American Republic Online

ARO is now a big-time blog. ARO recently posted a bit about a short article at the Scientific American. Here’s the cerfuffle: Mims at Scientific American defends his use of a recent Yale survey (he used the American public as his majority, not scientists): “My intent in posting that story was not to comment on the science of global warming–it was to point out that, whatever your opinion of the subject, an overwhelming majority of Americans are pretty freaked out about it.”

However, if you look closely, at the bottom, Mims refers to our very own ARO. He also throws around nasty words like “plagiarism.” Apparently Mims is not aware of linking as a way of referencing sources, and a convention of italicizing words instead of using quotation marks. And to be fair, in hindsight, we should have probably indented everything one more time to make the citation more apparent.

The story is reproduced below, for your review. We have since added an additional citation for the -uhm- link-handicapped. We meant no harm; We repent of our sins: forgive us our cavalier posts. But thanks for the traffic!

Reality Check (Link to OpinionJournal.com)

Scientific American is boasting about the result of a new poll:

“Via the very-much-worth-checking-out Sietch Blog:

In what can only be considered a tidal wave of public opinion, a new Yale research survey reveals a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming. Fully 83 percent of Americans now say global warming is a “serious” problem, up from 70 percent in 2004. . . .

Most dramatically, the survey of 1,000 adults nationwide shows that 63 percent of Americans agree that the United States “is in as much danger from environmental hazards, such as air pollution and global warming, as it is from terrorists.”

In other words, 63% of the American public now agrees with the 2003 Pentagon report that, while speculative, said as much.

(The rest of the survey results are well worth reading, and demonstrate U.S. citizens’ growing concern about extinction, air pollution, and other environmental issues.)

Well, if 63% of the American public says it, it must be true, right? That’s how science works!

So we checked the survey results, as Mims recommended, and we found another interesting finding: 58% agree that “as the Bible says, the world was literally created in six days.” So according to Scientific American, the biblical story of creation has only slightly less scientific merit than global warming.”