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How to separate creative genius from creative mistakes? Not with peer-review. It is a consensus filter.
Classical peer review is a form of scientific gatekeeping (it’s good to see that term recognized in official literature). Unpaid anonymous peer review is useful at filtering out some low quality papers, it is also effective at blocking the controversial ones which later go on to be accepted elsewhere and become cited many times, the paradigm changers.
And the more controversial the topic, presumably, the worse the bias is. What chance would anyone have of getting published if, hypothetically, they found a consequential mathematical error underlying the theory of man-made global warming? Which editors would be brave enough to even send it out for review and risk being called a “denier”? Humans are gregarious social beings, and being in with the herd affects your financial rewards, as well as your social standing. Even high ranking science journal editors are afraid of being called names.
Mark Peplow discusses a new PNAS paper in Nature:
Using subsequent citations as a proxy for quality, the team found that the journals were good at weeding out dross and publishing solid research. But they failed — quite spectacularly — […]
The more we give the UN, the more it wants.
The UN Green Climate will get more than $10 billion of other people’s money to spend, but are arguing that they shouldn’t need to obey the laws and taxes that other people do. The Chosen Ones are above all that.
Potentially this could include organizations that are not part of the UN but “working” with it and thus more of the global economy and financial system would come under complete UN control. We could get a whole separate economic and legal system that operates far beyond any voter control. Fun, Fun, Fun. Global parasites anyone?
Another reason to shut down the UN.
Fox News (via GWPF)
If the GCF succeeds in its broader negotiations, not only billions but eventually trillions of dollars in climate funding activities could fall outside the scope of criminal and civilian legal actions, as well as outside examination, as the Fund, which currently holds $10 billion in funding and pledges, expands its ambitions.
The shield would cover all documentation as well as the words and actions of officials and consultants involved in the activity documentation—even after they move on to […]
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8.3 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
Two weeks ago on the HockeyStick Update post we discussed the miracle of how the Bristlecones used in HockeyStick graphs had finally (sort of) been updated. I marvelled that 800 year old tree rings were easier to find than ones from 2002. Now 16 years after the MBH98 “seminal” (well, popular) paper was published, Salzer et al had finally found some rare modern trees and updated the temperatures after 1980, but gosh, the tree rings didn’t proxy for the red-hot rising trends of the modern era, instead they recorded a fall. That particular hockeystick collapsed (again).
It took a while, but Greg Laden bravely dropped in here on Thursday to share a link to his post on how skeptics are misunderstanding the update with “mind numbing” arguments. My reply to him on the old thread may have gone unnoticed. So I’ll repeat it here (with slight edits). Perhaps Greg missed my reply?
Steve McIntyre has also taken Laden to task on his blog.
Greg Laden December 19, 2014 at 12:54 am
A post on one of the studies you refer to here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/12/17/new-research-on-tree-rings-as-indicators-of-past-climate/
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Joanne Nova December 19, 2014 at 1:41 am
[…]
It’s time to pin down the definition of the Green Blob
Owen Paterson gets the credit for setting this phrase into popular use (as far as I can tell). Here is his definition:
Owen Paterson: I’m proud of standing up to the green lobby
By this I mean the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely.
Local conservationists on the ground do wonderful work to protect and improve wild landscapes, as do farmers, rural businesses and ordinary people. They are a world away from the highly paid globe-trotters of the Green Blob who besieged me with their self-serving demands, many of which would have harmed the natural environment.
Pressed in Fenbeagle’s hand the Green Blob became The Green B-Lobby. Which adds that edge — the amorphous blob becomes a Lobby blob.
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And you thought humans were special because they can control the climate. Move over Big-Coal, make way for the squirrels and beavers. They’ve been stirring up the soil releasing CO2, or damning up streams and producing methane.
