Your Friendly Neighborhood Liberal
Music Appreciator. Book Slayer. Immigrant. Critical Thinking Advocate. Artist. Super Skeptic. Progressive Liberal. Atheist
Bill Nye to CNN: “The two sides aren’t equal’ on climate change
Science educator Bill Nye on Monday told CNN that they weren’t doing the public any favors by giving climate change deniers equal airtime because ‘the two sides aren’t equal.”
“There are a couple of things that you can’t really dispute,” Nye explained to CNN’s Carol Costello. “Sixteen of the last 17 years have been the hottest years on record. That’s just how it is.”
“I appreciate that we want to show two sides of the stories — there’s a tradition in journalism that goes back quite a ways, I guess — but the two sides aren’t equal here. You have tens of thousands of scientists who are very concerned and you have a few people who are in business of equating or drawing attention to the idea that uncertainty is the same as doubt. When you have a plus or minus percentage, that’s not the same thing as not believing the whole thing at all.”
The Washington Post noted on Sunday that scientists had been warning for years that because of warming weather and severe droughts, Colorado’s “table was set” for monster wildfires like the ones currently sweeping through the state.
“It is because of the heat ultimately,” Nye told Costello. “Just two years ago, it was was wet in Colorado and there was a lot of growth in forests. And then you can say they should have responsibly cleared that growth — it’s a difficult thing. So then two years later when it’s especially dry and the forest flora gets especially dry and then there’s a lightening strike, the fire is that much more intense than it would have been.”
“But the people who are politicizing this issue, they seem to be winning because not much is being done on the issue of climate change,” Costello pointed out.
“If you’re a voter consider taking the environment into account as well as the economy,” Nye advised. “I think the two candidates running for president right now have different views about the validity, for example, of science and the importance of it and what you would do about climate change in the coming years.”
“We in the science education community chip away at this problem all the time. We have an enormous population of people in the United States that don’t believe in evolution, the fundamental idea in all of life science. It would be like saying, I don’t believe in earthquakes or something. The analogies are disturbing.”
Earlier this year, a Media Matters analysis determined that coverage of climate change had dropped by 80 percent on U.S. broadcast networks between 2008 and 2011.
Watch this video from CNN’s Newsroom, broadcast July 2, 2012.
Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!
(via bellaquerida)
Rush - Chemistry
I bet Geddy Lee is an atheist…… Hell yeah
Pretty much every state in the US has been introducing and passing awful, anti-science, anti-woman legislation, but two states in particular have recently been locked in a heated battle for Worst State Ever: Tennessee and Arizona.
How black holes grow
Evidence indicates they eat binary star partners. — Published: April 3, 2012Artist’s conception of a supermassive black hole (lower left) with its tremendous gravity capturing one star (bluish, center) from a pair of binary stars, while hurling the second star (yellowish, upper right) away at a hypervelocity of more than 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h). The grayish blobs are other stars captured in a cluster near the black hole. They appear distorted because the black hole’s gravity curves spacetime and thus bends the starlight.Credit: Ben Bromley (University of Utah)
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Holy shit, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Kansas raising the bar for bullshit peddling once again. Kansas, you can’t just put ‘Intelligent’ in front of a word to give your religious nonsense an intellectual platform to peddle it with. Even the dumbest of people will soon start catching on.
(via godless-apostate)
Fox News Baffled By The Moon
When you go on Fox News, you have to talk to them like preschoolers, and affirm them that science is real countless times. Climate change connected to volcanoes erupting? what? /sigh
*I like how Bill corrects the guy when he says “million years ago”
These are the best
Scientists have long drawn connections between the decline of the ancient Maya and environmental catastrophes, especially drought. Deforestation linked with farming could also have triggered disaster — for instance, reduced tree cover of the ground would have led to loss of fertile topsoil by erosion, as well as greater evaporation of water by sunlight, exacerbating drought.
Moreover, archaeologists have pointed out that ancient Mayan societies may have been vulnerable to collapse by their very nature. They apparently funneled wealth to a small ruling elite topped by hereditary divine kings, who had virtually unlimited power but whose subjects expected generosity — a string of military defeats or seasonal droughts could greatly damage their credibility. The stability of this system was further threatened by polygamy among rulers, spawning numerous lineages that warred against each other, overall generating conditions ripe for collapse.
“Researchers from the University of Rochester and North Carolina State University have for the first time sent a message using a beam of neutrinos — nearly massless particles that travel at almost the speed of light,”
And they pushed the message — which simply spelled out the world “Neutrino” — through “240 meters of stone” (787 feet).
That’s right, as Live Science puts it: “For the first time, scientists have used neutrinos — the exotic fundamental particles that routinely pass right through Earth — to send a message through the ground.”
