"Junk Science" Can Provide Some Good Laughs

Like every news center, FOX News has released another sort of "year-in-review" article. This article, by Steven Milloy, features the top ten claims that would easily be considered "junk science." If you're at all interested in science, then you have to read this. I don't agree with everything this article says, and I certainly have issues with its source website, JunkScience.com, but this still makes for some good laughs. "The Top 10 Junk Science Claims of 2005" For fun, I'll pull just a couple from the list to comment.

1. Obese Statistics Get Liposuction. After years of alarming the American public with ever-scarier estimates of obesity-related deaths, the Centers for Disease Control finally backed away from its exaggerated 2004 claim of 400,000 deaths annually and made a 93 percent downward adjustment to just 25,814 deaths. It’s not clear that even that number can stand up to scrutiny.

I have a theory! Maybe CDC didn't actually count people, but counted an assumed population based on the weight of the surveyed individuals. It could almost then make sense.

7. Warning: This Label Based on Junk Science. In July, the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the FDA to require warning labels on soft drinks. It seems the “food police,” who have no credible scientific data on which to base their petition, are out to demonize just about every food other than soy milk and bulgar wheat.

I'm currently drinking a Honeybaked-Ham-provided Coca-Cola. The only thing on it that looks like a warning label is "VERY LOW SODIUM." But they do welcome my questions and comments through their toll-free phone number. So maybe I'll give them a call.

9. The Lone-Tree Theory. It nearly took an act of Congress to get the researcher behind the notorious “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show a steep rise in global temperature in the 20th century following a millennium of stable temperatures, to release his publicly funded data and computer code. Among other dubious presumptions, the graph is derived from data that bases climate estimates for the entire 15th century on the tree ring measurements of a single tree.

Wow. Which tree? Joe: "What do you think, Bob? Could this be a good tree to tell us what the global temperature was like in the 15th century?" Bob: "Behold! The great oracle of the 15th century! I bow before your wisdom and knowledge of an entire century." I was glad to see that no anticreationism appeared in this article, although the source website does contain anti-ID articles. Have some fun and read the article.