A bunch of folks have let me know about a new video that starts in the Himalayas and accelerates you out to the edge of the Universe, and then back again. It’s done by the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and was directed by data visualization expert Carter Emmart. Make sure you click the high-def button!
Cooooool. I’d love to see this in the AMNH planetarium. That place rocks.
Behold, the West Mata ocean volcano eruption:
Over 50 hours (!) of hi-def footage was captured of this western Pacific ocean volcano, which is 1,200 meters underwater, by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)—named Jason—from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The footage was unveiled recently at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
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Video: NSF & NOAA via YouTube / djxatlanta
Hot on the heels of the story of lab-built red blood cells that DISCOVER covered on Tuesday, a different team of scientists have announced another step forward. Bioengineer Erin Lavik announced that her team built synthetic platelets that, when given intravenously to rodents, could slow their bleeding after a cut. The study appears in Science Translational Medicine.
Your normal platelets exist in the bloodstream and use proteins to bind together and close off the bleeding when you get a cut. Lavik’s synthetic version is a nanoparticle that her team injected into the rodents intravenously. The synthetic platelets augment this process, bonding with natural blood platelets and acting as a nanostructure boosting the natural platelets’ ability to form a solid barrier that stops bleeding [Popular Science]. The rodents with synthetic platelets stopped bleeding 23 percent faster than those without.
Lavik’s particle is a third the size of a natural platelet, and the team was careful not to make it too sticky. “There’s a balance between the two edges of the sword–bleeding too much and clotting too much,” says Mortimer Poncz, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. “You don’t want to stop bleeding in the leg but die of a heart attack or have stroke” [Technology Review].
The scientists now must do pig and then human tests to determine the platelets’ effectiveness in people. So it would take years before synthetics nanoparticles are slowing the bleeding for accident or battlefield trauma victims. Lavik, though, is hopeful can be just as helpful for humans. “All we’re doing is leveraging what biology does naturally,” Lavik said [Bloomberg].
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Image: Science/AAAS
A Newsweek writer better known as Fake Steve Jobs is so fed up with AT&T’s service for his iPhone that he’s calling on his fellow AT&T customers to clog up the 3G wireless network today in protest of AT&T’s plan to impose service fees on “bandwidth hogs.”
According to the Inquirer:
Dan Lyons, blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, has called on AT&T users to show their service dissatisfaction by trying to overwhelm the network with data-intensive tasks. “Operation Chokehold”, as he called his incitement to flash-mob mischief, hopes to shut down the US AT&T 3G network at 3pm today and appears to have gained some support from the iPhone rabble.
Thousands have pledged their support for Operation Chokehold (on Facebook, so take that as you will). However most tech blogs are calling Lyons and his protesters jerks for attempting to disrupt service. The FCC and AT&T are calling the stunt irresponsible because it would be an intentional disruption to AT&T’s 80 million customers. However, a disruption, if one even happens, wouldn’t affect voice service, so the claim that 911 calls would be blocked isn’t true.
Some blogs don’t think anyone will participate outside of New York and San Francisco, but if the thousands do materialize, and the network is bumped off-line, the Inquirer speculates that Lyons could face legal trouble for inciting the stunt.
Just to play it safe, if you need to use any of your amazing iPhone apps to access the internet, you might want to do it before 3 p.m. today.
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Image: flickr / William Hook
Over at Mother Jones’ blog “Blue Marble,” I’ve got a post/essay on a topic that I started thinking about after my Wednesday night panel with the Guardian’s George Monbiot in Copenhagen–namely, why is there suddenly a new surge of climate denial? The post starts like this:
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and global warming author who combines pugilistic defenses of climate science with Monty Pythonesque levity, is struck by a paradox at the heart of the attempt to achieve action here in Copenhagen. For, as he put it to a full room last night at a panel hosted by the Danish science magazine FORSKERForum, “In the past year, there has been a massive upsurge in climate change denial in the United States, even as the science gets stronger.”
Opinion polls certainly support Monbiot’s contention. According to results released in October by the Pew Research Center, considerably fewer Americans now believe the Earth is warming (the decline has been from 71 percent to 57 percent over the space of a year and a half). And as for agreement with scientists about the cause of global warming—human activities, human emissions—that too has sloped downwards, to just 36 percent today.
