Monthly Archives: May 2019

Extinction Miscalculation

Posted on 31/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

The recent press story of mass global warming extinctions came from a policy summary published well in advance of the scientific survey on which it is said to be based (so that governments get their policies in place before being distracted by  complicated science?). But the core of it was based on the IUCN Red List of endangered and recently extinct (vertebrate) species, of which a graph was included on a century by century scale, indeed showing a dramatic escalation from the 16th century.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

The Emperor has no clothes

Posted on 29/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

The Independent, 28th May __19 Anti-democrat’s tweet condemned There was widespread outrage on social media yesterday following a tweet by a formerly unknown costume-denialist, Wat Simkin, claiming that, at the morning royal parade, the Emperor “hadn’t got anything on.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Here comes the sun – and fuel poverty

Posted on 27/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

So the EU election results show, more or less as predicted, an increasing polarisation between broadly globalist and broadly nationalist people. As in the USA, this trend is worrying for long-term civil peace, but is probably inevitable because their respective visions for society are, truly, incompatible.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

Nobel Prize pseudoscience v Classics orthodoxy

Posted on 21/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

Returning to my long thread on science in the media over at Peaceful Science, at one stage the accusations of irrational climate denialism were expressed, by a classics graduate, no less, thus: This is the language of the science denialist. Which anti-science cause will you champion next, chiropractic and homeopathy?

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

Welcome back M. Macron

Posted on 18/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

I had reason to comment on the number of apparent French vistors The Hump was receiving, back in March. I invited any French readers to comment here, but it soon became clear why none ever did.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

Models of probity

Posted on 14/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

There is still no substantive response to the evidence I gave at Peaceful Science for the misrepresentation of walrus deaths in a David Attenborough film. But “T_aquaticus” has taken it upon himself to apply the “climate denialist” insinuations of people on the thread (I have not denied climate change there), and to sigh, in that exasperated tone that scientistic types always use when they think they’re dealing with people who read as little as they do. He writes: “I’m guessing that no amount of information is going to budge you?”

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Big oil = big chums!

Posted on 11/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

My thread on Peaceful Science, “Media Science” has gone, so far, to over 400 comments, but despite the stern admonitions from the skeptical scientist types there to “follow the data, not the propaganda,” none of them has even attempted to address the subject of the post, which was the data about the misinformation about walrus deaths being due to climate change on a David Attenborough documentary.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Simplifying good government

Posted on 08/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

When I was a medical student, I got to meet the wife of one of my then-favourite Sci-Fi writers, James Blish, after she’d had a minor accident on a London bus. This was around the time of the author’s declining health, so it must have been a particularly stressful time for Mrs Blish.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Short memory and easy distraction

Posted on 06/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

As I mentioned in a previous post, in a Radio Times article puffing the recent David Attenborough Doom Documentary on climate, he drew attention to the deforestation of the Philippines and Borneo. These are indeed serious problems, though not upon consideration any result whatsoever of climate change. Rather they result from various economic and social factors, including the high premium placed on timber for biomass as a result of misguided measures taken to prevent climate change .

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

If governments followed science

Posted on 04/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

Let me first return to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, and especially here (hat-tip to Clinton Ohlers’s work), since it can be used to explore many aspects of modern science, especially in relation to faith.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment