The environmentalist template of overstating health hazards has already been used with disturbing effectiveness. Lead hazard at indoor ranges, anyone? Breathing lead isn't high on anybody’s list of healthy stuff to do, but overstatement of the risk and degree of exposure has already been used to attack some indoor ranges. I suspect there’s plenty of relevance to guns. The mods might agree – I note the thread still lives.
I like the junkscience.com site a lot: it plays well to my personal prejudices. That being said, I'd caution against getting one's knickers in too much of a twist over anything Steve Milloy says about global warming. He’s an adjunct scholar at Cato and can be expected to spin about as hard in a free market direction as the Union of Concerned Scientists can be expected to spin in a socialist direction. Actually, UCS is more "statist" - Thanks Art - "statist" is a much more descriptive term.
IMHO, it’s dang near impossible to find any science that hasn’t been shanghaied and perverted to push a political agenda.
As example, these are some remarks from an individual who wrote a paper on climate forcings that didn’t support the "hockey stick":
I wrote a letter to Nature, but they edited my letter so as to change its meaning. It made me realize that they had an editorial position on the matter. That is their right, but they should have published the article discussing our paper on the editorial page, not under a "News" banner.
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The UCS leadership sent to its members an "Information Update" discussing our paper. The essence of the update seems to be that our paper is controversial, potentially harmful to the Kyoto Protocol, and not a helpful contribution to the climate change discussion as it "may fuel confusion about global warming among the public". They describe "first reactions from within the scientific community", which perhaps are accurate but they seem a bit like commissioned criticisms.
Apparently the UCS leadership did not read our paper, or did not understand it.
The surprise in all this is that the above was not written by Steve Milloy - those are the remarks of Dr. James Hansen noting the media spin on his paper back in 2000. Mr. Hansen, the bogeyman. Mr. global warming alarmist himself.
It seems the paper had enough concerns about climate forcings that JunkScience cheerfully roasts the man but not enough to keep the UCS from consigning him to the stocks and pillory. Each side finds what they like and condemns the parts they don't like. This leaves, as the only casualty, science laying dead in the street.
Full text with links to the original paper and research available at
NASA-GISS
OTOH, Milloy's work on heath related scares, overstatements and outright fraud are generally mirrored at
http://www.stats.org which lacks the bombast of junkscience.com and is a bit more "centered". Makes for a better citation should one find oneself surrounded by hostile statists (only happens to me at my high school reunions
) They both name the banning of DDT as the most bone-headed policy manuver of the 20th century, but stats is less over the top about it.
Regrettably, climatology and paleoclimatology together don't offer any insights that could reasonably lead one to believe
anything with any degree of certainty. To be as certain of a position as the UCS is requires an "ideology to science ratio" of at least 9:1
Yes, the hockey stick is suspect - view it in the same light as "13 children a day".
IMHO
