Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
A new paper has been published within the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin entitled … Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection We report three studies—including an analysis of large-scale survey data—in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support … Read more
This week Discover Magazine ran the story of what happened to Russian Scientist Anatoli Bugorski when he accidentally stuck his head inside a particle accelerator. It all happened back in 1978. This was in the Soviet Union at a time when talking about anything Nuclear related was not exactly encouraged, so he did not talk about … Read more
Recently a right-wing Facebook “friend” shared an article from the Daily Caller that claimed that Satellite data showed no acceleration in warming for the past 23 years. Apart from the rather obvious “How did this guy get on my FB friends list?” question, I do actually find it fascinating to observe how such “truth” is … Read more
The classical image of dinosaurs that we carry within our heads is that they were scaled up lizards. This is not simply a cultural view, but was the initial scientific one. Back in 1842 paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur from Greek as a description of the term “fearsome lizard”. We perhaps still carry that … Read more
There is a meme going around that consists of a sweatshirt slogan that reads … This perhaps is the essence of climate modelling. Observations are made, and slowly slowly you build up a precise mathematical model that can be used to work out what comes next. Within such models you have the various drivers of … Read more
A new scientific study published a few days ago within a reputable peer-reviewed journal by some leading Climate Science scientists has generated rather a lot of heat within the climate denial community. Entitled “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy” and published within BioScience, it examines the reporting of Arctic Sea Ice and … Read more