#2910: Indur Goklany

Indur M. Goklany is a science policy advisor to the United States Department of the Interior and one of the most influential promoters of climate change denialism in the US. Goklany has an extensive network, and has worked with numerous organizations promoting climate change denial, such as the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Global Warming Policy Foundation – for instance taking part in the CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies are More Dangerous than Global Warming Itself, and writing papers for the Heartland Institute, who also paid him $1,000 a month in 2012 for writing a chapter in their book (pure and unadulterated corruption of a government official, of course (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialgate)) – which was also the qualification the Trump administration relied on when promoting him to a position charged with reviewing climate policy in 2017. In 2020, it was predictably revealed that he had repeatedly tried to insert misleading language on climate change into the agency’s scientific reports.

 

Goklany is trained as an electrical engineer, and although he has published numerous reports, documents, books and rants about climate change and climate change policy, he has of course been involved in no relevant scientific research on climate-related issues.

 

The kind of nonsense he promotes and inserted into official reports (some also made it here) belongs to the category of nonsense usually promoted by climate change denialists, including falsely asserting that there is a lack of agreement among scientists and (at best misleadingly) arguing that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has various beneficial effects. At a Heartland-organized conference in 2017, Goklany presented a correlation between rising CO₂ levels and life expectancy and GDP, concluding that “we’re actually living in the best of times, and carbon dioxide and fossils fuels are a good part of that” – we don’t think he’s that oblivious to how to reason about correlation vs. causation, so we’ll chalk that one up to rank dishonesty. In response to the WWF’s and the UN’s claim that stabilizing population would help sustain the planet, Goklany pointed out that “the problem, however, is not population but poverty,” which ought to be a textbook example of a non-sequitur.

 

There’s a decent portrait of Goklany and his deeds here. 

 

Diagnosis: We’ve got no doubt he is a true believer w.r.t his denialism, which makes it notable that he feels the need to support his claims with rank dishonesty. He has anyways caused a lot of damage and seems to be on a trajectory to continue to do so.

#2908: Rebecca Goff

Craniosacral therapy is pseudo-religious quackery based on a number of fundamental errors about human anatomy and lots of murky New Age fluff about life energies and vibrations – indeed, even among quack therapies it stands out as a particularly wildly nonsensical one. But how would you go about taking such New Age delirium even further down into the rabbit hole of pink warm fluffy phantasms? Well, you could of course augment craniosacral therapy with some other stock New Age silliness, such as … dolphins. Oh, yes: Say hello to AquaCranialtherapy®, an “advanced modality, [that] is a mix of osteopathic based cranial sacral moves, dolphin therapy movements, and visionary emotional release work developed through years of cetacean research”. In particular, AquaCranial therapy’s “extremely light touch decompresses the spine, cranium and other areas of bone and tissue. This balancing of the CranioSacral System eliminates physical stresses from the body acquired throughout a lifetime.” If you were looking for testable hypotheses or even statements that make sense when you spend a second to think about them, you’re thinking about this the wrong way.

 

The therapy in question was developed by Rebecca Goff of Maui – a “licensed massage therapist” and “certified marine-mammal naturalist” (that would be a 4-week holiday designated as a “course”, and which promises “fun and exciting stories to tell their friends and families about a one-of-a-kind experience”) – by “combining lessons learned from studying the behavior and movement of dolphins and whales with CranioSacral Therapy” – in other words, by trying to produce insights about human anatomy (in particular human skull sutures) by looking at whale behavior from a distance and trying to draw analogies to a model of human anatomy that would be considered stunningly obsolete even by 19th century phrenologists.

 

Goff, who according to herself is “on the cutting edge of Cetacean Therapy Research and one of of the most experienced people today in the field of Aquatic Biomagnetic Healing”, has more to tell us about the therapy, but we won’t bother since it’s challenging to find anything suitable for putting into grammatical sentences in the pastel-colored fluffy nonsense she produces. Nor does it really matter; Goff’s AquaCranial Therapy is one of the novelties offered (or at least used to be offered) at the Four Seasons Resort & Spa on Maui along with Ayurvedic massage, Thai massage, Hawaiian temple lomilomi and outdoor adventure activities. It’s a White Lotus spa treatment for real-life White Lotus travellers, with gentle massages in warm waters in tropical environments; it’s probably lovely and completely beyond our price range.

 

Diagnosis: On the surface, at least, it is probably harmless, but Goff might be a true believer or get it into her head that what she does could offer real help for real people in real difficult situations (she seems to suggest that some of what she does could assist with homebirths, for instance) – and then things could quickly get ugly.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence