Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook
Categories Menu

Posted by on Jan 24, 2013 | 75 comments

Left-wing anti-science – UPDATEx2

I see that Michael Shermer has written a new article on the subject of left-wing attacks on anti-science, and that my colleague has critiqued it.  As probably surprises no one, I find the critique unconvincing.  I also think that Shermer doesn’t go as far as he might.

At the outset, let me say what my colleague gets right.  The anti-science attitude of many on the right, particularly on the American right, is exceptionally crass and vulgar.  I think of Palin’s appalling line on fruit fly research (incidentally, do read the Hitch’s column on the subject), not to mention the vulgar and stupid philistinism of men like Ben Stein.  But you don’t really need me to tell you any of that.

That said, I do think that left-wing anti-science is alive and well.  I have written about the disgraceful and unscientific attitudes taken towards Bjorn Lomborg before now, and the wretched attitude towards evolutionary psychology has been documented by Edward Clint.  But, to start with my colleagues comment:

“Concerning nuclear power, it does have very serious public safety problems, not necessarily limited to waste disposal (have we forgotten Fukushima already?)”

I have not forgotten Fukushima at all, the situation where an old and decrepit power station, hit by one of the five worst earthquakes in human history, caused only one death.  It was this that caused George Monbiot to come to his senses over the subject of nuclear power.  It is well worth reading his exchanges with La Grande Dame, Helen Caldicott about nuclear power.  Particularly the bit where he says

“It’s all horribly reminiscent of the dealings I had with Ian Plimer and Stewart Brand”.

That is to say the least of it.  But my colleague also mentions the problems with waste disposal.  He’s a little behind on the times: the new generation of nuclear power plants consume spent fuel and render it relatively harmless after decades rather than hundreds of millennia.  By some estimates we have enough nuclear waste to power all of Europe for three centuries.

Moreover, there is the matter of getting real about this.  There is no other power source that can even begin to make a serious dent in carbon emissions.  Even more green resources, such as hydroelectricity, are being blocked by the Luddite left.  Vide Deanna Archuleta, the deputy secretary of the Interior in the Obama adminstration:

 ”You will never see another hydroelectric dam”.

This is insane. The time for such footling responses is long, long past.

My colleague makes another point, quoting Shermer:

“Whereas  conservatives obsess over the purity and sanctity of sex, the left’s sacred values seem fixated on the environment, leading to an almost religious fervor over the purity and sanctity of air, water, and especially food”

My colleague comments,

“Again, the right and left are not comparable.  Conservative condemnation of gay and premaritial sex stems from the fact that it is against their religious doctrines, not that it harms anyone. Contaminants in air and water and food affect public health and safety”.

To take that in order, I have no brief for the insufferable anti-gay prejudice of the right, but this is not the whole of the conservative concern about sex.  The collapse of marriage and of sexual norms has demonstrably lead to a rise in the abuse, physical and sexual, of both women and the children of illegitimate unions.  A brief reading of Theodore Dalrymple‘s observations on the subject will give you stories that would ring tears from a stone.

But the second part is more important.  My colleague misses Shermer’s point: the left wing worship of the environment is not about the provable dangers of certain forms of pollution.  It is the veneration of an “untouched” environment as a good in and of itself, one to which human well-being and prosperity must be sacrificed.  Here is the founder of the Sierra club Chris Muir,

“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!  How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! …Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish property of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beast and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”

This attitude has not vanished.  Here we have Al Gore in Earth in the Balance:

“Bacon’s moral confusion – the confusion at the heart of much of modern science – came from his assumption, echoing Plato, that human intellect could safely analyze and understand the natural world without reference to any moral principles defining our relationships and duties to both God and God’s creation.”

That such a man can get an honorary science degree makes me want to throw up.  This is not the voice of a scientist or engineer trying to solve a technical problem.  This is the howl of the anti-Enlightenment.  Is it any wonder that much green thought draws from Heidegger‘s poisonous well?

Now here I come to my conclusion: right-wing anti-science is much more crass, but left-wing anti-science is much more dangerous.  The two most destructive irrational pseudo-sciences of the last century, Eugenics and Lysenkoism, were movements of the left.  Millions died because of the evil nonsense advocated there.

It might be argued that that is only of historical interest; after all, at the time when eugenics was being seriously debated, King Leopold of Belgium was treating the entire Congo as his personal property and murdering eight million people in the pursuit of rubber.

I wish this sort of barbarism were a relic of those times, but such talk has not vanished.  Only this week we have David Attenborough calling human beings on the planet a ‘plague’.  But you can bet your last penny that Attenborough is not volunteering to be one of the ones who decides to ease the burden – and what difference would it make if he did?  We know where this sort of talk leads: whenever people are considered disposable, garbage, there is only one end in sight.  That was the case when Malthus wrote his famous essay to argue for maintaining England’s corn laws that would lead to the death of one million Irish in the famine.  Lest anyone think that I am drawing a too damning portrait, here we have Sue Blackmore, a supposed skeptic, writing in the Guardian:

“If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen.  So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilisation and of everything we have achieved.

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving.  In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population – weighting the value of scientists and musicians, for example”

If you think that such measures may be a little difficult to push through in a democratic system, don’t worry: democracy is expendable.

James Lovelock has said it might be necessary to “put democracy on hold for a while”. Mayer Hillman, senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute in London agres with him.

James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard institute, “Chinese Leadership needed to save humanity”.

David Suzuki, Canada’s famous environmentalist: ““What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,”

The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman.  ”One party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks.  But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today it can also have great advantages”.

None of these are minor figures.  So what we get from the right wing irrationalists is a collection of obnoxious big-mouths who cause trouble on the Texas school board, around the subject of embryonic stem cells fruit flies and so on.  What we get from the left-wing irrationalists is a powerful, mainstream movement that considers democracy disposable – in fact, a hindrance – and demands the power, since it thinks there are too many people, to decide who will and will not be ‘allowed’ to live.  Nor should this be considered impotent; when it comes to blocking the industrial development of the poorest of the world, and in its opposition to GM food, it has already been responsible for a great deal of unnecessary misery .

This is much, much worse than the empty headed morondom of creationism.  For people to trade in such talk in the aftermath of the twentieth century is nothing more or less than evil.

UPDATE:  It appears certain people aren’t happy about  Shermer.  The argument is “we don’t have an Inhofe”.  I don’t think even the “Senator from Hee-Haw” is calling for the suspension of democracy.

UPDATEx2:  I’m being taken to task over my description of Eugenics as being movements of the left in the way that environmentalism is considered a movement of the left today, despite its support by both the BNP in Britain and the NPD in Germany (among others).  This point isn’t really that controversial in honest left-wing circles.  My point is that it is the subtle unreason that you must beware of.

  • Copyleft

    I’d gauge the relative danger level by how much power the anti-science freaks have access to.

    On the right wing, anti-science has been formally adopted as part of the Republican Party platform, and political candidates are subject to litmus tests while campaigning, with the ‘right’ answer being the anti-science position. On the left? A few anti-vaxxers that no one takes seriously, and zero political pull beyond the typical religious drivel.

    Anti-science exists on both sides… but only on the right is it publicly welcomed, embraced, and even required in order to do business. That strikes me as a greater threat.

    • ThePrussian

      “On the left? A few anti-vaxxers” Er, did you read my post? The nutcase environmentalist movement has already been responsible for great misery.

      It’s true that my views are informed by internationalism; I care less about the Republican party than what the Green international does to the poor in Africa, for example, but I still think that the extent of this is worrying.

      • Reginald Selkirk

        The nutcase environmentalist movement has already been responsible for great misery

        Where drinking clean water and breathing clean air are defined as ‘misery.’

        • ThePrussian

          Where people choking to death on cooking fire smoke because environmentalists have blocked power plant developments is defined as misery. Where people are dropping dead from starvation due to environmentalists spreading hysteria about GM crops is defined as misery.

          Look, get it straight. There is a real world out there, beyond your shores, beyond your world where the only energy consumers are those meanies on the right. And those poor in Asia and Africa deserve a better life.

          • Reginald Selkirk

            Visit Beijing for a week. Breathe the air. Cut it with a knife. Then tell me about a better life.

          • ThePrussian

            Given that the Greens I cite above are all admirers of China, your “point” has a while to go before it reaches the level of silly.

  • Harry Barnes

    Eugenics was a left wing movement was it? Jesus wept.

    • ThePrussian

      Sitting in front of me is a copy of Harmsworth Popular science, one of the must-reads for the humanists and modernists (read:non-socialist lefties) of the day. Major supporters of Eugenics included the (socialist) H.G. Wells, the left-wing US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and Leon Trotsky. Others included Margaret Sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, and Leland Stanford, Old Whig and founder of Stanford University. Then there was George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes…

      Want me to go on?

      • Harry Barnes

        Yeah and? What you have done there is list left wing people who supported eugenics. Bravo. Do you now want me to list right wing supporters of eugenics? A more intellectually honest approach would have been to say that that eugenic had supporters on the left and right, rather than call it a left wing movement.

        Key question though: the most dangerous implementation of eugenics was by whom?

        • Harry Barnes

          **that eugenics**

        • ThePrussian

          The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, the movement that drew of the worst of the left and the worst of the right of its day. Specifically, it drew totalitarianism and eugenics from the left, and anti-semitism and militarism from the right. Here’s the point where we get into a long and tiresome argument due to your lack of knowledge as to what the Nazi platform was on dozens of issues, or what “right” and “left” meant in those days.

          The key thing is that those who defended eugenics considered themselves progressive, modern, scientific forward thinkers, a similar mode that is affected by people like Al Gore.

          Now, a “more intellectually honest approach” to coin a phrase, would be if you were to take the slightest notice of the distinctly unpleasant views that are active right now, that I list at the end of my article. A “more intellectually honest approach” might also be to concede that when non-socialist lefties, fabian socialists, reformist socialists, and one of the most significant socialists in human history comes out for an idea, that may mean it is an idea of the political left.

          • Harry Barnes

            “The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, the movement that drew of the worst of the left and the worst of the right of its day.
            Specifically, it drew totalitarianism and eugenics from the left, and
            anti-semitism and militarism from the right. Here’s the point where we
            get into a long and tiresome argument due to your lack of knowledge as to what the Nazi platform was on dozens of issues, or what “right” and “left” meant in those days.”

            Pompous little ass, aren’t we? But I will give you some free education on the subject. The Marxist left may call for a vanguard party based on centralisation (though Marx never mentions a fully centralised economy) but they also suggest worker ownership of the means of all production (the Nazi’s didn’t) the end of wages (the Nazi’s didn’t) and the end of Private Property (the Nazi’s didn’t).The centralised state of Nationalist governments are based solely on the‘advancement’ of the nation. On the glorification of a piece of land with borders, based on perceived ‘heritage’ and race underlined entirelyby the prominence of ‘Nation’ above all other considerations.

            The far left is international and pluralist in its approach and is not a fan of national borders, and race is not an issue. The Nazi’s main goal, was the glorification of the Nation State. It’s methods were racist, anti-communist, pro-christian, it labelled its enemies as “social democrats” and “liberals”, it imprisoned Atheist leaders, and it attacked Unions. They did indeed oppose libertarianism, but they also opposed communism, Enlightenment thinking, evolution, liberalism, internationalism, social democracy, multi-culturalism, secularism, and Marxism. None of that is proscribed by Marx and no serious Left Winger would agree with those points of Nazi ideology. The suggestion that because they had the word ‘socialist’ in their name, and based their economy centrally, some how makes them a party of the Left, is ludicrously simplistic.

