Presidential Snark

Ahahaha:

Official White House Response to "Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016":

This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

That's awesome, I don't care who you voted for.

Sports vs Science

With all the Rugby World Cup coverage going on at the moment, which I'm more interested in than I thought I'd be, I keep coming back to a point made by physicist Sir Paul Callaghan on Radio New Zealand's "Mediawatch" (at about the 22 minute mark):

You could imagine what would happen if a sports commentator made a mistake about a score, or the track record of a particular player. They'd be deluged with complaints, because they're dealing with an expert audience out there, and sports commentators treat their audience with respect.

And that's why sports commentators are some of the smartest people in the media. They're the ones who have to think on their feet, and they've got to get it right. That's kind of a benchmark. If we could all be as good as sports reporters and commentators, we'd really have a fantastic media.

What he doesn't say explicitly is that we also need an "expert audience" for science - people who are interested in and educated about science issues - which underlines the need for good science education.

Science, Technology and Freedom of the Press

I knew there was a reason I haven't completely written off my former career in information technology. From Wired.com:

Scientific advancement never happens in a vacuum.... The broad and effective communication of science is essential for public understanding and support of the research enterprise. ... Any region hoping to be recognized for innovation needs an independent press corps that is able to seek out truth, without interference, while providing a conduit for exchange between science and the rest of society.

More broadly, the article pinpoints my gut feeling that the reporters and scientists I admire share the same intense curiosity about the world: "Good journalism, like good science, thrives on openness and a respect for truth based on evidence."

That, and they tend to be nerds. Let's just be honest.

Interview: Paul Gilding on "The Great Disruption"

Original post at The Lumière Reader as part of their coverage of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

After 35 years of activism and social entrepreneurship to address climate change and sustainability, including a stint as head of Greenpeace International, Paul Gilding has reached a stark conclusion: “We need to forget about ‘saving the planet.’”

In The Great Disruption: How the Climate Crisis Will Transform the Global Economy, Gilding argues that not only is it too late to avoid a global crisis, but that the crisis has already started. Since the financial meltdown of 2008 we’ve seen rising food and oil prices, new evidence of ecosystem collapse, extreme weather and wildfires, all in the face of an exponential increase in world population and energy consumption.

It’s now a simple matter of maths, physics and system dynamics: our global economic footprint is past the limit where our planet can support it. “We didn’t change,” Gilding says. “So now change will be forced upon us by actual physical consequences” – including energy and food shortages, refugee migrations, and widespread geopolitical conflict.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but Gilding has clearly been through this debate countless times and from countless different angles, and he’s gathered plenty of evidence to back him up. I had quite a few “Yes, but...!” moments as I read the book, only to have them persuasively addressed several pages later.

The real sticking point of The Great Disruption is whether we can follow Gilding through to the confident “Let’s get to work!” attitude he eventually reaches. After all, he says, after a few million years the planet will recover from the worst we can do to it. Our job is to muster up the courage, compassion and innovation that is necessary to revolutionise the economy and save our civilisation, and he believes that humanity is up to the challenge.

A few weeks into his international book tour, I called Paul Gilding in New York City to find out what makes him so sure.

ScienceGate

Okay, this? Is driving me up the wall.

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports. [...]

[T]hough they say each revelation itself is small, they worry that the continuing string of them is damaging the IPCC's credibility—not just with experts who question the premise of human-induced climate change, but with the public at large.

I’m definitely angry with the scientists at the IPCC. I’m counting on them to be the rational reliable people in this debate and it does nobody any good when they cut corners and don’t own up to mistakes.

But what really gets me is that every time scientists do admit to a mistake, no matter how minor it ultimately is, the anti-science crowd start screeching at the top of their lungs. This disproves the entire theory! It’s all a conspiracy! Environmentalism is nothing but a cult!

Of course this makes massive headlines, which is all the deniers really want to do – not address the evidence or improve our understanding, but simply shout the whole thing down. And in the meantime scientists have to run around trying to convince the public that they're not evil, instead of focusing on scientific issues that really do need scrutiny and debate.

For the last time, nutjobs – true science is not a religion. It does not attempt to define the great cosmic Truth of the Universe. Science is about gathering evidence and creating, as best we can, a series of models that explain how the world works. If you find a mistake, you fix it. If you want to scrap an entire model, you come up with a better one. Those are the rules. If you’d paid attention in high school Chemistry class, you’d know that.

Gawd.