Open letter to Scientific American

I’ve subscribed to, or purchased at the store, every issue of Scientific American since 1978. At one time, the arrival of the magazine was an event anticipated with joy and excitement. As an amateur astronomer, physicist, cosmologist, geologist and electronics tinkerer, a new issue would invariably put me in hog heaven. It would allow me to escape the politics and insanity that shouted at me from every other publication or media outlet, and venture into a cool, abstract world of pure science.

No Longer.

Now, I dread each new issue, for I know it will be filled with dumbed-down-for-the-masses, politically motivated, unscientific crap – crap that contradicts the formerly sound science that used to characterize the magazine, crap that sucks me back into the unscientific world of politics, the same crap that drives me daily to shout at and then turn off my radio with fingernail-breaking jabs. The new layout - which more-or-less went into effect when SciAm was taken over by the Nature Publishing group and Mariette DiChristina (former editor of Popular Science) was installed as the Editor-in-Chief - is filled with whitespace, full-page pictures that lend nothing to the content, and the length of some "feature" articles has been shortened to two pages and a mere few hundred words.

I'm not going to waste any more time either reading SciAm or trying to get DiChristina to see the light. I will instead read a magazine that still holds true to the standards that SciAm has abandoned: American Scientist.

The problem with SciAm has been building for many years. I used to look forward to reading Shermer’s columns. Then I saw with horror that he was suckered by Al Gore’s moronic movie, and then re-horrified when it was revealed that he bought into the freedom-destroying travesty that is drug testing.

For the record, I’m not a Limbaugh/Beck denier of global warming (I call it by the correct term, not the euphemistically PC “climate change” canard). Global warming IS real, it is partially man-caused – but the primary forcing factors are completely outside human control: Terran orbital parameters such as variations in obliquity, eccentricity, and inclination of the ecliptic relative to the invariant plane of the solar system. These factors, combined with the warning that has already occurred, guarantee that even if 100% of mankind’s industrial effort was directed toward carbon sequestration, the current warning trend will continue for at least 50,000 years. Go back through the last decade’s issues and you will find plenty of support for the fact that not only did man-caused GM start thousands of years ago (a good thing – ice ages are a bummer) but also that decomposing tundra, peat moss and other sources of greenhouse gases have already carried Earth past the GM tipping point. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps WILL melt, the sea level WILL catastrophically and quickly rise many meters – yet SciAm magazine ignores this, and instead has joined the liberal clamor to waste our money and time on stupid efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – efforts that the Chinese will ignore, and will only destroy the US economy and prevent us from taking the steps needed to deal with the very real danger of inundation of our major coastal cities.

SciAm magazine ignores other, very real problems, like the inevitability of the next dust bowl and the fact that lakes Mead and Powell will be emptied. Phoenix and Las Vegas will wither and die, yet you people are obsessed with every excuse to plaster Obama’s face on Sci Am’s pages. (Page 49 – are you deliberately TRYING to piss-off ½ of the US electorate?!? Couldn’t you find another half-Negroid, half-Caucasoid face to use?!?) I have no doubt that the majority of your editors and staff voted Democratic – how do you feel now, hearing the announcements of Obama’s cuts to key NASA programs such as Aries, Constellation and Orion, leaving the US with ZERO heavy-lift capacity after the shuttles are retired? After we have already sunk $19 billion into those critical programs?

Steve Mirsky used to be mildly amusing, now he has revealed himself to be an insufferable climate-change butt-boy, by trying to pass off as logical the fallacy that just because the imbecilic Senator Inhofe is a creationist, climate-change can be reversed because Inhofe is a global-warming denier!

And Krauss – don’t get me started. His columns are so filled with excrement that I’m now starting to have serious doubts about his work in astrophysics – and I used to be one of his biggest fans! Tell him to stick to physics and shut the f—k up about politics!!

The pathetic article that attempted to refute the recent “Climategate” flap is yet another example of politics circumventing reason in the pages of SciAm. Again, don’t lump me in with the Republican masses – I have never voted for a Republican and never will. I had hoped to read a balanced, logical analysis, but instead was tormented with a left-leaning pile of poop. When I saw the repeated references to the “theft” of the emails, my eyes just rolled. Words have meaning, and those emails were not stolen, they were leaked. If the hackers had deleted the emails from the servers after copying them, that would have been theft. If your magazine can’t get something as simple as that right, how can I believe anything in it?

I’m staring at the February 2010 issue right now. My subscription will lapse in April, and for the first time in thirty years, I’m not renewing. Across the room, in one of the many bookshelves that barely contain the > 4000 books in my house, I can see the rows of Scientific Americans in which I used to take such pride in owning. Now I’m embarrassed to admit that I subscribe. Many friends who also subscribe share my disgust. I want to hold out hope that in a few years, changes to the SciAm board will pull the magazine back to reality – I’ve seen this happen at least twice before, but this time I have my doubts. I hate to see my money being used to promote such blatantly biased political pseudo-science.

Perhaps I ought to see if I can get the local bookstore to give me the cover-removed guts of the issues they can’t sell. Perhaps I should keep my subscription, but tear out all the pages that spout nonsense, stamp “FAIL” on them, dip them in dirty toilet-water and then mail them to you. (Tempting, but you would probably have me arrested for terrorism).

The bottom line is this: my once-beloved Sci Am is dying. I hope it lives, but I’m steeled for the end. At age 55 I’ve held the hands of several friends and loved ones while tearfully watching the glorious spark that was their life fade into darkness … Nothing lasts forever. It was a good run while it lasted.