Potholer: DisCERNing “Cosmic Ray” Nonsense
September 10, 2011
Dryly amusing and excellent as always, Potholer deals with the cosmic ray kerfuffle.
I treated the issue in a blog post and video here, will be covering again when I update my seriously old “Sun Causes Climate Change Crock” video this fall.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
September 10, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Hah, I like how he traces the blogs and news sources back to their origin, a guy who misinterpreted the paper.
September 10, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Brilliant as usual. One caveat: compare with Monbiot’s argument aboutr academic publishers. It’s easy enough for those of us inside the gated community of academia to get hold of papers – it’s also easy to forget that in a lot of cases, no-one on the outside could possibly afford to (see Monbiot for some of those costs). This Nature paper is one such. It does undermine the “well if you won’t check the source” argument if nobody on the outside can afford to.
Not that it’d make much difference for much of BlogScience, but still.
September 11, 2011 at 11:23 am
Yes those paywalls are annoying. But very often through google scholar you can find a PDF on one of the authors’ home page that is free.
Unfortunately making papers free won’t help much if you don’t also make the education needed to understand them free — and include relevant questions in the Citizenship Admission Exam to be passed at age 18 before being allowed to vote… just joking (but only half)
September 12, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Still, everybody has access to the abstracts. One can get the jist of the major contributions and claims that the paper is making from the abstract, at no cost.