, marked as "Updated and Expanded." Updated and Expanded indeed, full of bullshit.

The premise of the book, of course, is to prove global warming to be a hoax and that what is happoening actually happens in natural cycles every 1,500 years. Thus, we have nothing to worry about.

A quick check on Amazon shows some of the people who rated this tome of knowledge:

Mrs. Avery and Singer provide an excellent readable and well documented book on the global warming hoax. The reader can only conclude that this book is an invaluable resource on the topic of global warming. The work refers to a vast amount of scientific research in a wide variety of scientific journals indicating a natural sunspot magnetic wave is causing what little global warming exists. Man created carbon dixoide has very little effect on the earth's climate.

Avery and Singer go further by providing an in depth expose of the fallacious research that alledgedly supports man made global warming. In particular the authors make an incisive investigation into the so called hockey stick hypothesis of unprecedented recent warming hoax widely enunciated by the UN's climate change panel. This hoax was first exposed by two skilled and courageous Canadian researchers - McIntyre and McKitrick.

Pseudoscientists and others with a vested interest in controlling the global economy by use of the global warming hoax will not like this work. However informed readers concerned with human welfare and human progress will find this book invaluable. This book should be read by all Amercians and really by everone else in the world

My favorite is

Detailed and documented, Fred Singer is a Distinguished Research Professor at George Mason University and Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. He also debunked the "passive smoking as a cancer risk" nonsense...
...The report attacked the US Environmental Protection Agency for their 1993 study about the cancer risks of passive smoking and called it "junk science"

Let's start with Fred.

Mr. Siegfried Frederick Singer
Singer is the President and co-founder of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, the focus of which is to dispute the prevailing scientific views of climate change, ozone depletion, and secondhand smoke. He is also the science advisor to the conservative journal NewsMax. I have not yet had the time to look into all of the organizations he is a part of, but I think I know what I'll find if I do.

As for Mr. Singer's track record on scientific matters, I offer the following:

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Dr. S. Fred Singer debated Carl Sagan on the impact of the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on the ABC News program Nightline. Sagan said we know from the nuclear winter investigation that the smoke would loft into the upper atmosphere and that he believed the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer, in massive agricultural failures, in very serious human suffering and, in some cases, starvation. He predicted the same for south Asia, and perhaps for a significant fraction of the northern hemisphere as well as a result. Singer, on the other hand, said that calculations showed that the smoke would go to an altitude of about 3,000 feet and then be rained out after about three to five days and thus the lifetime of the smoke would be limited. In retrospect, we now know that smoke from the Kuwait Oil Fires dominated the weather pattern throughout the Persian Gulf and surrounding region during 1991, and that lower atmospheric wind blew the smoke along the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula, and cities like Dhahran, Riyadh and Bahrain experienced days with smoke filled skies and carbon fallout.."

So he struck out on that one. No biggie. Just forgot to carry the 3 or something. Well, it certainly doesn't improve for Dr. Singer:

[English global warming skeptic]David Bellamy has said that most glaciers have been advancing since 1980 as evidence against global warming. This contrasts with the scientific consensus that the vast majority of glaciers have been retreating since 1850. In an editorial in The Guardian, [environmental journalist and political activist]George Monbiot said that Bellamy's argument came from Singer, and that Singer's stated source is an unspecified 1989 article in Science. Monbiot reports that he performed both electronic and manual searches of the journal, and found no such article[emphasis mine].

Okay. So, more than forgetting to carry the 3, it looks like we're now into making shit up. Cool. We're used to that. And then there's the kicker.

A 2007 Newsweek cover story on climate change denial reported that: "In April 1998 a dozen people from the denial machine — including the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer's group and Exxon — met at the American Petroleum Institute's Washington headquarters. They proposed a $5 million campaign, according to a leaked eight-page memo, to convince the public that the science of global warming is riddled with controversy and uncertainty."[emphasis mine] The plan was reportedly aimed at "raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom'" on climate change.

And there it is. A meeting with the oil and gas industry at their turf to create a PR campaign.

Let's move on to his Co-author.

Dennis T. Avery
Dr. Avery is the director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, where he edits Global Food Quarterly (sounds like a real barn-burner of a newsletter. According to Sourcewatch:

Avery crusades against organic agriculture claiming that modern industrial agriculture and biotechnology will save the world from starvation and disaster. Avery also disputes the scientific consensus on global warming.

He is the originator of a misleading claim that organic foods are more dangerous than foods sprayed with chemical pesticides.

Avery served as a senior agricultural analyst for the US Department of State for between 1980 and 1988 under the Reagan administration[emphasis mine]

A look at Dr. Avery's track record, like we did with Dr. Singer, shows this little trip-up:

[Avery writes]"According to recent data compiled by the U.S Centers for Disease Control (CDC), people who eat organic and 'natural' foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157:H7)," Avery wrote in the Fall 1998 issue of American Outlook, a Hudson Institute publication. This happens, he said, because organic food is grown in animal manure, a known carrier of this nasty microbe. He said his data came from Dr. Paul Mead, an epidemiologist at the CDC.

The CDC answers:

CDC took the unusual step on January 14, 1999 of issuing a press release stating, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not conducted any study that compares or quantitates the specific risk for infection with E. coli 0157:H7 and eating either conventionally grown or organic/natural foods."

Oops. Yeah, so Dr. Avery quotes scientific studies that don't actually exist. Again, we're sort of used to that by now. The plot thickens with this one, including a phone call from the CDC to Dr. Avery, telling him to quit citing the CDC as his source because, you know, it isn't. As for the Hudson Institute, at which Dr. Avery is a senior fellow, a search string yields, at the end of the day, a slew of conservative think-tanks that contribute to it, including the Capital Research Center, which ranks the Hudson Institute "as a 7 on its ideological spectrum with 8 being 'Free Market Right' and 1 'Radical Left.'"[link broken]

So there you have it: the authors of this fine study. I intend to do many more "parts" to this "study" as I sit down to slog through it and comare its arguments to those that we know are accurate. If I have the energy.

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