Without a doubt, National Geographic is going to be flooded with letters on the cover story in the March, 2015 issue, “The War on Science.” Thank you for being thought-provoking.
The first thing that came to mind as I read the piece was an observation based on a relatively safe shibboleth …
PREMISE: 95% of science is eventually thrown-out as incorrect.
PREMISE: National Geographic is a science magazine with essentially scientific content.
CONCLUSION: 95% of what we read in National Geographic will eventually be thrown-out as incorrect.
So, don’t be too hard on the skeptics.
The next thing one has to comment on is the issue list on the cover of the March, 2015 National Geographic, itself.
“Climate change does not exist.” Of course it does. The asymptotic graphs reflecting atmospheric greenhouse gas inventory are frightening to look at. CO2 is ju-u-u-u-ust about 400 ppm, which seems unremarkable until one realizes that CO2 in the atmosphere is 60% higher than when I was born in the 1950s. The Atlantic Ocean off Atlantic City is getting deeper faster and faster -- 2 mm per year, at present, which doesn’t seem like much until one realizes that that translates to about a 200 mm invasion of beaches every year. The oceans come in about 100 times as much as they go up. That process is doubly frightening when one realizes that as centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis throws the denser, heavier cold water at the poles toward the equator, displacing lighter warm water at the equator toward the poles, the poles, where all of the important civilization-drowning ice is, are paradoxically getting warmer 4 times faster than the rest of the Earth!
“Evolution never happened.” The very weird people who take this position should stop smoking whatever is making them say that. Science is not “at war with” religion. Instead, science is “God’s property.” It is a part of theology. If the brains God gave us require that we believe that evolution is a reality -- and, come on, guys, they’ve been digging-up good evidence of evolution for decades, right? -- then we are required by God’s laws to interpret His inspired Bible with that in mind.
“The Moon landing was fake.” Here I have to disillusion you folks at National Geographic a teensy weensy bit. Years ago, when Moon landing “truthers” first started piping-up, I began collecting their arguments in a memo, which I forwarded to NASA for their explanation. My memo succeeded in enticing somebody in NASA public relations to respond. NASA’s representative’s item-by-item rebuttal by-and-large pointed-out exactly what I would have pointed-out to rebut the skeptics’ arguments. Things like, “You can’t see stars in the sky in NASA’s Moon photos because very heavy filtering was installed on the cameras to protect them from reflected sunlight unfiltered by an atmosphere on the airless Moon”: and “The Lunar Excursion Module left only a very slight rocket blast crater in the dust of the Moon beneath itself because gravity on the Moon is so low that only a very gentle rocket blast was necessary to land on it.” That sort of thing.
However, the NASA representative shook me up when he failed to address what should have been the easiest argument to deal with: “A photograph marked to show that it is from a later Moon landing clearly shows a Moon hill that is obviously identical to a Moon hill in a photo marked to show that it is from an earlier Moon landing -- a hill way, way, way too far away to be in both photographs -- and, while the hill in what appears to be the earlier landing’s photo shows astronaut footprints, they have all been swept clean in what appears to be the later landing’s photo.” While one can easily say, “The dates on the photos have been photo-shopped,” the NASA representative didn’t do that. His failure leaves open the possibility that he checked, found that the contradiction was real, but could not publicly solve it because the reels of Moon landing photos with dates appended have been too widely circulated to get away with giving that explanation.
“Vaccination can lead to autism.” Instead of inferring that the “vaccination truthers” are screwy, you folks really should be more laid-back on this issue. Even as I write this letter, autism rates in New Jersey are doubling once every 6 years, even adjusting for the broadening of the definition of “autism.” No one knows the reason. Science is mystified.
If science is mystified, then science has no business saying that “vaccination truthers” are all wet -- especially with science’s very, very bad record for getting things right the first time around.
Against the background of this logic, we have to keep in mind what our pediatricians are injecting into our infant’s rear ends: In addition to debilitated populations of the viruses against which immunity is sought, the shots include
(1) liquefied uncooked undigested cow heart flesh;
(2) liquefied uncooked undigested green monkey kidney flesh;
(3) a small quantity of uncooked undigested fetal human lung tissue;
(4) formaldehyde;
(5) soap surfactant;
(6) aluminum sulfate;
(7) aluminum phosphate;
(8) a mercury compound.
Now, that list of medium ingredients is not an exaggeration. It is real. Would you volunteer to have that stuff injected into your newborns, while their developmental stem cells are working overtime to create a normal child? No. You wouldn’t volunteer to have that stuff injected into your dog!
So, the vaccination truthers have a point, and you should leave them alone, or volunteer to pay damages for being a reputable source of scientific information who makes fun of vaccination truthers if it turns out that vaccinations are causing autism to double once every 6 years in New Jersey.
“Genetically modified food is evil.”
Let’s give the “genetically modified food truthers” half a nod. Genetically modified food strains have reached the point where they are generating judgments in lawsuits. Because, when push comes to shove, we are still stupid when it comes to understanding the role of genes in the manifestations of life in all of their glory, so that genetic modification of various crops constantly generates tremendously under-reported unintended consequences, it is wrong to include skeptics about genetically modified crops in your "weirdo skeptic" list.
