Please keep in mind, the original post is a comment on how political parties treat science.

1. “completely factual science” what a polition calls some peice of science that he wants to use to further an agenda.
2 “academic justification” justification for a coarse of action that derives largely from some time of output from a University or think tank.
3 “you cried science” its a word play on ‘the boy who cried wolf’.

Keeping with the Environmental theme. The evironmental organizations just know that the number of necessary fuel breaks is near zero and no forest ever needs to get cut regardless of the reports. This is why there are the automatic lawsuits filed when ever the issue comes up.

Which I never quite understood. Whale tastes awful (I’m told). It used to be available off-ration, and people still didn’t eat it unless they were desperate. Still, I suppose, “local delicacy” = “we have yet to persuade anyone outside our extended families to actually eat this stuff”.

On whaling, I think most people recognise that the issue, as regards non-endangered species (only minke is in this class IIRC and they are listed as “threatened”), is between people who want to protect whales because they like them, or want to help the whalewatching industry, and people who want to kill whales either to be eaten as a delicacy item or to keep the uneconomic whaling industry going. I’m happy to line up in the first class.

Hey now – it goes both directions. I don’t see liberals pushing prayer or placebos as part of healthcare reform, regardless of the science. Or for that matter – what is the sustainable number of non-endangered whales that Iceland, Japan, etc. can safely hunt? Most of the liberals I seem to see already know the answer is zero before reading the science…

As someone who is sadly only capable of using liberal logic, I would like the following terms you used explained to me:

1. “completely factual science”

2. “academic justification”

3. “you cried science”

many thanks in advance.

Steve LaBonne: I try a tongue and cheek answer and you immediately jump to being insulting.

It was more like a head in rectum response.

It doesn’t seem to matter if the academic is in the hard sciences of physics/chemistry/etc or in the cultural / social sciences.

Nor should it. What should matter is what the facts are. Many wingnut denials of social / behavioral science findings , on things such as, for example, needle exchange or abstinence “education”, are every bit as idiotically (and damagingly) wrong as their denials of ideologically inconvenient bits of natural science.

In the US, academic views are used as a justification for a wide range of items. From the purely scientific to the strange and completely cultural. No matter what the topic is, the academic justification applied at the political level is that the position is science and therefore fact. It doesn’t seem to matter if the academic is in the hard sciences of physics/chemistry/etc or in the cultural / social sciences. Dozens of cultural battles later, the conservative is remembering multiple instances where the completely factual science turns out to be complete crap. Not just from the conservative view point but also from the academic’s view point. As a non-offensive example look at the change in the “science” behind dieting. So the wolfs here and a significant segment of the population doesn’t believe you anymore because you cried science one to many times.

To translate into left speak. Nuclear power may be a scientifically viable solution to dealing with global warming, but I don’t trust it because…

Alternatively they could view Climate change as the second, third, or fithteen most critical issue. If the economy is tanked to deal with Climate Change where will the funds come from to deal with these other more important issues? From my personal view, plague or runaway super bacteria is a more likely cause of mass death in near term.

I’d be interested to hear for the same reason, how strong denialism is in Canada, which has a similarly hostile environment to deal with, but a different political tradition.

I don’t think it has anything to do with Thatcher. The Tory/Cameron Leadership’s (!) position on climate change/environment was driven largely or exclusively, as far as I can tell, by Cameron’s determination to “detoxify” (his term!) the Tory brand. Environmentalism, like hugging hoodies, was useful and fortunately, unlike hugging hoodies, it seems to have stuck. The ‘Thatch hypothesis’ would seem to be devalidated by the fact that the most right-wing parts of the Tory party (whcih are the most Thatch-worshipping) are least persuaded that climate change is actually real/a threat/… Also, to my knowledge, in opposition the Tories were never much bothered about Greenery pre-Cameron.

Above someone asked about Telegraph and Times: To my knowledge, the Murdoch press has actually been comparatively sane about climate change (at least compared to the Spectator’s ravings). James Murdoch is said to be a quite committed environmentalist. The Telegraph, from the little I see of it, is Far, Far Out There. They publish articles by people with degrees in Classics telling climate scientists how to do their job…

As a US resident/participant/observer, that description seems spot-on to me. I don’t have personal experience with Australian attitudes, but the parallel makes sense to me.

Thanks for contributing that perspective.

(now back to lurking …)

In Europe it’s all a bit different. Certainly, in the UK modern Conservatism stems from Burke and other ‘reactionary’ writers who stressed organicism, and evinced a certain distrust of science and technology. So the idea that ‘we’ have screwed up nature and that ‘we’ need to reign back on growth and ‘progress’ is much easier to swallow than in the US/Australia, where ‘progress’ has always been a key part of the imperial project.