          • ThePrussian

            In the first instance, this is why I said that it drew on the worst of both the left and the right. Please read what I actually write. In the second instance, this is completely circular: “The left is not racist and therefore any racists can’t be on the left”. In point of fact, racism was every bit as advanced on the left as on the right. In the united states, for example Upton Sinclair was very much a racist and a proponent of “white socialism”. Here he is on the black American underclass:

            “‘The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa, and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free – free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves.’”

            Now, first of all, I’d like you to read the following essay. It has a lot of good material:

            http://jonjayray.tripod.com/hitler.html/

            Then I’d like you to take a shufty at the following book:

            http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Social-Revolution-1933-1939-Paperback/dp/0393315541

            Probably the best study of the top-to-bottom nature of the Nazi left-wing movement.

            Now as to the rest of this… Sorry, but you will have to do a little better than this: “pro-christian,” Yes and no. They would have been very happy to replace Christianity with paganism. Conversely, Stalin wrote apologia to the Church, and you should reread Animal farm, paying careful attention to the character of Moses the Raven. The Nazis killed Communists, but nowhere near as many as did other Communists, and one doesn’t even have to get to Stalin to find that out. The Mensheviks were thoroughly loathed by the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, in Germany, the first attempted putsch against Weimar was lead, not by Hitler, but by Rosa Luxemburg, against a social democratic state, which had the effect of licensing the political violence that would come. As regards being anti-Enlightenment, the whole swathe of the post-Marxist left have always been fanatically anti-Reason. Lenin, just as much as Hitler, always prefaced reason with some pejorative, and Stalin dismissed genetics as Bourgeois in the same way that Hitler dismissed much of physics as ‘jewish’.

            Is being “anti-Union” a sure sign of non-socialist thinking? Leon Trotsky, the hero of Kronstadt, would disagree. You mention multi-culturalism: the great levelling movement of Communism aimed at a monoculture. And so on.

            Sorry, you are simply wrong about this. You are building castles in the sky of how the left ought to be, rather than what it actually and provably was and is.

      • MosesZD

        You missed a lot of conservatives in that list and I suspect that your ideas on who supported eugenics, and why, are flawed. It wasn’t a ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ agenda. It was a class/racial-agenda near and dear to the white-upper-crust ‘better than yous’ who practiced social Darwinism (which had nothing to do with Darwin (and evolution) and wrote against the both term and the practice, finding it abhorent).

        Almost a modern form of Calvinism. God loves the rich. He made them superior. Destination. All that kind of crap.

        • ThePrussian

          Well, I did use the terms “left” and “right” there. Eugenics was emphatically championed by the european left. Oddly enough I have found at least some evidence that a significant amount of the early creationists in the US were spurred by fears of the eugenics. But I’d think you would be hard pressed to argue that men like Trotsky and FDR were anything other than men of the left.

          In the final bit you confuse eugenics with “social Darwinism”. If anything, eugenics is a kind of social creationism.

  • http://twitter.com/GerhardPrinslo1 Gerhard Prinsloo

    “I wish this sort of barbarism were a relic of those times, but such talk has not vanished. Only this week we have David Attenborough calling human beings on the planet a ‘plague’. But you can bet your last penny that Attenborough is not volunteering to be one of the ones who decides to ease the burden – and what difference would it make if he did?”

    That’s a cheap shot. He’s not volunteering anyone for death. You’ve picked out the word ‘plague’ for emotional manipulation.

    • ThePrussian

      For the love of… it’s not an isolated case. This stuff runs right through the environmentalist movement.

  • DavidGaliel

    Prussian, can you point us to any belief you espouse, on any subject of social significance, in which you have changed your belief in response to contrary evidence within, say, the past ten years?

    You are so dogmatic it is easy to predict, down to the most minute detail, where you will fall on any given political issue *before* reading your posts. That is not the sign of a skeptic, it is the sign of a true believer.

    • ThePrussian

      I can name several ones. One would be on the death penalty: after seeing the way that this is practiced in fact in the US, I became an abolitionist, the other would be my opposition to the legalization of drugs, at least at this historic juncture.

      Now my question to you: do you ever bother to read anything against your own views, or does your brain simply edit out anything that runs contrary to it? I would love to know. I am still waiting for your response on the previous thread.

      • DavidGaliel

        So, that is why you quickly deleted the comment where you falsely quoted me as stating, “Shermer is a libertarian therefore he’s irrational”.

        • ThePrussian

          No, because I decided to take that comment to the other thread. And that is an accurate precis of both your level and mode of argument, by the by.

          You have “opposing views”. Whoop-de-do. So does any creationist, or follower of David Icke. How about bringing some actual facts to the table or failing that, actually bother to engage with the ones here presented?

      • DavidGaliel

        As for reading opposing views, I’m here, aren’t I?

      • DavidGaliel

        Consistent with that claim of “having done the research” and not being motivated by emotional belief, I note your recent post about how the Jordanian people rejected an attempted boycott of their election registration by the Islamists, and the praise the international observers have for the transparency and accountability of the process.

        Oh, wait. That doesn’t fit into your ideological blinders about the hateful Arabs and their doomed “Arab Spring”, so you haven’t written about it at all.

        • ThePrussian

          Great, so your entire claim rests on my not posting something. I’ve not seen you post any condemnation of the recent EU funding of the BNP, so I assume you are favour of European fascism.

          I post what I read about, and I am particularly interested in Egypt because it is central to much of the region, including such people as the excellent blogger the Egyptian sandmonkey. I’m glad to hear that things are going less catastrophically elsewhere.

