Links tagged “science”

Claim: The two emergencies are in fact quite similar. Both have their roots in the world's current economic model - that of the pursuit of infinite growth at the expense of the environment on which our survival depends - and both are deadly and disruptive. In fact, one may argue that the pandemic is part of climate change and therefore, our response to it should not be limited to containing the spread of the virus. What we thought was "normal" before the pandemic was already a crisis and so returning to it cannot be an option. ...

The rapid response to COVID-19 around the world illustrates the remarkable capacity of society to put the emergency brake on "business-as-usual" simply by acting in the moment. It shows that we can take radical action if we want to.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing an executive order that would make it easier for everyone to access publicly funded research. According to E&E News, the White House is considering mandating, via executive order, that all federally funded research be immediately available to the public upon publication. Currently, a lot of federally funded research is kept behind a paywall for one year before it becomes public. The executive order would reportedly mandate eliminating that paywall period...

But if what’s reported is broadly true, this could be a big win for a movement known as Open Science, which has complained that for too long, taxpayer-funded research has been locked behind expensive paywalls, keeping it out of reach for the people who paid for it...

Publishers, however, are not pleased. On Wednesday, more than 125 scientific publishers of scientific journals (including the behemoth Elsevier, as well as Wiley) and large scientific organizations (like the Association for Psychological Science and the American Geophysical Union, which also publish journals) co-signed a letter condemning the potential executive order. Other notable signatories include the American Heart Association and the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the letter, they write that the executive order would “would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals” and that the move would “effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free.”

Barrasso: 'I disagree with the solutions Democrats are proposing in terms of this alarmist view. Is it a concern? Yes. But it's not a crisis.'

President Trump's new top science advisor Dr. Will Happer of Princeton University has told The Scientist that the significance of climate change has been "tremendously exaggerated" and has "become sort of a cult movement in the last five or 10 years."

Happer: "The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO₂ is not one of the problems. So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, 'This is a problem, and we're going to solve it.' All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies."

Happer: “The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing CO2 will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science,”

Dr. Happer Testifies to Congress: ‘Warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind’ – ‘CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning’