Skepticblog

As I discussed in a previous post (April 11), the people who deny anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have many similarities to creationists. Despite the fact that the reality of AGW is supported by a 95% or greater consensus of qualified climate scientists, the critics (mostly non-scientists, or scientists in fields that do not qualify them to assess climate science) keep on repeating the same false tropes over and over again, no matter how many times they are debunked. This is analogous to the shopworn old arguments of creationists, who invariably trot out fallacious arguments like “evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics” even though it has been corrected hundreds of times by scientists. The creationists have such a strong denial filter to resolve their cognitive dissonance that they either don’t realize why their “Second Law” argument is invalid, or they are deliberately and deceptively using it over and over again because it impresses their scientifically illiterate following.

The same is true of the long-debunked example of cherry picking, “It hasn’t warmed since 1998″ (see my April 11 post). Another common false statement is “The planet warmed just as much during the Medieval Warm Period, but eventually it cooled down again.” They argue that if this warming preceded our modern injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then maybe our current global warming not caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Climate deniers repeat this old saw over and over again as if it’s somehow a devastating blow to the huge body of data about our recent climate changes. They often illustrate it with the anecdotes about how the Vikings could colonize Greenland for a while, then as climate cooled in the late Middle Ages, these colonies failed when Greenland became too cold again. The story about the fate of Viking colonies in Greenland is true—but the rest is not.

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When you hear creationists argue their cause, sooner or later they reach into their standard litany of debunked arguments. One of their favorites (since it sounds convincing to their largely math-illiterate followers) is to point to the complexity of a molecular system or the cell or any other part of nature and “how could such a complicated system arise BY CHANCE?” The bigger implication is that they cannot fathom humans and their religious worldview being produced by anything other than a supernatural creator, so chance (as they misunderstand the concept) cannot produce it. The same argument underlies much of what the “intelligent design” creationists claim as well.

There are many versions of this argument, all of which are equally fallacious. When I debated Duane Gish at Purdue University in 1983, he was using his favorite line of his whole spiel, stolen from the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle (legendary for being wrong on nearly every thing he argued, including Big Bang cosmology and his attacks on Archaeopteryx and evolution). In Gish’s version, he argues that the probability of random evolution assembling the complex system of life was as likely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 (which shows how ancient this punchline was).

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Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), held in Long Beach, California, from April 21-25. 2012. Although I have done lots of consulting with oil companies over the years, have taught the basics of oil geology all my career, and have many former students working in oil companies, I’m still primarily an academic geologist. Normally I attend the Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting each fall, which is the principal professional meeting for nearly all academic and research geologists. However, it was important for me to attend this AAPG, since I’m currently President of the Pacific Section SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), and had to chair an Executive Committee meeting, judge student posters for our Cooper Award, and present our Lifetime Achievement Award as well. But each time I attend the AAPG meeting, I’m immediately struck by the huge differences between it and more academic conferences like GSA.

The most obvious difference is MONEY: the exhibit area for AAPG is HUGE, and filled with gigantic expensive booths from many of the major companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton. These booths have mini-lecture theaters with multiple big-screen displays where they give free seminars on their methods, thick plush carpets, potted plants, free food and drink, and fancy furniture—all for less than 3 days that the exhibits are open! Professional registration for this meeting is expensive (since most oil geologists make MUCH more than academic geologists, and the oil companies pay their employees to attend), and the dress code is also suits and ties for men (it’s much more casual at academic conferences). You can just smell the money at the meeting, and see lots of geologists hungry to learn techniques so they can jump to a more profitable position in their company, or go off and get rich as an independent (all of whom have smaller booths there as well).

The second difference is the emphasis of the meeting. At GSA, nearly 6000 attendees give more than 4000 talks or posters, 20 talks every 15 minutes for four straight days plus hundreds of posters. By contrast, for the same attendance there were only 5-6 20-minute talks at any given time at AAPG in less than 3 days, and the majority of the attendees didn’t present anything. Their job is to do whatever their company pays them to do, not churn out new research results to present at a meeting every year, like academic geologists must. Most AAPG talks tend to be very narrow and describe details of one particular oil field, not independent research into general principles of geology that academics are trying to decipher. Finally, the demographic differences are striking. Academic geologists are nearly 50% women now, and they are distributed across all age classes. Oil geologists, by contrast, are nearly all old white guys in their 60s or older, with a lot of young men (and a few women) just recently hired in the business. The entire generation that would now be in their 40s and 50s is missing because of the attrition during the oil busts of the late 80s-90s. (continue reading…)

As someone who has frequently had his scientific research featured in the popular media, I’m painfully aware of the constant struggle between conveying science accurately and trying to make it sexy and newsworthy. Scientists are perpetually frustrated because reporters are often scientifically illiterate, and reduce the story to a level they can understand—which totally misrepresents what the science is about. The science reporters I know are equally frustrated at scientists who don’t know how to communicate the essence of what they are doing, or who are aloof and uninterested in making the public more aware of the reasons why their tax dollars should support pure scientific research. I’ve had my work oversimplified or misrepresented many times, and I’ve seen the work of others completely butchered by incompetent science reporters. I’ve also seen scientists who make outrageous claims and trust gullible science reporters to buy it, hook, line and sinker—and this happens FAR too often (see my April 4 post about the coverage of a ridiculous claim by an amateur that dinosaurs were aquatic, or my Nov.2 post about gigantic Triassic squids arranging ichthyosaur bones).

One of the problems both scientists and reporters face is how to make the research sound interesting to a lay public that knows almost nothing about science—and much of what the public thinks they know is wrong. Much of chemistry and physics is incomprehensible and uninteresting to people that never took a single class in high school on physics or chemistry, and even something more immediate like biology is full of subjects that are obscure to the lay audience. Geologists usually have it slightly better, since topics like earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, climate change, etc., are easier to relate to.

We paleontologists usually have it even easier, because a few of us work on something immensely popular—dinosaurs—although I’m really a Cenozoic fossil mammal specialist and only rarely has my research ventured back to the Mesozoic. Just add dinosaurs and the research goes to the front page of most science news websites or The New York Times, or gets published in high-profile journals like Nature, Science, or PNAS. But when I make an important discovery on a group such as rhinos or peccaries or camels, I’m lucky to get it published in a third-tier journal, and I typically get no reporters calling at all. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs generated huge interest when the asteroid impact theory first emerged in 1980, with thousands of papers published and dozens of books on the topic. But it’s only the third or fourth largest extinction in earth history. The great Permian extinction 250 m.y. ago, which wiped out 95% of species on earth, is lucky to get ANY press attention. Who cares about productid brachiopods, or fusulinids, or tabulate or rugose corals, among the many victims of this event? (continue reading…)

Having taught for 33 years at small nationally-ranked liberal arts colleges (Vassar, Knox, and Occidental) where teaching is a priority over research, I’ve seen pedagogical fads come and go. It seems like every 2-3 years the college brings in some pedagogical “expert” to tell us experienced professors that we were doing it all wrong for years, despite the excellent responses and teaching evaluations that we receive. I’ve sat through endless committee meetings and workshops where they try to get us to follow their “one size fits all” approaches to pedagogy. In some fields where discussion of everyday experience is the norm, they insist that we should make every class a discussion section, and let students “discover for themselves” what the field is about. I’m all in favor of “active learning,” as the current fad is called, but there are limits to where it is applicable. Some subjects, such as most of the natural sciences, are “content-heavy” and require that the students be exposed to a certain minimum amount of material, or they cannot take the next course in our  highly structured and sequential curriculum. We try to make up for it by giving students all the “active learning” we can in lab sections, where they handle the materials and do the experiments themselves. But even in a small liberal arts college where the largest lecture section is limited to 32 students, it’s a severe challenge to “cover the material” and expect the student to also take an active role in every lecture. When some humanities professor tell us science faculty that we should turn Intro Chemistry into a non-stop discussion section, we all just laugh at their cluelessness. Not only do we have the constraints of a large amount of material to cover so the student can take the next course in the sequence, but in the case of chemistry and biology, there are MCAT and GRE exams that also have an expectation of a certain amount of “content” mastered by the students’ third year. Nonetheless, the reality is that the content-driven lecture is an essential element of at least some college courses. You may be able to get away from them in some subjects in the humanities and social sciences where every person has at least some valid expertise or ability to form an opinion, but it won’t work with a  lot of the material we cover in the natural sciences, since so much of it is alien to one’s everyday experience and few students could have a meaningful debate about the merits of some reaction in organic chemistry.

