The Inflation of Infantile Denialism

I felt that the below article was worth re-posting here, especially after just having watched Jesse Ventura’s ‘documentary’ on the global warming conspiracy - give me a break…

The below was written by Steven Newton; the public information project director for the National Center for Science Education. It originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 12/24/09.


Science denial is on the rise
From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists - those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself.

Recent foment over stolen e-mails from a British research group inspired an American creationist organization to pronounce that "a cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media" has sought to "professionally destroy scientists who express skepticism" about climate change. The Discovery Institute usually uses this kind of over-the-top language to attack evolution, so it was remarkable to see it branch out to climate-change denial.

Despite such misleading hyperbole, science is meritocratic. Once at a minimum level of education and competence, anyone can participate, ask a challenging question of even the most respected scientist, or submit papers to scientific journals, where research is judged by the data and methodology. Esteemed scientists face relentless criticism. This is how science works.

Even when a scientific consensus based on evidence emerges - as it has for evolution and climate change - there is opportunity for dissent. As the great physicist Richard Feynman noted, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Science requires conclusions about how nature works to be rooted in evidence-based testing. Sometimes progress is slow. But through a difficult and often frustrating process, we learn more about the world.

Science denialism works differently. Creationists are unmoved by the wealth of fossil, molecular, and anatomical evidence for evolution. Global-warming denialists are unimpressed by climate data. Denialists ignore overwhelming evidence, focusing instead on a few hoaxes, such as Piltdown Man, or a few stolen e-mails. For denialists, opinion polls and talk radio count for more than thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles.

Denialists often appeal to the ideal of fairness, arguing schools should "teach the controversy" and address "evidence for and against" science, as in then-Sen. Rick Santorum's proposed amendment to the No Child Left Behind bill in 2001. But they apply the ideal selectively to science they dislike: evolution, climate change, vaccines. They hope to cloak themselves in the mantle of science without being restricted by its requirements.

If denialists had evidence disproving global warming or evolution, they could submit it to scientific conferences and journals, inviting analysis by scientists. But, knowing their arguments don't hold water, they spread misinformation in arenas not subject to expert scrutiny: mass-market books, newspapers, talk radio, and blogs.

Understanding science has never been more important than it is today. Critical issues such as climate change and the threat of newly evolved flu strains demand greater scientific literacy among the public and politicians. As long as scientists must squander their time defending their work from denialism, we will fall behind on our fundamental responsibilities.

Rick Santorum: the High Priests of Darwinism went berserk

Another Science Lesson from Rick Santorum...

I think that I ruffled Rick Santorum’s feathers. Last week I published an article in which Christian fundamentalist and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum was used as a metaphor to dispel one of the commonly held misconceptions about biological evolution. In that post, “What an Unlearned Presidential Hopeful can teach us about Evolution ,” Santorum’s science illiteracy was presented as a ‘proof’ that humans do not occupy the top rung of an evolutionary ladder. On Thursday, just five days later, Rick Santorum published an opinion in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he argued that evolution and climate change are ideological beliefs used to indoctrinate children and to promote socialism.

At first glance, I thought that the appearance of Santorum’s ‘science based' article a mere five days after mine was coincidental, but then I read his closing, “In some respects, the case for evolution is improving: We may indeed have evolved to the point where we can detect hot air of a different kind.” Now, I may be reading into this a wee bit, but Santorum’s metaphorical use of humans evolving towards an improved state suggests - to me at least - that he read the article here (or at the Faster Times). In addition to his closing lines, Crazy Rick also used the Philadelphia Inquirer as a soapbox to defend his 2001 “Santorum Amendment” that was criticized in my previous post. In his own defense he explained that his “teach the controversy” based amendment was initially well received by the Senate, but then, the next day “the High Priests of Darwinism went berserk” with assertions that there is no controversy. With the “berserk” assertions of scientists, the tides turned, dooming the amendment – luckily for us.

In Santorum’s new post, “The Elephant in the Room: Challenging science dogma,” he argued against science generally, and both evolution and climate science specifically. Far from being bound by conjecture, Santorum brings what he believes to be hard scientific facts to bear in disputing the “ideology” of science. Here are his facts:

“A recent Gallup poll found that only 14 percent of Americans agreed that "humans developed over millions of years" and "God had no part." A Zogby poll this year found that 78 percent of Americans agreed that schoolteachers "should teach Darwin's theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it." The same poll also found that 86 percent of self-identified liberals agreed that "teachers and students should have the academic freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific theory." But the scientific "community" claims there is no controversy, and that debate should be banned. …only 37 percent of respondents agreed that man is causing global warming in a recent Rasmussen poll.”

That’s Santorum argument; scientific facts should be determined by opinion polls, not by scientists! So, in addition to disproving the notion of human evolutionary perfection, Santorum has now taught us how to employ incorrect reasoning. To hold a proposition as true simply because many people happen to believe it, is a logical fallacy - argumentum ad populum.


Incidentally, Crazy Rick’s numbers don’t give the whole picture. Setting aside for a moment the fact that ‘belief’ has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality or what is true, consider and compare the below 2009 Gallop statistics to those provided by Crazy Rick:

Overall ‘Belief’ in Evolution - Rick's Stats Only Show Atheist

‘Belief’ in Evolution by Level of Education

‘Belief’ in Evolution Cross-referenced to Knowing Darwin


‘Belief’ that Humans are Factors in Climate Change (View at Gallup)

Just for the fun of it – Here’s Belief in Witches, Astrology and Haunted Houses

Then, after irrationally linking popular belief to scientific validly, Santorum goes on to produce even more nonsensical non sequitars; he correlates climatology and global climate change to a socialist conspiracy!

“It is one thing for ideologically driven science to indoctrinate children in classrooms. It is another for politicians to use science to destroy national economies and redistribute global wealth. I refer, of course, to the latest scientific non-controversy, man-made global warming.”

How can one argue with that kind of reasoning? What world does Rick Santorum live in?

In closing, there are about 15,000 independent school districts in the United States and although science education standards are gradually improving, there is still much work to do (check-out the US standing below, listed as #2 from bottom). Rick Santorum, his minions, and others like them are out there, actively working to insert creationist propaganda into textbooks and classrooms – stay watchful! As can be read from the above tables education is a critical factor in promoting rationality.

(source)

Scott, E. (2009). Science Standards Evolve Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2 (3), 538-540 DOI: 10.1007/s12052-009-0153-0

Hints of a Catastrophic Paleoclimatic Event from Manny the Mammoth

In an effort to gain insight into the challenges posed by climate change, I just spent the last couple of hours watching the animated feature film “Ice Age 2 – The Meltdown.” The plot of the cartoon centers on a group of anthropomorphized prehistoric mammals (a mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, sloth and a halfwit saber-toothed squirrel) as they flee an impending flood and their certain extinction. Interestingly enough, the floodwaters in the movie purportedly result from a period of global warming and the associated thawing of their fictional ice-aged world. Initially, the characters in the film celebrate the rising temperatures with lakeside antics, but their clowning around comes to an abrupt end when they realize that their short-term fun-in-the-sun will inevitably end with substantial losses in lakeside real-estate, an ecosystem on which they’ve come to depend.

All considered I enjoyed the cartoon; mostly because of its paleoclimatological accuracy. Well, maybe it wasn’t all that accurate, but the underlying theme wasn’t too far-off…

Parallels between the feature and the real paleontological past can be glimpsed when consideration is given to the thermal fluctuations and water linked extinctions portrayed in the film. To explain, the impending floodwaters in the movie were precariously dammed by a mile-high glacial wall. It was the gradual disintegration of this frozen barrier that established the dramatic timeline for the lead mammals escape from danger. The waters bound by the glacial front had accumulated through the receding of the glacier itself, and should the wall be breached the waters would be freed to reap havoc. Although such a physical setting may seem a bit far fetched, it just so happens that between 12,900–11,500 years ago similar lakeside conditions may have contributed to the extinctions of numerous North American mammal species.

Characters from the ‘Ice Age 2’ ; glacier and glacial lake (Lake Agassiz?) in background.

During the Wisconsin glaciations about 12,000 years before the present, a massive continental ice sheet covered most of what is today the United States and Canada. As the Wisconsin came to a close, rising temperatures instigated its receding glaciers to form a colossal lake; roughly centered on modern day Manitoba. The lake was uniquely positioned in such a way that a combination of topography and its inclusive glacial blockades trapped the discharge of meltwater. The glacial melt, being unable to drain, resultantly accumulated in a water body that covered nearly half of a million square kilometers – Lake Agassiz. As in the animated movie, once sufficient hydrology was achieved to overcome its restricting geography and ice, the water was released in a catastrophic flooding event of incomprehensible immensity. However, unlike the cartoon’s scripted drama, the direst impact to fauna 12,000 years ago wasn’t the risk of drowning; the biggest consequence of the flood was its affects to global climate.

The enormous quantity of water released from the rupture of Lake Agassiz’s glacial banks, as opposed to flowing directly southward, chose to exit by way of the Saint Lawrence River. Following the St. Lawrence, the freshwaters moved eastward and into the North Atlantic. Once in the North Atlantic, the vast icy water cooled the warmer North Atlantic Current, and rapidly diluted the saline gradients that help drive its heat-conveying waters. Known as thermohaline circulation, variations in ocean water density create flow patterns that convey heat from regions proximal to the equator to those areas located more pole-ward; the constituent variations in density are brought about by surficial heat and saline content. The rupture of Lake Agassiz impacted the thermohaline circulation of the North Atlantic Current, altered heat transfer to the northern hemisphere, and drastically changed the Pleistocene climate of the North American Continent. The rapid climate change associated with the Lake Agassiz event is known as the Younger Dryas stadial (a ‘stadial’ is the name assigned to a period of cooling temperatures).

During the Younger Dryas stadial, mean annual temperatures throughout large portions of the Northern Hemisphere plummeted by as much as five-degrees Celsius. The drop in temperature caused some regions to re-glaciate, despite what had until recently been a warming trend. Climate change forced ecosystems into flux, and likely contributed to the extinction of several genera of mammals – The End Pleistocene Extinction Event.

The End Pleistocene Extinction Event marked the end of the road for some of the characters portrayed in the Ice Age movie, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, mastodons and similar mammals. As a matter of fact, a recent article in Science collaborated the extinction chronology for more than 30 genera of Pleistocene fauna; the study used data from FAUNMAP to determine that the extinctions occurred nearly simultaneously.

Although much is known about the Younger Dryas stadial, its exact contribution to the End Pleistocene Extinction is still largely a matter for debate. Complicating the issue is the immigration of Clovis people into North America at about the same time that the Younger Dryas was putting a strangle-hold on the climate. The Clovis may have participated in the mammals’ disappearance through hunting – the Overkill Hypothesis.


Faith, J., & Surovell, T. (2009). Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908153106