Daily Mail — Richard Gray
Forget humans, RODENTS are the climate villains: Squirrels and beavers are contributing to global warming far more than previously thought
Arctic ground squirrels churn up and warm soil in the Tundra, allowing carbon dioxide gas trapped in the ice to escape into the atmosphere Methane released from ponds created by beavers estimated to contribute 200 times more greenhouse gas to atmosphere than they did 100 years ago Climate scientists will have to tweak their models to include role of rodents Scientists insist that rodents role in global warming does not let humans off the hook but shows animals play more of a role than previously thought
Wake up climate simulators, it’s time to add rodent-forcings to the models. Along with anthropogenic forcing (and beaver-effects), that’s three vertebrate families down, and only 181 to go.
Squirrels have been around in some form for 40 million years, but in the last 100 they’ve become dangerous climate […]
Naomi Klein is still throwing rocks, and these rocks are hairier than ever. Try this: if you disagree about climate sensitivity you are not just an unconvinced mind, but a white supremacist. It’s racism, racism all the way down, I tell you!
Lucky Naomi is here to unpack the sinister World Order of evil white men who control the climate. Who knew? In her world, man-made climate change will kill more non-whites than whites, but the white guys who run everything just don’t care. So there! (Is she saying that white men can control the weather but black men can’t?)
The namecalling reaches a new level of absurdity in “Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate“. Forget money, power and sex, the world is run on racism:
“What would governments do if black and brown lives counted as much as white lives?”
Taken together, the picture is clear. Thinly veiled notions of racial superiority have informed every aspect of the non-response to climate change so far. Racism is what has made it possible to systematically look away from the climate threat for more than two decades. It is also what has allowed the worst health impacts of digging up, processing […]
Too many big names too list, and all in one book, edited by Alan Moran and published by the IPA. I’m am just tickled, delighted to be one of the authors.
The proper headline should include Ross McKitrick, Willie Soon, Pat Michaels, Garth Paltridge, Kesten Green, Stewart Franks, Christopher Essex, Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbott. Not to forget the great writers Rupert Darwall, and Donna LaFramboise.
— Jo
An excerpt:
Shh, don’t mention the water
To state the bleeding obvious, Earth is a Water Planet. Water dominates everything and it’s infernally complicated. Water holds 90% of all the energy on the surface,[1] and both NASA[2] and the IPCC[3] admit water is the most important greenhouse gas there is, they just don’t seem inclined to produce posters telling us this is a humidity crisis, or that water is pollution.
I get right into the Dada-science, foggy-text, Klingon plots and zombies. I went right over the word limit… :- )
There are briefings in February as well, see below for details! From John Roskam at the IPA
Climate Change: The Facts 2014, a new book from the Institute of Public Affairs is now available. It couldn’t come at a […]
So Lima produced another “accord” of late night unenforeceable nothingness. They pumped out gloom and doom, and trumpeted the $12 billion in funds pledged to the Green Climate Fund. But only a few years ago in Cancun they were aiming for $100 billion. A grand failure as the world grows more skeptical.
But as long as these UNFCCC mega-junkets occur at all, it is still a win for the Green Blobby. Blob-science and the renewables industry still got $12 billion more than skeptical scientists. And 11,000 potential lobbyists got a two week junket in South America, mixing with friends, and hearing how virtuous and important they are. That’s bound to pump up the science-activists — at the very least, they’ll be motivated to make sure they don’t miss out on next year’s two-week junket, or the year after that…
For scientists, this is rock star treatment. Is there any other branch of science which gets a regular paid two-week long international trip to an exotic location year after year? In what other career could B-grade researchers — whose computer simulations fail on every measure — get the red carpet rolled out and lauded as people “trying to save the […]
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8.5 out of 10 based on 31 ratings
The emotional babies in Parliament will do anything to avoid discussing certain ideas on their merits.
The Australian Department of Education has been asking specialists if their appointed curriculum reviewers have been “connected” with two of Australia’s most prominent non-leftist think tanks. The crime apparently is to consort with the scum who ask if big-government is too big.
Both the IPA and CIS support free markets, individual liberty and limited government.
South Australian Greens senator, Penny Wright, wants to know.