This is not to say that I don’t integrate “active learning” techniques in my lecture whenever I can. They can range from simple things like passing a specimen of a rock or fossil around and make sure they are all see or feel what I’m describing; or getting them to all stand up in their seats, and then having the men and women sit down in 2:1 ratios as if they were atoms paired up into crystals and settling out of a magma chamber.  I frequently pose questions to the class and wait patiently til someone comes up with the answer, giving them a few hints along the way if necessary. I’ve got amusing cartoons that make the point interspersed here and there through my slides; I try to make sly references to cultural phenomena or things the students can relate to, or poke fun at familiar movie plot devices that are geologically impossible. I try to pose realistic scenarios (especially on exam questions, which are all essay style) so that they can show they understand how their knowledge applies to the real world, and not just how well they can memorize and regurgitate a list of facts.

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One of the most familiar memes we hear from the climate-change deniers is the phrase, “Global warming ended in 1998 and it’s been cooling since then.” You find something along these lines on most of the AGW denier books and websites, and it is repeated endlessly as if somehow repetition makes it more true. This is just like creationists who continually repeat the phony argument that “evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, even though this is patently false. As has been pointed out many times, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system since it receives energy from the sun. Yet in every creationist book and website and debate for many decades now you’ll hear them repeat it over and over again, since it sounds impressive to their scientifically unsophisticated audience and apparently they cannot understand why it’s wrong, or they don’t care as long as it suits their political agenda.

One of the most famous examples of the “cooling since 1998″ meme occurred when conservative pundit George Will wrote in a Feb. 15, 2009 Washington Post column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” that “According to the World Meteorological Organization,there has been no record of global warming for more than a decade.” The same column also printed false claims about the retreat of the glaciers, and about scientists predicting global cooling back in the 1970s (all discussed and debunked in Jim Powell’s new book The Inquisition of Climate Science, pp. 75-79). Will was taken to task by climate scientists all around the world for his mistakes and misrepresentations, but he never retracted them. The Washington Post ombudsman tried to justify running Will’s column and rationalize their lax fact-checking procedure, writing that “opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they are not free to distort them.” Eventually, the uproar was so great at Will’s egregious distortions that the Post printed two separate columns rebutting him. Apparently learning nothing from the experience, Will dug an even deeper hole by again claiming in an April 2, 2009, column that there hasn’t been a warmer year since 1998.

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The long-discredited idea of sauropods snorkeling in deep water as illustrated in this old painting by Zdenek Burian. The biggest problem is that they couldn't breathe in water this deep with the pressure it puts on their lungs.

The story popped into my email box earlier this week and soon I had dozens of follow-up emails from the vertebrate paleontology listserver flooding my inbox. Once again, the media have shown their complete inability to get the science right and publicized another flashy story that was complete garbage. I already gave an example last fall (my Nov. 2 post) with Mark McMenamin’s ridiculous claim that a giant Triassic “kraken” rearranged the bones of ichthyosaurs to create art. (By the way, that claim has dropped out of sight, and I don’t ever expect to see it published). As soon as the furor of that media gaffe dies out, however, they commit an even bigger blunder.

This time it was an article in the British media, starting with a “journalist” Tom Feilden (previously caught plagiarizing dino stories) reporting for the Telegraph doing an interview that then got coverage on both BBC radio and TV and on their website. In the brief story, a “Professor” Brian J. Ford makes the claim that giant sauropod dinosaurs were aquatic, not land-dwelling creatures. Immediately, the first reaction that my paleontologist colleagues and I had was “Who the hell is ‘Prof. Brian J. Ford’?” and “Did he say this in 1900?” To us, the article was startling not because it has some new insight on sauropods—but because someone who clearly  had no idea about the last century of sauropod research had managed to get all this publicity, and there was no evidence he had any credentials to be taken seriously!

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Last week (starting on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day), the city of San Juan Capistrano began their annual celebration of a huge festival in honor of the return of the swallows. According to the legend, the swallows nested in the old historic Mission (founded in 1776 by Father Serra himself) because an irate shopkeeper destroyed their mud nests, and today the return of the swallows is considered a semi-miraculous event. In one version of the story:

In his book Capistrano Nights, Father St. John O’Sullivan, Pastor of Mission San Juan Capistrano from 1910-33, tells how the swallows first came to call the Mission home. One day, while walking through town, Father O’Sullivan saw a shopkeeper, broomstick in hand. He was knocking down the cone-shaped mud swallow nests under the eaves of his shop. The birds were darting back and forth, shreiking over the destruction of their homes.”What in the world are you doing?” O’Sullivan asked.”Why, these dirty birds are a nuisance and I am getting rid of them!” the shopkeeper responded. ”But where can they go?”"I don’t know and I don’t care,” he replied, slashing away with his pole. “But they’ve no business here, destroying my property.”O’Sullivan then said, “Come on swallows, I’ll give you shelter. Come to the Mission. There’s room enough there for all.”The very next morning, Father O’Sullivan discovered the swallows busy building their nests outside Father Junipero Serra’s Church.

