Ok, some of you might say, you’re nothing but a conduit for Bast.
Well actually in this position I am a conduit for good stuff, anytime.
I do believe it is my job to recommend, and admire. Joe Bast is prolific and articulate. I admire his work as a writer and editor.
I sure have a lot of accomplished people to admire.
Here’s some reviews by Bast, who seems to working at a speed an order of magnitude higher than mine.
Joe says:
* “Wanted: Fraud-buster with political antennae,” by Colin Macilwain (Nature, Vol. 507, March 20, 2014, P. 275) comments on the resignation of David Wright from the Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Public Health Service. Wright wrote a resignation letter that blasts the agency as being “profoundly dysfunctional.” (The letter, linked above, is delightful reading.) “Wright’s resignation letter blows wide open long-standing doubts about its capacity to deal with a caseload that, the available evidence suggests, should have expanded with the growth of the NIH itself.” I read this as further evidence of the lack of oversight that has compromised the quality and reliability of academic research in the U.S.
* Back the renewable boom,” by Jessika E. Trancik (Nature, Vol. 507, March 20, 2014, pp. 300-302… looks like I accidentally included p. 299 from a different article), pays homage to conventional wisdom about the need to subsidize alternative energy to make up for the fact that “carbon is not priced in the global market,” and deplores recent steps away from subsidies in the U.S. and EU. The rest of the article cheers recent improvements and “breakthroughs,” excuses “the recent failure of a few prominent energy companies,” and of course calls for more subsidies for alternative fuels and taxes and regulations on fossil fuels.
* “A clean slate,” by Virginia Gewin,” Nature, vol. 507, March 20, 2014, pp. 389-390… looks like I accidentally didn’t scan the last page(s)).More commentary about the crisis in academia: “Worldwide, retractions are on the rise: last year alone, scientific journals retracted roughly 500 pages (of more than 1 million published), compared with fewer than 50 per year in the early 2000s. One study – in the life sciences – suggests that misconduct, such as plagiarism or falsified data, has been to blame for two-thirds of retractions.” As retractions become more frequent, the need arises for academics to be able to amend or retract articles without ending their careers, and that is the focus of most of the article. Rather than focus on ways for liars and cheaters to save face, though, wouldn’t it be better to remove government funding and dysfunctional government bureaucracies from the science endeavor and return to proper peer review? Just asking.
* “Market forces,” a one-page science fiction essay by Ian Stewart (Nature, Vol. 507, March 20, 2014, p. 394) is a delightful look at what heaven and hell would look like if God “adopted a new business model” and became CEO, Chairman, and CFO of Paradise Group. Can heaven be commercialized? Sure it can. Would you like it? Well, that depends…
* “Oil money takes U.S. academy into uncharted waters,” by Helen Shen (Nature, Vol. 494, February 21, 2014, p. 295) reports that “over the next five years, British oil-and-gas giant BP will give the NAS $350 million, and Swiss oil-rig contractor Transocean will add $150 million – money that officials at the NAS say they were surprised to receive.” The money comes from the settlement of damages following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I think this is hugely significant, and ought to be a talking point we all use. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is receiving far more money from oil companies than ALL free-market think tanks in the world combined, EVER, for any research use including to address climate change. Is its credibility compromised? Should we all start referring to NAS as the “oil-industry funded NAS”?
*”Brace for Impacts,” editorial (Nature, Vol. 508, April 3, 2014, p. 7) reports the release of IPCC WG-II report. Oddly, it doesn’t mention the release of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), another sign of blatant bias, but oh well. The editorial repeats the highlights of the IPCC report without any critical thought, an unfortunate example of “news release journalism” common in the environment field. It ends with the obligatory call for more funding for researchers. The editors’ conflict of interest is so obvious it is blinding to everyone… except the editors, and I suppose, and many of the researchers buy subscriptions to Nature.
* “Crabs ready for climate change,” a “Research Highlight” (Nature, Vol. 508, April 3, 2014, p. 11) describes new research by Tepolt and Somero on “the remarkable temperature tolerance of the European green crab,” which the authors say “could withstand warmer waters before their cardiac function was compromised… crabs also thrived in colder habitats, and acclimatized quickly to temperature shifts.” Craig Idso told me recently that research findings of this kind are becoming more frequent as real scientists test the simplistic computer models used to predict “massive extinctions” due to global warming. Empirical research takes time to conduct, write up, and publish, but it is finding its way into the peer-reviewed literature. Science can’t tolerate fraud for long.
* “Mobilize citizens to track sustainability,” by Angel Hsu et al. (Nature, Vol. 508, April 3, 2014, pp. 33-35) acknowledges what skeptics have been saying for years, that “Official data sets are not up to the task. We have found problems with government-reported sources in nearly every global data set that we have used in 15 years of constructing the Environmental Performance Index…. Government investments in environmental monitoring, data collection and reporting are patchy, and are influenced by limited budgets and political motivations…. The global data sets that do exist are often incomplete, erratic or untrustworthy. Conspicuous reporting gaps compromise our understanding of most environmental problems, from toxic chemical exposures, global recycling rates and wetlands loss to freshwater quality, species loss and vulnerability to climate change.” This is the data being fed into computer models used to estimate global temperatures, change in temperature, emissions, and impacts, models that claim to be able to find or project tiny impacts and trends against backgrounds of natural variability. Well, call me a skeptic!
* “No place like home,” by Tim Lenton (Nature, Vol. 508, April 3, 2014), pp. 41-42), reviews James Lovelock’s latest book, A Rough Ride to the Future: The Next Evolution of Gaia. “He sees no prospect of us collectively reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and has nothing good to say here about geoengineering. That leaves adaptation as the only option.” I’ve never been a fan of Lovelock, and I haven’t bothered tracking back reports of his late-life conversion to something like a global warming skeptic. Anyone who “sees us as tribal carnivores, doomed to bumble around in the technological world we have created,” won’t make it onto my summer reading list.
Best regards,
Joe
Joseph Bast
President
The Heartland Institute