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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (14967)	7/14/2007 7:14:33 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Algore and Mike Moore didn't get that fat being vegans

To: Brumar89 who wrote (14967)	8/27/2007 10:33:29 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 36917

The Double Standard in Environmental Science Can science abide political causes? By Stanley W. Trimble. (PDF, 667K ) Everyone knows that soil erosion is a U.S. crisis. This study can't be right." That statement is a paraphrase of a reviewer's comments on a paper on greatly declining rates of U.S. soil erosion that I submitted to the journal Science in 1982. For Science, as a matter of policy, it took only one negative review to reject my paper; the reviewer's disbelief meant the journal would not publish my findings. No matter that the study was sponsored by several government agencies and overseen by the U.S. Geological Survey, that it had involved thousands of person-hours by three generations of scientists over a period of 44 years, and that it had used precise and massive on-the-ground measurements to reach its findings. My offense was demonstrating that soil erosion in one region of the Midwest was only a small fraction of what it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, with the clear implication that the same improvements were occurring elsewhere in the country. My experience suggested to me that ideology, not science, had established a significant grip on the top scientific press. This article attempts to portray the emotionalism, exaggeration, and even ideological viciousness -- qualities that to me define extremism -- that have invaded the field of environmental science. It also considers the different standards of evidence required for pessimistic, as opposed to optimistic, views on environmental problems. As a backdrop, I will use my own specialty, soil erosion. This article also considers the scientific objectivity of some prominent, if perhaps extreme, players in environmental science and the implications of some of their actions... cato.org cato.org