Guest post by Tom Freeman

This month’s Prospect magazine has a section on neuroscience, and in particular its political implications.

One thing came up in their roundtable discussion that always gets my goat: the idea that neuroscience is going to be a good way of telling what effects on people different policies will have. Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge, says:

For years we changed our education system again and again, but these changes weren’t based on evidence about how we learned. Instead, wouldn’t it be useful if we thought about how the brain really works, and how children learn best, and in turn formulated educational policy based on that?

And the RSA’s Matthew Taylor adds, in a similar but more nakedly political vein:

I am confident that, as we find out more about our brains, it will strengthen the progressive case, in the sense that children learn best when they are actively involved, not being passive.

No, no, no.

Think about it: how could you use neuroscience to tell which teaching methods promote the best learning? continue reading… »

Liberal Conspiracy has obtained a set of notes taken at a recent seminar which show that the Conservative Party is pushing ahead with plans to provide state funding to a network of independent schools with close ties to a controversial occult society.

The notes were taken at a recent seminar organised by the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF), an offshoot of the Anthroposophical Society, which exists to promote the occult philosophies of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner, and also suggest that a newly registered educational charity with close ties to the Conservative Party may be actively engaged in the promotion of Conservative education policy in such a way as to breach the Charity Commission’s regulations on charity involvement in political activity.

The meeting, which took place last November, was described as a ‘pre-election seminar about possible developments in the state funding opportunity for Steiner Schools’ and included seminars with Sam Freedman, the head of Policy Exchange’s education unit and a current advisor to Shadow Education Minister, Michael Gove, and Rachel Wolf, the Founder/Director of the New Schools Network and former education advisor to the Conservative Party. continue reading… »

Guest post by Richard Wilson

Every month, in pubs and bars from Edinburgh to Bristol, hundreds gather to discuss unashamedly nerdy issues – from the resurgence of quack medicines like homeopathy, to the flaccid state of science reporting in the UK media. Every week, thousands more download the ’skeptic’ podcasts Little Atoms and the Pod Delusion, while many others visit skeptically-minded blogs and websites.

Whether this reflects a growth in the number of people interested in these issues, or simply better organisation (helped along, doubtless, by the internet), skeptics today seem more vocal and visible than at any time that I can remember. continue reading… »

There has been an ongoing “re-evaluation” of Green Party policy around scientific evidence recently. This came about mainly due to a few journalists helpfully letting us know that there was some deeply dodgy stuff in policy.

It certainly came as a shock to many of us who had not thoroughly read our voluminous policy documents.

This conference saw the first swath of re-orientating our policy on a more science friendly footing. We passed the motion on abolition of the science pledge – a policy so offensive to scientists and ‘technologists’ that it makes me wince just to think of it. Anyway, it’s gone. Hurray.

This was quickly followed by the passing of the science chapter enabling motion which means that the party has officially endorsed a review and rewrite of our entire science and technology section of the PSS, our core policy document.

That’s going to take some hard work and we’ll be looking for people both inside and outside of the party to help us with that process.
continue reading… »

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:

As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.
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Liberal Conspiracy has uncovered evidence that strongly suggests that a parliamentary committee which, last week, came out in favour of introducing a statutory minimum unit price for alcohol, was given misleading evidence on the scale of alcohol-related deaths in the UK.

We’ve found that that official government statistics for alcohol-related deaths, produced annually by the Office for National Statistics, have routinely been inflated by anything up to 1,100 deaths a year by the inclusion of deaths from liver diseases for which alcohol was not identified as a cause on individual death certificates.

One of these diseases, biliary cirrhosis, which accounts for around 160-180 deaths a year in the UK, was initially linked to coeliac disease in the late 1970s (Logan RF 1978) and was clearly identified as being caused by an auto-immune disorder by the year 2000 (Nakanuma Y 2000). It was not, however, excluded from official statistics for alcohol-related deaths until 2006.

However, there is also clear evidence that, overall, official ONS estimates fail to show the true extent of alcohol-related mortality in the UK by excluding mortality data for a significant number of causes of death in which alcohol use is known to be a significant causal factor, including several common cancers, road traffic accidents and alcohol-related violence.
continue reading… »

It looks like being a long, drawn-out general election campaign and that mean plenty of opportunities for politicians to demonstrate their scientific illiteracy and statistical ineptitude.

