Science vs. Subjectivity in Environmental and climate Research articles

Food for thought! This research confirms that climate change and the environment are treated by too many scientists more like modern religions than science!

What is particularly disturbing is that subjective science articles may get more future citations than more neutral ones.

Most of these research results have been well known or strongly suspected for decades.

"... about how journal authors use subjective and emotional language when describing environmental or climate change–related issues more often than when writing about other topics.

Looking at 170,000 articles published between 1990 and 2023, they find that “subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12 percent in economics and by 42 percent in science.” They also find articles that use subjective language receive more citations than those that do not."

SSRN = Social Science Research Network

From the abstract:

"Objective science aims to uncover truths about environmental conditions, including those related to emission trends, biodiversity loss, climate change, and their economic costs.

When and why do scientists use subjective language to describe these conditions with bias, emotion, or advocacy? To shed light, we study determinants and trends in subjective language within the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of over 170,000 peer-reviewed articles published during 1990-2023 in top economics and science journals.

Using machine learning to label and score text by subjectivity, we find that subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12% in economics and by 42% in science.

After accounting for factors such as article age, author experience, number of authors, and journal quality, higher subjectivity scores associate positively with future academic citations in both science and economics, especially if the article is focused on an environmental topic.

These findings, which imply subjective language has been rewarded in the academy, are consistent with informal theory suggesting subjective language will be used more frequently by scientists when expected rewards are high and risks are low."

Iran Is Still Losing, Badly

Science versus Subjectivity in Environmental Research

When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing—he believes in anything

Food for thought! A famous observation by Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

When pseudo religions like environmentalism, climate change, LGBTQ, AI and so forth gain support.

"G.K. Chesterton famously observed that when people no longer have faith in God they don’t believe in nothing, they are open to believing anything. And as Christianity has ebbed recently, so the tide of mysticism, the occult and magical thinking has grown. It is precisely amid some of those who proclaim their belief in Reason most loudly that curious belief systems are taking hold.

Big Tech is under the spell of the occult, warns Damian Thompson in this week’s cover piece. Half a century ago, Arthur C. Clarke observed that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Today, artificial intelligence has advanced so far that even its creators are flirting with mystical mythologies and supernatural fantasies. 

Peter Thiel’s lectures on ‘the Antichrist’ attract many, while the number of self-identifying witches in America has overtaken Presbyterians. And these modern day magi are thoroughly at home in the tech-enabled world, with witches now using ChatGPT to generate spells. AI can craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or conjure a Wiccan goddess.

In Silicon Valley, the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest, cults have thrived since the 1960s. In the vacuum left by faith, tech firms have fed employees eastern mysticism to cultivate ‘mindfulness’ among the workforce. What remains is an endless Halloween of woke spirituality, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell. ..."

The Spectator Weekly Highlights

US Supreme Court in 8-0 decision limits judicial authority to block infrastructure projects over environmental concerns

Good news! Environmental concerns have become way too exaggerated and dominant allowing for far too much interference since the 1970s in Western countries. A correction is long overdue! Hopefully, the pendulum finally swings back!

Environmentalism is like a pseudo religion!

"Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County (23-975)

The D. C. Circuit failed to afford the U. S. Surface Transportation Board the substantial deference required when reviewing agency action under the National Environmental Policy Act, and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider in its environmental impact statement the environmental effects of temporally and geographically separate upstream and downstream projects unrelated to the Uinta Basin Railway." US Supreme Court

SCOTUS limits judicial authority to block infrastructure projects over environmental concerns | Just The News ""Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote."

You wish these men and women were wiser more often!

Reducing inequality is essential in tackling climate crisis, researchers argue | University of Cambridge. Really!

The many ways the elites and others try to exploit the Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion! Cambridge U. a mecca for the pseudo religion!

A tempest in a teapot or the ivory tower being in a bubble larger than life!

What a cult and extreme tribalism! Just ludicrous!

Here is what the high priests recommend:

"... Cooking more meat-free meals: plant-based meat alternatives currently tend to be less affordable than the animal products they are trying to replace. ...
Buying an electric car or an electric bike is a substantial upfront cost, and people who aren’t in permanent employment often can’t benefit from tax breaks ..."

Reducing inequality is essential in tackling climate crisis, researchers argue | University of Cambridge Promoting climate-friendly behaviours will be more successful in societies where everyone has the capacity: financially, physically, and timewise, to make changes.

And Nature journal promotes this pseudo religion (probably good for business):

Tackling inequality is essential for behaviour change for net zero (no public access)

Save the the world according to Cambridge University. What a dystopia!

A Collection of Writings on the Religious Character of the Environmental and Climate Movement

This might be interesting reading! The hoarse horsemen and horsewomen of the apocalypse!

".. through and around the UN’s signature annual [United Nations Climate Change Conference], describing the jockeying among the climate elite for prominence inside the conference and relaying the apocalyptic religiosity of the activists – like “Brother Spirit” – who make up the true believers in the climate movement. He introduces readers to Les U. Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who is “mainly concerned with speciecide, annihilating Homo sapiens and leaving behind a planet liberated even from the memory that human beings had once existed.” And he explains why nuclear power offers a zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels available right now, but the Biden Administration is only supporting projects in countries like Romania ..."