“This is outright McCarthyism,” IPA deputy director James Paterson said. “It is pretty much ‘Are you now or have you even been a member of the IPA?’ ”
Should we or should we not teach points X, Y or Z to the children of Australia? Green-logic says it depends on whether the person making the decision has ever been associated with the IPA or the CIS. Presumably reviewers who’ve been published by Green Left Weekly, the CFMEU, The Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, or The Australian Conservation Foundation should be weeded out too. Right?
Maybe not.
The lead author of the original history curriculum was Melbourne University historian Stuart Macintyre. His connections were not pursued by […]
In The Australian Bob Carter compares the long term tide gauge record in Sydney with projections, and exposes the exorbitant cost of insurance for alarmist sea level forecasts. The good news is that it appears councils are waking up, and “peak-sea-level-panic” is behind us.
Sea-level alarmism has passed high tide and is at last declining. With luck, empirical sanity will soon prevail over modelling.
After years of research it turns out that talking about “global” sea level rise is nearly meaningless to real people who live in one place. The ocean rise varies locally from beach to beach from as little as 5cm per century to as much as 16cm per century. The variations are mostly due to different rates of land subsiding or rising.
More importantly, the rate of rise was either the same or was even faster before World War II when CO2 levels were “safe”.
Figure 5: Comparison of decadal rates of change over historical record. Analysis based on relative 20-y moving average water level time series. | Watson 2011
Fort Denison in Sydney has one of the longest running continuous records, starting in 1886, and finally local councils are realizing that they need […]
A group of people calling themselves “leading scientists” think that what the climate really needs is some A-grade namecalling. Specifically, they want the word skeptic for themselves, and want everyone who is unconvinced by their argument to be called a “denier”. I guess they’ve finally realized how uncool it sounds to be an unskeptical scientist. Their reasoning is that they have 48 sciencey type celebrities and they can quote Carl Sagan. Their scientific greats include guys like Bill Nye the Science Guy, James Randi, and Dick Smith.
The headline reads:
End misuse of ‘sceptic’, urge 48 science minds
Me, I think — let’s aim higher, and end the misuse of of the term “scientist”. Real scientists debate the evidence and don’t use namecalling as scientific argument. Denier” is not a scientific term, it’s a form of character assassination from lazy minds who want to avoid discussing the data.
Make no mistake, “denier” is not a descriptive term in a science debate, it’s equal to saying “you have the brain of a rock”. Being in denial of observations to the point where a person in toto becomes labeled a denier, is shorthand for saying that they are so mentally deficient that […]
Pander to the crocodile. Danegeld. The Australian government has offered $200 million for the UN Green Climate Fund. It’s more advertising money for the Green Blob, guaranteed to fund nice jobs that depend on the belief that man-made climate change is real, dangerous and can be solved by the UN. The cluster of dedicated climate-changing lobbyists will grow (slightly) and Australia’s foreign aid budget will shrink. In the end, it won’t make any difference to the global climate, but it will increase the number of press releases pushing the meme, and demanding more money from the public. Shame.
When Green bullies use outrage to push for money, the answer is not to pay them off, but to out-Green them and expose the hypocrisy.
Imagine if the Abbott government stood up to the so-called environmentalists and said: “We’re doing something real to help the poor and the environment — we’re funding programs direct to make sure the funds go where they are needed most. Large conglomerate centralized groups are inefficient, they tend to feed bureaucracy and junkets. We are going to be the first nation to fund an independent science program. For the sake of the environment we going to audit […]
Does anyone care about actual carbon emissions anymore? (I mean, apart from our coalition government?)
What matters is not whether you emit or suck the CO2. It’s not even about whether you are seen to be doing something. Doing something is irrelevant. It’s about joining the club and obeying the rules. And the rules are complex: Carbon trading is good. Planting trees is bad. Carbon taxes are good, but carbon soil storage is bad. And nuclear, of course, is awful — unless you are a large communist power, in which case, it’s a landmark agreement.
More efficient coal power is bad, even if they reduce emissions, but inefficient wind towers are good, even if they don’t.
If there is a rule underlying the rules, it appears to be that any solution is a good solution if it makes big government bigger. If governments are already as big as they can get (e.g. China) then any solution is a good solution.
