I’ve recently discovered RenewAmerica.us, which just might be crazier and dumber than Conservapedia.  Of all the RenewAmerica columnists, I think you’d be hard pressed to find another who can bring the stupid like Cynthia Janak.  Cynthia doesn’t like vaccines, especially the Gardasil HPV vaccine.  Cynthia also has the scientific literacy of an eighth-grader, a fact she basically admits with alarming frequency.  But she doesn’t let this limitation stop her from wading into the scientific literature to find evidence that vaccines cause all sorts of nastiness, often resulting in hilarity.  Anyway, I just couldn’t make it past the third paragraph of her latest juicy turd:

Since September of 2008 a mystery illness has struck the UK after the HPV jab Cervarix was implemented in a school vaccine program.

It has been reported in the UK Mail Online that 1,340 reports have been filed coincidentally after the HPV vaccine Cervarix was implemented in September. This mystery illness causes Paralysis, Convulsions, Sight problems, Nausea, Muscle Weakness, Fever, Dizziness and Numbness, Bell’s palsy, Hypoesthesia (loss of sense of touch) and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

With the knowledge that I have from an insider as to how the young girls and women are being treated by the medical establishment in the UK, I feel it is safe to say that approximately only 1% are reporting. So if 1% are reporting that means that the real number of girls affected by this mystery epidemic is more like 134,000. That means that 19% of the girls getting the jab have acquired a new medical condition. I came at this percentage because it states in the article at 700,000 girls aged 12–13 have been vaccinated. This vaccine is also being given to 17 and 18 year old girls.

Wow.  Cynthia finds a couple of girls who thought they were treated badly by their doctor and concludes that 99% of patients aren’t reporting paralysis, convulsions, Bell’s Palsy, and the loss of one of their five senses.

Perennial conservative douche George Will continues to distort reality in his drive to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, despite having been caught making shit up in his last column on the subject.  This time, he trots out the zombie lie that global warming has stopped:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Will, like everyone who makes this argument, is shamelessly cherry picking data.  Let’s take a look at some data and see how well Will’s claim holds up:

The blue lines show 8-year trends in the global land-ocean temperature.  Some 8-year trends show a decrease in average temperature, while others show a drastic increase.  Clearly, any given short-term trend tells us little about long-term changes.  Yet, that is exactly Will and other denialists use regularly when they claim that global warming  has stopped.  They take the short-term trend since 1998, which was anomalously warm, and use it to argue that warming has stopped.  Such an argument is clearly wrongheaded.  And this isn’t a hard concept to grasp, so the question is, then, why does anyone listen to anything George Will has to say?  He’s either incredibly dim, which I doubt, or he’s dishonest enough that he’s willing to distort science to fit his ideology.  Either way, I can’t understand why anyone thinks his opinion matters.

In his most recent post on his blog, Billy Dembski, the pope of the intelligent design movement, falls hook, line, and sinker for the freshest droppings from global warming denialists.  While declaring the death of scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, he approvingly cites a story from the denialist website DailyTech.com about an alleged policy reversal by the American Physical Society.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

Just one little problem, though:  the APS has done no such thing.  From the front page of the APS website:

APS Position Remains Unchanged

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.”  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

Oops.  Not that we needed any further evidence that Billy D. is a credulous asshat, but come on, it took me less than five minutes to debunk that DailyTech article.

You might not be familiar with John Coleman, but he’s becoming quite the hero among the global warming denialist set.  Coleman is a meteorologist, and his big claim to fame is his founding of the Weather Channel.  He has since retired, but still holds a postition at a television station in San Diego.  He is also a huge denier of global warming, and his popularity with the right-wing has been growing since his threat to sue Al Gore for fraud.  Well it seems that Mr. Coleman spoke before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce the other day about global warming, giving a speech which included the following howler:

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

I really don’t think it’s necessary to say anything about how ridiculous that statement is.  I trust that that’s pretty self-evident.  You might expect such a remark from a child, but from a grown man who is supposed have been educated (at least a bit) in atmospheric science?  Of course, it also says something about the credibility of many global warming skeptics that they treat this man as a qualified voice deserving to be heard on the issue of climate change.

Joel Barofsky has written a baffling post at Uncommon Descent. In it, he attempts to argue that naturalism offers no reasons to protect the environment, but intelligent design does. Gag. His post is dedicated to the failure of naturalism to provide motivation for going green. He has a second post planned espousing the need for ID in environmentalism. If the first post is any indication, the follow-up will be a real gut buster.

Barofsky offers three alleged “naturalistic arguments” for addressing climate change. Unfortunately, he never defines what he means by “naturalism”, so it is hard to address his claims without running the risk of putting words in his mouth. With that risk in mind, I will take “naturalism” to be the view that the natural universe is all that exists, that there is no “supernatural” realm. Assuming I have Barofsky’s concept of naturalism correct, let’s take a look at his discussion of these naturalistic arguments for environmental protection.

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Gerlach got himself some fine pseudoscience in his meatspace mailbox.  Specifically, a pamphlet from an organization called The Geocentric Bible Foundation, located in Hugoton, Kansas.  It was addressed to “resident” and, judging by the number of copies discarded on the ground by my neighbors, this must have been one expensive mass-mailing effort.  The cover of the pamphlet entices the recipient with a question (well, one question worded as two, to be correct):  “Have scientists been wrong?  For 400 years?”

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Several conservative outlets were abuzz yesterday with the news that a global warming denialist group, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, has found 31000 “scientists” who reject anthropogenic global warming.  From the WND:

More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting “global warming,” the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth’s climate.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate,” the petition states. “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

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ABC News has an article about a report that indicates that childhood vaccine rates are falling, with only 72% of children properly vaccinated.  The ABC story goes into some possible reasons for the decline, like parental confusion about the sometimes complicated vaccine schedule, and I have no doubt that the causes discussed in the story are accurate.  That said, I think they missed one, and it has reared its ugly head in the story’s comments section:  Antivaccination hysteria.

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