Amazingly, they fly 6000 miles from their winter nesting grounds near Goya in Corrientes, Argentina, which is one of the longest migrations known and even more remarkable when you realize the bird is smaller than the size of your fist. This purely local event wouldn’t have become such a big deal if it were not for the 1940 chart-topping song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”, which was recorded by everyone from  Gene Autry to Glenn Miller to the Ink Spots to the King Sisters  to Guy Lombardo to Pat Boone. (I vividly remember how often my parents would sing or play records of this song, a family sentimental favorite).

The city and its boosters use the occasion to put on a huge week-long festival, which draws 35,000-40,000 visitors to this tiny town of a few thousand, according to the Los Angeles Times. On Saturday, March 24, 2012, there was a huge parade and street fair with about 3200 participants and over 500 horses, but traveling only a few blocks (1.5 miles). It is said to be the largest non-motorized parade in the U.S.  I once marched in that parade with my high school band (I play trombone). I remember the festival as a huge deal, with vendors set up everywhere and every shop in town crammed with tourists. Except for the businesses, however, most of the residents of the town who DON’T make a buck from the mobs hate the crowds and traffic and people parking illegally everywhere. Part of my family still lives in San Juan Capistrano, and they try to leave town during that weekend.

There’s one small problem with the whole thing: it’s a complete myth! The return of the swallows does not happen on March 19; the swallows don’t return to the Mission any more; and most don’t even return to the region! (continue reading…)

The recent passing of  Sherwood Rowland, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery (along with Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen) that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) break down ozone in the stratosphere, causes me to think back on that furious debate over environmental issues—and the remarkable way it was resolved by international agreement and no longer threatens us. Those of us who are old enough to remember the political events of the 1970s and 1980s might recall the big public concern over the ozone layer. Like the debate over acid rain, this environmental crisis arose from earlier research that suggested a problem, then ran into huge opposition from conservative business and anti-environmental interests during the 1980s when Reagan’s cronies were in power. Like the debate over acid rain, the evidence for the hole in the ozone layer only increased until the pressure from scientists and governments around the world overcame the resistance of the affected industries, and resulted in an eventual global agreement to curb the causes of this pollution.

The story began in the late 1960s when the U.S. and Europe were both engaged in a race to develop a supersonic transport (SST) for civilian passengers, which would whisk people around huge distances in much shorter times (primarily between Europe and America). I vividly remember this series of events, because my father worked for Lockheed Aircraft at the time, and spent years  of his life working very long hours to develop a huge multivolume “proposal” for how the Lockheed SST would be built. Huge numbers of man-hours and millions of dollars building two working prototype aircraft were wasted by Lockheed in the competition when the contract went to Boeing Aircraft instead. Ironically, the Boeing SST was eventually canceled, too. The only SST that was built was the Anglo-French Concorde, which traveled between New York and Paris from 1976 until it was retired in 2003 due to low demand after the 2000 Concorde crash, low air traffic after 9/11, and high costs since most of the electronics in the aircraft were over 30 years old and obsolete. (continue reading…)

A  review of Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw through Time by Richard Milner, with an Introduction by Rhoda Knight Kalt. See several pieces of Knight’s art in the eSkeptic version of this review on skeptic.com.

Order the book from Amazon

Anywhere you go in modern society, dinosaurs are ubiquitous. From the movies to TV to the internet to toy stores and museum gift shops, there are countless chances to spend money on dinosaur paraphernalia. The three Jurassic Park movies were among the top grossing movies of all time. For kids between the ages of 2 and 12, dinosaurs are often a major part of their imaginations. Many kids are hugely fascinated with them, and have learned to master their polysyllabic names to the amazement of  their parents. (I was one of those kids, hooked on dinosaurs at age 4. I wanted to become a paleontologist as soon as I knew what the word meant. Back in the late 1950s-early 1960s when I grew up, this was highly unusual; kids back then didn’t care much for dinosaurs compared to today’s kids). Most kids change their interests as puberty hits and they enter the “tweens” and teen years, but the fascination with dinosaurs never completely disappears.

We can’t imagine a world where this is not true, but in fact it is a relatively recent phenomenon, just a century old. More than any other person, the public fascination and interest in prehistoric creatures owes its existence to one man, Charles R. Knight. Prior to Knight’s  “reconstructive” illustrations of a wide range of extinct animals, there was almost no public awareness of them. (continue reading…)