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Study: Belief in biblical end-times stifling climate change action in U.S.

(Raw Story) - The United States has failed to take action to mitigate climate change thanks in part to the large number of religious Americans who believe the world has a set expiration date.

Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.

The study, based on data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, uncovered that belief in the “Second Coming” of Jesus reduced the probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change by 12 percent when controlling for a number of demographic and cultural factors. When the effects of party affiliation, political ideology, and media distrust were removed from the analysis, the belief in the “Second Coming” increased this effect by almost 20 percent.

“[I]t stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” Barker and Bearce explained.

That very sentiment has been expressed by federal legislators. Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said in 2010 that he opposed action on climate change because “the Earth will end only when God declares it to be over.” He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.

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I bolded that last paragraph. Read it again and let that sink in a little.

Louisiana counts the cost of teaching creationism – in reputation and dollars

GOP Governor Bobby Jindal defends anti-evolution education policy, but it costs his state millions in science-based business

(The Guardian) - Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal endorsed teaching creationism in public schools, by way of the state’s creationism law, a misnamed and misguided piece of legislation called the Louisiana Science Education Act. In a recent interview with NBC News, Jindal said:

“Let’s teach them about intelligent design … What are we scared of?”

Governor Jindal, we are scared of the harm to Louisiana students and to our state. The Louisiana Science Education Act has already hurt our economy.

The chairman of Louisiana’s senate education committee, Conrad Appel, has called for high schools and colleges to graduate more students in Stem fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), because “the amount of income [students] can earn in these related fields is best.” Teaching students that creationism is science will confuse them about the scientific method and the nature of science, which, in turn, will hold them back from getting jobs in any cutting-edge scientific field.

We can’t teach students misleading lessons that blur the lines between rigorous fact and religious belief.

If the law stays in place, we will not graduate more students into careers in science unless we teach them evolution, which is vital to fields like agriculture and medicine. We need our students to understand the concept to get jobs in places such as Baton Rouge’s top-notch Pennington Biomedical Research Center or New Orleans’ BioDistrict.

Claude Bouchard, a former executive director of the Pennington Research Center, told me that because of the Louisiana Science Education Act:

“[Students] will continue to believe that the laws of chemistry, physics and biology are optional when addressing the big issues of our time. Unfortunately, this is also not without economic consequences.

“If you are an employer in a high-tech industry, in the biotechnology sector or in a business that depends heavily on science, would you prefer to hire a graduate from a state where the legislature has in a sense declared that the laws of chemistry, physics or biology can be suspended at times or someone from a state with a rigorous science curriculum for its sons and daughters?”

Peter Kulakowsky, a biotech entrepreneur in Louisiana, recently published a letter in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, saying that:

“As the director of a biological laboratory in Louisiana, I need enlightened staff. Distracting the state’s students in their formative training [through the Louisiana Science Education Act] only cripples them.”

The Louisiana Science Education Act does more than harm the potential of Louisiana’s students. It is already directly impacting the state’s economy. Louisiana State University’s former graduate dean of science, Kevin Carman, testified before the state legislature in 2012 that top scientists had left the university citing the Louisiana Science Education Act as a reason. Other scientists chose to accept jobs elsewhere, because they didn’t want to come to a state with a creationism law. Carman said: “teaching pseudo-science drives scientists away.”

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It seems they are shooting themselves in the foot with this.

Study: Conservatives less likely to buy same lightbulbs if you tell them it will help the environment

When it comes to deciding which light bulb to buy, a label touting the product’s environmental benefit may actually discourage politically conservative shoppers.

(scienceblog.com) - Dena Gromet and Howard Kunreuther at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Rick Larrick at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business conducted two studies to determine how political ideology affected a person’s choice to buy energy-efficient products in the United States.

The authors suggest that financial incentives or emphasizing energy independence may be better ways to get people to buy energy-efficient products than appealing to environmental concerns because these represent unifying concerns that cross political boundaries. Their paper, “Political Ideology Affects Energy-Efficient Attitudes and Choices,” is published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1218453110)

“A popular strategy for marketing energy efficiency is to focus on its environmental benefits,” said Gromet, the lead author on the studies. “But not everyone values protecting the environment. We were interested in whether promoting the environment could in fact deter some individuals from purchasing energy efficient options that they would have otherwise selected.”

The first study surveyed 657 U.S. adults, 49 percent men, ranging in age from 19-81. Participants were given a short description of energy efficiency and answered questions about the psychological value they placed on reducing carbon dioxide emissions to protect the environment, reducing dependence on foreign oil and reducing the financial cost of energy use. They also indicated how much they favored investing in energy-efficient technology. Participants were asked about their political ideology, and how much they identified with different political parties.

The more conservative the participant, the less likely that person was to support investing in energy-efficient technology.

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Interesting, this brings to mind the way Fox News instantly started trashing the Chevy Volt when it came out and continued doing so until GM’s Former Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz called them out.

It’s like conservitives have this instant knee jerk reaction that green = bad, associate green technology with liberals, or see using green technology as something conservatives don’t do.

It probably has a lot to do with the way it’s bashed in conservative media too, (the article calls it the Limbaugh Effect).

From personal experience, it almost seems like some conservatives take pride in not being ‘green’ or environmentally conscious. 

The Distance to Mars

Space is vast. Like, really, fucking vast. So fucking vast that my brain has a hard time wrapping itself around the distances involved.

At our current technology level, it takes about 150 days to get to Mars.

How far is Mars from Earth? 

So far that at it’s closest, it takes light over three minutes to travel from Earth to Mars, when Mars is at its furthest from Earth light can take almost half an hour to travel between the two.

To appreciate the distances involved, check out distancetomars.com - a nice little interactive website that demonstrates just how far away our red neighbor is, and how far we have gone for science. 

The exploding world of pseudo-academic journals

(The New York Times) - The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.

But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

[…]

[S]ome researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”

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This just further muddies the water for science in a time when the waters are already pretty damn muddy due political, religious, or any other of the various motivations for folks deny scientific evidence.

Earth may actually be closer to the edge of Sun’s habitable zone

(physicsworld) - The Earth could be closer than previously thought to the inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone, according to a new study by planetary scientists in the US and France. The research also suggests that if our planet moved out of the habitable zone, it could lead to a “moist greenhouse” climate that could kick-start further drastic changes to the atmosphere.

A star’s habitable zone is the set of orbits within which a planet could have liquid water on its surface – and being within this zone is considered to be an important prerequisite for the development of life.

The current consensus is that the Sun’s habitable zone begins at about 0.95 astronomical units (AU), a comfortable distance from the Earth’s orbit at 1 AU. However, this latest work by James Kasting and colleagues at Penn State University, NASA and the University of Bordeaux suggests that that inner edge of the zone is much further out at 0.99 AU.

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Research reveals almost all climate change denial books linked to conservative think tanks

(The Contributor) - If you haven’t seen them on the television or come across their interviews on the radio or in newspapers and magazines, then you’ve almost certainly seen their work as your eyes scan the climate change section in your local book store or library.

They are the authors of books claiming to reveal the “real truth” about global warming and climate change - that it’s either all a hoax, that it’s overblown bad science from green ideologues or an elaborate illusion and wrongheaded nonsense.

You might have been intrigued by titles like An Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming, The Climate Caper or the subtle sledgehammer that was Global Warming and Other Bollocks.

But new research into the origins and authors of more than 100 of these climate science denial books finds almost all of them - about four out of five - are largely the products of conservative-leaning think tanks.

The research finds the books avoid traditional academic peer-review and are often written by non-experts. Dr Riley Dunlap, of Oklahoma State University, and Peter Jacques, of the University of Central Florida, have published their research - Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection - in the journal American Behavioural Scientist.

Sponsoring books “espousing climate change denial” has been a key tool for conservative think tanks to get the climate science denial message out to corporations, politicians and media leaders.

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I’d like to say, “File this under, no shit Sherlock.” but the fact of the matter is, a lot of people buy into this bullshit. 

They are being duped by right wing thinktanks who’s only purpose is to use this bullshit to deny peer reviewed scientific evidence to make sure there’s enough voters to support representatives who deny climate change - because if you can make it seem like it’s ‘not a real problem’ the corporate donors don’t have to spend any money on cleaner energy or convert to less polluting methods that might take away from the oil and coal industries.

It’s amazing how they’ve managed to get folks to carry water for corporations who could give a shit less if they completely fuck up the planet.

HP Develops Glasses-Free 3-D For Mobile Devices

(manufacturing.net) - LOS ANGELES (AP) — Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have developed a way to put glasses-free 3-D video on mobile devices with a viewing angle so wide that viewers can see an object more fully just by tilting the screen.

Glasses-free 3-D is not unique. Nintendo Co. Ltd.’s 3DS handheld allows video game play in 3-D without glasses, but it requires players to look straight into the screen with their noses centered.

HP’s researchers have found a way to make images viewable in 3-D from angles up to 45 degrees from center in any direction — up, down, side-to-side or diagonally. That means viewers can see a person’s face with one ear blocked from view, but reveal the ear by swiveling the screen.

The company’s findings will be published in the scientific journal, Nature, on Thursday.

The scientists used nanotechnology to etch multiple circles with tiny grooves into a glass layer of the display.

The grooves bend light in a way that allows for 64 different points of view. By moving the screen, people will perceive two of those points of view at any one time, one with their left eye and one with their right. As a result, the image will appear in 3-D.

David Fattal, the lead author of the paper, said the effect is “much like you’d see in the movie ‘Star Wars’ with the hologram of Princess Leia.”

He acknowledged the effect wouldn’t be identical to a hologram, however, since the images won’t pop as far out of the screen as Leia’s projection did in the movie.

The technology isn’t exactly coming to a movie theater near you any time soon. While moving images can be created using computer animation, any live video capture would require an array of 64 cameras all pointed at an object, Fattal said.

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This sounds pretty damn cool, even though it wouldn’t work with live video without having 64 cameras, it could make for some very impressive 3D computer generated images.

Salty water oozes up from Jupiter moon’s hidden ocean

If you could lick Jupiter’s moon Europa, it would taste like earthly seawater. A fresh look at the moon’s icy surface has revealed magnesium salts – the best evidence yet that material can seep from Europa’s buried ocean to its frozen surface, providing a glimpse of the moon’s liquid innards.

“We think the ice shell of Europa is serving as a window into the ocean below,” says Kevin Hand of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Europa likely has a sea salt composition similar to our own ocean.”

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I have no idea how I missed this, it’s exciting news!

Tendency To Fear Is Strong Political Influence: “The study … shows that individuals who are genetically predisposed to fear tend to have more negative out-group opinions, which play out politically as support for policies like anti-immigration and segregation.”

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — It’s no secret that fear is a mechanism often used in political campaigns to steer public opinion on hot-button issues like immigration and war. But not everyone is equally predisposed to be influenced by such a strategy, according to new research by Rose McDermott, professor of political science, and colleagues published in the American Journal of Political Science.

By examining the different ways that fear manifests itself in individuals and its correlation to political attitudes, the researchers found that people who have a greater genetic liability to experience higher levels of social fear tend to be more supportive of anti-immigration and pro-segregation policies. Thus far, research examining the link between fear and political attitudes has seldom accounted for trait-based fear, with transitory state-based fear being a more common focus area.

[…]

The research indicates a strong correlation between social fear and anti-immigration, pro-segregation attitudes. While those individuals with higher levels of social fear exhibited the strongest negative out-group attitudes, even the lowest amount of social phobia was related to substantially less positive out-group attitudes.

“It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security,” McDermott said.

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White Republicans And Southern Evangelicals Most Likely To Claim Reverse Discrimination, Stanford Research Finds

Whites who perceive anti-white bias draw from different communities in different parts of the country: evangelical churches in the South, and the Republican Party elsewhere.

(Stanford University News) - With the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas before the Supreme Court, “reverse discrimination” is back in the public eye.

Perceptions of reverse discrimination – so-called because it involves bias against whites, rather than against minorities – are not new, and have been building among American whites for decades. However, the phenomenon is little-studied, in part because some assume such claims by white Americans have little merit.

“We talk about whites who claim reverse discrimination a lot, but we don’t often study them systematically, ” said Stanford sociology Professor Aliya Saperstein. “The issue of reporting racial discrimination is such a loaded one. So, we were curious about who the white people were who would say out loud to a survey interviewer that they had been treated unfairly because of their race. What makes them different?”

Using data from a 2006 survey of American racial and religious diversity, Saperstein, along with fellow sociologist Damon Mayrl, found that the answer varies depending on where you are. In the South, the most likely discrimination reporters are evangelical Christians. Elsewhere, it’s Republicans.

The reasons for this aren’t ideological – the specifics of people’s religious or political beliefs seem to make no difference. Instead, the researchers suggest, Southern evangelical churches and the GOP are acting as regional communities for racially disaffected whites.

The findings show that common stereotypes of white people concerned with “reverse racism” – the stereotype of the “angry white male,” for instance – are not the whole story. While the study shows whites who report racial discrimination are more likely to be recently unemployed and pessimistic about their future, they are also more likely to say they have daily contact with non-whites, and count at least one non-white person among their eight closest friends.

