Lamar Smith, Future Chairman For the House Committee On Science, Space, and Tech 292
An anonymous reader writes "Lamar Smith, a global warming skeptic, will become the new chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Someone who disagrees with the vast majority of scientists will be given partial jurisdiction over NASA, EPA, DOE, NSF, NOAA, and the USGS. When will candidates who are actually qualified to represent science or at a minimum show an interest in it be the representatives of science with regard to political decision-making?"
Re:To Be Fair, He's Replacing Texan Ralph Hall (Score:5, Informative)
Lamar happens to be the dickbag that keeps trying to push things like SOPA... just keep that in mind.
Re:To Be Fair, He's Replacing Texan Ralph Hall (Score:5, Informative)
Lamar Smith is a Christian Scientist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_S._Smith#Personal_life [wikipedia.org]
Christian Scientists believe that sickness and disease are the result of fear, ignorance, or sin, and should be healed through prayer or introspection.
Christian Science is opposed to science and uses the appearance of being a science to give itself extra legitimacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science [wikipedia.org]
Re:I can see it now (Score:2, Informative)
No, the Mexican government would have prevented this. In Mexico the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, elects 3/5th of its members by district and 2/5th by proportional representation. Proportional representation puts a wrench in the gerrymandering machine. By contrast, in the US we would have to have a 5% greater Democratic vote than Republican vote [princeton.edu] just to get parity in the House due to a phenomenal level of gerrymandering (which the Supreme Court says is perfectly legal even outside of the census as long as there is no obvious attempt to define districts to disenfranchise people based on race). Unfortunately, the people only voted for Democrats by 0.5% more than Republicans, resulting in the Republicans having 33 more seats than the Democrats.
Re:To Be Fair, He's Replacing Texan Ralph Hall (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science [wikipedia.org]
Lamar is also a part of the Christian Science denomination. Read up on what these people think, then get back to me.
Re:Just vote them in to office (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Skeptic is ok... (Score:5, Informative)
" but in this case knowledgeable people are divided"
NO! they are not. It's is a fake controversy manufactured for rating and the illusion of debate. Nothing more.
The experts in the field have consensus.
"So basically you're saying that what you believe to be true is a "well established fact" "
no. AGW is a well established fact.
As the poster stated: Anyone who opposed something that has a well established facts is a denier. The ONLY exception is if you bring forth a different testable idea. At which point you see if the data fits and have actual scientific debate.
You may have never heard the term 'denier' before the holocaust denier issue, but it has been used for other things for at least 30 years that I personally know of.
A denier is someone who denies facts. YOU are the one that tried to connect to the holocaust. There is a logical fallacy there, you might want to look it up.
If you want real world examples look at China. AGW harm there growth more then anyone on the country, and they say it's real. Look at the predictions, there only fault is that they are turning out to be too conservative.
But you don't understand the literature, so you refuse to believe the community they is experts in the field.
That makes no sense. I'ts like not understanding set theory so you refuse to accept that Cartesian product is real, and the Georg cantor was on the doll of big Maths.
Re:Skeptic is ok... (Score:5, Informative)
The irony is that there is no convincing evidence that the global climate is actually warming.- Fred Singer
"The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn't show a warming. Neither does the ocean." - Fred Singer
Yeah Fred Singer isn't a skeptic he's a denier and one of the worst ones at that.
The attempt to portray him as some sort of reasonable doubter is a PR move, initiated by himself, and nothing more.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/singer-criticises-deniers.html [skepticalscience.com]
He's been so dramatically wrong on so many issues where the evidence was incontrovertible and always in the favor of the industry that was paying him, it's hard to conclude that he's a just liar for hire. He's been called out for stating falsehoods so frequently, displayed so little remorse or contrition when caught and about things of such great consequence - the life and death of millions of people- that it's hard not to conclude that he's a textbook sociopath.
http://www.desmogblog.com/s-fred-singer [desmogblog.com]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer [sourcewatch.org]
The list of scientific facts that Fred Singer has denied over the years doesn't paint a pretty picture. He's denied CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone, something he termed the "ozone scare".
He's denied that second hand smoke causes the spectrum of diseases second hand smoke does indeed cause.
He's denied that acid rain was a problem or what caused by industry emissions.
He's denied human caused climate change.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/01/20/202297/unstoppable-disinformation-every-15-minutes-from-fred-singer/ [thinkprogress.org]
http://climateinsight.wordpress.com/editorial/merchant-of-doubt-s-fred-singer/ [wordpress.com]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer [sourcewatch.org]
and so on ad naseum...
Re:Just vote them in to office (Score:5, Informative)
Re:which scientists (Score:4, Informative)
The ones writing scientific articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals.
You know, the ones who have spent 10 years post-secondary science education studying the details of the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to the level of accepted PhD thesis, then gone on to do say 5-years post-doctoral research in a relevant specialty, then conducted accepted peer-reviewed research in these fields for years or decades.
Those ones. Especially the ones that have no funding associations with the fossil fuel industry.
If you seriously have no clue as to how to evaluate the credibility of sources of information, you're in a deep morass of ignorant hurt.
Great modern myth, but... (Score:1, Informative)
That's a great modern myth, but it has nothing to do with reality.
First, Challenger was destroyed by the explosion of its external tank while climbing to orbit after an SRB joint seal failed and a jet of flame caused the aft SRB attach point to fail
Second, the foam impact did not "nearly tore the wing in half" of Columbia. The foam impact punched a hole about the size of a basketball in the leading edge of Columbia's left wing. Had the damage been as severe as you suggest, the orbiter would likely have been destroyed by aerodynamic forces on ascent, or it would have been visible to the ground-based Air Force telescopes that examined Columbia while she was on orbit (photos of that inspection are available online... none of the images was taken at a moment when the vehicle was oriented in a way that a basket-ball sized hole at that location would be visible, so the damage was not seen). The wing was indeed lost when the structure failed during reentry due to hot plasma entering the hole and melting aluminum structural elements during reentry.
Third, it was mangers (a younger generation than the ones who were there when the system was developed... remember: it operated for 30 years) and not scientists or engineers who did not know that foam could harm a shuttle's thermal protection system. While some managers were may well have been engineers previously, once you change "hats" and become a management weenie your analytical skills get rapidly replaced by "people skills" and budget and schedule concerns. The potential for foam lost from the ET to hit and damage an orbiter's TPS was well documented in the 1970s during the system design phase and there were proposals to have the crew carry a repair kit but the technology for such a repair kit was not available at the time so it was decided to minimize the possibility of damage in the first place to the extent possible while still ending up with a system that could fly. The documentation of all of this is in NASA's own archives, some of which are online. Of course, if you get your news from places like MSNBC and Comedy Central you do not know these things.