We can see the rules at work in the current name and shame campaign. Australia might meet those targets but who cares — it’ s now at the bottom of the Climate Oscars.
Oh no. The pain and humiliation. Australia […]
One more reason not to give funds to the UN, but do enjoy the contortions.
Japan claimed it spent $1b on a particular action against climate change, which made the UN happy. But it turns out that money went to Japanese companies to build coal fired power stations in Indonesia, which makes the UN very unhappy because the UN does not support coal-powered projects, even if they lower CO2 emissions. Coal is evil, after all.
Newsweek: U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres was apparently unaware of where those funds wound up until it was brought to her attention by the AP. Figueres told the AP that “there is no argument” for supporting coal-powered projects with climate money, and that “unabated coal has no room in the future energy system.”
Watch the anamorphosis as the PR picture turns inside out. Good money becomes bad money. What was UN money becomes not-UN money. What was a CO2 reduction (with a more efficient coal fired power) becomes unsupportable.
The journalists at Reuters had to correct their Newsweek article within hours:
This article was corrected to clarify that the nearly $1 billion were not specifically U.N. funds, but rather Japanese funds that […]
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8.4 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
You’ll be shocked that after decades of studying 800 year old tree rings, someone has finally found some trees living as long ago as 2005. These rarest-of-rare tree rings have been difficult to find, compared to the rings circa Richard III. The US government may have spent $30 billion on climate research, but that apparently wasn’t enough to find trees on SheepMountain living between the vast treeless years of 1980 to now.
I’ve always thought it spoke volumes that many tree ring proxies ended in 1980, as if we’d cut down the last tree to launch the satellites in 1979. We all know that if modern tree rings showed that 1998 was warmer than 1278, the papers would have sprung forth from Nature, been copied in double page full-fear features in New Scientist, and would feature in the IPCC logo too.
Ponder that the MBH98 study was so widely cited, repeated, and used ad nauseum. It was instrumental in shaping the views of many policy makers, journalists, and members of the public, most of whom probably still believe it. The real message here is about the slowness of the scientific community to correct the problems in this paper.
Steve […]
Good news. The Australian government is cutting out the enviro-middlemen, saying “No” to one $11 billion Green Blob.
Australia stands as the only wealthy country to have ruled out a contribution to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. As of last week, the fund had received pledges from 22 countries totalling $US9.6 billion ($A11.2 billion) against an initial funding target of $US10 billion.
The UN money making scheme was never about the poor or the environment. If it was they wouldn’t be wasting “aid” on so-called clean energy subsidies, which won’t change the weather:
The fund is a new financing mechanism to help developing countries protect themselves from the impacts of climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It will invest in clean energy generation and distribution, energy-efficient buildings and transport, forest conservation and management, and the “climate-proofing” of infrastructure and agriculture against storms, floods and higher temperatures.
Apparently the Australian government can see that funding these UN agencies is hand-feeding sharks. By paying for environmental aid direct, our tax funds might achieve something useful, and it exposes the hypocritical self-interest of the Green Gravy train. Which environmental groups will praise Abbott and Bishop? All the […]
The headlines are burning around the nation: 2014 was the hottest ever spring! Except it wasn’t. The UAH satellite coverage sees all of Australia, day and night, and are not affected by urban heat, airport tarmacs, “gaps in the stations”, or inexplicable adjustments.
When will the Bureau of Meteorology discover satellites? How many years will it take to train the ABC journalists to ask the BOM if satellite measurements agree or disagree with their highly adjusted, altered, deleted, and homogenised ground stations?
I used exactly no tax dollars to email John Christy of UAH, get the latest data, and graph it to show that in Australia 2014 was not the hottest spring, and not the hottest winter, summer or autumn either. Why can’t the BOM or the $1.1 billion ABC do that?
The obsession with cherry picked, unscientific and irrelevant single season records that are not even records shows how unscientific the Bureau of Met is. By its actions we see a diligent PR and marketing agency. If the BOM served the public, they would make sure the public knew that these records depend entirely on their choice of dataset and on their mysterious homogenization procedures. If the BOM were […]
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