          But your repeated attempts to act as though only bigotry could motivate anyone to be be gloomy about the “Arab Spring” (not my term, by the by) have a long way to go before they reach the level of pathetic. Now, are you going to address any of the data I provided on that issue? Well, of course you’re not.

          • DavidGaliel

            You have yet to respond substantively to my original critique of your very misleading post here, a critique that quoted extensively from the article your linked to, showing how misleading your post was: http://www.skepticink.com/prussian/2013/01/10/wear-veils/#comment-762754805

            Instead, as you have here, you cherry-picked the inclusion of an organization – in the *very article you linked to* – in a long list of quotes showing how the thrust of the article contradicts your slant, and erected a straw man, accusing me of supporting that organization and ignoring the substance of the evidence I provided contradicting your post.

            You took the ranting of an obscure ultra-extremist whom even the Islamist organizations dismiss as marginal and presented his comment as evidence of the failure of the “Arab Spring”.

            One could easily cite, say, the introduction by a GOP rep in New Mexico of a bill that would make a rape victim a class 3 felon for aborting “evidence” as proof that “The American Revolution is failure” – if one was inclined to play the same dishionest smear game you play against Arabs in every post you write about the region. But, to do so on this site, rather than on Fox News or RedState, would not be “skeptical” or rational in any way.

            It is you who have yet to admit or acknowledge that you misrepresented that article and events on the ground in support of a biased portrayal of the Arab Spring – just as you have yet to admit or acknowledge any critique of your false equivalency clams here, instead zeroing in and obsessing about eugenics.

            When you start acknowledging, much less addressing, substantive critiques about your actual, on the record posts here, you will be surprised at the substantive responses you will get.

          • ThePrussian

            That is all addressed here:

            http://www.skepticink.com/prussian/2013/01/12/about-the-arab-spring/

            I posted that story because it was in line with a rather larger phenomenon. Now either answer any of that, or stop it. This thread is about left wing and right wing anti-science stances. Any further off-topic posts from you will either be moved to that thread or deleted.

            EDIT: Actually, just deleted. I cannot see a way of moving those comments over.

  • MosesZD

    Even more green resources, such as hydroelectricity, are being blocked by the Luddite left.

    I lived where the salmon fishing on one entire fork of a river was destroyed. One third of the spawning grounds gone to a hydroelectric plant that produces very little energy considering the revenues lost by the commercial fishing industry.

    So, there’s more too it than being a luddite. The issue is that hydroelectic power has huge trade-offs and there are better ways to extract energy that are far less harmless to the environment. But this is an old issue for those of us from the Pacific Northwest who’ve had to live with this dam-building stupidity for most of our lives. So I’ll just copy-paste:

    According to American Rivers, a conservation organization, “by diverting water for power, dams remove water needed for healthy in-stream ecosystems. Stretches below dams are often completely de-watered.” This may not seem like a significant problem until animal species are studied. Birds that have migrated to a specific riparian environment for generations no longer have enough insects on which to prey when the water level drops. If they have few migration alternatives, that could mean the endangerment of species that once flourished. Fish species such as salmon “depend on steady flows to flush them down river early in their life and guide them upstream years later to spawn. Stagnant reservoir pools disorient migrating fish and significantly increase the duration of their migration.” Native populations of fish may decrease or disappear altogether due to temperature changes caused by dams. Slower water flow means warmer temperatures, and bottom-release of cold water means cooler temperatures. Several of hydropower’s disadvantages focus on fish. It is easy to forget how important fish and other aquatic life are, some of which reside at the bottom of the food chain.

    The environmental changes caused by hydroelectric projects may be obvious to the local biologist, but elude the average person. Most people will more readily notice a smoggy haze developing in an area where a coal plant is operating than a smaller population of a particular bird species where a hydropower facility functions. Such oversights lead people to believe that nothing is wrong.

    Hydroelectric companies and organizations often emphasize their “clean” manufacture of electricity and neglect to mention the long-term environmental hazards. “Dams hold back silt, debris, and nutrients.” Silt collects behind the dam on the river bottom, accumulating heavy metals and other pollutants. Eventually this renders the dam inoperable, leaving the mess for future generations, who will either have to remove the collected debris or live with a potentially catastrophic mudflow poised to inundate the area below the dam.

    My grandparents lived there before the dam. My mother and uncle lived there before the dam. Before the dam, the north and south forks of the river would run black with salmon. And, in the summer, steelhead.

    Now, with the damages to the water, the spawning grounds, etc. There’s virtually no salmon on the north fork. The spawns have failed so many times the salmon are nearly extinct in that watershed, though the south fork is still impressive. The steelhead in the northfork are gone with the last time anyone in our family saw one was in the 1980s. The water has been too warm. too often for them for sixty years now.

    And while they do stock the northfork, in the summer, the water is so warm that they get algae blooms and fish-kills. So even the stocked rainbow trout die off because they need fast, cool water with a lot of oxygen. And the dam just doesn’t release enough to keep the river’s water table up.

    Even worse, it’s now lost over 25% of it’s capacity according to California Rivers and Streams: The Conflict Between Fluvial Process and Land Use By Jeffrey F. Mount.

    There are other options. Better options than destroying a hundred thousand (small dam) acres of forest, wetlands and breeding grounds every time you build a dam.

    Geothermal. Solar. The fast-nuclear you mentioned. Wind. I’d take everyone of those 10 times out of 10 before I destroyed the world because I had the mistaken idea that dams were ‘good’ for the environment.

    • ThePrussian

      Thank you for posting this. That’s a very interesting point. It’s of course grotesque that your grandparents livelihood is destroyed like that. On the other hand, I’d say it’s a matter of where the dams are built – in Lesotho, the Highlands Water Project is trying to provide some electricity for the mountainous regions.

      I don’t like wind – it kills too many birds and its ugly as hell – and I have a friend who is working on solar. He says that there are huge problems integrating it into a an energy grid, so for the moment it seems to be restricted to niche markets, such as individual houses and so on.

