HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
When you think "Hamilton" in 2019, you think $800 tickets to a Broadway show in Manhattan, and when you think Manhattan, you think urban wealthy elites and the denial of science that seems to go with it.Not so for "Hamilton" producer Jeffrey Seller and Broadway photographer Josh Lehrer, who are instead funding efforts to use science to clone and plant 100 of the world's oldest and largest trees, called Champion Trees. Like California Redwoods.
From herbicides to vaccines to pollution, there is a science consensus but there are still pockets of people who refuses to accept them. They are bolstered by disinformation campaigns. When it comes to food or what car to drive, the difference is higher cost or kicking the pollution can down the road for future generations to solve, but vaccine denial is harming people with immune issues right now.
Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison.What did peasants in the 17th century understand about science that modern environmental scientists lack? Skepticism. Modern academics are armed with gavage tubes and cell cultures, and in those, any "toxic chemical" can change hormones.While I write this, the coffee I am drinking changed my hormones. It's detectable. Have you seen the LD50? It's 10X as toxic as glyphosate, which activists and trial lawyers are suing over in California. (Yes, they are suing over coffee also, California is a good state for anti-science beliefs)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says autism diagnoses went up 43 percent from 2010 to 2014 in New Jersey
You may recall seeing public outrage over Mylan's Epi-Pen recently. The company had successfully convinced everyone that anaphylaxis was routinely killing kids with allergies and so they needed an epinephrine pen everywhere they went. Corporations desperate not to get shamed on Twitter jumped on the bandwagon and started putting them in as a marketing expense. Then Mylan raised the price for consumers. It caused a Congressional investigation and the public blamed Big Pharma.But it's a generic medicine. Big Pharma greed did not cause that issue, the government did.
A new statistical analysis in Injury Prevention found an association between county-level income inequality and the number of firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. Higher rates of firearm homicides were statistically linked to greater income disparity, they highlighted that this was especially persistent among African-American populations, where the firearm homicide rate was almost 10 percent higher for every 0.04 greater value of the Gini index, a common measure of income inequality.
In 2014, in outlets as diverse as Science 2.0, the Chicago Tribune, American Thinker, and the American Council on Science and Health I began debunking "pre-diabetes" as a fake designation for a non-disease no one else in the world accepts.
Is there something in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields that penalizes new parents? Perhaps. An analysis of longitudinal survey data from U.S. STEM professionals collected between 2003 and 2010 by the National Science Foundation finds that 43 percent of new mothers and 23 percent of new fathers leave STEM fields within seven years after the first baby arrives.
If you are in science media and I mention names like Bill McKibben or Naomi Oreskes, how you react to hearing those names tells me how you probably vote.Some things are that clear. And because they are so clear, it is instructive to discuss how choosing an umbrella on one issue can actually undermine acceptance among the public by others. Climate change is the only science that Oreskes and McKibben seem to accept; most other fields are dismissed as corporate conspiracies. Chemicals are bad, GMOs are bad, it's all bad. Only the doomsday prophecy that the engine of business needs to stop right now is a consensus they accept.
Citizen science has existed for as long as science. At one point, being an amateur was actually more prestigious than doing science as an occupation, in the same way the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes was considered superior to the police, because he did it as passion rather than blue collar occupation.Though bird watchers and amateur archaeologists still exist, and amateur astronomers are likely on par with paid government scientists when it comes to new discoveries, citizen science has become more widespread than ever, and that is all thanks to "gamification" of science; making scientifically tedious work fun for people who are passionate, but who aren't going to turn it into careers.
Academics and their conspiracy-minded followers are always the first to suggest that anyone who debunks their claims must be shills for Big Evil, but Science 2.0 gets no money from any polluter (and in the past, when I have challenged academics who insist Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy by offering to show the donor list in return for a bet that would be a tax-deductible donation if they lost, none have taken me up on it) (1)Here is the problem. They write, for example, that Between "1970 and 2017, combined emissions of six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 73%, while the U.S. economy continued to grow, Americans drove more miles and population and energy use increased" but then claim it is now rising.
Many American journalists have dispatched any pretense of objectivity, according to a new think tank report.
