Wood Romances

JWST Image from NASA Like many, I've been dazzled by the early images of the the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), and I've loved seeing not only the images but the memes poking fun at how popular these images have become. I've found these images beautiful, inspiring and even mind blowing. The scientists who are examining these images have had similar reactions, and from what I can tell, early images and reports from the JWST may have far reaching implications for how scientists understand the universe, especially how the earliest galaxies formed. But on August 11, 2022, Eric Lerner wrote an opinion piece for iai news suggesting that these images from the JWST basically prove that the Big Bang didn't happen. When someone shared this on Facebook, I was very interested in this, since as I understand it, this would be a major paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe as expanding. I read the article to be told that many of the surprising images from the JWST we...

In December 2020, the CO2 Coalition published a document authored by Richard Lindzen and John Christy entitled, The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record: How it works and why it is misleading . It should be acknowledged that this document is a political and partisan document. It is not written to advance our understanding of the GMST anomaly record. It's written to affect policy. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, Executive Director of CO2 Coalition, makes this nearly explicit. After asserting that academic publishing has been taken over by a "'climate crisis' and an 'easy to change sources' narrative, he says, "this paper, which in earlier days would have, as a matter of course, been published by a scholarly journal, now finds a home with our advocacy group." This is not an academic paper (and this by itself is not a criticism of the paper), and it would never be published in a scholarly journal, since the intended audience is general voters, not scholars. It...