is the equivalent - whether or not it comes from the DOE or anyone else - of publication in
Science.
As it happens, I was in a government laboratory today, discussing the subject of journal publications, and the topic was the
difficulty of publishing in
journals for reasons that are not always scientific but - unsurprisingly - often political. Of course, the person I was speaking with has published many
hundreds of papers, and is the author of major graduate level text books, hardly a flake who can't tell the difference between
Science and a web page, the latter being accessible to any damn fool who can work an editor.
In fact, I have
observed directly that clueless people can and do publish worthless, dogmatic, wrong headed and outright delusional stuff on the web. This is not to say that the web is useless, but if one has children, as I do, the
first thing to teach them about the web is, um, critical thinking.
It is
also true that not everything in the
scientific literature is true. Often it is wrong. Many damn fools - Mark V. Jacobson comes to mind and Benjamin Sovacool - publish pure
garbage in the scientific literature.
But, that said...
It always amuses me to no end when those who hold
Science and
science - journal and practice - in contempt then attempt to make declarations about scientific credibility.
It is true, by the way, that Searchinger is a lawyer. Although I never have met him personally, I use the engineering, science (Lewis) and general (Firestone) libraries at his institution - Princeton University - and I have learned that anyone with access to those libraries, and a reasonably prepared mind - can learn almost
anything one wants to know.
There are people with advanced degrees and oodles of post docs who will not ever have a publication accepted in
Science.
Searchinger's paper has been cited by
hundreds of other papers, including those by the famous or infamous Robert H. Socolow - also of Princeton - who claimed in the famous but thus far completely meaningless "stabilization wedges" (or stabilization wedgies) paper that biofuels could actually be useful.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5686/968">Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.
This very glib paper was the subject of much discussion by wishful thinkers who are clueless and who wallow around in tons of anti-intellectual fat while the atmosphere collapses. In the first six years of the "next fifty years" of Socolow and Pacala spoke, the derivative of carbon dioxide concentration with respect to time is not decreasing, it is
increasing.
And still we have clueless twits come here and ridicule
Searchinger, an
intellectual heavyweight on the grounds he conflicts with their wholly religious, oblivious to data,
faith.
The biofuels car CULTist fantasy has proved, thirty years into the game, to be pure garbage, and only lead to more wastes of human and material resources. The funds for this horseshit comes out of the future. In Trenton, a beautiful but impoverished, hard-luck city, they are closing four of the five city libraries, selling off the books and the buildings.
The young people in that city are poor, and left
nothing but drugs and crime, and now just one tiny path open to them, their libraries, are being shut.
For what?
Well for one thing, so the corn lobby can countinue to feed pigs and a few stupid and worthless
cars.
Oh and by the way, Socolow - biofuels fan - was a, um, co-author with Searchinger in a recent publication in, um,
Science.
One could look it up, if one knows
how.
I guess Socolow, who is a Princeton Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a Ph.D. in high energy physics doesn't regard Searchinger as "just a lawyer."
However, none of Socolow's credentials make
him infallable. His ideas in the
wedgie paper have not done a damn thing to affect climate change, other than to induce further complacency and wishful thinking.
The world is
still arguing over biofuels, and in fact, no one can say if they are good or bad. One thing they are not is
significant. Given the fact that they are propped up by huge subsidies and produce almost
nothing for them, they do not deserve government funding.
Humanity needs to make
choices. It's very clear this late in the game that biofuels are at best marginal, and at worst, a continuance of the disaster.
Have a nice evening. Try, just once, to try to wonder how, um, Malians might feel about the swell flex fuel Chevy Tahoes you guys are driving around.