This is a field in which, as might readily be expected, the Tories have already taken an early lead courtesy of Cameron’s Greenwash Guru and ex-Non-Dom, Zac Goldsmith, who’s clearly failed to take to heart the first rule of writing fact-check articles; make absolutely sure your own facts are correct before you publish:

Every few months, an organisation called Sense About Science (SAS) issues a pamphlet that makes fun of celebrities getting their science wrong. It is full of what it regards to be false assertions by celebrities about the benefits of homeopathy and so on, and ends with an offer by the organisation to act as a fact-checking service.

Actually, Sense About Science’s Science for Celebrities series is an annual publication but that’s the least of Zac’s problems when compared to the abject intellectual dishonesty and general ineptitude of the rest of his commentary. continue reading… »

The last few weeks have produced more than their fair share of idiotic ramblings on the subject of climate change and climate science but surely none worse than Iain Dale’s latest pathetic effort:

Oxford is Cool

From one of my readers, Victor NW Kent…

The Met Office has released all of its stored temperature readings “confident that they will prove its prediction of global warming”. Useful.

Purely at random I chose a Midlands city – Oxford, which has recorded data going back to 1853.

Yes, Iain Dale (2:1 in German, Linguistics and TEFL from the University of East Anglia) really is suggesting that his readers check the evidence for climate change in the Met Office’s data using a method posted in comments on his blog by one of his semi-house trained comment-box chimps.

This is obviously an accident waiting to happen but in the interests of humouring him, for the moment, lets look at the method proposed by Victor:
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Thanks to the Copenhagen summit and the fall out from the CRU hack the subject of Climate Change here has been the subject of much discussion recently, not least here at LC.

A lot of this has centered on “climategate”, the battle between “deniers” and “believers”, or got bogged down in arguments about hockey sticks, computer models, the medieval warm period etc., but I think it is worth going back to the scientific arguments for AGW from first principles.

Much of this has been touched on before at LC and some of it may seem overly basic – but I believe it is worth going over again because it is important to keep sight of the basic scientific case for AGW and to point out that many of the disccussions I mentioned above have little or no impact on this basic science.

Human CO2 emissions

There has been an increase in the level of several GHGs in the atmosphere, the most significant being CO2 – which has increased from 280ppm to 385ppm. That this is due to human activity, largely the burning of fossil fuels, is not in doubt – CO2 from different sources contains different carbon isotopes and by analysing their relative presence it is possible to determine the source of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. The notion that such an increase in CO2 levels as a result of the burning of fossil fuels would cause the earth’s climate to warm was first proposed in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius.
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On Wednesday, The Telegraph’s in-house global warming denier, James Delingpole, published an article in which it was claimed that climate scientists working at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, which is based at the headquarters of the Meteorological Office, near Exeter, had ‘probably tampered with Russian climate data’ under the headline:

‘Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming’.

‘The Russians’, it turns out, did nothing of the sort and scientists working at the Hadley Centre are only tangentially related to the so-called ‘Climategate’ story, which relates to the hacking of a web-mail server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

The source of Delingpole’s claims, which were reported uncritically by a number of Russian news agencies, is disclosed in the news release which he quotes in full in the article, before going on to provide links to articles by Steve MacIntyre (Climate Audit) and Jeff Id (posted at TV Weatherman Anthony Watts’ ‘Watts up with that’).
continue reading… »

Time for part 2 of our countdown of ‘100-ish Reasons why Conservative Home and Jim McConalogue are full of shit‘, and this time around we’ll be covering numbers 70-87.

In honour of Paul Evans’ tweet on the first part of this series, we’re calling this next part ‘Creatures from the Tory ID’.

As per last time out, our comments are in italics…

——————

70. It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything by changing a great number of input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used. In this context, the IPCC predictions do not “prove” anything.

Is anyone actually suggesting that climate models do anything other than extrapolate likely future trends based on a combination of historical data, statistical analysis and the use of defined scenarios? Modelling is common place in science, not just climatology but cosmology, particle physics and other branches of the natural sciences, particularly those that rely heavily on the use of statistical physics. Models are not used in isolation, they have to be tested and validated both methodologically and observationally, i.e. they’re used to model past events and trends and their output is then compared to the observed evidence to ascertain whether and how closely they match up (hindcasting). When used to extrapolate future trends, models are monitored against real world data to evaluate how closely the model’s predictions coincide with what’s actually going on in the real world.

None of this has anything to do with providing proof of anything. In science proof has a very specific meaning, and it one that Jim evidently doesn’t understand or he wouldn’t be advancing such an asinine and boneheaded argument.

71. It is entirely inconsistent that the United Nations claimed to prove that man-made CO2 causes global warming while in a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft stating that “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases” and “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”.

Hey Jim… its 2009 not 1996 and science has moved on and accumulated a mass of evidence which supports AGW theory.

72. It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

There are ways in which CO2 does act as pollutant in the colloquial sense of the term, i.e. acidification of the ocean. However, references to CO2 as a pollutant are usually made in the context of role as one of a number of greenhouse gases which cause warming. Too much warming has severe negative effects on agriculture, health and the environment.

Water is, of course, essential to life but that doesn’t mean you can’t drown in it and if you consume too much in a short space of time you’ll die of hyper-hydration (i.e. water-poisoning).

73. It is simply not true to claim that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes because, while regional variations may occur, there is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports these claims.

Hurricane? What Hurricane? – Michael Fish.

Fuck me, this is basic fucking science. Sea/Oceanic warming in the tropics pushes as increased amount of water vapour into the atmosphere and what goes up much eventually come down, typically after its worked it way up to us, and across the Atlantic, from the Caribbean.

It’s the water cycle you twat, just about the single most basic and readily understandable/verifiable scientific concept in fucking climatology.

BTW, I am working through these in reverse order as I write this up, so expect the level of frustration and abuse to rise as the series continues.

74. It is myth that receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming given that glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries.

Ist not the fact that glaciers are receding and ice shelves are breaking off that provide the evidence for global warming. The accelerating rate at which this is occurring is where the evidence lies. This is gibber.

75. It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising, because that is natural variation and whilst the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The main Antarctic continent is actually cooling.

These are local temperature variations that have no overall impact on global temperatures. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice mass, overall, at an accelerating rate. More gibber.

76. The IPCC claims “new evidence suggests that climate-driven extinctions and range retractions are already widespread” and the “projected impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance, since global losses in biodiversity are irreversible (very high confidence)” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research.

Ecosystem studies and biodiversity modelling are relatively new research fields and there is much that is still to be understood, particular in terms of the impact of microclimate buffering and assessing the full acclimation capacity of plants and animals It is, however, untrue to suggest that the IPCC’s assessment is not supported by scientific research. This is a rapidly expanding research field and one that appears, to date, to be remarkably free of fucknut deniers. The overwhelming mass of current evidence indicates a clear link between climate change and the loss of biodiversity, what is uncertain is the full extent to which such losses may be realised if warming continues along the trends evident over the last 100 years or so.

77. The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as they have proven to be remarkably resilient to climate change. Most wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles involving temperature changes similar to or greater than those experienced in the twentieth century.

Jeez, is this guy a moron or what? Evolutionary adaptation is, in very simple terms, a race between the incidence of genetic variations that give rise of characteristics favourable to survival in a changing climate and the rate at which the climate changes. It not just the scale of climate change that matters but the rate at which that change occurs – if it happens to fast, many species, particularly large mammals, will likely not be able to adapt fast enough to avoid extinction. That’s why the fucking polar bears are endangered – the impact of climate change on polar sea ice is shortening their hunting season, preventing the bears for find the food they need (seals) to lay down the fat reserves necessary to survive hibernation.

78. Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but the real state of sea levels is not what they have stated. Climate scientists have sought to measure the tide gauge. Tide gauging gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. Certain members in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), chose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they chose the record of one, which gives a 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. It is known that this is a subsiding area. It is well known in geological terms that this is the only record which you should not use, but the IPCC has done so.

