Taking on cultural myths and other nonsense

Things we hear about in the media all the time, some of it with a lot of gravitas and hype, wind up coming clean under the scrutiny of journalists with actual data, good sense and a lot of wit. Herewith: this year’s Top Ten Junk Science stories.

1. Some Real Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore whipped the world into a global warming frenzy with his doomsday documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” I personally asked Mr. Gore to help arrange a debate between scientists about the purported climate catastrophe. He declined (twice) without explanation – leaving me to wonder why global warming alarmists are unwilling to explain why they believe in non-validated and always-wrong computer guess-timations of future climate change rather than actual temperature measurements and greenhouse-effect physics that indicate manmade emissions of greenhouse gases are not a problem.

That could fall under the old ‘I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts’ category.

2. Board of Health or Bored of Science? New York City’s Board of Health banned restaurants from serving foods cooked with vegetable oils containing trans fats. It apparently mattered little to the Board that the Food and Drug Administration classifies trans fats as “generally recognized as safe” and that the sort of “science” the Board relied on could also be used to ban potatoes, peas, meat, dairy products and many other food items from restaurants.

Peas? How did they get in there?

We need to ask more questions, like…

3. What Hurricane Season? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction for the 2006 hurricane season was about as wrong as wrong can be…

thanks be to God.

This one is crucial. Informed folks know this already, but you have to pass the information along to everyone else.

6. Stem cell fraud and futility. Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi plans to introduce legislation lifting the limits on federal funding of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. But she ought to pay attention to what did, and what did not happen, in ESC research during 2006. What did happen was the indictment of prominent South Korean ESC researcher Hwang Woo-suk for faking his research. What didn’t happen was any meaningful advance in ESC research. One alleged ESC research advance hyped in the journal Nature (harvesting of ESCs without destroying the embryos) had to be corrected to note that none of the embryos in question actually survived the procedure – oops.

That can’t be stressed enough. This issue is dead serious.

Unlike this one…

8. Woodpecker Racket. The 2005 reported sighting of the thought-to-be-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas raised hopes of bird-watchers everywhere. But a prominent bird expert cast serious doubt on the report in 2006, characterizing it as “faith-based” ornithology and “a disservice to science.”

 “Faith-based ornithology?!”

But the debunking may not matter. Environmental groups used the dubious sighting to convince a federal judge in July 2006 to stop a nearby $320 million Army Corps of Engineers irrigation project. Given that the anti-development Nature Conservancy funded the “search” for the woodpecker in the first place, the supposed “sighting” turned out to be quite convenient.

Thanks to reporting like this, we get to see the real stories behind the headlines trumpeted by the mainstream media. They can cook the books and tweak the data, but they don’t control all the message. How mainstream are they, anyway?