The k2p blog

No doubt it is the quest for funding for what are “fashionable” projects which leads to this kind of rubbish. This is not even worthy of being called pseudo science – this is just nonscience (pun intended).

We find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology.

This is is what passes for science for University of California economists Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen in their peer-reviewed paper (abstract here) “Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle: The Chilling Effect of Recession”.

Apparently this is funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Clearly they have surplus funds to disseminate, or was it the trigger words “Environmental Concern” which loosened the purse strings.

image

Does it really take two University economists to come to the conclusion that

Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue.

One wonders who the peers who reviewed this article and recommended publication could be — and are they getting any funding from the NBER?

Tags: climate change, economics, global warming, pseudo-science

This entry was posted on July 31, 2010 at 11:39 am and is filed under Environment, Non-Science, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.