Global mean sea levels are calculated using a variety of methods – sediment cores, tidal gauges, satellite measurements – all of which show close agreement, i.e. that the rise in sea levels has been accelerating for the last century. The allegation that the IPCC based in measurements on a single tidal gauge in Hong Kong comes from only one source, Dr Nils-Axel Morner, a former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University and  president of the INQUA Commission on Neotectonics from 1981-1989. Morner is now widely regarded as a crank. In 1995 he was awarded the ‘Deceiver of the Year award’ by the Swedish Skeptics Association for arranging university courses about dowsing, for which he claims to have provided theoretical support. In 1997, he was asked by James Randi to claim the one million dollar paranormal challenge by making a controlled experiment that proved that dowsing worked. Morner bottled out of the challenge.

There is no credible evidence to support Morner‘s allegations.

79. The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. This eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. How can CO2 rises bring about global warming?

The planet has continued to accumulate heat since 1998 but surface temperatures can and do show a considerable degree of internal variability due to heat exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have occurred from 1998 onwards and 1998 was unusually warm due to a very strong El Nino effect.

How can CO2 rises bring about global warming? Take a course in atmospheric physics, asshole.

80. If one factors in for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent). How can CO2 rises bring about global warming?

Tropospheric satellite measurements match current warming models other than in the tropics, where the discrepancies are thought to stem from data errors arising from corrections made for satellite drift.

81. There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

See #83. The planet has been off the solar trend for the last 30 years, the main period of modern warning.

82. Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets. In the case of Antarctica, the research actually suggests the opposite: that CO2-induced global warming would tend to buffer the world against such an outcome.

The Greenland interior is in mass balance but the rate of ice loss in coastal regions doubled between 2002 and 2009. While East Antarctica is gaining land ice, Antarctica as a whole is losing ice mass at an accelerating rate.

83. The IPCC claims the climate variation due to changes in the solar output since 1750 is smaller than its estimated net anthropogenic contribution. A large body of scientific research suggests the opposite: that it is the sun that is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

Solar activity has shown little or no long-term trend since the 1950’s, the net effect of which is that any statistical correlation between warming trends and solar activity ceased in 1975. This particular fact comes from a 2005 study by Usoskin, which is one of studies most commonly cited by sceptics and deniers  in support of the solar activity hypothesis. It, however, states that “during these last 30 years (1975-2005) the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”

84. The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” and will “increase malnutrition and consequent disorders.” In fact, the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels have played an indispensible role in making it possible to feed a growing global population.

See response to #86, which explains why McConalogue is talking out his arse.

85. The historical increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and into the future it will likely provide more of the same benefit.

The two most important factors in increasing human lifespans since the industrial revolution are improved nutrition, which is what McConalogue is alluding to, and modern sanitation, which has fuck all to do with CO2.Yes, there’s a statistical correlation between post-industrial CO2 levels and increases in lifespan, but if McConalogue actually understood anything about science he’d know that correlations do not imply causation so ‘probably’ doesn’t cut it as an argument.

86. The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years on the order of 70 percent for wheat, 28 percent for cereals, 33 percent for fruits and melons, 62 percent for legumes, 67 percent for root and tuber crops, and 51 percent for vegetables.

The most recent projections for the impact of global warming on crop yields indicates that CO2 fertilisation may, at best, compensate for around 50% of the decline in yields project to happen as a result of a number of factors, including higher average temperatures and the impact of warming on soil moisture content. Current evidence also indicates that raising atmospheric CO2 levels above 450 ppm will have a significant adverse impact not only on yields, but on nutritional quality and plant toxicity. Not only is there no guarantee that any additional plant growth due to CO fertilisation will go in to those parts of the plant that are eaten (e.g. grain) but excess CO2 inhibits Nitrogen uptake, which reduces the nutritional content of edible plants.

Guess we can put McConalogue down for ‘knows fuck all about agriculture’ as well.

87. The total man-made CO2 emission throughout human history constitutes less than 0.00022 percent of the total CO2 amount naturally degassed from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

The Earth’s been around for 4.5 billion years, although maybe we should skip the first half billion years or so to be fair. Humans? About 200,000 years all-in from the first true Homo Sapiens and about 10,000 years if you want to go by the first evidence of settlement and agriculture. So we’ve been around for between 0.0005% and 0.0000000125% of geological history and we’re already up to 0.00022% of the level CO2 emission of natural emissions from the mantle. Almost all of the man-made contribution to CO2 emissions stems from the last 200-250 years.