CEI Publishes Collection of Kevin D. Williamson Writing on the Religious Character of the Environmental Movement - Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Four Horsemen, from "The Apocalypse" by Albrecht Dürer

New Database Quantifies the (negative) Human Impact on the global Environment. Really!

What is the point of this effort? So what! 

Of course, 8 billion humans roaming this planet have some effect on the "biosphere" and some are negative. This is research in search of relevance and useful knowledge!

What is the motivation behind: Humans are villains and need to be put on display like the pillory in the medieval ages! What garbage! Environmentalists and other ideologues have subjected humanity to this Bible like penance for decades now! Repent your sins or else! This is called pseudo religion!

The hamburger as a measuring or reference unit! The Big Mac Index was introduced in 1986 by The Economist to compare prices and exchange rates across the globe, but to take it much further like attempted here by the California Institute of Technology is questionable! 

This is a bunch of pseudoscience! Just notice that they feature the mean sea level rise of approximately 3.4 millimeters per year! This is not better than a measurement error or great pretense of knowledge like the much quoted 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming that needs to be avoided by all means by tomorrow.

"... The Human Impacts Database is designed to be accessible to scientists, policymakers, and everyday citizens, and provides information ranging from global plastic production (4 x 1011 kilograms per year), to the number of cattle on Earth (about 1.6 billion), to global annual mean sea level rise (approximately 3.4 millimeters per year).  ...
"For example, a friend texted me asking how to compare the impact of dairy cattle versus beef cattle," ... "

New Database Quantifies the Human Impact on the Environment | www.caltech.edu If you are in a major city anywhere in the world, it is probably quite easy to grab a cheap hamburger from a nearby fast-food restaurant. [What kind of nonsense is this??? I bet hamburgers in low income countries are not cheap and not affordable to many inhabitants] But what you may not realize is that the meat in that cheap burger can actually illustrate a grand narrative about how humans have shaped the planet. From the land used to raise cattle for beef consumption, to the water used to feed those cattle, to the fuel used to transport the beef all over the world, the human progress that enables us to easily buy a burger—and, for that matter, hop on a plane, charge our phones, and take part in the multitude of activities that make up our everyday experiences—has changed the biosphere.

Virtual Discussion: Radical Diversity: Los Angeles - Goethe-Institut USA

Johan Wolfgang Goethe is spinning in his grave! Do German tax payers actually know what the socialist Chancellor Merkel is spending money on?

This is not the only such event!



Virtual Discussion: Radical Diversity: Los Angeles - Goethe-Institut USA

Plastophobia Is A Serious Disease

Posted: 7/22/2018  Updated: 5/4/2019, 2/17/2019, 12/22/2018

Update Of 5/4/2019

This could be a breakthrough we have been waiting for!

Here is the article: New family of polymers can be easily recycled and even upcycled (published by the Royal Society of Chemistry on 4/29/2019)

Quote (emphasis added): “A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US, has developed a new family of polymers that brings us closer to ... closed-loop, zero-waste plastics. ... they used a family of molecules called polydiketoenamines, held together by dynamic covalent bonds that, while very strong, can be easily broken down using small amounts of acid.”

Update Of 2/17/2019

Just read the abstract of this research article Use of Supercritical Water for the Liquefaction of Polypropylene into Oil (Here is the MIT Technology Review article about it). Human ingenuity is already taking care of this manufactured plastic crisis.

Some salient quotes (emphasis added):

1. “Synopsis: We develop efficient methods to convert polypropylene waste to oils, which can be used as feedstocks for fuels or other chemicals.”
2. “About five billion tons of plastic waste have accumulated in landfills and the natural environment over the past 50 years. Polypropylene (PP) waste accounts for about 23% of the total plastic waste”

Update Of 12/22/2018

Just read this article Mumbai’s Plastic Ban (12/19/2018), which featured under subject “Pollution”: “In June 2018, Mumbai became the largest Indian city to impose a ban on single-use plastics.”

It seems more this ban has less to do with pollution and much more with political incompetence. What do incompetent or inept politicians do when they cannot handle a situation? They reach for simplistic, drastic solutions like prohibition.

Original Post

Same Script Every Time

The pandemic of plastophobia is spreading rapidly in the Western World. This is just the latest of dozens environmental scares and demagogueries I have been subjected to and had to suffer through in my five decades living on planet earth. Again humans are caught up in tremendous irrational folly and superstition. Our elected representatives follow right along passing one stupid measures after the other (e.g. ban on plastic straws, bags etc.)

Previously, it was e.g. smoking; conventional candescent light bulbs; genetically modified organisms; global cooling/warming and many more …

Human Ingenuity & Individual Liberty

When will humans finally have more trust in human ingenuity and their fellow humans to take care of these issues without resorting to irrational, statist, paternalistic measures? It may take another several centuries if history is any guide.

Pleading With The Powers That Be

God have mercy on humans!