How is this possible?
Keep reading here for Monbiot’s, and my, answer.
I hate to make the obvious jokes, so I’ll simply say I was on this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe talking about methane on Mars and the tilt of Uranus. I’m glad they invited me on; I hadn’t heard of either of these stories until Steve Novella alerted me to them before we did the interview.
Basically, a new hypothesis has come out that the large tilt of Uranus (98°) is not from a collision, but instead had its natural tilt reinforced by a large moon that has since been ejected. Also, scientists tested the idea that the methane seen to change on Mars with the seasons might be from meteorites, and find that they don’t supply nearly enough to explain the observations. We also talk JREF, solar power, the Norway lights, and the usual nonsense. I just finished listening to the whole episode, and thought it was pretty good despite me being on it, so go give it a listen!
My favorite example of a recent Hollywood blockbuster that scientists should like is Iron Man. Yes, it’s implausible that a prisoner in a cave in Afghanistan could build a lethal flying suit out of scrap metal, etc. But plausibility should never be the criterion for judging a science-fiction/fantasy scenario; sometimes you just have to bend the rules of the real world to get the required dramatic effects. Consistency, on the other hand, is crucial; the non-real world you invent should follow some set of rules, even if they veer away from the actual world. (Nobody complains that the Enterprise travels faster than light, but there are plenty of complaints about the bizarre use of time travel in the Star Trek franchise.)
Even better is when a film does a decent job at reflecting the practice of science. And that’s why I loved Iron Man — the whole second act revolves around Tony Stark in his lab, engineering designs and using trial-and-error to determine experimentally what works and what doesn’t. It makes for compelling viewing, which should be a lesson to people.
So we’re all excited about Iron Man 2, right?
The Science and Entertainment Exchange had a small hand in this one — apparently they needed a particle physicist to help get some of the scenes right. I don’t think it was the scene with the whips.
Eric has an interesting post up on the age distribution for recipients of NIH grants since 1980:
He writes that it’s difficult for young U.S. researchers to obtain funding and points to Darwin and Einstein as examples of scientists with revolutionary ideas in their 20s–even though we tend to remember them as old men in photos.
While it’s a thought-provoking point, to be fair we really need to consider that there is more to this discussion than the most obvious factors. Yes, older PIs receive the lion’s share of funding, but these trends also reflect the large hiring periods in the past as university faculty members age. I agree that in many instances, scientists may be doing their most creative, groundbreaking research early, however, success during this time is not necessarily measured by obtaining large grants given few can land the job to be eligible until their mid-30s. Rather, it’s a crucial period for obtaining a faculty position, so the most promising young scientists may go on to recruit a lab, and eventually apply for such grants from a stronger position.
The trend’s shift right over decades may also reflect that postdocs are no longer allowed to be PIs on grants at many universities that do not want to lose a portion of overhead when the person leaves. In addition, agencies such as NIH provide a vast amount of fellowships to fund legions of graduate students (especially in the biomedical sciences) so it’s important to acknowledge that support to young scientists comes in many forms. NIH provides an enormous number of postdoc fellowships as well.
I do like Eric’s point that perhaps we should consider young Darwin and Einstein as iconic figures before their hair whitened. Still, we must remember that many complex factors are at play influencing the initial graph. The real question to consider is whether such grants are adequately funding early tenure track professors.
Check this out! Cassini took a gorgeous shot of Titan casting its shadow on Saturn:
[Click to embiggen]
Wow!
A couple of cool things to note in this image… one is that the shadow is fuzzy. That’s because Titan has a thick atmosphere, so there is no sharp edge to the moon to cast a sharp shadow.
[Update: A few folks have pointed out that I didn't consider the idea that the fuzziness may be due to the fact that the Sun is not a point source, and so it will cast a fuzzy shadow -- this same thing happens during solar and lunar eclipses on Earth. I did some quick trigonometry, and I get that the fuzzy outer part of the eclipse shadow (called the penumbra) should be about 1000 km across or so, while the deep shadow (the umbra) is a little bit bigger than the size of Titan itself, or about 5200 km (again, these are pretty rough numbers). That jibes well with what we see in this image (if you neglect the weird distortion of Titan's shadow being stretched since it's projected on Saturn's curved cloud tops), so I'm now thinking that the shadow is not fuzzy due to Titan's atmosphere at all -- it's just the penumbra of this Titanic solar eclipse! I stand corrected, and I thank my readers for pointing this out. Very cool.]
Another is that even though Titan’s orbit is almost exactly in the same plane as the rings, its shadow is really far south of the rings’ shadow. That’s because spring has started in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, so the Sun is shining down on the planet from just north of the equator. The rings are relatively close to the planet surface, so the shadow they cast is just south of the equator (and narrow since the Sun is still shining nearly straight down the ring plane).
Titan orbits Saturn much farther out (1.2 million km from Saturn, very roughly 10 times farther out than the main rings on the average). Over that distance, the angle of the moon’s shadow carries it farther south of the equator. It’s a like a tall tree’s shadow being longer than a short tree’s shadow.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: we will get a vast amount of science out of Cassini data, and learn more about Saturn in a few years than we have in all the centuries of observations before we launched the probe. But sometimes it’s just the pure beauty of the images that gets to me.
Tip o’ the tweet to Carolyn Porco.
If you were following Cosmic Variance yesterday, you saw its live blogging of one of the most anticipated recent announcements in physics: the team from Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) telling the world whether a Minnesota detector spotted evidence of dark matter. The answer? Maybe (pdf).
CDMS scientists use super-cooled detectors made of germanium and silicon to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of the leading suspects for what could make up dark matter. The detector is deep underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which scientists also use to hunt for neutrinos. WIMPs streaming in from space would very rarely jostle the germanium nuclei, some 800 meters underground in the Soudan mine, generating a tiny amount of heat and slightly altering the charge on the detectors in a characteristic pattern [Science News].
In 2007-2008, CDMS researchers saw two events that could have been WIMP interactions. Because their calculations had suggested a likelihood of 0.8 jostling events for the two years just from radioactive decay of regular matter, that means there’s a decent chance—but far from a certainty—that they saw dark matter interactions. The team is not claiming discovery of dark matter, because the result is not statistically significant. There is a 1-in-4 chance that it is merely due to fluctuations in the background noise. Had the experiment seen five events above the expected background, the claim for having detected dark matter would have been a lot stronger [New Scientist].
Dark matter is the hypothetical stuff that physicists believe to be far more abundant than the matter that makes up you and me. It seems that ordinary matter – gas, stars, planets and galaxies – makes up less than 5% of the Universe. The remainder is unseen [BBC News]. Dark matter and dark energy—which is even more mysterious and plentiful than dark matter—constitute the rest, scientists think.
Next year the CDMS team will upgrade its detector for further experiments, and the bevy of scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider will be champing at the bit to use this new data when they resume their work in the new year, Dan Tovey of the LHC’s ATLAS project says. “The really exciting aspect of all this is that if you see a signal in a direct-detection dark matter experiment and a signal for supersymmetry at the LHC, you can compare those two observations and investigate whether they are compatible with each other,” says Tovey [New Scientist].
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Image: CDMS
There is a really good piece up at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media that looks at the top five most prominent issues raised in “ClimateGate”, analyzes the relevant emails in context, and finds some concerns but not much wrong–with the notable exception of the suggestion that emails subject to a Freedom of Information request be deleted. The article’s author, Zeke Hausfather, concludes:
It is unfortunate, if perhaps not surprising, that the quotes from the e-mails that have gotten the most publicity from skeptics and in some media strongly distort the views and actions of the scientists in question, contributing to a perception of collusion to manipulate the climate data itself.
Nothing contained in the e-mails, however, suggests that global temperature records are particularly inaccurate or, worse, that they have been manipulated to show greater warming. The certainly troubling conduct exposed in some of the e-mails has little bearing on the fundamental science that strongly indicates that the world is warming and that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.
You should read the whole piece, for it clearly and soberly shows just how much this has been blown out of proportion.
The Science magazine blog is quoting unnamed sources who say that Obama, after a meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, has pledged $1 billion to NASA in 2011 to work on a heavy lift rocket to take astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
If this is true, that’s very interesting news indeed. I’ll stress that I personally look at this as unconfirmed leaked info, so take it with a grain of salt. Science is saying it’ll be announced officially as early as next week, or as late as the State of the Union address in January. If it is true, it comes on top of a more than $900 million bump by Congress for next year (which is official).