Conservative Home have published a list, in conjunction with the Daily Express, of their ‘100 Reasons why the ‘Copenhagen’ Governments and other proponents of “man-made” Global Warming theory of Climate Change are completely wrong‘.

By way of a response to Jim McConalogue’s lengthy article, we’ll be publishing our own rundown, in several parts, which we’re calling…

‘100-ish Reasons why Conservative Home and Jim McConalogue are full of shit’

For part one of our rundown, which covers reasons 88 to 100, check below the fold… my responses are in italics.
continue reading… »

So, at last, the Mail on Sunday has waded into the furore surrounding the hacked CRU emails with a special investigation, bringing out its big guns, David Rose, who is highly regarded as a journalist and has a solid track record in serious reporting and investigations, to write up the story.

For all his well-deserved reputation as a serious journalist, Rose, it must be said, also has previous form for being taken in by sources he believed to be reliable at the time but which then proved to have been feeding him disinformation. In this case the disinformation in question related to alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, which Rose fell for hook, line and sinker. To his credit Rose did eventually come clean and admit to having been duped, expressing his regrets in very strong and, in regards to the role of some of his sources.

The point I’m making here is that even a very good journalist is only ever going to be as good as his sources, and in the case of Rose’s investigation his choice of sources are letting him down very badly indeed.
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Peter Sinclair’s latest Climate Denial Crock of the Week is well worth a look…

If the furore surrounding the hacking of a webmail server at UEA’s Climate Research Unit has achieved anything at all it’s been to push the issue of scientific probity and integrity firmly into the spotlight. By far the most damning, but still unproven, allegation levelled at the CRU’s scientists is that they deliberated distorted and manipulated the evidence to shore up AGW theory and, on the basis that I’m entirely in agreement with the proposition that distortion and manipulation of evidence is a bad thing I think it only fair that we apply that same standard to some of the arguments put forward by some self-styled AGW ‘sceptics’.

Oh, screw it – we’re not talking about genuine sceptics here, we talking about Mad Mel, who’s used her blog at the Spectator to direct yet another signature rant at the BBC (as recommended by Iain Dale) because it neglected to put up a complete fruit-loop against Ed Miliband on the Today programme.
She goes on to state that:

This was just yet more anti-scientific ignorance and ideological propaganda. There is no such ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientists; more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists are on record expressing deep scepticism of AGW. Is Miliband saying therefore that these eminent scientists are themselves ‘profoundly irresponsible’? Does Miliband even know they exist?

She’s most likely referring here to a list of allegedly sceptical scientists compiled by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma/Exxon-Mobil) who, just from his biography on Wikipedia, looks to be a bigoted wackaloon after Mad Mel’s own heart. He loves God, Israel, torturing Iraqi prisoners and his campaign contributions from the oil, gas and energy industries – in 2002 he received more oil and gas contributions than anyone other than Texas senator John Cornyn – and he hates immigrants, gays and genuine climate scientists.
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As anthropogenic global warming is currently a hot topic, thanks to the CRU e-mail hack and the Copenhagen summit, I figured it was long past time that someone (me) sorted out this whole business of how to correctly identify the difference between climate change sceptics and climate change deniers.

The problem is a fairly straightforward one.

On the one hand you have genuine climate change sceptics who are often unfairly labelled as deniers for voicing what are wholly legitimate scientific and economic concerns about the validity of certain aspects of the main climate change narrative.

On the other, you have a loose coteries of flat-earthers and wackaloons who use the terms ’sceptic’ and ’scepticism’ as cover for the fact that they haven’t got the first clue about climate science and are, not to put too fine a point on it, talking out of their collective arses.

So far as helpful resources go, the Denialism blog at Scienceblogs has a long, but very interesting and helpful, generic guide to denialism which covers the main tactics deployed by genuine deniers; conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (i.e. moving the goal posts) and fallacies of logic. Do take the time to read the full article as it will arm you with many of the tools you need when spotting deniers, not just in the climate change debate but more generally as the tactics set out in the article apply just as readily to creationists/ID-ers, HIV/AIDS deniers, 9/11 conspiracists, the anti-vaccination lobby and an assortment of other wackaloons.

