- Bishop Hill blog - A new dark age?

Thanks to Alex Cull for this transcript of a segment on yesterday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4. This concerned the alleged threat of an end to enlightenment values.

Earlier this year, the President of the AAAS, America's leading academy of science, claimed that the politicisation of science, on issues such as climate change, genetic modification, evolution even, was driving the U.S. into a new Dark Age. And over here, scientists complain that politicians routinely cherry-pick data, casually disregard the facts when they don't fit their preconceptions. So are we descending into a new Age of Unreason in public policy? Our science correspondent, Tom Feilden, has been weighing the evidence, and has found some encouraging signs that the geeks are fighting back.

CO2 Bulimia | Real Science

If you wanted to get someone to kill themself, an effective way to do it would be to put an idea in their head that something they need for survival is very bad for them. For example, the belief that food was bad killed Karen Carpenter.

Al Gore, James Hansen and a few others are leading an effort to convince people that something else they need for survival – i.e. affordable energy – is very bad for them. If this form of mass mental illness is not stopped, it will eventually have very severe impacts on societal health.

The Reference Frame: Is the "follow the money" argument correct?

Science surely has to check and crosscheck past results, look for the wrong ones, and adjust the new research according to the findings. If the verification weren't done or if its results played no role, it wouldn't be science as the new papers would be building on assumptions that are as likely to be wrong as that they are right. The body of research would resemble noise – or noise "pushed" in a direction dictated by something else than the truth. And the latter is what has described 90% of the climate science since 1988.

The New Nostradamus of the North: The history of the UN led global warming circus

The Toronto Sun´s columnist Simon Kent has written an excellent brief history of the UN global warming travelling circus:

Which of the following major world cities and/or seaside resorts has NOT hosted United Nations climate change talks since the inaugural meeting way back in 1997?

Marrakech, Morocco; Bali, Indonesia; Lyon, France; Bonn, Germany; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cancun, Mexico; The Hague, the Netherlands; Vienna, Austria; Montreal, Canada; Bangkok, Thailand; Barcelona, Spain; Durban, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Milan, Italy; Kyoto, Japan and New Delhi, India.

Sorry, trick question. All have played host at some time to the 47 UN-funded get-togethers in the past 15 years.