October 26, 2009

Last night

Spending the night in San Francisco before flying out tomorrow. Fun trip but it will be fantastic to get home again... Went to see the new California Academy of Sciences Museum. Wonderful exhibits -- they cherry-picked the best of a couple of older "traditional" museums (the Academy is 155 years old) and are presenting them together under one (living) roof. The rainforest was a delight. The planetarium was awesome -- it is the largest digital planetarium in the world and the image quality is stunning. The Aquarium was small but of gemlike quality; presenting little slices of various environmental niches. The only real disappointment was the "Climate Change" exhibit -- the data was cherry-picked to show warming and to ignore the Medieval Warm and Cool periods. The statements about the oceans warming up were downright false (Project Argo anyone?), the statements about the increased warming causing more storm damage to structures ignores the fact that people didn't use to build near the storm-ridden coastlines and now they do. They grossly overstated the effects of CO2 on global temperature -- data that has now been removed from Al Gore's presentation and is now no longer supported by the IPCC. Each exhibit there is funded by an individual or an organization and each exhibit has been labeled as to who contributed the funding. I asked about the Climate Change exhibit and it was funded but the person I asked didn't know who the funding agency was (granted, I was asking a guide right at closing time). I plan to dig a bit deeper when I am back home as perpetuating this drivel is an insult to Science... Posted by DaveH at October 26, 2009 5:47 PM
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?