Science 2.0

Something happened last night that you don't see very often - almost all of the polls were right. Nearly everyone predicted the state electoral results correctly and that, my friends, is truly rare. 

A few months ago, before Monsanto and DuPont realized Proposition 37 may have been started by anti-science crackpots but it was not going away and I was one of the few critical of it, I would have predicted GMO warning labels to win by 66% - because that is the percentage of Democrats in California and while Republicans get attention in science media for being 'anti-science' due to global warming, the actual anti-science positions that are dangerous are bastions of the left.

In his 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” in addition to making the government more transparent and accountable. Millions rallied to his cause. Four years later, how has he done?Unfortunately, not well. On a whole host of issues, Obama has placed politics before science. We will examine just three of them: vaccines, the BP oil spill, and “Cash for Clunkers.”Obama vs. Vaccines

Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008.  So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful.  They were vindicated, the age of scientific projections had arrived, in a baseball cap.They thought that because they don't understands polls or statistical models.

In 2008, I was as excited as anyone about the chance to correct some public relations mistakes made by the Bush administration in the nascent years of blogging.  Obviously some of the 'Republicans are anti-science' stuff was because when you are far left, even the middle looks like the right, but Republicans had done no favors to themselves by 'taking the bait' on topics like hESC research.  What had been a reasonable, bipartisan position on human embryonic stem cells in 2001 (traditional conservatives were actually all for it, more religious types among both Democrats and Republicans were not) became a simple partisan divide when it was revisited two more times and Bush shot it down despite Republicans overall being in favor of it. 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science did something that was so obvious it was a surprise to find out they hadn't already done it - they formally came out against labeling GMO foods.

If you get rich suing people, your days going after Big Tobacco are basically over. The tobacco companies have been sued for everything by now and the people who still smoke know what they are doing, and the risks, and they are willing to pay an ever-increasing amount of taxes to fund government employee unions. We can't really blame corporations for that any more. Luckily, the food industry could soon take its place. Not because they have done anything wrong, but rather because we live in a culture where a dizzying cross-section of people assume anyone working for a corporation must be unethical. And creating nuisance laws that make it possible to sue over labels without actually having any evidence of harm are a dream for litigation attorneys.

In 1987, unthinking, primitive pre-GMO breeders exploited an abandoned shelter cat in Montana, with no one to defend it, for their own nefarious ends when it was discovered that this feline pawn gave birth to a curly-haired kitten. The kitten was then raped by a Persian male and gave birth to a mixture of curly-haired and normal-haired kittens, resulting in a horrible mutation that was now dominant over nature: its presence on even one of the two copies of the gene involved was suddenly sufficient to cause cats to have curly hair. (1)

OpenStreetMap, an alternative to Google map data, has had a lot of success but can't agree on what direction to go next, say those in the know. An odd problem for people who make maps, right?But at least they are having fun trying. When I was young, the only sort-of controversy in maps was 'fairness' to third world countries.  We didn't say 'developing nations' back then, we said 'third world', just like people who were trying to foment dissent in a country were called 'fifth columnists' but now we call them 'humanities professors'.

If you think global warming deniers are anti-science about the environment, take a look at environmentalists.  While the former are only anti-science about one thing, environmentalists are increasingly on the wrong side of lots of science issues.Journalist Fred Pearce is an environmentalist and a journalist but even during the real nadir of science journalism, the mid-2000s, he was never an advocate or a cheerleader. He always asked the uncomfortable questions, even about people whose side he was on, and he brought new science issues to light while doing it. He has been right for doing so, because scientists are in the forefront of environmentalism, not environmentalists.

Kroger, America's largest supermarket chain, announced it will stop selling sprouts because of their "potential food safety risk". It joins retail behemoth Walmart, which stopped selling them way back in 2010."After a thorough, science-based review, we have decided to voluntarily discontinue selling fresh sprouts," Payton Pruett, Kroger's vice president of food safety, said in a statement that USA Today got.

Since spot weather events are once again proof of global warming, reversing the trend of 2007 to 2011 when we were told that local weather was not evidence against global warming, it's time to think about the upcoming Ice Age - because we are having a big storm in the northeast, weeks later than when we had a giant snowstorm in 1980 Pennsylvania that knocked out our power for a week, so NYC media writers desperate for pageviews say it must be due to climate change.