Ideas that wander…
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Consensus — slowing real science for decades There is a surprising amount of interest in the cholesterol story of Matt Ridley’s in The Times and The Australian last week. Surprising to me anyway, because 15 years ago the other benevolent side of cholesterol was pretty clear online. Fifteen years is not a long time in human civilization, but it’s a long time in a human life. And in the case of the war on cholesterol, it’s been running for 40 years. How many people died sooner than they would have, because they followed expert advice? Finally the official consensus on cholesterol is admitting defeat: “Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of “nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat, given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease”. “ In the late 1990’s it was widely known online (among health zealots) that our livers are mostly in charge of our cholesterol levels, not what’s on our dinner plates. Something like 80% of the cholesterol in our blood came from our own livers, not the food we eat. Way back then, it was […] May 31st, 2015 | Tags: Argument by Authority, Consensus, Diet, Food, Health | Category: Diet, Health, Logic & Reason, Science Communication |  Print This Post | | Science is broken. The genius, the creative art of scientific discovery, has been squeezed into a square box, sieved through grant applications, citation indexes, and journal rankings, then whatever was left gets crushed through the press. We tried to capture the spirit of discovery in a bureaucratic formula, but have strangled it instead. There are no shortcuts to the truth, or to status, and no easy way to figure out which projects should be funded. Every time a decision is crowd sourced — via committee, panel, or “consensus” — the responsibility for thinking gets divided and avoided. The modern bureaucratic process of science is now not even trying to search for the truth. It’s hunting instead for an impact factor, for attention, for headlines, and inevitably, for funding. It is good to see people starting to discuss it — including the Lancet Editor, Richard Horton, who wrote in April that he could not name names, but it needed to be said: “A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially […] Is this the way the backdown plays out? The endless warming becomes cooling, and man-made change becomes natural cycles one paper at a time? The press releases still talk of “change”! No mention that natural cycles could have been the cause of past warming, and that skeptics have been saying this for years. Figure 3 | Sea-level circulation index, the NAO and the AMO on multidecadaltimescales. Shown are the accumulated sea-level index (blue), which isrepresentative of subpolar heat content evolution, the accumulated NAO (red,dashed) and the AMO (black). The heat content proxy and the accumulatedNAO have been normalized. All timeseries have been 7-year low-pass filtered.The accumulated sea-level index and accumulated NAO have been detrended. This Nature paper will be tricky to feed into the “Panic Now!” scenario. It’s still climate change, but it’s a half a degree of cooling that might be headed your way if you live around the northern Atlantic. UPDATE: A quick summary of the paper. McCarthy et al created a circulation index (blue line, fig 3) which appears to lead the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, black line) by two years. The sea level index is generated by comparing sea levels north and south of […] May 28th, 2015 | Tags: AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), Oceans | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | US Republicans have passed a bill through the House (but not the Senate yet) aiming to get back some control over the 7 billion dollar science budget. Previously the National Science Foundation (or NSF) had all the fun in dishing out the dough, but the Republicans have had enough. Their wish list includes cutting social sciences by 55%, climate science by 8%, and putting extra money into biology, computers, engineering and hard sciences. It can’t come soon enough. Critics are howling that this will politicize science, but it’s just the opposite. Science was already politicized, and thanks in no small part to the NSF itself. This would put control of the funding back slightly closer to the voters. The NSF is almost unaccountable to the taxpayer, and if the NSF had not wasted money on so many one-sided pointless extravaganza’s (like $5m for “climate games”) and tipped so much money into “behavioural” studies, the elected members would not be knocking at their door. The NSF has only itself to blame. Ultimately, elected representatives have to be accountable for public spending, but they like to hand over control to a committee of experts. Said committee grows on the gravy train, and […] May 28th, 2015 | Tags: ARC Grants, NSF, Science (funding of) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | The IPCC has told us in letters of fire for twenty years that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. But despite the unending propaganda 60% of Australians are not convinced. This fits with other better designed and much larger surveys by CSIRO showing