GOP and Climate Change

Climate change is happening and we are steadily going to reach the peak production possible for oil, these are facts but they are facts which many, most common among those on the right (this does not exclude everyone on the left nor does it apply to everyone on the right), try to deny, see here. This is why I was glad to see this story late last night in which outgoing Republican Rep. Bob Inglis (SC), a member of the House Science and Technology Committee, chided his colleagues and incoming chair of the committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), for denying climate change.

There are people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they’re experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly.

I am glad that Rep. Inglis is supporting science but it is unfortunate that this support of actual science was probably one of the things that did not get him reelected, he lost his primary to a Tea Party candidate. It is sad what many people think about education in this country. The G.I. bill, which allowed vets from WWII to get a college education, is one of the reasons that we became a great country but now it has come to this:



Sometimes I worry about our future.

VOTE!!!!

This is a repost of this post from October 6th but I just wanted to make sure that everyone who hasn't voted does.

Coming up in November the U.S. is holding our annual elections. This year is as important as every year to make sure you get out and vote. Now some of you may be asking yourself, why is he posting this so early? Well the answer is quite simple, I know there are a lot of people out there who will be away from their permanent residents on election day due to being at school and what not. I wanted to remind all of these that there is a way to go about voting. One option is to declare your residency in the area where you are currently going to school but for many of you this just will not be possible for any number of reasons. The other option, and the one that inspired me to write this post, is the absentee ballot. Every state has an option to fill out an application form for an absentee ballot but you need to make sure that you do so shortly. I received my ballot in the mail on Monday and this will allow me to participate in the voting process even though I will be attending school over a thousand miles away. So no matter who you vote for or if you have to vote absentee make sure that you do.

UPDATE: It is too late to submit your absentee ballot but make sure you vote my absentee ballot has long since be submitted.

VOTE!!!!

Coming up in November the U.S. is holding our annual elections. This year is as important as every year to make sure you get out and vote. Now some of you may be asking yourself, why is he posting this so early? Well the answer is quite simple, I know there are a lot of people out there who will be away from their permanent residents on election day due to being at school and what not. I wanted to remind all of these that there is a way to go about voting. One option is to declare your residency in the area where you are currently going to school but for many of you this just will not be possible for any number of reasons. The other option, and the one that inspired me to write this post, is the absentee ballot. Every state has an option to fill out an application form for an absentee ballot but you need to make sure that you do so shortly. I received my ballot in the mail on Monday and this will allow me to participate in the voting process even though I will be attending school over a thousand miles away. So no matter who you vote for or if you have to vote absentee make sure that you do.

Why we must teach evolution

Now while I said that I would try to avoid talking about politics sometimes in order to support science and science education it is important to say something. Keith and Dr. Steven Pinker are absolutely right in this clip, minus the ad-hominem at the begining but that was cearly meant as a joke.

NASA and the future of Science

So I should have blogged about this about a week and a half ago when President Obama first unveiled his budget. Anything dealing with the President and the budget will be perceived as political so I am going to have to flirt a fine line here I know.

So when the President unveiled his budget for this upcoming year one of the major programs taking a hit was NASA's attempt to return to the moon and then their eventual plan to go to Mars. Now while I understand that this is a trying economic time, I am a grad student after all, these programs risk doing damage to the number of young kids who we are drawing to science.

Let me explain my reasoning. In the 1960s the US had one enemy who was in one place, the USSR for those of you who don't know/remember/really should go take another history class. Well in the early '60s President Kennedy challenged the American people to get safely to the moon and return to the Earth. This challenge was not taken lightly by the American people and the scientists of the US and in 1969 we DID land on the moon, no matter what some people might have you believe. This inspired many of the people growing up at that time, my parent's generation, to have an interest in science and while not always a complete understanding they were at least interested and respected it.

In the '70s NASA's budget was cut we had accomplished our mission why do we need to keep funding this mission. This continued until the 1986 Challenger disaster in which more money was briefly increased in order to increase the safety of the shuttle missions. Finally through the '90s and 2000s anytime that it seemed that some budget needed to be cut it came from NASA and in many ways this is one of the causes of the Columbia disaster in 2003, wow has it really been 7 years.

I mention this because the current leads in science were brought up during the prime of NASA's space exploration. This most likely led to them going into and being interested in science. While many of these scientists are still young enough to do research there has been a fall off in the number of students being interested in science and this will be visible in the number of researches in mine and future generations.

So why did I mention the new NASA budget cuts? Simple these return trips to the moon and eventually to Mars would draw people into science that may not have been interested in science the same way the original trips to the moon brought people into science in the '60s.

Do I understand why the President did what he did? Yes, we need to keep ourselves safe etc. Do I have actual solutions? Make space feel more open to private companies. Privatization will make the technology cheaper to get into space which then NASA and universities etc can use to get themselves into space to open it up to scientific exploration. Cutting the funding to these programs however is not the way to do that and will probably set NASA back more than the year that the actual budget will financially effect. As with the space shuttle disasters cutting money now will cost us more money later! I welcome every one's comments tell me how wrong I am or how right I am or whatever you have to say.