The report is unclear about some things, like what happens to the Constellation program to build Ares rockets. A lot of people in the space business (but outside of NASA) say the Ares 1-X test recently amounted to little more than fraud. Buzz Aldrin is one of them (note: Link to Huffington Post). I have heard the same from the Space Frontier Foundation as well. Dropping Ares-1, as Science is reporting might happen, is maybe not a bad thing. But what about the next generation rocket, the Ares V? That’s not mentioned, but I would expect that would be ditched too.
Here’s the money shot:
According to knowledgeable sources, the White House is convinced that scarce NASA funds would be better spent on a simpler heavy-lift vehicle that could be ready to fly as early as 2018. Meanwhile, European countries, Japan, and Canada would be asked to work on a lunar lander and modules for a moon base, saving the U.S. several billion dollars. And commercial companies would take over the job of getting supplies to the international space station.
I suspect this would be very good news indeed. Still and all, I note two things: 1) private companies still have not put much into orbit, so it’s premature to know how well they will do (though I have very high hopes, especially for SpaceX), and 2) just to reinforce this, this story is not yet confirmed.
So my take on this is wait and see. I have my opinions about space travel, but I lack the experience in this field to know specifically what is best for NASA and what is best for space exploration. I’ll be very interested to hear what others in the business have to say.
I know that this is Bad Astronomy’s usual bailiwick, but I had to post this. It’s a glint of sunlight reflecting off the surface of a lake of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, a moon of Saturn. When I look at it, I wonder what diesel-fueled creatures might be swimming below. More details here.
A southern beauty. Click for larger (~140k), Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee
People in the southern hemisphere have some gorgeous sights in the sky we in the north can only dream about. You add the Hubble with its new camera and you can get some stunning images. Take this southern beauty for example, the Hubblesite press release says it all (Oh they have many different sizes and versions of this image too please do check it out!):
Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.
The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.
Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible, and red light by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars, giving astronomers important information about the stars’ birth and evolution.
The brilliant stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light, and hurricane-force stellar winds (streams of charged particles), which are etching away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born. The image reveals a fantasy landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys, as well as a dark region in the center that roughly looks like the outline of a holiday tree. Besides sculpting the gaseous terrain, the brilliant stars can also help create a successive generation of offspring. When the winds hit dense walls of gas, they create shocks, which may be generating a new wave of star birth.
The movement of the LMC around the Milky Way may have triggered the massive cluster’s formation in several ways. The gravitational tug of the Milky Way and the companion Small Magellanic Cloud may have compressed gas in the LMC. Also, the pressure resulting from the LMC plowing through the Milky Way’s halo may have compressed gas in the satellite. The cluster is a rare, nearby example of the many super star clusters that formed in the distant, early universe, when star birth and galaxy interactions were more frequent. Previous Hubble observations have shown astronomers that super star clusters in faraway galaxies are ubiquitous.
The LMC is located 170,000 light-years away and is a member of the Local Group of Galaxies, which also includes the Milky Way.
The Hubble observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.
Things are getting a tad testy in Denmark as the Copenhagen climate summit lurches toward its conclusion tomorrow. Contrary to rumors that he would skip the event because of the growing pessimism about reaching an agreement, President Barack Obama says today that he’s on his way for the conference’s decisive day.
Yesterday was protest day, as 4,000 people marched around the Bella center and police arrested 260. Activists tried a variety of methods to enter the conference centre, approaching in large groups from several directions and, at one point, sending several hundred people running with seven giant lilos [air mattresses] to bridge a moat next to the centre [The Guardian].
They were not successful, but that didn’t stop the conference from grinding to a halt. The Group of 77, the broad group of developing and emerging nations, railed against the wealthier nations’ proposals. China, by far the largest economic power in the group, has dragged its feet throughout the week by raising one technical objection after another to the basic negotiating text [The New York Times]. More than 100 countries staged a walkout Monday to draw attention.