that 53% of the population are skeptical, and a UK study which showed that 63% of British people were skeptical that storms and floods are probably man-made. The IPSOS polls have been running for years, and are unashamedly pro-IPCC in leaning, but despite that obvious bias, and loaded, ambiguous questions, most Australians don’t agree that it is mainly our fault. The climate is changing but it is mainly or partly natural. IPSOS gloss over that, but if humans are responsible for less than half of “climate change” that makes Direct Action twice as useless. If natural forces caused more of the recent warming, that also reduces the scary projections. The IPSOS Climate Change Report 2015 (Online poll, 1,063 people) Q3: Which best describes your opinion about the causes of climate change? Only 40% of Australians accept the IPCC position that mankind is the main cause of climate change (orange and red). | Click […] In the topsy turvy world of modern science, big-government has strangled science to the point where bright outsiders know more than the fully trained “experts”. Maurice Newman, the chairman of the P.M’s business advisory council, daringly wrote in The Australian: “It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error.” In Senate estimates, a Greens spokesperson asked Dr Rob Vertessy, Director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on his view of this. “That is incorrect,” he said, showing how little he knows about climate models, where everyone (even the IPCC) is trying to figure out excuses for their failures. Some even invent time-travelling climate models that can finally “predict” today’s climate correctly a decade after it happened. If Maurice Newman was wrong, he was far too generous to the climate modelers. Instead of a 95% failure rate, it’s well up over 98%. Hans von Storch et al published a paper nearly two years ago comparing models and observations of a 15 year long pause. Statistically von Storch […] May 26th, 2015 | Tags: BOM, Climate Models, IPCC, Newman (Maurice), Pause (in global temperatures) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Kalbarri, Western Australia, about 600km North of Perth….(Click to enlarge) The colors are glorious in the land of iron oxide. Though I pitied any poor shipwrecked soul staggering ashore here at the wrong time of year. How forbidding, dry and vast that landscape. 8.5 out of 10 based on 36 ratings ” Labor vacated the arena of argument. The sceptics and deniers have turned the 70 per cent-plus belief in climate change into a minority because no one has engaged them.“ — Graham Richardson, Friday May 22nd, 2015 No one has engaged them? That’s right Graham, we unfunded bloggers and the few surviving skeptical scientists not evicted and blackballed from our universities (yet) have tricked 20% of the population because no one has put forward the climate change arguments except for: The Climate Commission, CSIRO, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, The ABC, The BBC, The Guardian, Fairfax, The Australian government, most universities, The EU, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF. With a budget of nothing we’re winning. Why? We have nature on our side.* The world isn’t warming, the models can’t predict the real climate, and half the population have wised up to the propaganda. The main arguments of those who would control CO2 are not scientific, but insults and bluster, shutting up and disqualifying critics rather than answering politely, and producing the evidence. The University of Queensland offers a whole course in namecalling to train people to “engage” deniers. […] Here I go, harping on about the missing hot spot again. Roy Spencer has been hunting for the famous missing hot spot (like half the climate world) but he’s been looking in the UAH satellite temperature data. Last week Sherwood et al claimed they finally found it (again!) in an iteratively reiterated homogenized and adjusted version of radiosondes. Spencer was not impressed with the black box statistics approach. As I pointed out here, the Sherwood results was adjusted so much it did not look like the original data, and they somehow found the hotspot by adding in data from years when a hot spot shouldn’t occur. They mushed the data to fit one part of their model, but it broke in other parts. Roy Spencer has used new methods to improve the satellite signal of the hot spot, and is “increasingly convinced” the all important mysterious hot spot is really not there, which fits with 28 million weather balloons and humidity data too. Satellites are not particularly good at finding the hot spot because it is a very thin layer over the tropics and satellites peering down from on high find it difficult to measure signals from 10km up and […] May 23rd, 2015 | Tags: Missing Hot Spot, Predictions (that went wrong) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Of seventy four million deaths (that is quite some study) 7.7% of all deaths could be blamed on “non-optimal” temperatures according to Gasparrini et al in the Lancet. But look closely, and 7.3% of deaths were due to the cold and only 0.4% were due to the heat. This may be part of the reason people retire to Florida, and not so much to Barrow, Alaska. The biggest killers were not the