1. You may recall that a computer scientist who has positioned himself as an expert on global warming is suing the science journal PNAS for publishing an article - led by a researcher at NOAA - debunking his paper claiming that 100 percent alternative energy would be viable right now if only politicians would get out of the way.
He says they should not have published the rebuttal because they gave his 2015 paper an award for “outstanding scientific excellence and originality.”
Isn't the best reason to publish a rebuttal when the original is shown to be so flawed as to be unusable? Not to Stanford's Mark Jacobson. He thinks they hurt his reputation. Actually, it hurt theirs. Clearly a paper that got an award yet was then debunked shows their peer review of his claims was equivalent to having other astrologers peer review a paper on astrology.
The College Fix has more details and uses our work on the subject.
2. Huffington Post has finally published a science article. They may have before, actually, but serious science writers don't follow Huffington Post. However, when Dr. Angela Logomasini of Competitive Enterprise Institute posts something, it's worth walking into the belly of the anti-science beast. In this case she is debunking scaremongering food and she talks about our famous Holiday Dinner Menu, where we showed that 100 percent of your meal, be it organic or kosher or shade-tree grown or holistic or any other process, contains carcinogens known to cause cancer in rats.
Environmental activists make a billion dollars a year manipulating science that way, but they aren't getting by Angela.
3. The progressive blog site Center for Investigative Reporting, which practically invented the concept of using loaded words in "news" articles to promote its political good works, is claiming Dr. Stan Young, one of America's foremost statistics experts, being on an EPA panel is a sign that Science Is A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
Dr. Young is an adjunct at three universities, has co-authored over 50 papers and won six “best paper” awards. He wrote the acclaimed book Resampling-Based Multiple Testing and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
So what is their problem with him? Well, it's the Trump administration and they are a hard left group. And Stan does not want to ban everything first and do science later, which is how they believe EPA should work. What else is odd? The lead author of this is the exact same political science journalist, Liza Gross, who smeared us in the Vox gossip site last week.
In her latest conspiracy fable, she notes when the few people she wrote to for a comment did not reply, but says nothing of the kind about us - because she never wrote to or called anyone here. Not once. It is just rehashed Mother Jones nonsense, no fact checking by anyone, and I would have told her that.
It turns out that she has a habit of poor fact-checking. Numerous people mentioned have stated she never contacted them. Obviously her only claims about us are from fellow partisan political activists. In the case of ACSH scientific advisor Professor Brad Rodu last week, she took his criticism of tobacco company RJR as evidence he must be secretly working for them. That's some Deep State Paranoia right there.
The only people defending her slipshod screeds are her political allies against science, like discredited denier for hire Paul Thacker.
4. In Hay's Post, John Schlageck of the Kansas Farm Bureau also debunks the claim by activists that “natural” chemicals are somehow safe but “manmade” is always suspect. While both can be toxic in excess, neither natural nor man-made food chemicals are hazardous in the quantities we consume on a daily, monthly, yearly or lifelong basis.
But calories, yes. Watch those.
5. Gears of Biz discussed our work on new guidelines for stem cell treatments. We can't control what Chinese hucksters promise people, but in the US we can at least make sure people know what works, what is instead more like "natural" medicine woo or acupuncture, and what is downright dangerous.
6. New American discusses our work on cigarette smoking harm reduction and cessation in the context of new FDA guidelines for teens. Look, we don't want teens smoking or using e-cigarettes but if a teen is smoking, it will be better to have them vaping than ingesting hundreds of toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke.
7. Dr. Chuck Dinerstein's vaguely dirty-sounding title (Unauthorized Touching: It's Not What You’re Thinking, about people touching priceless objects in museums) was a huge hit in a whole lot of countries that claim to be superior to we decadent Westerners.
8. At the Heartland Institute's "In The Tank" podcast, John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal discussed topical stuff like '5 little-known Thanksgiving etiquette rules you probably don't follow' and our famous Holiday Dinner Menu, which shows that everything you will eat has chemicals known to cause cancer in rats. Luckily, as we note again, you are not a rat, nor will you eat 7,000 servings a day in order to get enough of the chemical.
As we all wonder, why do environmental groups continue to pretend our food is not safe "at any dose" despite the science? If they learned evidence-based thinking it would be a true holiday miracle.
9. Finally, Dr. Alex Berezow is really proud that he is the only staff member who we know has been cited in Estonian media. We hope Dr. Doom does not kidnap him and take him there. Or to whatever country Dr. Doom is from.