The United States had been quiet and non-committal during most of conference, as developing countries and European leaders talked about starting a fund for wealthier countries to help the rest of the world lower greenhouse gas emissions. Then this week Sen. John Kerry acknowledged the responsibility, which was followed by a major American announcement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared in a crowded press briefing room at the summit and announced that the United States would contribute to a $100 billion international fund starting in 2020—as long as “all major nations” commit their emissions reductions to a binding agreement and submit those reductions to transparent verification. And by “all major nations,” she meant China [The Atlantic].
President Obama, fresh off receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, returns to Scandinavia tonight to try to reach an agreement during the final day in Copenhagen, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says. The president still believes that “the elements are there to get an agreement,” Mr. Gibbs said. It would be a political agreement for a future treaty, he said, rather than a binding agreement [The New York Times]. That is, let’s all agree to agree later.
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The Intersection: I’m Going to Copenhagen
Image: flickr / adopt a negotiator
… not yet released, but we’ll find out in just a bit. 2:00 p.m. Pacific time, to be exact.
Last week we mongered the rumor that the CDMS experiment was going to announce an exciting new result soon — and that time is now. (My guess remains: some interesting data that falls well short of “we’ve discovered dark matter!”) If you’d like to watch the talks online, here you go:
Further bulletins as events warrant.
The U.S. military does not think much of Iraqi militants’ technological capabilities. How else to explain the fact that their Predator drone surveillance planes used unencrypted links to send down to their military operators? The lack of encryption means that the drones’ data is less secure than most home wireless internet networks, a serious vulnerability in the unmanned aerial network.
According to a story in The Wall Street Journal today, video feeds from Predator drones have been intercepted by militants in Iraq. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter [The Wall Street Journal]. Officials are saying that they don’t believe militants were able to take control of the drones, but by downloading the videos they were able to keep up with which areas were being monitored.
The Defense Department has responded by saying they discovered the vulnerability a year ago, and are working to encrypt all drone communications links in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. However, there are at least 600 unmanned vehicles and thousands of ground stations to upgrade, so the security improvement will not happen overnight. However, officials say they have made technical adjustments to systems in key threat areas to block the signal interception.
The breach arose because the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles do not use encryption in the final link to their operators on the ground. (By contrast, every time you log on to a bank or credit card Web site, or make a phone call on most modern cellular networks, your communications are protected by encryption technology) [CBS News]. After a Shiite militant was captured in Iraq with a laptop full of intercepted drone feeds, and following similar discoveries, officials concluded that groups were trained and funded by Iran to intercept and share video feeds.
The problem is similar to street criminals listening to police scanners, according to Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community. The military has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it [AP]. The surveillance network described in most news reports suggests that the final link between the drone and the operator is between a satellite flying around in space and that that final link is unencrypted for reasons unfathomable to anyone with even cursory knowledge of network communications. Maybe they wanted to save on bandwidth costs [Crunch Gear]?
Following the publication of The Wall Street Journal’s story on the security breach, Bryan Whitman, a U.S. defense official and Pentagon spokesman, said on Thursday that they have fixed the leak, but declined to discuss any details.
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Image: U.S. Air Force
Here’s a Newsweek.com bloggy profile hailing the tough-to-dispute successes of a leading nemesis climate progress, Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com:
With “Climategate”—the release last month of thousands of hacked e-mails showing debate about climate change may have been stifled—[Morano] is now getting more attention than ever before. As of last Friday, according to one the many e-mails this—and probably most—reporters get, he’s currently stationed at ground zero of the climate-change debate, Copenhagen, which he points out in e-mails, “is extremely cold.” (Several independent reviews of the hacked e-mails conclude that some scientists were engaging in embarrassing and at times unethical discussions, but the scientific consensus showing anthropogenic global warming was neither compromised nor fabricated).
He has been on countless news shows lately, including the BBC and CNN where he’s engaged in what he described to me as “lively and hostile debates.” He’s also appeared on the national radio shows of Sean Hannity, Fred Thomspon, and Lars Larsen. One of his fans (and a former boss of Morano’s) is Rush Limbaugh, who last month inadvertently shut down Morano’s site by urging listeners to follow his coverage of Climategate. The race to Morano’s site came after Rush gave this blessing: “Morano’s probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy?other than me, of course?doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what’s going on here.”