heat waves that score the headlines, but the moderate cold. Winter kills. (Time to ban winter?) Cold weather kills far more people than hot weather Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells. “It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from […] May 22nd, 2015 | Tags: Health, Mortality, Temperature (Effect on Mortality) | Category: Global Warming, Health, Mortality | Print This Post | | The new UWA logo? Bizarrely the UWA debacle has opened many eyes in Australia. People who have never mentioned the climate debate to me are now approaching me to talk about it — aghast that something so tame was treated like an outbreak of Ebola. The over-reaction to Lomborg’s Consensus Centre is priceless — it has exposed just how much the pro-climate-crisis team are scared of even the tiniest deviation from their religious doctrine. They depend so entirely on their unchallenged “university” authority that the threat of any official dissent could cause the collapse of the whole facade. (What a disaster.) Figure just how innocuous and banal their target was: The Consensus Centre at UWA wasn’t even going to discuss the climate. Lomborg wasn’t going to work there, he wasn’t going to be paid a salary, and he completely accepts the IPCC scientific position, wild exaggerations and all. He’s not a climate scientist and doesn’t pretend to be one. He is a political scientist who discusses economics. On other campuses and in other contexts, Lomborg tries to find ways to help the environment with smarter spending. Oh the crime, twice removed, to seed an errant thought that doubts the […] The ambit claims know no bounds. Who else would ask for $89,000,000,000,000? If the evil “more developed” nations pay for their carbon sins, the bill for those 1.3 billion people works out at $70,000 per person by 2030 (babies included).* When the target is 89,000 billion dollars, anything the Global Saviours get, can be painted as “not enough”. (It’s never enough). A trillion in funds is a “tiny”, “insufficient” amount that is “barely adequate”. Compliant journalists will print those headlines. The crowd will pay the money and feel guilty they are not paying more. Speaking of the loot, the world’s GDP is currently $70 trillion, so asking for $89 trillion is a claim on 8% of all the money turned over in the world economy for a decade and a half. Handsome! There is a grand array of climate junkets for Global Worriers this year. A gala of red-carpet events culminating in Paris, from November 30 to December 11. The wheeling and dealing is on right now, months ahead — and though they talk about the importance of Paris, I expect that Paris is mostly the cabaret show (like UNFCCC event in Bali that I went to), and it’s the […] May 19th, 2015 | Tags: Climate Money, Renewable Energy, United Nations (UN), World Bank | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | In the latest news about wind-generators, The Australian reports that a new Australian study estimates we wasted $70m on RET* certificates last year because of losses the wind turbines put on the rest of the grid. About a fifth of the CO2 supposedly cut by wind-farms was emitted by the rest of the grid as it ramped up and down trying to cope with the erratic supply from the on-and-off whirly-gigs. If we double our wind-farms the losses are proportionally even greater (every extra wind farm is even more useless than the one before). With twice as many, all of the wind towers would only be 70% effective. But this is all a wild fantasy overestimate, since the point of wind towers is not to reduce CO2, but to reduce global temperatures, stop storms, and hold back the tides. The 3.5% reduction in total Australian electricity emissions changed global temperatures by 0.00C, hence RET on wind is 100.00% useless, accurate to two decimal places. The Clean Energy Council said they had no answer at all, and wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that Australians like “renewables”. In other news in from the UK, the new majority conservative government says […] May 18th, 2015 | Tags: Renewable Energy, UK, Wind Power | Category: Energy, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … 7.8 out of 10 based on 30 ratings Who’s desperate to find the missing hot-spot? Sherwood’s new paper claims to have found it, but after years of multi-layered adjustments, and now kriging the gaps, and iteratively homogenizing, the results of the new data partly “solve” one problem while creating others. There’s no documented, physical reason for the homogenizing and there’s no new insight gained. The raw data was used by airlines, the military, and meteorologists for years, yet the suggested new results are quite different to the raw data. It’s as if we can’t even measure air temperature properly. Somehow we’ve made multivariate complex models work but not simple temperature sensors? The main problem with the old results was that they didn’t fit the models. Now, after torturing the data, they still don’t. Twenty-eight million weather balloons had shown by 1999 that the key assumption in the climate models was wrong. Without feedbacks, the models only produce 1.2°C of warming with a doubling of CO2. With feedbacks the simulations ramp that up to a dangerous 3 – 4 degrees C, and water vapor was the most important feedback. It’s just no fun for the Global Worriers without it. No hotspot = no water vapor feedback […] May 16th, 2015 | Tags: Hot Spot, Missing Hot Spot, Sherwood (Steven), UNSW | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … Forecast the Facts wants newspapers to label anyone who disagrees with them as mentally deficient deniers. Climate change is settled, beyond debate, and the evidence is overwhelming, but the the team with all that certainty seems awfullly scared that the public might listen to their critics. Look at the first line of their defining statement Who We Are: “Forecast the Facts is dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change”. In this case the truth is not about the planetary atmosphere so much as “facts” about newspaper word use, opinions of science pin-up personality, and a club with a long nerdy sounding name. The research they want to share is not about the troposphere, but about their “success” in silencing alternate views: can we cancel an ad campaign, or harrass an executive who is not toeing the line? Forecast the Facts is a grassroots human rights organization dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change: that temperatures are increasing, human activity is largely responsible, and that our world is already experiencing the effects. We do this by empowering everyday people to speak out in the face of misinformation and […] Many psychologists are looking at “political ideology” as a predictor of belief in the theory of man-made climate disasters, but I’m convinced it’s the more basic element of personality types that matters more. A new study shows (no surprise) that climate believers are more networked in the Facebook world. In the press release, the researcher, Juha Itkonen, calls these Facebook connections “friends” as if the terms facebook-friend and friend are interchangeable. Mark Zuckerberg would be happy. Extroverts on Facebook might also agree, but I’d bet the introvert types would not. Sometimes fewer relationships means deeper ones. Perhaps extroverts are more likely to be group-thinkers, and introverts are more likely to have some inbuilt immunity to mob thought? No doubt it will be reported with the usual shallow semi-narcissistic flare “climate deniers have fewer friends”. So sharpen your pencils, smile, and remind everyone that skeptics have better things to do than spend all day on social media, that Facebook friends are not always real friends, and that having fewer deeper friends would suit people who are deeper thinkers.
Climate change attitudes are reflected on social networks 11 May 2015 Helsingin yliopisto (University of Helsinki) People who […] Headlines across Australia yesterday told us the dire news that a new study finds that “Sea level rising faster in past 20 years than in entire 20th century“. A new paper by Watson et al is driving the headlines, but underneath this Nature paper is a swamp of adjustments, an error larger than the signal, and the result disagrees with many other studies and almost all the raw measurements. Paper after paper kept showing that sea levels rates had slowed (e.g Chen showed deceleration from 2004, Cazenave said in the last decade sea-levels had slowed 30% (but argued post hoc adjustments could solve that). Beenstock used 1000 tide gauges and found no acceleration of sea levels over the last 50 years. A different researcher — Phil Watson, found that Australian sea levels rose faster before World War II then slowed down.) Firstly, hundreds of tide gauges show sea level rising at about a third of the rate than satellites do. Worse, the original satellite raw data showed the same slow rise, until it was suddenly adjusted. The real scandal is that the rapidly rising trend was largely created by adjustments in the first place. These latest corrections just adjust down […] Never talk about a new world order. We’re on flak-watch tonight, and pop-guns are going off at the ABC. Jeff Sparrow is firing at Maurice Newman, feeling very superior, and doing namecalling, namecalling, all the way down. Get ready for the Sparrow-personality-test based on tenuous speculative associations with random three-word-phrases. This is the best of ABC-big-gov-lovin’ intelligensia. The fireworks over Maurice Newman’s opinion on how the UN are using climate for their own powerhungry agenda continues. He not only spoke of “world government” he used the words “order”, “new”, and “world”. You and I thought these were simple words in the Oxford Dictionary, but lo, dumb punters, there is a special secret meaning Jeff Sparrow can reveal. Anyone who uses these words in the correct order is probably also a conspiracy theorist, paranoiac, gun nut, religious fanatic, and survivalist. All that psychoanalysis, and in just three words. Maurice Newman raised a valid topic, but Sparrow ignores the issue, drops a smoke-bomb to distract loaded with namecalling. As mindless as it is, the ABC editors lapped it up. This is the way the big important issues of national importance get treated at the ABC. What is a geopolitical issue of […] May 12th, 2015 | Tags: ABC, ABC Unleashed (blog), Newman (Maurice) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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