      But, again, thank you. This is an interesting point.

      • peter

        “I don’t like wind – it kills too many birds and its ugly as hell – and I have a friend who is working on solar.”

        I live near two dams, build on the Peace river in the 60′s and after. The amount of habitat loss is sizable, the amount of organic mercury released from dying trees that were submerged triggered warning of the amount of fish per week considered save for eating.

        Who gives a flying fuck about a few hundred killed birds by wind power, when habitat for Grizzly bears, Elk, Moose, Deer, Beaver, Marten, Blackbear, Porcupines etc. etc. is lost by a dam – that damage is almost irreversible.

        And then ugly – what about all those shoreline that got created and are uglier than a hairless pussy? being constantly torn apart by fluctuating water levels.

        Neither dam, wind or solar are any replacement for transportable energy or base load electricity.

        Run of river projects are less destructive, hydrothermal is another option, although not available everywhere.

        Nuclear energy might be an option, there are some attempts of safer options in the works.

        For transportable energy – it is carbohydrates, baby, and the shale oil and oilsands are where it is, and fuck global warming. That train has left the building already, and even turning back the screw to pre 90′s values now will not help the temperature increase that is coming.

        We will use what is there and I have just the hope that by not destroying the economy by trying stupid measures to severely crank back the use of hydrocarbons (instead tax the stuff) we will buy us time to develop really alternate baseload and mobile energy.

        As soon as we can produce hydrocarbons organically and we do not threaten food production by using non edible products (algea, bacteria utilizing waste wood, organic waste etc) and do not remove arable productive land for this purpose, we can close the carbon cycle – burn what we need and the plants for new fuel will use the carbon again.

        • ThePrussian

          Well, that is why I am a supporter of nuclear power among other things. We need energy from somewhere and nuclear is the best option on the table at the moment. I’m sure it’d be nice to have, say, fusion up and running, but the fact is that we don’t.

          Okay, let’s take global warming off the table for a minute. What about the related problem of ocean acidification? More CO2 means more acidic oceans, means bad consequences. Another way of addressing that is through carbon capture, but a drive towards lower emission modes of energy production is necessary.

          • peter

            Let us agree on one thing first – Hydrocarbons are the most efficient and energetic mobile source of energy in BTUH/Lbs, or Joules per kg.
            And that is what I like to adress. BTW – we produce so much cheap NG where I live, that I am still amazed why some of the shale Ngas is not used for power production.

            Hydrogen production needs heavy investment and redirection of electric energy or heavy investment in not very efficient solar power, and has a relative low energy density compared to hydrocarbons and need heavy and strong containers to contain about 2000psi.
            The solution is to close the carbon cycle of hydrogen combustion by producing ALL hydrocarbons used for mobile energy use through biologic means – algae, bacteria etc. utilizing wasteproducts or plants grown on marginal soils that cannot be used effectively for food production. This way through the use of energy from sunlight we return all the CO2 back into new hydrocarbons. Some energy will be necessary to refine the product, but compare that to e(nergy) in vs. e out in conventional drilling of 1/10 and in the case of oilsands of likely 1/4 or lower.
            With a closed hydrocarbon cycle there is no adding of CO2 into the atmosphere.

          • ThePrussian

            That’s an interesting idea; could you please send me a link to a reference or something on’t? I’d like to do some further reading.

          • Reginald Selkirk

            We need energy from somewhere…

            I hope you will save some effort to criticise the obstinate folks on the right who insist on their “right” to drive gas hogs and use incandescent light bulbs because of “freedom.” Conservation is by far the easiest and quickest way to address the issue of energy.

          • ThePrussian

            Actually, Reginald, that last sentence is a) utter bullshit – there have been studies done on conserving energy in the way you want; it conserves next to nothing (you get maybe a 5% reduction) while being very dangerous; those energy saving lightbulbs are toxic, and b) that idea leaves out the world’s largest environmental problem which is called two billion people in poverty.

            Those people will be lifted out of poverty by only one way: large scale industrialization and economic development. That will take a great deal of energy.

          • Reginald Selkirk

            it conserves next to nothing (you get maybe a 5% reduction) while being
            very dangerous; those energy saving lightbulbs are toxic,

            I presume you’re talking about compact fluorescent lights (CFL), which use several fold less power than incandescents, and pay for their higher up-front cost within a year or so, and which contain miniscule amounts of mercury which is contained in the lamp unless the glass is broken (oddly, you are willing to put up with substantial risks in your other technology choices, and coal-burning power plants also produce mercury, but a tiny amount of mercury in a CFL freaks you out).
            However, LEDs are even more efficient than CFLs, and contain no mercury.
            Since you care so much about the 2 billion in poverty, I will point out that the superior efficiency of LED lighting allows small-scale lighting powered by solar/battery or land crank generators, in locations far off the grid.

          • ThePrussian

            This is simply cobblers. The CFLs are so toxic that they require special instructions for dealing with them. The energy reductions, as I say, you propose would be miniscule, even if you could get people to follow your guidelines, which you cannot.

            In the meantime, something that you singularly fail to address, the Green movement advances a fantastically cruel and illiberal agenda, and is responsible for the direct inflicting of suffering on the poorest of the world.

      • James

        I’ve heard similar criticism about solar and wind power being more of a liability than an asset to the grid, although the death-by-turbine rates for birds aren’t nearly what you might have heard. And even if they were that bad twenty years ago (note that the Altamont Pass turbine farm was an exception rather than the rule, being built in the middle of a major migration path – oops), changes in blade and housing design (to prevent roosting) have reduced wind turbine-related avian deaths.

    • Vic

      There is also the thing that dead biomass which would float downriver is held back by the damn, begins to rot in the lake and creates greenhouse gases (in addition to changing the chemistry of the lake, reducing oxygyn levels, all that nice stuff).

      And that fish swimming downriver get chopped to pieces by the turbine blades. While that may sound like a singular or rare event, on some dams it gets so bad workers have to regularly clean the machinery of dead fish glob, sometimes still spasming.

      http://www.rivernetwork.org/blog/swse/fish-friendly-turbine

      • ThePrussian

        Very interesting point. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

  • DavidGaliel

    Keeping score and arguing over who is more to blame is unproductive, derailing and feeds political bias and divisiveness, rather than uniting people of reason in opposition to unreasonable policymaking.

    As I posted in the original discussion about Schermer’s post by nocrossnocrescent:

    Clearly, we should combat irrational, antiscientific and pseudoscientific claims wherever they appear, and clearly we should champion evidence-based policymaking regardless of the source.

    Just as clearly, the desperation on the part of those whose political biases are non-democratic to push a false-equivalence is neither evidence-based nor rational.

    • ThePrussian

      Well I agree with you on those who are non-democratic, which is why I take the environmental movement to task above.

      Or do did you mean something else?

      • DavidGaliel

        Referring to, much less blanket dismissal of, “the environmental movement” is an astonishingly lazy generalization, sort of like referring to “the democracy movement.

        Of course, a common irrational and logically fallacious tactic is to single out the most extreme examples of something one opposes, and use it to stand for the entire thing.

        So, for example, if I used your blatant anti-Arab bigotry to generalize about “libertarian anti-Arabism”, i might be guilty of the same kind of lazy pseudo-intellectualism. Instead, I merely called you out on the specifics of your personal posts. You responded by focusing in on a single mention in a long list of mutually reinforcing opinions on the issue in Egypt, which all contradicted your own, and then proceeded to attack that source, as if the central argument depended upon it. Moreover, you proceeded to attack me personally, as if that had any bearing on the substance of the critique.

        You do the exact same thing here – obsessing about the eugenics argument while ignoring all the broader and more substantive critiques of the essence of your post.

        The rhetorical style you engage in is anything but reasoned, skeptical or tolerant of dissent. As I’ve noted before, it is more akin to the kind of behavior one sees on the Fox News network, and unworthy of any site that has pretenses of representing skeptical/rational voices.

        • ThePrussian

          To take this in some sort of order, in the first case the voices I mention are rather mainstream. Lovelock. Hansen, Friedman. You rather confirm my point that you would sooner whinge about creationist bigmouths than take on anything with teeth.

          In the second instance, you are once more just lying about any anti-Arab bias on my part. I imagine, had I been skeptical about the “Moscow Spring” back in the day, you would have accused me of “Anti-slav” bias. You have painted yourself into a corner and you are too stupid and arrogant to come out of it on that one.

          In the third, I provided a long, long list of events from Egypt, by no means exhaustive, that made me gloomy on this. You, predictably, never bothered to answer a thing.

          In the fourth case, my commentator brought up the subject of eugenics, something I mentioned only in passing. However, I can back up even passing arguments with facts, something you have not managed to do for the least of your assertion.

          And in the final case, if you find this blog so unworthy, you are free to scuttle off somewhere else and cease wasting everyone’s time.

  • DavidGaliel

    Simple point: Look at the voting record of members of Congress on issues of science and evidence-based policy. Any kind of false-equivalence fails right there.

    That is not to say that magical thinkers do not exist all across the political spectrum. But to deny that the primary forces behind science denialism that affects American lives are not disproportionately on the Republican side – and, even more importantly, that leading science denialists are in leadership decision-making positions overwhelmingly on the Right side of the aisle, is simply counter-factual.

    That being the case, what can we do about it? I submit that arguing, “but there are idiots on the Left, too!”, while true, is not productive. Certainly arguing, “idiots exist equally on the Left” is refuted by the evidence. Which is not, in and of itself, an argument for the Left or against the Right. It is a factual basis that matters when it comes to public policy and voter’s actions.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, as I said when I began this blog, I’m an internationalist. I care much more about anti-science moves that prevent industrialization in the developing world than about the loud mouthed obnoxiousness of certain US politicians. Take Palin, for example. I’m a working scientist, and worked with fruit flies. I don’t think you could find a single working scientist who was even slightly discombobulated by her stupidity and vulgarity. On the other hand, when anti-GM stuff is spread to the point that African states refuse GM food aid because they’ve been told lies about it… that does matter. People die because of this.

      • Vic

        Oh non-existant god, GM food. I have a friend who is a biologist/geneticist and they have a experimental field near the Austrian border.

        They get -regular- vandalism. I’m not kidding. Crops destroyed, windows smashed etc.

        I always hear anti-GM concerns in the newspapers, on TV, on the internet and how they want more research on the effects of GM etc. SO how about you let the scientists do their job then? :/

        I really can’t stand luddites. Environmentalism? Broad movement, very wide spectrum, I grant that. But they surely have some annoying nutters in their ranks.

  • Arcus80

    In these parts the socialists wants to remove testing and grades from school, so there’s that..

    As for leftists being often espousing anti-science views it is certainly true, though in the US it is definitely the rights which are the largest purveyors of nonsense. I think a more important point is, as the Prussian raises, is that leftist anti-science behavior tends to have a larger impact on individuals. Creationism is bad, but it really doesn’t hurt anyone, as opposed to denial of inherited traits that is prevalent on the left. One harrowing example can be found in this video, specifically from 15:30-22 mins: http://vimeo.com/19889788

    • ThePrussian

      I’ll give it a shufty tomorrow, Arcus. Don’t have sound on my home computer.

    • Reginald Selkirk

      Creationism is bad, but it really doesn’t hurt anyone

      I would certainly disagree with you on that, and so would Bill Nye.