Rush is absolutely right. The two of them are driving waves of outrage against climate scientists that are significantly influencing the media and thus, probably, public opinion. And there is, in my mind, little effective counter.
Yesterday, James Randi posted an entry on the JREF’s Swift blog about global warming. In it, he expressed some doubt over the consensus that humans are causing global warming. He does not doubt that warming is happening, as he made clear, just the role of humans in that change.
Unfortunately, one source he used in his essay was the Petition Project. This was an attempt by global warming denialists to muddy the climate issue, and one that has been thoroughly trashed — it’s really just as awful as the similarly ridiculous, and just as thoroughly nonsensical, attempt by the Discovery Institute to get a petition by scientists who doubt evolution. Randi also made a claim about the complexity of global warming, and how difficult it is to model, casting some uncertainty on it. As he said, this makes it very difficult for someone not well-versed in the field to come to a well-informed decision on climate change.
I was unaware that Randi had just posted his essay when, yesterday, I wrote a post asking for donations to the JREF. Obviously, the comments focused on Randi’s post. While some were fair, I was taken aback by the vitriol of many of the comments; some people were out-and-out calling Randi a denialist, which is ridiculous. Other comments were worse.
Needless to say, this made quite a splash in the skeptical blogosphere as well. Posts and comments sprouted up everywhere about it. Some were thoughtful, others, um, not so much. I was surprised by how many skeptics were quick to vilify Randi, again accusing him of being a global warming denialist. I got emails from people fearing for the skeptical movement as a whole!
Instead of rending my garments over this, I read Randi’s post carefully, and then sent him a note outlining why the Petition Project is a crock, as well as saying that yes, mathematical models of climate are very complex, but that doesn’t change observations indicating the reality of global warming or our role in it. Randi told me he was writing a followup, so I decided not to say anything about it here until his new post went up. I wanted to make sure I had all the facts before commenting.
Randi posted that followup blog entry today. As I expected, he took the new information into account, admitting that he was unaware of the dubious nature of the petition, and re-affirming that he is not denying global warming is occurring.
So what are we to make of all this?
One is that anyone, everyone, is capable of making mistakes, from grand to minor, from basic ones we never should have made to ones that are inevitable. Skeptics make these same mistakes, too. Even noted skeptics. I’ve done it, Randi’s done it, every human has done it. Apropos of exactly this, Michael Shermer changed his stance on global warming after sufficient evidence swayed him.
Another is that even skeptics can be quick to jump to conclusions based on our own preconceived notions and methodology. Randi made an error, yes. Pointing that out politely and clearly is fine, as can be seen by the fact that he followed up on his post once he was given better data. But the ways in which many people attacked him were, in my opinion, unfair. If someone has a history of spinning the truth, of lying, of distorting reality for their own agenda, then sure, have at them. But when it’s someone who has devoted their life to prying the scales from everyone’s eyes, I think they’ve earned a modicum of decorum when they make a mistake.
Of course, on blogs (either writing them or commenting on them) it’s very easy to simply react. Again, we have all done this, and usually with some regret later. I’ve had to go back and retract things I’ve written when better evidence has arisen, or simply when someone has pointed out where I blew it.
Part of being a skeptic — and it’s a big part — is admitting when you’re wrong.
And finally, there is a really good takeaway point from this: when it comes to reality, no one and no thing is sacrosanct. If something is wrong, it gets called out. That’s what skepticism is all about. If Randi makes a mistake, he gets called on it. If scientists do, or the Pope does, or anyone, then it is up to all of us to speak up. And I think that how we do it is just as important as the content of our claims.
I’ve known Randi many years, and I know that for him, truth trumps all. May all of us be so inclined.
It is clear that the GOP now has a new denial spokesperson–Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. I already blogged her misleading radio address on “ClimateGate” and Copenhagen; now, watch her in this CNN debate with Ed Markey:
It’s all here, folks: We’ve got the massive over-interpretation of “ClimateGate”, global cooling claims (both about the 1970s and about the present), the assertion that “climate change is cyclical,” that it is “unsettled science” and “it depends on whose science you’re looking at,” and so forth. It’s bad, bad news.
Blackburn is quickly becoming the new James Inhofe….