So, bringing the subject back to climate change, what can we say about the position adopted by genuine sceptics? continue reading… »

Attention shoppers, and ladies that means you: now that marriage, mortgage and maternity are the new must-have items in today’s post-credit-crunch-pre-Torygeddon social control bonanza, there’s a new lifestyle drug on the market. It won’t help you dance all night, shunt you through a red-eyed work deadline or – heaven forbid – encourage you to go to bed with random strangers; it won’t even make you lose weight. It’s called Filibanserin, and it’s here to help you please your man.

As any fool knows, in this all-the-sex all-the-time society the only functional couples are the ones who are going at it like crack-addled bunnies night after hard-shagging night, whatever their age or personal preference. Your duty as a woman is to provide your male partner with the sexual release he needs. Don’t fancy sex with hubby tonight? Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy or a culture that frames heterosexual intercourse as the ultimate panacaea: the problem, little lady, is with you. You have a disease called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Filibanserin can fix you.

According to Boehringer-Ingelheim, which just happens to make and sell Filibanserin, HSDD is “a form of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD)” affecting around 10% of women. It is “a medical condition characterised by a decrease in sexual desire…. the condition can negatively impact a woman`s life and her relationship with her partner.” continue reading… »

Imagine, if you please, a kettle. The empirically-minded may wish to actually fetch one and 3/4 fill it with water. Examine the water in this imaginary (or actual, for the science geeks) kettle. It’s pretty much stationary. Now turn the kettle on and watch very carefully. You will quite quickly notice that the system becomes less predictable, less stable, more active and wilder, as the heat in the system increases.

If you increase the temperature far enough, your system will change radically and comprehensively (all the water will change state and leave the system through the cracks) leaving you with a barren, parched shell of what was once a nice cup of tea in potentia.

This is the image you should have in your mind when you hear an Environment Agency spokesmen using words like “unprecedented”.

The Second, Law, of Thermo, Dynamics.

The flooding in Cumbria is not quite Hurricane Katrina, but then we’re not in a hurricane belt. For Britain, even a Britain recently flooded a number of times in different areas, this has been a pretty wet week. Most specifically over a foot of actual rain fell on the Lake District and south-western Scotland [1] over the last 24 hours alone.
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If you’ve spotted this story in the newswire then you may well be wondering just what the hell is going on.

The short version is that sometime in the last couple of the weeks, hackers managed to raid a server at the University of East Anglia and download a large number of emails and other documents relating to the work of the University’s Climate Research Unit.

As a result, just over 61Mb of files were released onto the internet prompting climate change deniers into a full scale hue and cry.

As I write this, a coalition of the misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons, are heatedly pouring over the contents of the CRU’s mail server for any traces of ’something dodgy’ in a vain attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming theory once and for all. It’s like watching a road traffic accident unfold in front of you in slow motion.

One of the hot topics of the moment is a number of emails which show CRU scientists trying to find ways to avoid releasing raw data into the public domain in response to FOIA requests from known deniers. Sounds dodgy, eh? Not when you understand what’s actually going on in the background.

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Since my last article on Steiner-Waldorf education in which I argued, that pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice, things have moved on somewhat.

In the last week or so Plymouth University has discontinued both its BA and Foundation degree courses in Steiner education, the only such courses in the UK.

Unlike Stockholm University, which took the same decision after concluding that the course literature contained ‘too much myth and too little fact’, Plymouth University have decided to axe their course due to poor recruitment and retention of students, although it is looking at incorporating a Steiner option into its existing BA course in Education Studies. They blame the government’s decision to withdraw funding for second degrees for the demise of these course. The excellent UK Anthroposophy blog has a rather more prosaic take.

Despite this obvious setback, the Steiner-Waldorf Schools Fellowship is pressing ahead with its efforts to get its nose into the state-funding trough by arranging a ’special pre-election seminar about possible developments in the state funding opportunity for Steiner schools’. This will take place on the 17th November 2009 at the Charity Centre in Euston.

And if you haven’t already guessed the ‘possible developments in state funding opportunity‘ are those already indicated by Tory Shadow Education Minister, Michael Gove:

Under the Tory proposals, new schools entering the state system would be free from the constraints of the statutory national curriculum.

Mr Gove believes many parents think the particular teaching styles “and atmosphere of the environment” at Montessori and Steiner schools would suit them and their children.

This event has, to say the least, an interesting line-up of guest speakers.
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