Citing a speech by a retired TV weatherman who could no more construct a climate model than a television camera , and the philosophical authority of one "Thomas Eddington " ( the inventor of the supernova light bulb, perhaps --surely not the Sir Arthur who astronomically confirmed relativity) James Kerian, scion of the North Dakota potato, fruit and nut-sorting machine dynasty, and mechanical engineering graduate of Gonzaga University, has authored a Wall Street Journal online oped entitled "Yellow Science", equating global warming warnings with the "Yellow Journalism " the Hearst papers used to spawn the Spanish American War. In it . Kerian baldly ,and bizarrely, asserts that no hard scientific evidence links human activity and climate change. None. Nada. Zip.
Sad as it is to see the venerable Journal jaundiced by its editors failure to exercise the intellectual courage to expose this dweebery, the op-ed betrays a deeper malaise. The responsible member of the WSJ editorial board, James Taranto, has made it a point of anti-elitist honor to declare his disinclination "to delve deeply" into matters presented as scientific in his section, instead censoring comments critical of the errors of fact it all too often features-- Taranto is Opinion Journal's electronic gatekeeper as well as its editor.
I last encountered him at a Harvard science journalism seminar, where he insisted the Opinion Journal section was open to critical feedback , an assertion his subsequent actions and omissions has betrayed. Hoping to provide him a means of fact checking now that the WSJ has dispensed with its science editor, I went so far as to present him with a hard copy of Nature.
He'd never laid eyes on that journal before, and given the appearance of Kerian's piece,it appears he has not seen it since. As Nature's Science And Business section contains much of profound interest to readers of so otherwise astute a financial paper as The Wall Street Journal, it's odd the publishers should spare Taranto the inconvenience of contradiction by providing a link or two to such scientific journals of record.
Though Taranto is free to ignore them, such links would provide readers with the option of refusing to think about science themselves, instead of having their unthinking done for them at Rupert Murdoch's expense. The WSJ is after all a business , not a charitable foundation for Junk Science challenged purveyors of prose from First Things-- the journal in which Keran's piecw debuted is long on dogma as it is short on scientific peer review. While Kerian seems never to have published a science or engineering paper, his maiden publication bodes well for his career as a philosopher of science-- few Bob Jones or Maharishi University graduates aspire to such metaphysical heights. Perhaps he should start a think tank with the other culture hero of the week, Doctor Tom Chalko
Elsewhere in Never Never land, National Review is ballyhooing a submarine volcano that erupted in the arctic in 1999, inviting its readers to believe in the event's connection to the retreat of polar ice in the years since. Never mind that the Mount Saint Helen's sized blowout failed to punch a hole in the sea ice directly above it- the two mile water column evidently providing ample quenching of the heat.
A cubic mile or more of incandescent lava may seem a lot , but there are millions of cubic miles of ice-water in the Arctic seas , and one part per million of incandescent rock can only raise the temperature of the whole of it by -- do the arithmetic , it's not even math-- a couple of milli-degrees C-- Bloody Freezing plus .002 C still equals Bloody Freezing.
While the Dittohead blogs coo over the latest factoid delivered by their scientific tooth fairy , the website of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution features a lucid account of the Gakkel Ridge eruptions' aftermath , as surveyed in 200, that underwater landscape:
"Appear to have been chemically transformed by hydrothermal venting. Sensors on their dredging lines also detected whispers of warmer water, chemicals, and particles that are present in plumes of vent fluids that billow out ”
Since the murmurs of warmth are muffled by two thousand fathoms of ice water, Kerian and Taranto's fairy tales might benefit from delving more deeply into The Princess and the Pea