“You have to look beyond the simple view of who’s claiming racial discrimination,” said Mayrl, a professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and first author on the study. “There is no singular profile of the white discrimination reporter.”

The paper is currently available online ahead of publication in Social Science Research.

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Creationism spreading in 300 schools, thanks to vouchers

by Zack Kopplin

(MSNBC) - I first began investigating creationist school vouchers as my part of my fight against creationism in my home state of Louisiana. Over the past few months, I’ve learned creationist vouchers aren’t just a Louisiana problem—they’re an American problem. School vouchers are, as James Gill recently wrote in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “the answer to a creationist’s prayer.”

Liberty Christian School, in Anderson, Indiana, has field trips to the Creation Museum and students learn from the creationist A Beka curriculum. Kingsway Christian School, in Avon, Indiana, also has Creation Museum field trips. Mansfield Christian School, in Ohio, teaches science through the creationist Answers in Genesis website, run by the founder of the Creation Museum. The school’s Philosophy of Science page says, “the literal view of creation is foundational to a Biblical World View.”  All three of these schools, and more than 300 schools like them, are receiving taxpayer money.

So far, I have documented 310 schools, in nine states and the District of Columbia that are teaching creationism, and receiving tens of millions of dollars in public money through school voucher programs.

There is no doubt that there are hundreds more creationist voucher schools that have yet to be identified. The more than 300 schools I have already found are those that have publicly stated on their websites that they teach creationism or use creationist curricula.

There are hundreds more voucher schools, across the country, that are self-identified Christian academies, that appear very similar in philosophy to the ones I’ve identified in my research as teaching creationism. These schools may not blatantly advertise that they teach creationism on their websites, or often don’t even have a website, but there is a good chance that hundreds more voucher schools are also teaching our children creationism. Some states, Arizona and Mississippi, haven’t even released lists of schools participating in their voucher programs for the public to audit.

Here are a few highlights from creationist voucher schools I have identified:

• The Beverly Institute in Jacksonville, Florida, teaches “Evidence of a Flood,” and “Evidence against Evolution,” and ”The Evolution of Man: A Mistaken Belief.”
• Creekside Christian Academy in McDonough, Georgia says,“The universe, a direct creation of God, refutes the man-made idea of evolution. Students will be called upon to see the divine order of creation and its implications on other subject areas.
• Life Christian Academy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma says their life science class will “lead the student to recognize that God created all living things and that these living things are fearfully and wonderfully made.” Evolution is taught only in history class, where students “evaluate the theory of evolution and its flaws.” The school uses the creationist Bob Jones and CSI curriculums.
• The principal of the Claiborne Christian School, in West Monroe, Louisiana, says in a school newsletter, “Our position at CCS on the age of the Earth and other issues is that any theory that goes against God’s Word is in error.” She also claims that scientists are “sinful men” trying to explain the world “without God” so they don’t have to be “morally accountable to Him.”
• Trinity Academy, in Gary, uses the creationist A Beka curriculum and says it “presents the universe as the direct creation of God and refutes the man-made idea of evolution.”
• Rocky Bayou Christian School, in Niceville, Florida, says in its section on educational philosophy, “God mandates that children be discipled for Christ. They must be trained in the biblical world view which honors Jehovah, the sovereign Creator of the universe. It recognizes that man was created in the image of God” and says “Man is presumed to be an evolutionary being shaped by matter, energy, and chance… God commands His people not to teach their children the way of the heathen.”
• Wisconsin Lutheran High School, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, says in its biology syllabus that it teaches, “evolutionists are ‘stuck’ because they have no god, therefore they must believe in evolution” and “young earth evidence a disaster to evolutionists.”

This year, we may see even more creationist school vouchers. Both Tennessee and Texas are considering passing voucher programs. Indiana and Georgia may expand their programs.

Advocates for vouchers argue that private schools and more competition would offer a better education for American students.  Schools that teach creationism and do not meet basic science standards will fail our students and do not deserve taxpayer funding.

We must to speak out to prevent funding these creationist schools with our public money. We must speak out and end these existing creationist voucher programs. As Americans, we must do the right thing and teach our students evidence-based science.

Zack Kopplin is a 19-year-old student at Rice University, and one of the leading American voices against the teaching of creationism in schools. He was featured as an MHP Foot Soldier last March, and profiled at length this week by io9.

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This infuriates me to no end. Not only the fact that taxpayer funds are being used to teach a religious belief in violation of the first amendment, but also because this particular religious belief is being taught as “science”.

Creationism IS NOT science. Creationism is religion posing as science.