Chris C. Mooney's Blog, page 10

Santorum's Wacky Science Claims: My Appearance on the Alyona Show

I was on RT America's The Alyona Show last night, and have pasted the video below. The topic, as usual, was Rick Santorum…who I compared to George W. Bush, and not advantageously. Here it is:

Chris on the Alyona Show

The Science of Left and Right: Links for My AAAS Talk Today

I'm going to be talking about some of the left-right material in my new book today at AAAS in Vancouver (panel here). And because the subject matter tends towards the, er, controversial, I'm once again putting up some links so that interested attendees can go read some of the peer reviewed research themselves.[image error]

First, there are the studies on left-right differences in brain structure, function, attention, and physiological responses. I've listed seven of them here. An eighth, just out, is...

Questions for Michael Mann? Our Next Point of Inquiry Guest

[image error]Sunday in Vancouver, I'm interviewing climate hero Michael Mann about his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

Already, there has been an Amazon.com war over the book, with climate deniers going over there and, rather appallingly, giving it 1 star ratings (surely without even having read it).

For the record, you can get the book on Kindle now, though I am not sure if it is out in print yet.

If there are things you'd like to hear Mann asked on the air, ...

Off to Vancouver for AAAS: My Panel on "Getting to 350″ with James Hansen

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James Hansen, Wiki Commons

Tomorrow I fly to Vancouver for the annual AAAS meeting (most of the geeks are already there already, of course). I'm going for this panel, which includes quite a luminary:

Climate Solutions: The Challenges of Getting to 350Sunday, February 19, 2012: 8:30 AM-11:30 AMRoom 214 (VCC West Building)

Society is on a carbon dioxide emissions trajectory committing itself to dangerous climate change this century with potentially catastrophic effects. It has been argued that...

Cultural Cognition and Group Belonging–Do We All Defend Our "Teams" With Equal Strength?

[image error]This is my second post about the Dan Kahan show, which  has just gone up at Point of Inquiry.

After my long post yesterday laying out the cultural cognition model, I wanted to bring up one point in particular that came up on the show.

Kahan's cultural cognition model is at least in part about the power of group affiliation. It postulates that we want to affirm the values held in our communities about how society ought to be ordered, and that it is this sense of belonging that leads to...

The Alleged Heartland Institute Documents

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Update: The Heartland Institute has put out a statement, claiming that "Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered." This post has been updated accordingly. 

The web has been aflutter about allegedly leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, a global warming skeptic think tank.

However, the Heartland Institute does not seem to have officially claimed the documents yet (see here), and I have not verified their authenticity...

"Dissuading Teachers From Teaching Science": The Leak of Alleged Heartland Institute Documents

[image error]The web is aflutter today about allegedly leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, a global warming skeptic think tank. My colleagues at DeSmogBlog have published the documents, and they refer in detail to real people, plans, and dollar amounts–in other words, they sure sound real.

However, the Heartland Institute does not seem to have officially claimed the documents yet (see here), and I have not verified their authenticity myself. So we will exercise an abundance of caution and call t...

Are the Left and Right Equally Biased?–Debating Dan Kahan

[image error]The latest Point of Inquiry just went up. It's actually a double length episode, because that's how long I needed to really get into the question that I've been meaning to air on a show for some time–the question of, er, who's right, politically, about everything for all time.

That sounds ambitious, and I'm of course exaggerating..but actually somewhat less than you might think. Let me explain.

My guest was Yale's Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural...

Republicans Aren't the "Truth Party," Mr. Santorum. They're the "Certainty Party"

[image error]Rick Santorum has begun to take head-on the charge (originating with people like, um, me) that his party is "anti-science." He recently rebutted it directly, declaring,

You hear all the time, the left: 'The conservatives are the anti-science party.' No. No we're not. We're the truth party.

As I explain at DeSmogBlog, Santorum is slightly off on this. Actually, Republicans are the certainty party, which not only implies that they think they know the truth about things, but also that they're...

Did Conservatism "Evolve"? Early Responses to Coyne, Pigliucci, and 2K Others

I was away this weekend, and so could only distantly watch as responses to my "Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution" piece trickled in. There are over 2,000 comments at Huffington Post, and 1.5 K Facebook likes. I haven't even been able to read through them all.

Two prominent blogosphere responses came from Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking and Jerry Coyne. Reading these, I see that there are things I need to clarify, as both raise the idea that I am advancing an "...