Were Losing the War on Science

[demmiblue]

Source: Wired

<snip>

Since then candidates such as Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, and Gary Johnson have all answered questions from ScienceDebate.org. But Otto has also seen a gradual erosion of science content in major media outlets. He’s horrified that the three presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton didn’t feature a single question about climate change.

“ScienceDebate was the only place that asked President-elect Trump any questions about climate change on the campaign trail,” he says. “Which was kind of a remarkable and sad development in our media.”

<snip>

“The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence,” Otto says. “Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being.”

<snip>

Shawn Otto on the media:

“I was on a TV show not long ago, and we were talking about the book, and we were talking about climate, and the reporter clearly understood what the evidence was indicating about climate change, but when we were on the air he was very cautious about indicating what the evidence actually suggested. … And I talked to him about it afterward, and he said, ‘If I say that we think that climate change is actually happening—that that’s supported by the evidence—we’re going to just get tons of letters and emails, and it’s going to upset the news director and the station ownership, because it may affect our bottom line.’ And that is a great example of exactly what’s happening here.”

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/geeks-guide-shawn-otto/

[spanone]

1. K&R...

[Buckeye_Democrat]

2. Ugh. Money concerns above truth.

[demmiblue]

3. Yep.

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." -Leslie Moonves, CBS executive chairman and CEO

Disgusting.

[Archae]

4. As bad as the right-wing is on science, the left is pretty bad also.

Science tells us vaccines do *NOT* cause autism.

Science tells us GMO's are *NOT* "poison" or "Frankenfoods."

Science tells us one guy shot JFK.

Science tells us one guy shot RFK.

Science tells us one guy shot MLK.

[ismnotwasm]

5. Yeah

It can get pretty embarrassing. Science is science, and to paraphrase a meme--it doesn't care what you believe

[NNadir]

6. This is very true, but we are losing the war on science on both sides of the political spectrum.

Many of the "holiest of the holy" ideas on the left, specifically anti-nuclear and anti-GMO rhetoric are in fact pernicious.

Similarly, our faith in so called "renewable energy" which has not worked, is not working and will not work foreclose the possibility that we will be able to address climate change.

It is not even "renewable" in the sense that it relies on increasingly depleted exotic and in many cases toxic elements.

Science is about experiment. The so called "renewable energy" experiment involved the expenditure of two trillion dollars in the last decade with the result that climate change gases are accumulating at the fastest rate ever observed. As an experiment, this is definitely worthy of being referred to as a failure, since the result negates the hypothesis.

I know this analysis will not be popular here; but the truth is the truth. It is one thing to deny climate change, as the nuts on the right do, but the effect is no different ultimately than choosing the wrong way to address it.