Political Science

ECN ran a piece a little over a week ago about how the Republican Party was technologically weak when it came to election winning technology. The evidence is pretty good for this. Normally when the economy is down the party out of power stands a very good chance of winning a national election. But 2012, although close, was not particularly close. About 51% to 47% nationally. Democrats vs Republicans. With the electoral college numbers wider at 332 to 206. So the Democrats won where they had to win in the States.

But that is not my main interest. What interests me is where the two parties are weak on science. The Republicans are called the anti-science party in that they don’t allow evidence to change their beliefs. And I will get to the Republicans in a bit. But I’d like to start out in a place where the Democrats have the same defect. And that would be climate science.

Let us start with NOAA’s State of the Climate Report from 2008.

Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.

What does that mean in plain English? That model predictions are not very good if we observe a period of 15 years or more with no warming. Well what has been observed? According to the head of the IPCC head we have observed seventeen years with no warming. Well obviously new models are required. And it will take another 15 years after they are developed to confirm their accuracy. What do we likely know now? What we know is that it is unlikely that CO2 is the climate driver the models claim. Or alternately that water vapor does not amplify the effects of CO2 as the models claim.

But we do know something else. There have been alternate warming and cooling scares about every thirty years since 1895. Fear equals funding. So what will the next scare be? It will be cooling since temperatures are already declining slightly and should accelerate in the coming years because the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been negative since about 2000 and sunspot numbers have been rather low.

OK. So much for the Democrats and their attraction to election models which do work and climate models which don’t. What kind of science makes Republicans go off the rails? I have one word but it is a long one. Endocannabinoids. We will get into the who of their fear in a bit. But first let us take a look at the subject scientifically.

For a look at the science go to nih.gov. That would be the National Institute of Health (NIH). Go to that page and enter – endocannabinoid – in the search box. I got 136,000 cites for that search. Let us try to narrow it some. Try – endocannabinoid heart – that returns 27,600 cites. Then try – endocannabinoid cancer – that returns 28,800 cites. And I’m sure that in another week there will be more for everything. Research in the area is exploding especially in Israel where Dr. Raphael Mechoulam of the Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been doing a lot of work on the subject, publishing 350 articles on the subject over a period of 50 years.

So why are there so many papers which touch on so many diverse systems in the body? Because there are more endocannabinoid receptors in the body than any other receptor type. The endocannabinoid system is a major regulator in the body implicated in almost all diseases including cancer.

So with all this research being done why do the Republicans twitch so violently at the mention of endocannabinoids and by implication cannabis? Because cannabis is etched in their minds as associated with dope smoking hippies. And that is true even though a large active cohort of hippies have been gone from the cultural scene for about 30 years. Now a days it is gangstas and blunts. But for Republicans of certain type their eternal enemy is the hippies. It is unfortunate that such a stereotype is impeding the progress of medicine such that much of the work in America is being done by guess and by gosh in what can generously be described as gypsy laboratories because of the fear of the law and the impediments the DEA and FDA place in the way of researchers according to Dr. Donald Abrams. So if cannabis and cannabinoids turn out to be really useful drugs? Then the Republican hate for hippies will be shown to be as useless as the hate for alcoholics that brought us alcohol prohibition in 1920. In other words preventing a blow to their psychology takes precedence over saving lives.

But let us not leave out the Democrats. High heating and cooling costs created by carbon taxes cost lives too. As does raising the price of everything which uses energy for production. Which is everything.

Let me leave you with something Eisenhower said about the scientific industrial complex which is not reported as often as what he said about the military industrial complex.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

As always in the human endeavor we are caught between hope and fear. We only become free men when realistic hope predominates over our darkest fears.


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10 responses to “Political Science”

  1. Daniel Taylor Avatar
    Daniel Taylor

    15 years ago was 1998, an anomolously warm year.

    If you look at the same trend over the last 14 or 16 years you get a completely different answer.

    Somebody is trying to pull the wool over your eyes on climate change, and it isn’t a Democrat.

  2. Daniel Taylor Avatar
    Daniel Taylor

    Now if you said that Democrats had a major blind spot with respect to nuclear power, where the science is very clear in favor, or that they didn’t want honest investigation into the overall effects of guns on violence, then you’d be standing on very solid ground.

  3. Simon Avatar

    Well I have studied the climate subject more extensively than I let on in the post. The models are shit. And that is what all the hysteria is about. Models.

    Try this;

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/05/31/sorry-global-warming-alarmists-the-earth-is-cooling/

    and this:

    http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2006/12/geologist-looks-at-global-warming.html

  4. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    “For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”

    I don’t think this sentence ends up meaning what Eisenhower thought it would mean. Compare the price of a blackboard to the price of a computer. OK, so it’s a Raspberry Pi, but if you’re looking for something to interface to your home particle accelerator, it’s a pretty good option.

    The field is tilting away from Big Science.

  5. Simon Avatar

    Neil,

    Tokamaks are a huge “science fair” project. OTOH I know some Polywell hackers who are looking to build one out of an old MRI machine. It might be possible.

    Tilting away yes. But not near tilted enough – yet.

  6. Gringo Avatar
    Gringo

    Here is one article on the superior election machinery of the Democrats.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/

  7. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    How much good has Tokamak really done? I tend to suspect that we’ve gotten nearly all the good out of the brute-force Big Science projects, at least for a while. The next wave of scientific advances will have to bubble up from random, unplanned vectors–the sort of inspired project that is best done small-scale.

    I agree, though–at the moment it’s tilting, not yet tilted.

  8. Simon Avatar

    Gringo,

    Thanks for that!

  9. […] Gringo left a link to an Atlantic piece about how the Obama team won the election that had this little gem […]

  10. […] is wrong with the Republicans? They don’t do science or technology well, and they appear to live in a world that no longer exists. Button down IBM. […]