And so it continues

So PZ kind of mentions this article briefly in one of his posts today, and that story is crazy in itself, but I figured I would say something quickly about it especially after having blogged about this very issue a couple of days ago.

So what else is there to say about this article? Well it shows what banning books can do to you. You start with just books then you get to authors then you finally mess up ban the wrong author and you say whoops but don't do anything about it. So why did they ban this author's children books?

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Ok so you banned him because of an misunderstanding...Whoops! But wait why should we ban books that are, "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system?" Shouldn't these be the types of books that we encourage students to read? Why shouldn't we know what communism was actually about or why not consult a first hand source to see how Hitler rose to power? I am not arguing that these are good ideas just that the best way to prevent things like them from happening again you have to be able to understand what they were trying to do. Although this does mean that you will have to think critically and we all know how you feel about that don't we David Bradley...I think it was something like, "This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook," yeah that's it. But wait it gets better:

Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, R-Spring, when she made her motion and comments about Martin's writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.'s listing on the Borders .com Web site as the author of Ethical Marxism. Leo's note also said she hadn't read the book.

"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ' ... It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,' " said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.

Neither one has read the book how do you know what it says. Leo later in the article says that she didn't recommend there be a motion put forth it was more of a oh here is something interesting e-mail. So now the author of children's stories was placed on the banned authors list.

There is something called common sense use it. You should not be putting a book with explicit sexual reference in an elementary library. But why shouldn't a similar type of book be in a high school library? I mean by the time most children get to high school they know about safe sex etc...wait no this is Texas we teach abstinence only. The Texas Board of Education is not only making the state of Texas fall behind in education but they are dragging the rest of the country down with them. None of you are experts in any of these subjects, most of you are from the far religious right, listen to the experts they know what they are talking about and yes I know this goes against the "American way" of questioning authority but what you are doing is rejecting facts in place of your personal religious beliefs. If you are a voter in the state of Texas make sure that when you get the chance vote for people who use logic and reason, this includes the governor's race this spring and fall make sure you know how they feel on supporting science and reason.

Update: Sorry apparently I forgot to spell check when I published this earlier

Textbooks and politics

I am a Yankee through and through it makes it a little weird at times living in West Texas, to be honest I feel really out of place a lot of times. But if many of those living here in Texas had it their way they would control everything. The main people doing this are very much the religious right. What may come as a supprise to many is how much control Texas has over the textbooks that students around the country use. This is because when their standards are written the state itself chooses the books. Texas is the 2nd most populated state in U.S. and with all of the schools using the same books this is a huge number of books. This means that many publishers write their books to the Texas state standards and don't rewrite them for another state or school district. With this background information I figured I would pass along this article I came upon a couple of days ago showing the history of the far right's take over of textbook standards here in Texas that have been causing a stir amongst educators from over the entire U.S. This is an interesting read and shows why so many of those in higher education here in Texas are so vocal about going against what the board says. Things like this in particular:

There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as “unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the following morning before the other board members even had a chance to read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got spanked,” he added.

It is things like this along with the state standards for science and the potential ones for history that only show the US as being right in all of their decisions and founded as a christian country. Both of these are wrong ideas. The U.S. has made mistakes in foreign policy along with domestic policy. Showing these wrongs and teaching why they are wrong is what makes us a better country and better people in general. And there have been enough people that have pointed out why we are not a Christian country that I don't feel I even need to address the idea of seperation of church and state.

Anyway I def suggest that you check out the article it is important that we all know what we are up against both here in Texas and throughout the rest of the country.

But it's cold...

So I have blogged about greenman3610 before (see here, and here) and I know I seem to really push every video he does, it couldn't be because he addresses concerns that anger me in a very eloquent way could it. In his latest video he addresses the common misconception that just because it is really cold outside right now that must mean that global climate change is wrong:



So while we are on the subject PZ Myers blogged about this a couple of days ago (and of course I can't seem to find his post exactly to link here) and I thought it was very interesting. PZ pointed out that the person writing this article is in fact a restaurant critic, so enjoy this article as well.

EDIT: So this is why I couldn't find the article on PZ's blog I actually found it on Rationalwiki's what's going on in the blogosphere section, by bad!

Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship

Potholer54 continues refuting those people who cling to the recent e-mail hacking incident as evidence against global warming in his newest video and since I posted his last video (here) and greenman3610's last video (here) and after my post yesterday/earlier today (here) I figured I should pass it along as well:

Why we must tread carefully with climate refrom

So I just finished up my work for the semester and made it home yesterday so I might have some free time over the next few weeks to put some posts together, assuming I can come up with some topics.

This week wrapped up the Copenhagen climate conference in which only very little was accomplished. But I don't really want to discuss what happened there to be honest you will never get most of the developing countries to support something like that until you make it cheaper than just dumping the trash in the ocean, so to speak, and for this reason I think the US needs to take the lead in this attempt to clean up our actions. We have done this before when polluting of water was a major problem and now most countries realize it is wrong it just isn't something they can easily change. We need to set the example!

