Bishop Hill New...scientist, did you say?
What can you say about New Scientist?
There's a bit in the Rational Optimist which discusses coral reefs and the greek chorus that claims they are all going to disappear because of ocean acidification. Acidification is not really the issue says our Optimist - there are much bigger problems:
Coral reefs... are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient run-off and fishing - especially the harvesting of herbivorous fishes that otherwise keep reefs clean of algae.
And what has New Scientist writer Liz Else got to say about this? Well, she accuses the Optimist of failing `to recognize that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate [i.e. acidification].
Standards are not what they were at New Scientist, are they?
Reader Comments (15)
"Standards are not what they were at New Scientist, are they?" Oh come; I loved it when I was fourteen, but by the time I was eighteen I had my doubts. And that was in the early sixties.
I can't praise highly enough Matt Ridley's all too rare positive stance in his new book The Rational Optiimist ... but ...the "... are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient run-off ..." seems not to be supported by the evidence either, at least on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Great Barrier Reef physicist Prof. Peter Ridd said " the reef had defied predictions that it would be overwhelmed by crown of thorns starfish, smothered in sediment from river runoff or poisoned by sediment and chemicals washed on to corals from the mainland."
"Scientists responsible for "crying wolf" over lesser threats had done the research community a disservice, he said. Ten years ago, I was told that the coral was going to die from sediment, and we have proved that is complete rubbish," Professor Ridd told The Weekend Australian.
"They are saying that pesticides are a problem, but when you look at the latest data, that is a load of rubbish. They are saying bleaching is the end of the world, but when you look into it, that is a highly dubious proposition. So when something comes along like the calcification problem, you are sort of left with this wolf story . . . they are crying wolf all the time."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/scientists-crying-wolf-over-coral/story-e6frg6xf-1225811910634
Maybe if some real science was applied to other reefs in the world a similar optimistic view would arise? About the overfishing bit ... particularly that the fish will never come back ... I remain to be convinced.
Walter Starck is another more rational Barrier Reef Scientist that opposes the alarmist mantra of our governmentally well funded aussie Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/alarmists_all_at_sea/
It's good to see that this debunking of the new alarmist ocean acidification scare is gaining some traction in America as well:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/16/oz-report-footy-at-least-has-rules/
What Brady said, but in CAPS. :o)
Thanks, Brady, you make some good points. I will follow them up.
'Worldwide sales of the New Scientist, excluding Australasia and North America, fell 7.5% year on year to 101,060' (Feb 2010)...quoted from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/feb/11/private-eye-abc-circulation-figures
Meanwhile, who's topping the sales list of the Amazon books on global warming? How many print impressions is it now, Bishop?
[BH adds: I think we must be around the 5,000 mark now]
I started reading New Scientist back in the 60s I guess. Not anymore, not since it gave up on science in favour of advocacy. I'm surprised the readership hasn't fallen faster; must be the gullible still there.
No those standards most certainly are not what they were. The magazine has clearly been taken over by the politically agitated, and no doubt, like the similarly affected BBC, sees itself with a mission to persuade 'the world' to its own point of view.
quote 'Worldwide sales of the New Scientist, excluding Australasia and North America, fell 7.5% year on year to 101,060' (Feb 2010) unquote
Good. I used to get it on a subscription paid for by my daughter every week. It got so bad with every page containing something about the way evil humanity was destroying the planet, and hardly any pages containing real science, that I forbade her to renew.
They couldn't even give it away.
JF
OT, you know the piece about science education of MPs. Maybe you should send them copies of a book which spells out the problems with CRU, climate science, hijacking of peer review. I'm sure there's something suitable out there....
"About the overfishing bit" ... Aussie reef scientist Walter Starck seems to disagree as well:
"Fishery statistics for the GBR amount to an annual harvest of a miniscule 17 kg/km². Elsewhere, over a wide range of Pacific reefs, the annual harvest averages some 7700 kg/km2 and these reefs are generally considered by fisheries biologists to be sustainably harvested."
"Coral trout are the most heavily fished GBR reef species and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has funded extensive surveys of their populations for over two decades. These surveys show trout are abundant everywhere and there is little to no difference between the most frequently fished reefs near population centres and remote, rarely visited, ones, nor between reefs open to fishing and those closed to it. They clearly indicate that even the most heavily fished species are in fact being only lightly harvested. Remarkably, this exceptionally valuable body of information has never been published but exists only as unpublished reports in the GBR Authority library."
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3396&page=0
..see Walter Starck's other fascinating articles at the bottom of this link too :-)
More in depth peer reviewed criticisms of the ocean acidification scare can be found at:
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/corals/p2ch1.php
"Clearly, climate-alarmist claims of impending marine species extinctions due to increases in both temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration are not only not supported by real-world evidence, they are actually refuted by it." :-D
"Standards are not what they were at New Scientist"
When was that, then?
Most issues of New Scientist contain some new kind of perpetual motion machine or similar that looks like an April 1 story published on the wrong day.
I registered on their website for a while to get the NS email - out of (masochistic?) curiosity after buying a copy at the airport and thinking - sheesh, this is bad.
The shrill advocacy alluded to by other folk here was awfully stark sandwiched between scare stories and self evidently loopy stuff piled up in the New Scientist email folder.
Truly a member of the MSM with the Daily Express and NOTW.
It's only minor saving grace was The Last Word and even that has it's cringeworthy moments.
New Scientist has been a comic for a loooooong time, I was sad when Scientific American went the same way though. Their "lets gang up and give Lomborg a kicking" issue was disgraceful (and incorrect in all the areas that I personally have experience in).
I don't know about MPs lack of science, but there is at least one famous ex MP who is poorly informed about units of measurement. I heard Michael Portillo mention 'square acres' on a repeat Railway Journeys last evening.
Dearieme has it about right.
He gave up a bit before I did; I think I managed to continue with until around the late seventies, but then it just annoyed me too much. And that was before the global warming scam got started (iirc, the scare-du-jour then was a new ice age - or possibly SARS or some such - had they invented the millennium bug by then? - I really can't be bothered thinking about it).
Not for nothing does the great Lubos Motl refer to the mag as "Nude Socialist"