      • Arcus80

        Creationism doesn’t physically hurt anyone, unlike leftist dogma. Though that doesn’t mean it’s not harmful to society and should be ignored.

        My apologies for the double negative.

        • ThePrussian

          Watched it. Harrowing is the word. But also infuriating

  • Reginald Selkirk

    The two most destructive irrational pseudo-sciences of the last century, Eugenics and Lysenkoism, were movements of the left.

    You should reconsider and withdraw that comment, it is wrong-headed and unhelpful. Stalinist communism has nothing to do with today’s left-wing politics in either the USA or Europe. You have practically Godwined your own thread.

    • Reginald Selkirk

      p.s. my comment concerns Lysenkosim, not eugenics.

    • ThePrussian

      I’m sorry if I gave the impression that modern left-wing politics endorsed lysenkoism; I certainly didn’t mean that. What I want is to keep the historical prospect in mind.

  • http://twitter.com/JakCharlton Jak Charlton

    Thank you for bringing some reason and a sense of perspective which I failed to do via comments on your “colleagues” post … beautifully expressed

  • Ingemar Oseth

    Prussian writes:

    “I have not forgotten Fukushima at all, the situation where an old and
    decrepit power station, hit by one of the five worst earthquakes in
    human history, caused only one death.”

    Damn! Considering the tens of thousands of people displaced due to radioactive fallout, not to mention the thousands of square miles of land that are no longer arable, your facile dismissal of the tragedy is not just unreasonable, it is unconscionable.

    For the record, the plant’s seawall would have protected it except for the significant drop of the land on which it stood.

    And the total deaths from radiation poisoning will, like those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not be known for some time to come.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, maybe it is unconscionable, but what it isn’t is wrong. Extreme cases make bad law. You don’t have to be indifferent to the suffering caused in the second worst disaster in human history (repeat: Earthquake) to be able to oppose needless hysteria (I recommend that you read Monbiot’s article on the subject), any more than you need to be indifferent to the suffering caused by 9/11 or 7/7 to conclude that a great deal of the nonsense forced on us in the name to terrorism is just so much nonsense.

      And, you make my point for me: that sea wall would have prevented even what did happen, were it not for one of the most unusual natural disasters in recorded history.

      • Ingemar Oseth

        Your lack of empathy is simply astonishing.

        Prussian writes,

        “And, you make my point for me: that sea wall would have prevented even
        what did happen, were it not for one of the most unusual natural
        disasters in recorded history.”

        Your claim is specious in two respects.

        1.) I made my point, which is that no man made structure, including nuclear power plants, are earthquake proof.

        2.) “Recorded history” is merely a blink of the eye when compared to the history of vulcanism and earthquakes. Earthquakes create great rifts, move mountains, and make oceans by moving the earth’s crust. They are one of the powerful forces that have made the world we see today. Your claim that the land movement at Fukushima was “most unusual” is illogical and unscientific.

        • ThePrussian

          Well, what, exactly do you call one of the five worst earthquakes in human history? Normal?

          • Ingemar Oseth

            Prussian writes:

            “If you take a look at this thread, you will notice that claims about my wickedness are singularly unimpressive.”

            As they say in Japan: “Learning is the cure for Ignorance, but death is the only cure for stupidity.”

      • Reginald Selkirk

        Extreme cases make bad law

        We’re not talking about criminal law, but about safety concerns. If you’re not dealing with worst case scenarios, then you are not the person I want designing power plants, or deciding whether they should be built.

        • ThePrussian

          “If you are unwilling to weigh a miniscule risk to the certainty of death for miners every year, then you are not the person I want deciding whether power plants should remain unbuilt”

          See how easy this is?

  • Reginald Selkirk

    I have not forgotten Fukushima at all, the situation where an old and
    decrepit power station, hit by one of the five worst earthquakes in
    human history, caused only one death.

    And yet, before the incident, the government of Japan assured its citizenry that the plant was safe. Some questions you should answer:

    “old and decrepit” – Are other plants, say in the U.S., any safer? Most of our plants are quite old. Many nuclear plants are located on coasts or rivers because they need the cooling water.

    “Five worst earthquakes in human history” – Doesn’t it make sense to plan for worst case scenarios? hasn’t our knowledge of earthquake risks improved since the time the U.S. was building nuclear plants? Specifically, consider the risk of tsunamis in the Pacific northwest.

    “caused only one death” – This is remarkably naive. Immediate deaths would include only severe radiation poisoning and deaths to to physical accident. It would not include lives shortened by cancer which might not show up for years or decades. By concentrating only on deaths, you are also ignoring the cost and disruption of lost power and mass evacuations.

    • ThePrussian

      “Most of our plants are quite old” At least part of the reason for that is that the construction of new ones is blocked. The law of unintended consequences is the one piece of legislation that is always passed.

  • Reginald Selkirk

    He’s a little behind on the times: the
    new generation of nuclear power plants consume spent fuel and render it
    relatively harmless after decades rather than hundreds of millennia

    Or maybe you’re a little ahead of the times. Can you point to an example of such a plant in operation? It looks to me like someone is proposing an idea, which has not been approved or built. The proponents tell us it will be very safe, but I have heard that one before somewhere. So on the strength of this unproven idea, you are claiming that the waste disposal problem is solved.

    Also, the nuclear waste problem concerns more than just spent fuel. Purification equipment, containers, pipes and tools all pick up low levels of radiation from contact with the fuel during processing or use. The radiation level is lower, but the volume of contaminated equipment is much larger than just the fuel. And it will be radioactive for thousands of years.
    Your naivety is boundless.

    • ThePrussian

      The naivety here is coming from someone who is worried about the incidental radioactivity in equipment (which will not, by the by, be dangerous for thousands of years) but apparently believes the great volume of already extant nuclear waste can be stored safely for tens of millenia.

      • Reginald Selkirk

        but apparently believes the great volume of already extant nuclear waste can be stored safely for tens of millenia.

        You have this very bad habit of making shit up and pretending that I said it. I don’t like conversing with assholes like that.

        Bye bye.

        • ThePrussian

          Bye bye indeed. Tell me, did you have any particular alternative proposal for dealing with nuclear waste? Or were you relying on the power-flounce?

  • http://www.facebook.com/gojaejin Jeremy J. Goard

    Does it make me a neo-eugenicist that I would support an immediate, extensive program to develop human cloning techniques, clone perhaps 50 people from each of 1000 top scientific/mathematical minds, and subsidize their surrogacy and adoption?

    Certainly I don’t expect all of these people to replicate the success of their respective donors, but it’s certainly far more reasonable than what we currently do, which is to think that new education/recruitment techniques are going to greatly promote important breakthroughs in the next generation.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, the first thing to note is that the problem with eugenics was the whole forced sterilization-racism-murder-genocide thing. On the other hand, there is at least one eugenic policy which everyone here will agree with, which was the drive to providing clean hospitals and clean environments for pregnancy that were causing so many birth defects, especially among the working class.

      That said, regardless of what it is called, it is not right, not just to experiment on human beings. And what if you don’t find surrogate parents? And what if you do? Those fifty babies will be human beings, distinct individuals as twins are distinct. Imagine a child born like this having to live his entire life under the constant expectation of living up to one of humanity’s geniuses. And what if _none_ of those children become the super-geniuses? I mean, quick: name me one of Einstein or Darwin’s children who’s achieved something amazing. Meanwhile, many intelligent parents have stupid children.

      Per-se, there’d be nothing wrong with a couple or a single woman deciding on having a child with X DNA anymore than it’s wrong for women to specify the kind of sperm she’d like. Nor, once the tech comes in, would it be bad for parents to have GATTACA style fixes, anymore than pre-implantation screening to get rid of cancer-risks or similar.

      The thing is to keep this in the realm of the real. Meanwhile, if you are interested in a more practical intelligence enhancement, I invite you to look at the research of my colleague Roi Kadosch over at Oxford. Paramagnetic deep brain stimulation causing real, provable intelligence improvements, enough to scrub out discalculia etc.

      • http://www.facebook.com/gojaejin Jeremy J. Goard

        Very unscientific and incurious response, I’d say, coming from an admirable skeptic such as yourself.

        “And what if you don’t find surrogate parents?”

        That’s what a major public campaign is for.

        “Those fifty babies will be human beings”

        Of course they will, and will not lack any rights as individuals. It’s 50,000 babies, BTW.

        “distinct individuals as [identical] twins are distinct.”

        In other words, not very distinct at all, compared with fraternal twins, let alone two randomly selected members of the population.

        “Imagine a child born like this having to live his entire life under the constant expectation of living up to one of humanity’s geniuses.”

        Imagine having to climb into one of these horseless carriages and zip along at 60 miles per hour every day, just to get to work! Imagine that anybody could just call you at any hour of the day, even when you were on your lunch break! We get over that shit.

        And the “expectation” is far less than 100% or even 50%, but it’s far, far greater than for an average random-DNA individual.

        “And what if _none_ of those children become the super-geniuses?”

        Zero out of 50,000? Then decades of very good science will have been seriously challenged, and what we learn from that will help us tremendously moving forward. Plus, we’ll still have tens of thousands of people with well above-average intelligence, in other words far more likely to be the engineers, researchers and doctors that our education professions are always obsessed with (inefficient ways of) increasing.

        “I mean, quick: name me one of Einstein or Darwin’s children who’s achieved something amazing.”

        ROTFL. Charles Darwin’s grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, and his first cousin was Francis Galton! That doesn’t prove anything, of course, but twin studies do. Identical DNA is very, very different from a child, fraternal twin or non-twin sibling.

        • ThePrussian

          To phrase it another way then, what I am principally concerned about is the idea of treating people as means to an end, rather than an end in themselves. As I say, if a couple chooses on it’s own to select for certain DNA, that’s their concern.

          Of course, at the moment the point’s moot, since with current techniques, clones would be born with horrible defects.

          • http://www.facebook.com/gojaejin Jeremy J. Goard

            Your concern would take us far afield into a deontology vs consequentialism discussion, and also a closer analysis of how much agency violation is involved in having a comprehensive education policy. Do such notions as “molding an educated, curious, well-rounded and socially responsible human being” violate agency exclusively with respect to the “nature” factors? Or are we educators already committed to a comparable level of agency violation on the “nurture” side, because of what we have reason to expect are good consequences?

            It’s definitely not a moot point, though, because we have never aggressively tried to perfect human cloning, and have good reason to believe that there is no deep reason preventing it from working well, just a lot of engineering details to be worked out. Since I’m explicitly comparing cloning of great minds to our educational attempts to increase the number of great minds, allow me to suggest that 0.1% of the U.S. national and state education budgets would have cloning ready to go in the blink of an eye.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Pamela.Wilson.Law Pamela Wilson Law

    In regards to Ms. Archuletta’s comment, I am curious as to the reason that she said that the U.S. would not be building any more hydroelectric dams. Perhaps it is because dams are environmentally destructive, re-routing water from natural catch-basins such as wetlands, or preventing fish and other wildlife from following their natural migrations. I agree that hydro power is attractive because, after constructing the dam, it seems that the inertial force of falling water is “free”. As an atheist, I use logic and reason to look at all sides, all pieces of evidence to form my opinion. I believe that portion of this narrative was not an effective addition to your argument.

    • ThePrussian

      Well, fair enough; though I’d suggest taking a look at discussion thread about hydro power here with peter & MosesZD. It’s a matter of where you put them and who bears what cost if they are or aren’t built.