La campaña contra las tabacaleras, desarrollada durante el mandato Clinton-Gore, creó un precedente extralegal: si a suficientes políticos no les gusta un discurso o investigación científica y pueden vincularlo a una empresa o una industria, la empresa o la industria pueden ser perseguidas. A continuación, se pueden hacer leyes
ad hoc y aplicarse con carácter retroactivo; el castigo es ilimitado; y los intentos de los afectados para defenderse son considerados delitos adicionales. Esta estrategia es la que sigue ahora la administración Obama respecto a los críticos y escépticos del calentamiento global antropogénico: acusarlos de servir a los "intereses" de las empresas explotadoras de combustibles fósiles y, especialmente, a la industria del petróleo.
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Regresión científica
William A. Wilson
At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities. We’ve seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck. These failings need not hobble the scientific enterprise broadly conceived, but only if scientists are hyper-aware of and endlessly vigilant about the errors of their colleagues . . . and of themselves. When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice.
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Donantes frustrados porque un estudio no halla relación entre fracking y contaminación acuífera retiran sus fondos
The lead researcher in a study that concluded that fracking in Ohio didn’t contaminate groundwater told The Daily Signal that, contrary to her previous remarks, donors to the study did not pull funding because of “specific disappointment” with those results.
Amy Townsend-Small, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati who conducted the three-year study, did acknowledge that some financial backers “have declined to continue funding past the initial study period.”
However, Townsend-Small said in an email Monday to The Daily Signal, those decisions not to donate more might be because the study didn’t establish a relationship between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and water contamination in Carroll County and other areas that include the Utica Shale deposit.
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The new study looks at how rising temperatures and carbon dioxide along with changes in rainfall and cloud cover might combine to affect how efficiently maize, soybeans, wheat, and rice can use water and grow. It confirms that heat and water stress alone will damage yields; but when carbon dioxide is accounted for, all four crops will use water more efficiently by 2080.
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En todo el mundo, los científicos dicen estar observando evidencis del cambio climático con registros de altas temperaturas, el aumento del nivel del mar o el derretimiento de las capas de hielo. Pero a diferencia de estos cambios atribuidos al calentamiento global, una nueva investigación del MIT sobre atmósfera, océanos y clima indica que la Antártida y el Océano Austral estarían experimentando un largo período de enfriamiento. Y el culpable podría ser el agujero de ozono en lugar de los gases de efecto invernadero.