But, you might be saying that is not what you have as your title to this post. You would be correct and that is because of the economic problems we will face with a sudden drastic change in the way we produce power/drive/etc. The US transport and power industry is currently based on oil/gas and coal if we all of a sudden said no you can't use those any more because it is destroying the world well we will destroy our economy in the process it is currently too expensive to buy the alternative energy sources. I often think that many scientist forget about this cost and that is really too bad but I think most humans tend not to care as much about those who aren't us, so I don't think it is just a scientist thing but I know we do it and think that it should be easy to change things.

So what do I suggest we do, since it is one thing to say something is wrong but we should always be able to provide solutions to the problems we point out? Well we should start by funding alternative energy solutions. The current government subsidies go almost exclusively to oil/gas and coal. Why not scale back a little on that funding, thereby increasing cost and making it less desirable to the average person, and send that change towards alternative options. The strides that have been made in solar and tidal etc have been slowed by lack of money but yet they have occurred.

But the government shouldn't be the only one we as consumer's should demand cleaner resources etc. Vote with your wallet, drive less and walk more, turn off lights when you leave a room, (in honor of the massive snow storm on the east coast) shovel your own snow you don't need a snow blower, all of those things that we have been preached at to do we should. Yes it won't always be easy but it can be done but I do realize that you can never please everyone:

Smacking the Hack Attack

Write a paper of watch youtube videos and post a quick blog article? We will go with the second one.

Ok so yesterday I posted the video posted by potholer54 so today I was glad to see that greenman3610 decided to comment on the hacked e-mails as well. So I will let him take it from here:



So at least these two should help clear things up.

Those hacked e-mails

Ok still busy working on the end of the semester hopefully after the next two weeks I might be able to blog a little bit more.

Anyway I am sure you have all heard about those hacked e-mails from the climate change experts. Well the right here in the US has been holding up a couple as proof that it is just a conspiracy. So Potholer54 did some research and shows that well maybe they don't say what we have all been told they say.



Interesting eh?

Obama shouldn’t be silencing opposition

I want to start by apologizing for not posting recently studying and writing has been getting in the way of that, I should be studying now but I don't want to so I'm not.

This post won't be about science like normal and while I said don't want to talk about politics in here well sometime you can't escape it. I came across this story while reading the paper this morning. Now maybe I am a masochist but whatever it I always read the opinion portion of the paper and that is when I came across this. So I read the headline and decided to go ahead and read it.

The article started to annoy me right from the start:

Among the many volatile threads common in the current administration, there is one that is especially troubling. That is the repetition of the attacks our president and his media representatives have repeatedly made against any voice that dares counter his own.

We saw this when they set up a White House Web site for citizens to report any suspicious or contrary information about health insurance during the summer. We saw it when they unleashed havoc on Fox News for daring to criticize President Barack Obama. And we saw it when the administration decided to let loose another attack. This time it battled Edmunds.com over its criticism of the cash for clunkers program.

Ok the White House did not set up a way to report people who were lying, and there were plenty of lies, during the summer they just wanted to know about misconceptions about the health debate so they could correct them in speeches etc. Next how did they unleash "havoc on Fox News"? All they did was refuse to be interviewed by Fox News I would too if they were calling me these type of things:



But you know what I'll give you a chance lets see how you summarize the Obama vs Edmunds argument:

To sum up the squabble quickly, Edmunds claims the administration failed to deliver the facts about each “clunker,” costing taxpayers $24,000, and although it boosted third-quarter sales, the fourth quarter, which is traditionally the worst season for car dealerships, will report abysmal numbers at best.

This administration reports, in contrast, the excitement of an inventive vehicle program drew in purchases that previously would not have happened. What they fail to say is this is highly unlikely for those who did not qualify, which is a greater percentage than one would initially think and during the CFC program, prices on vehicles actually rose.

Really that is it they disagree on what is going to happen in the future? And how is this silencing the opposition? Last time I checked we were allowed to say what we want and we were allowed to disagree in none of the things that you quoted did the Obama administration stop anyone from saying anything. You can speak your mind and guess what he is a citizen of the U.S. so he can...speak his mind too heaven forbid it disagrees with what you think.

I will let you read the rest of the article if you want but he pretty much goes on to say that Obama is wrong and that he doesn't let us use free speech but there is one last thing I want to discuss from the article:

The First Amendment states American citizens have liberty in the areas of the free exercise of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly and to redress grievances before government. This is a statement that ought to take primacy in the lives of our leaders.

Guess what Obama is an American citizen and has the right to say what he thinks as well but even more so find me one instance where Obama has stopped any of these. Where the Tea party protesters allowed to protest? Yup. Are people still allowed to practice whatever religion they want? Sure. Do people call Obama a Nazi/Hitler? Yup. Has it ever been stopped? Nope. So you and he disagree on political issues, what did I expect living in West Texas, but that doesn't mean that you are being oppressed in what you can do/say.