Friday, July 27, 2007

Wild stuff

I had not planned to see "Sunshine". The Hollywood version of climate change was bound be an over-the-top fanatsy that upends (and feeds) the daily dose of doom that is now standard fare. Anthony Lane's review ("Hot Stuff") in The New Yorker suggests that the film is actually much (much) worse than I had feared.

But back in the real world, Joel Schwartz writes about a recently published piece in Nature which also has more to do with implausibly extreme scenarios than with anything real and serious. Schwartz take us through mind-boogling overreaching and sleight-of-hand by the scientists. He concludes:
So there you have it. Another “authoritative”-but-wrong paper
in a premier scientific journal that will henceforth be used to support
unwarranted alarmism about climate change and air pollution.