Friday, June 12, 2009

1. CARBON DIOXIDE: IAP STATEMENT ON OCEAN ACIDIFICATION.

At a departmental colloquium 30 years ago the speaker assured the audience that carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere would be buffered by absorption in the ocean. I kept waiting for that to happen. Of course, it was happening. According to a statement issued this week by the Interacademy Panel, whose 60-some members range from the Albanian Academy of Science to the Zimbabwe Academy of Science, a quarter of the CO2 produced by human activity in the last 200 years has been absorbed in the oceans. Unfortunately, excessive CO2 in the oceans is no more benign than that in the atmosphere. Marine life that depends on calcium carbonate is particularl. Moreover, ocean acidification is irreversible on a timescale of thousands of years. The only way to mitigate ocean acidification is to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Sequestration, that will at best affect the second derivative. We must reduce reproduction.

2. TOBACCO: SORRY, IT DOESNT SEEM TO REDUCE REPRODUCTION.

Are there still people who smoke? One in five actually, and President Obama is one of them. He has, however, promised to sign a bill giving the federal government sweeping powers to oversee tobacco products, just as soon as it reaches his desk. You might think smokers would at least have the decency to die young from their addiction, thus helping to hold down the population. Not so, it can take years to kill them, and meanwhile they keep multiplying.

3. LIBEL: BRITISH SCIENCE WRITER IS SUED BY CHIROPRACTORS.

Simon Singh, award-winning science writer and author of "Fermats Enigma," is being sued under UK libel laws for an article in the Guardian in which he called the claims of chiropractors "bogus." That sounds pretty tame for a treatment that has no plausible scientific justification. Harming the reputation of a chiropractor would seem to be a civic responsibility. In the United States plaintiffs must prove that the defendants statement is willfully false and defamatory. In the UK the plaintiff must show only that the statement harms his reputation. But under UK libel laws the burden is on Singh to prove he wasn't being libelous.

4. INTELLIGENT DESIGN: TEXAS SCHOOL BOARD MAKES THE RULES.

The Texas school book market is so humongous that publishers must pay heed to new guidelines on what students should learn. It has been a battleground for years with the National Center for Science Education under Genie Scott battling the creationists from the Discovery Institute in an increasingly conservative state. So far science has been winning but it's a close thing every year. The latest round in this epic battle is described by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in todays Science.

5. COLD FUSION: SPEAKING OF NEVER-ENDING CONTROVERSY.

In the Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2009, Eugenie Reich discussed "the five best books on scientific fraud," including my "Voodoo Science" (Oxford, 2000), which she referred to as "devastating" on the subject of "cold fusion." Cold fusion 20 years later remains a curious mix of self deception and outright fraud.

Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.