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Politics and 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Frogbeater writes "The producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is accusing the National Science Teachers Association of being in the pocket of Big Oil because she can't get preferential treatment for her film. The entire situation is turning into a 'if you're not with us, you're against us' yelling match. Regardless of the viewpoint, is it even possible that science can remain apolitical? Has it ever been?" The Washington Post makes things out to be less than above board: "In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school ... NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called 'Running on Oil' and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called 'You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel,' a shameless pitch for oil dependence."
From the above link:
Or if that's not enough, how about this from NSTA directly:"Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters."
Me - 1
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
.... Seriously folks, there have been big corporations and governments trying to influence the way schools go with everything from computers to food. Advertising brought into schools to get kids to buy things. Special interest groups spending money on things schools need to get a new generation of consumers interested in them.
Try:
* Discounts from Apple, Microsoft, etc on computers (I'd link, but I'm going to go with this as a given...)
* Coca-Cola
* Book It (Pizza Hut)
* A growing trend of commercialization of sporting events and buildings
* Large amounts of money being spent by religious lobbies to support Creationist teachings in schools....
* Large amounts of money being spent to promote evolution as a science teaching in schools
* Politicians getting involved in the above 2 items
* Politics derailing attempts to get anything done about improvments in materials and course work.
Where there is money and future political mindsets involved, people will spare no amount of money and/or stupidity on all sides of a debate. It's really too bad that politics and ideology wars have to get in the way of doing what schools should be doing, give the kids the ability to think for themselves instead of telling them what to think.
Just to add and what a cursory review can turn up:
Junkscience.com
The most visible public activity of TASSC [The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) was an tobacco-industry-funded lobby group which promoted the idea that environmental science was "junk science", which should be replaced by "sound science" more favorable to corporate interests] was its support for the Junk Science website run by Steven Milloy, who describes himself as the "Junkman". Milloy denounces research on environmental issues such as climate change, pollution and public health as junk science if it produced results suggesting a need for public intervention or regulation. He promoted the idea of sound science, interpreted in practice to mean science favorable to corporate interests.
Adverse publicity about Milloy's links to Phillip Morris were followed by his departure from the Cato Institute, where he had been an adjunct fellow, at the end of 2005, and the removal of links to junkscience.org from the Cato website. However, Milloy remains influential as the science columnist for Fox News.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advancement_of_Sound
Why would you laugh? An oil slick really will evaporate over time. It happens every day in the Gulf of Mexico where oil literally rises to the surface from the sea floor.
Immediately after the laughter, your science teacher could have made the important point that the results of experiments often conflict with what our intuition suggests.
Maybe because the NSTA themselves admitted it? As a previous poster pointed out: "Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place 'unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.'"
How in the hell can anyone be stupid enough to think that's NOT a political motive? ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Can you guess where the maximized profits are going?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Taken to the limit, this means that a company will take any action neccessary to secure and guard profits.
You totally misunderstood Friedman's point, probably because you never read Friedman, but instead took the quote out of context.
First of all, in the section of his book where he makes the quote you pulled, he's not talking about how companies do behave, he's talking about how he thinks the should behave. Friedman argues that corporations engage in all kinds of frivolous charity, making donations to causes and such, and that they should stop. Instead, corporations should return those profits to their shareholders, and let the shareholders make charitable donations as they wish.
Second of all, Friedman didn't believe that corporations should take any action necessary to secure profit. His understanding of corporate responsibility is the commonly-accepted, rational one: corporate businesses, like all businesses, individuals, non-profits, clubs, or other human agencies, should obey the law equally. In other words, if corporations take less-than-optimal actions, and they're not breaking the law, you need to change the law, not the corporation.
Your interpretation is akin to saying that Winston Churchill was a big supporter of Hitler--it's the exact opposite of the facts.
