Global warming does not improve plant productivity

April 16, 2012 Jason ThibeaultAGW, climate change, denialism, global warming, pseudoscience, science denialism15 Comments

There’s a very short window where plants improve with more CO₂, where they scrub more of it from the atmosphere than usual. This window is apparently overwhelmed in a hurry with the levels we’re seeing, though, resulting in crop die-outs which are exacerbated by warming-influenced droughts.

This would, in a perfect world, shut up those science denialists who admit global warming is happening, but think plants are going to fix it all for us. Considering we’re waging an all-out war on plants to begin with, I fail to see how these people honestly think there’s not a problem. It’s either short-sightedness or wishful thinking that leads people to believe this particular line of anti-AGW bunkum.

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Real genuine proof the moon landing (simulation) was a hoax!

February 4, 2012 Jason Thibeaultantiscience, denialism, hoaxes, moon landing, pseudoscience4 Comments

What do you get when you stitch together footage from NASA’s moon landing simulations prior to the Apollo project, with footage from the actual moon landing, with an audio track meant to make you pee with laughter?

Well, you get a Youtube comments thread so full of facepalmingly poor logic and conspiracy theory that you just have to weep for humanity. While laughing. It’s a very painful emotion.

We’ve been to the moon. There’s a mirror up there, planted by us at the Apollo landing site, that we can bounce lasers off of, to accurately measure Earth’s distance to the moon. This is evidence. That, and Buzz Aldrin will sock you one if you’re still a ridiculous conspiracy theorist.

Do extreme weather events make you more liberal?

January 22, 2012 Jason Thibeaultanti-science, climate change, Conservatives, denialism, global warming, Republicans, science, skepticism, study10 Comments

I will happily admit, the next several posts over the next several days constitute me trying to play some amount of catch-up with my ever-burgeoning Firefox tabs and RSS feeds. I’m trying to post a bunch of days ahead of time, too, so I might be reporting on some older stuff. But I’ll try to keep it fresh and relevant with my opinionation. Apologies if we’re covering ground you’ve already covered, you savvy and avid reader you.

Via Peter Sinclair’s excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week, this story from USA Today explores the ramifications of a study about how people react to global warming policy when having been exposed to examples of the kind of extreme weather event that climate realists have been warning of for decades.
Continue reading “Do extreme weather events make you more liberal?” →

Meta-analysis: Still no link between cell phones and cancer

December 14, 2011 Jason Thibeaultcancer, denialism, electromagnetic radiation, EMF, medicine, meta-analysis, science, wireless9 Comments

Via Skeptic North, good news for the side of science in the ongoing manufactroversy driven by people who are deathly afraid of wireless technology. A new meta-analysis of prior studies shows no link, causal or otherwise, between cellular phone usage and any of the forms of cancer commonly claimed by anti-wifi advocates. I’m sure this won’t stop them from repeating their claims that there must be damage if only we look at specific variations of the EMF spectrum.

We are constantly reminded of the failure of society to recognize the dangers of tobacco, let alone do something about it, and the industry led effort to suppress information and increase uncertainty in the pubic is held up as proof that all industries will stop at no lengths to protect their investment, despite dangers to the public. In the face of this, we need a scientific outlook to unblinker us from determining an unbiased truth. A new systematic review published in October’s Bioelectromagnetics is an excellent illustration of how we determine causality.

Continue reading “Meta-analysis: Still no link between cell phones and cancer” →

Michael Mann at TEDxPSU: “there’s still time”

December 13, 2011 Jason Thibeaultclimate, climate change, denialism, global warming, hockey stick graph, Michael Mann, pseudoscience, science1 Comment

Michael Mann and his IPCC report, the hockey stick graph, which has (by the way) been vindicated in twelve subsequent papers as being accurate and correct in how steeply climate has changed since humans began emitting CO₂, have essentially sealed the climate denialists’ fate. Unfortunately, these same climate denialists, by their systematic campaign of disinformation about climate change, have all but sealed all of humanity into ours, in preventing us from taking meaningful action. Mann says, however, “there’s still time to make the right choice”.
Continue reading “Michael Mann at TEDxPSU: “there’s still time”” →

It’s not about the “hockey stick”

December 7, 2011 Jason Thibeaultclimate, climate change, denialism, global warming, skepticism3 Comments

Peter Sinclair’s Climate Denial Crock of the Week videos are uniformly excellent. His latest discusses the climate contrarians’ seeming belief that all of climate science depends on that one thoroughly accurate hockey stick graph created by Michael Mann, which has been vindicated by correlating studies no less than nine times (and once by a true climate skeptic). Video below the fold.
Continue reading “It’s not about the “hockey stick”” →

The real climategate

November 27, 2011 Jason Thibeaultantiscience, climate change, climategate, denialism, global warming5 Comments

The climate denialsphere, having learned exactly the wrong lesson from the last email hack, has attempted to overshadow another international talk on climate change by releasing the remainder of the e-mails illegally obtained via a hack of university mail servers in the original incident now known as “Climategate”.
Continue reading “The real climategate” →

Lousy Canuck

… Because I don't watch enough hockey, drink enough beer, or eat enough bacon.

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