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Smithsonian 'Toned Down the Science' In Climate Change Exhibit
An anonymous reader writes "According to an International Herald Tribune article, the Smithsonian pre-emptively toned down the scientific content of a climate change exhibit put into place last year. The changes, including removal of scientist conclusions and muddying of displayed data, were made to ensure that the exhibit would not offend the Congress or the White House. Pressure brought to bear by Institute officials resulted in the resignation of Robert Sullivan, a sixteen year veteran of the organization. 'This is not the first time the Smithsonian has been accused of taking politics into consideration. The congressionally chartered institution scaled down a 1995 exhibit of the restored Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, after veterans complained it focused too much on the damage and deaths. Amid the oil-drilling debate in 2003, a photo exhibit of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was moved to a less prominent space.'"
It gets massive government funding, so you don't want to piss off the funders. Also, anything that is socially or politically charged is always toned down nowadays in the bigger institutions. You get the occasional out there displays, usually from smaller places trying to make a name for themselves.
It's like newspaper reporting now- skimp on the facts and give some conclusions, maybe put in a few emotional bits. Good luck trying to find objectivity, anywhere, anymore.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
You should. Before accusing the US government of polishing up its record, check out what the kind, benign, "Hello Kitty" modern Japan is doing.
The annexation of Korea? Peaceful merger agreed upon by both countries.
Colonization (and attempts of same) of the rest of Asia? Defending the fellow Asians from the racist Europeans. (Yes, the same government, that for decades continued to deny citizenship to Koreans in Japan is accusing someone else of "racism")...
Murder of civilians? Impossible — because Japanese soldiers are the most disciplined in the world (and always have been, you see).
Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the shrine, there are shrieks of him, allegedly, "honoring the war-criminals". That's not true — the handful of criminals there are in a tiny minority among the people, who died furthering the government's conquests without committing any crimes.
It is the justification for the conquests presented in Yasukuni (and I was only able to see the English versions of them, native versions are, likely, even more extremist), that we should be objecting to...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
By most accounts, and I've talked with curators at the Smithosonian about this, Small was a terrible leader of the organization. He apparently did bring a lot of money into the organization, but you didn't see any evidence of this behind the scenes at the museum. Instead, he had almost $50,000 spent on furniture for his office, $15,000 spent on the doors at his house, spent $160,000 spent on renovating his office at the Smithsonian castle building, and by using his house to host a few Smithsonian functions, was given $1.15 million dollars in housing allowances. All your tax dollars. Not to mention, his total salary for 2007 was supposed to be $915,000- nearly a million dollars, more than the president and vice president combined. Meanwhile, science seems to have taken a back seat at the Smithsonian, and I suspect the scientists threw a party when he finally resigned. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/03/18/AR2007031801369.html
But Small is just one symptom of a much larger problem, which is appointing incompetent hacks to important government positions, and pushing politics over facts. This is what happened at FEMA with Heckuvajob Brownie. This is what happened in Iraq, when the White House sent over people who had the proper Republican Party credentials, but not the credentials to do the job; it's one of the major reasons the occupation there has been such a disaster. The problem has been summed up pretty well by the phrase, "the triumph of the hacks over the wonks". See, the wonks are the policy guys, the analytical guys who can analyze the facts and tell you what you need to do in order to achieve a desired outcome. They are the political equivalent of a computer geek, except they write policy instead of code. The hacks are the political guys, the guys who don't give a shit what the facts are, they are only there to push their party agenda. And this administration has favored the hacks over the wonks, so the result is that facts get shoved aside by politics, whether it's climate change, or the debatable effectiveness of "abstinence-only" education, or the infamous case of General Shinseki getting sacked by Rumsfeld after he said we would need several hundred thousand troops to effectively occupy Iraq.
Gore has done more for the environmental movement in recent years, especially in terms of global warming, than arguably anyone else. The science in his film is sound, and while he does use the worst case scenario, many more people are aware of the issue because of it. It's not Gore that fosters the image of "wild-eyed-cool-aid drinking nut jobs," but his far right-wing opponents.
If exaggeration is the quickest way to lose an argument, why do the opponents of global warming continue to hold their ground? They repeat arguments that have been disproved, and slam people like Gore with dismissive rhetoric. How do the minds of reason address that?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Please put the Kool-Aid down slowly...
I'm a conservative. There is absolutely zero link between a conservative ideology and a disbelief in science/global warming. Additionally, there is zero link between conservative ideology and support of the (very anti-conservative) war in Iraq.
Republicans create a belief system out of a bunch of utterly unrelated ideas (abortion, global warming, gay-bashing, racism, social security 'reform'), then apply the conservative label to it. Then morons who can't think for themselves but who are Republican say, "Gee, not believing in global warming is conservative, and believing in global warming is liberal!" In fact, there are both liberal and conservative ways of seeing both views.
The truly conservative viewpoint is that it doesn't matter whether global warming is real or not -- we must act as though it is a reality. Why? Because doing so will:
1) End our oil dependence (our 'addiction,' as chimp in chief says), and therefore mostly removing our active financial support of terrorism.
2) Ensure that the U.S. is a leader rather than a follower on environmental initiatives. The world -- including the U.S. -- is getting greener, and there's lots of money to be made on environmentalism. We can make some of that money, or we can give it all to those who choose to capitalize on our science (since tech advances tend to come from the U.S.)
Republicans have consistently proven over the past 25 years that they are not generally conservative. Democrats have proven that they tend to be centrists, rather than liberal. There is nothing conservative about Neo-cons.
Here in Europe, where I live, in Africa, where my mother lives, in Australia, where my sister lives, the climate has obviously been changing over the last one and a half decades.
When I got to Europe in 1986, there was snow in winter on the local hills near to Zurich here in Switzerland so that kids could go skiing almost all winter, and people said they were used to that. Since then, the winters have gotten progressively warmer until there is often no snow on those local hills anymore long enough for more than one or two days of skiing, the whole winter. The summers have been starting earlier and earlier, so that this last April, the warmest EVER in HUMAN MEMORY, I was in a short sleeves in very warm sunny weather. In 2003, Europe had the hottest summer EVER. Last october, was the second hottest EVER recorded. The mountains in the Alps are losing their glaciers VISIBLY, not just in some geeky scientific measurements. The permafrost holding many of the highest together, is melting, causing massive landslides.
South Africa, where I come from, has gotten progessively warmer and drier in the same time. The high plateau inland down there, which at no point is below 1000 metres above sea level (about 3300 feet for the metrically challenged), didn't used to get much warmer than around 30 degrees Centigrade (86 Fahrenheit) in summer due to the altitude. In the summers now, the temperatures have regularly started to reach 36 degrees centigrade.
Australia, where my sister lives, is having one of the worst if not the worst drought the country has ever experienced, so much so, that scientists are beginning to think it might actually be a climate shift, i.e. it might be semi permanent.
What fucking blows me away, when climate change is pretty obvious to the naked, dumbass eye, without needing to see scientific measurements, is that some people are still fucking disputing this. I'm not talking about Greenland or Antarctica or northern Canada, since I don't live there. I'm talking about stuff that I can see. It blows my mind that so many here dispute it. Is there no such obvious change in America? Or is it that Americans spend so much of their lives in air conditioned houses that they don't notice?