I know very little about climate science (my total exposure is what I gather from Scientific American and some other rags), but I would point out that you are comparing two very different things. In the case of global warming, they are trying to model the amount of CO2 contained in the entire system (Earth), whereas in hurricane prediction they are trying to model a very complex process in a very specific region of the system (the Atlantic seaboard). They also know exactly what happened to their model - an unexpected El Nino - and when they plug that into their model, it more closely matches what actually happened this season.
:)
I suppose that you could argue that some unforeseen event will occur that dramatically throws off the CO2 model, and most climate researchers would probably agree with you. However, I'm not really into depending on a natural disaster blocking out sunlight. We should probably do something about this ourselves.
One could also argue that we're going to run out of stuff to burn pretty soon, so all of this is just academic anyway
And in a billion years, the sun's intensity will increase - rendering the planet uninhabitable no matter what we do, and no matter who controls congress (the otters?). Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Both the dust and the el niño effect were likely caused by global warming
No, the el niño is periodic thing that's been happening for a very, very long time, and is considered a natural coupling of the ocean and atmosphere with a predictable recurrance. Whether any larger change in global temps has anything to do with how it interacts with other weather patterns is a separate issue, and not at all clear. But it is not "caused by global warming." That's complete BS. Likewise, the dust from Africa exists because the Sahara desert has been there for 2.5 million years. Dust storms blowing out to sea are completely expected, and happen all the time. We're just now getting the regular use of imaging tools and computer models that help us to understand how readily that hot bowl of dust impacts Atlantic storms. The Sahara is as dry now as it was 13,000 years ago, but has gone through numerous huge fluxuations in wetness and vegetation unrelated to "global warming" as that phrase is now used. Unless, of course, you consider the last ice age - things were cooler, then, and the Sahara desert was much larger, drier, and dustier than it is now.
What about the 2005 hurricane season? It was also global warming that caused that.
What are you talking about? We have a hurrican season every year, and we're in the middle of a cyclic 25-30 year peak, which has been going on for thousands of years and is most likely tied to solar variation. Further, the number of storms reported in 2005 include storms that never came ashore - seen (and thus counted) by satellites that we've only recently had at our disposal. During a previous cycle (say, 100 years ago?) the dozen or so Atlantic storms that we saw stay out to sea might also have been there (or been more frequent), but they'd never have made it into the statistics that we now generate because they would have gone unobserved.
Take a deep breath, how about.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
maybe you should actually look into some climate research.
No, Global warming did not predict 15 hurricanes hitting NYC this year.
Some Scientists be believe that one of the effects of warmer global temperatures could be more and stronger hurricanes.
This is one effect that may be caused by global warming. There are other effects that Might be caused by global warming including :
* more drought
* more floods
* desertification
* loss of productive farm land
* more extreme weather changes in local areas
All of these effects are predictions of what might happen because of global warming based largely on data and simulation. Some effects are more widely accepted then other effects.
but what is OBVIOUS is that
1. we now have more carbon in the atmosphere then at any time in well a really long time.
2. CO2 is a green house gas
3. Global temperatures are starting to go up
If Carbon emissions are left unchecked by 2050 we will have twice the pre-industrial age level of carbon in the atmosphere. and there is a good chance we won't be be able to slow them down fast enough to avoid massive temperature increases. Every time in earths history the climate has radically changed the dominate life form on the planet became extinct. Guess what species is the dominant life form this time.
--meh--
You can mod that funny, but eugenics was considered a scientific endeavor at during the '30s when the KKK was at it's peak. Many people simply took it as fact that white people were genetically superior to other races. It is an apt comparison, though most people wouldn't agree because global warming is "real" and eugenics is "fake".
No, no, not bible-beating rednecks, well-heeled industry shills! And that stereotype exists largely because there's a well-documented conspiracy to debase science and muddy the waters on behalf of said industry. (There's an analogue for creationism as well.)
You're welcome to question global warming, just as you're welcome to question the theory of evolution. It gets old when the same tired crap is thrown out time and again, designed not to advance anyone's understanding of anything, but to sow public confusion and doubt.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca