Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Today’s key message is this: Without dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, most of the planet’s land-based ecosystems—from its forests and grasslands to the deserts and tundra—are at high risk of “major transformation” due to climate change. This comes from a newly published study by an international research team. Climate change warnings are often labelled as … Read more
How do we know that humans are responsible for Global warming, or that there is in fact any Global warming at all, what evidence do we have? There are in fact several lines of evidence. We know that certain gases such as CO2 are greenhouse gases. This is been an established fact for rather a … Read more
I’d like to point to two specific articles today that are related to the idea of communicating things that are true. Before we dip in, let’s first establish what we mean by “truth”. Religious truth is never wrong In a religious context communication of “truth” is the promotion of ideas that are deemed to be … Read more
I’ve previously written a few postings on this topic. Back in May I was writing about the censorship of press releases at the US Department of the Interior (a study highlighted an increasing risk of global flooding, but the press release purged all references to the cause being Climate change). A month later evidence was … Read more
Intelligent Design is the idea that life as we know it was designed and that evolution is a myth. It is essentially creationism dressed up to sound sciency and so the claim is presented without all the religious terminology. This topic has popped up because the Discovery Institute, the primary promoters of the idea, have … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more