I didn't think all that much of the bad astronomy post, yes it provides background info on Spencer, but I would call it an opinion piece mainly as far as it's scientific usefulness goes.
Mostly it quotes from the livescience article I already posted, so no need to repeat that stuff.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...ming-alarmism/
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I did some poking around on the web, and sure enough a lot of far-right blogs are diving on this red meat, simply repeating the claims of the Forbes article. I wonder how many of them actually read the paper or sought outside opinions?
And in this case, those outside opinions are very important. Why? Because of Dr. Spencer?s background: you may find this discussion of him interesting. He is an author for the über-conservative Heartland Institute (as is James Taylor, the author of the Forbes article), which receives substantial funding from ? can you guess? ? ExxonMobil. He is also affiliated with two other think tanks funded by ExxonMobil. Seriously, read that link to get quite a bit of background on Dr. Spencer.
I was also surprised to find Spencer is a big supporter of Intelligent Design. I was initially reticent to mention that, since it seems like an ad hominem. But I think it?s relevant: Intelligent Design has been shown repeatedly to be wrong, and is really just warmed-over creationism. Heck, even a conservative judge ruled it to be so in the now-famous Dover lawsuit. Anyone who dumps all of biological science in favor of provably wrong antiscience should raise alarm bells in your head, and their claims should be examined with an even more skeptical eye.
It?s too bad, really. I?m not a fan of ad hominems, but the recent attacks on the science of climate change, evolution, and the Big Bang by the far right ? and on medicine by the far left ? make it necessary to know more about the authors when reading articles. If you simply accept what they say without doing due diligence, you may be led down a road that leads well away from reality.
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